Have I Got Something To Tell You is Malachi Edwin Vethamani‘s brand new collection of short stories published by Penguin Random House SEA. The book which will be out on March 19th 2024, is an anthology of 20 short stories that delve into the complex lives, emotions, and thoughts of contemporary urban, middle-class Malaysian Indians. The collective of literary works stands as an exploration of what it means to be Malaysian and Malaysian Indian in the present socio-economic and political landscape of the nation, through the English language.
The Author
Internationally acclaimed, Malachi Edwin Vethamani, who is a Malaysian Indian poet, editor, critic, bibliographer, and academic, has spent much of his life in the field of academia, doing extensive work in the study of Malaysian literature in English. However, it was only in 2016 that the first collection of poetry was published under the title Complicated Lives. Edwin would go on to write several other poetry collections: Life Happens (2017), Rambutan Kisses (2022), Love and Loss (2022), and The Seven O’clock Tree (2022). He would also go on to publish his debut collection of short stories in 2018, titled Coitus Interruptus and Other Stories. One of his most notable international recognitions is being named as one of the most prominent Malaysian English poets by the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
Edwin began writing poetry in the 1980s and his short stories in the 1990s. He describes how the urge to write began with wanting a literary world for the Malaysian Indian middle class that earnestly expressed their thoughts, ideas, and emotions about the current complex and contradictory world of Malaysia. His stories are rooted in dealing with the contemporary post-colonial realities faced by this class of Malaysian Indians and how they interpret and express their identities through the pluralistic landscape of Malaysia with its multiplicities of race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Edwin writes stories that are very intimate and intrinsic to the lives of the urban English-speaking middle- and upper-middle-class Malaysian Indians that at once have a distinct cultural root while also appealing to a broader international audience. His literature explores the psychosis of characters, paying careful attention to the internal narratives of marginalised voices within the Indian community itself, like the lives of Indian women and gay men. Although the English language itself came to these lands through the subjugation of colonialism, Edwin firmly states that the former colonised people all over the world have managed to transform English into their language as an act of reclaiming their narratives.
“We have colonised the English language to make it our own.”
Have I Got Something To Tell You
The short story collection is a creative work that deeply and elaborately expounds on the present realities and existences of Malaysian Indians in Malaysia. Edwin places his characters and their emotions in the dialectical space of conflict and relationships. He creatively carves out the narratives of ideologies between his characters and the absoluteness of the political and social space that they inhabit. In Ghosts, we see the character of Ganesh grapple with the death of his father and the ideas of Mahathir’s Wawasan 2020. The narrative explores the grief and complexity of death at both the macro and micro levels in the Malaysian Indian context while bearing subtle political undercurrents.
Edwin’s employment of parallelism between the greater societal conflict and the interpersonal relationships of Malaysians continues through this story titled In Close Proximity, where the author examines the racial tension of the May 13th riots in parallel to the relationship between an Indian Hindu man and a Malay Muslim woman. In Sex and Politics in the Time of Lockdown, the narrative very tenderly and comedically explores the lives of queer men as they discuss the emotional and political existentialism brought by the pandemic. In all of Edwin’s writing, the dialectical nature of human relationships and the political landscapes around them emerges as a vital discourse that he presents his readers with. Edwin states how conflict and relationships are important elements embedded within his literature that express both the complexity of Malaysia and Malaysians. Edwin further shares how “relationships can be a source of alienation,” framing the bond shared between individuals as discrete narratives that form their own consciousness, be it affection or affliction.
Edwin’s new short story collection is the culmination of not only his own literary perspective but also a glimpse into the contemporary private and public philosophies of the urban Malaysian Indian bourgeois, who not only have to assess their own identities but also the fabric of the nation itself. In that sense, Have I Got Something to Tell You is a book that is sure to give readers some illumination into the cultural and introspective lives of present-day Malaysian Indians and the multiplicities of modern Malaysia.
All images are provided by Malachi Edwin Vethamani.
