Reading Trauma in Keris Mas’ Jungle of Hope
Zainor Izat Zainal
Abstract
The proliferation of trauma studies in literary and cultural studies in recent decades
has also foregrounded postcolonial literature as a site for articulating concepts of
suffering, loss, bereavement, recovery, healing, and other traumatic legacies of
colonialism. Indeed, attempts to give the suffering engendered by colonial
oppression its “traumatic due” have been vigorously addressed in postcolonial
studies. However, it becomes a matter of serious concern that Malaysian texts are
absent in this postcolonial debate on trauma. In this paper, I pursue the project of
“postcolonialising” trauma studies through a reading of Keris Mas’ Jungle of
Hope (1984), which addresses issues of trauma, colonialism, denial and resistance
during British colonial rule in Malaya in the 1920s- 1930s. Keris Mas, who has
written on serious issues that concern colonial and postcolonial Malaysia such as
independence struggles, Malay economy, Islamic faith, and Malay leadership,
represents a prominent voice in Malaysian literature. Jungle of Hope was written
based on Keris Mas’ memories as a youth growing up in rural Malaya. These
memories, coupled with extensive research of the colonial history, were clearly
utilized by Keris Mas to reconstruct the trauma produced by colonialism. The
novel dramatizes a traditional rice farmer’s struggle to resist the changing cultural
and environmental identity of the majority of the Malays at that time who are
assimilating into the colonial capitalist plantation agriculture. To read trauma in
Jungle of Hope, I draw on Marx’s theory of labour and alienation, rather than on
individual psychology. Marx’s theories are chosen mainly because they engage
with the tensions between individual and collective production, and the personal
and political spheres, which, I contend, are pertinent to the experience of
postcolonialism and postcolonial trauma. Indeed, I suggest that it is in addressing
these tensions that Keris Mas underscores the haunting legacy of colonialism, both
in Malaysia and in its literature.
Key Words: Malaysian Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Colonialism, Marxism,
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope, Trauma
*****
Introduction
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Reading Trauma in Keris Mas’ Jungle of Hope
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Assertions that literature is “a significant tool”, “an ideal context” and “a
key mode” for articulating and understanding postcolonial trauma seems especially
relevant in a world that has become increasingly global.1 The proliferation of
trauma studies in postcolonial literature in recent decades has reinforced these
assertions. Indeed, as a site for articulating concepts of suffering, loss,
bereavement, recovery, healing, and other traumatic legacies of colonialism,
postcolonial literature gives the suffering engendered by colonial oppression its
“traumatic due”. However, it becomes a matter of serious concern to me that
Malaysian texts are absent in this postcolonial debate on trauma.
In this paper, I pursue the project of “postcolonialising” trauma studies
through a reading of Keris Mas’Jungle of Hope (1984).2 Set in the 1920s -1930s in
colonial Malaya, Jungle of Hope (hereafter JOH) traces the life of a traditional
Malay rice farmer, Pak Kia, who is forced to move from Ketari to the jungle of
Janda Baik when a disastrous flood destroys his land. At the same time, the British
grant a permit to British-backed companies to buy the lands in Ketari and its
adjacent areas, including Pak Kia’s land, for conversion into a sledge tin mine that
would ultimately inundate and destroy them. Villagers are asked by the agents of
these British-backed companies to sell their ancestral lands in Ketari with the
option to relocate to a nearby frontier area – Janda Baik - a treacherous hilly
forested area without a proper accessible road. Pak Kia, however, is adamant about
remaining a rice farmer in the tradition of his father and grandfather before him.
His brother, Zaidi, on the other hand, is open to change and wants to acquire
wealth and move away from traditional farming. Forced by the impending
environmental disaster, Pak Kia reluctantly sells his land. His family and he suffer
a lot of hardship to clear the new land in Janda Baik and set up a new rice field.
Keris Mas (1922-1992) represents a prominent voice in Malaysian
literature. An avid observer, recorder and commentator of economic and sociocultural changes that affect the Malays, Keris’ corpus of works comprises five
novels, ten collections of short stories, and about two hundred critical essays,
covering topics on writing, literature, culture and nationalism. Jungle of Hope,
Keris’ last and arguably, finest novel, was written based on his memories as a
youth growing up in rural Malaya. These memories, coupled with extensive
research of the colonial history, are clearly utilized by Keris Mas to reconstruct the
trauma produced by colonialism. In order to examine Keris’ reconstruction of the
trauma shaped by colonialism and its legacy, I draw on Marx’s theory of labour
and alienation to show how these theories engage with the tensions between
individual and collective production, and the personal and political spheres, which
are pertinent to the experience of postcolonial trauma.
Labour and Alienation
Zainor Izat Zainal
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Labour is the mode of interaction, as well as an important mediation
between humans and the environment. Labour is also seen as humans’ activity of
reconstructing nature to serve their needs. According to Marx,
Labour is a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in
which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material
re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as
one of his own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands,
the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions
in a form adapted to his own want. 3
Marx’s theory of labour highlights the material transfer that anchors the
inseparability of humans, nature, history and culture.4 This argument is
substantiated if we look at the process of labour itself. Human beings transform
nature through labour. There is always the combined development of human-made
and natural forces within production. Forces and relations of production therefore,
“are simultaneously cultural and natural”.5 Labour, therefore, is not only a material
practice but also a cultural practice. Labour too, secures humans as part of the
environment, in contrast to some main currents in Western environmentalism
which advocate the protection and preservation of nature without taking humans
into consideration.
Closely related to Marx’s theory of labour is the theory of alienation.
Prior to the capitalist era, the labourer worked to use his own products. The farmer,
for example, works on his own to support his life and his family. He is in control of
the processes involved in his work, and has a say in how his product is sold or
bartered. He is also able to use the product of his work to engage in further
productive activity. The relationship he establishes with nature, from which he
extracts, and with other people with regard to his work is therefore more personal.
With the advent of industrialist capitalism, alienation became inevitable. Marx’s
concept of alienation revolves around four aspects: the alienation of the product
from the labourer; the alienation of the labourer from the process of labour; the
alienation of labour from species-being; and the alienation of the self from other
human beings.6 The labourer is alienated from the product (extracted from Nature)
that he produces because he is not able to use the product to engage in further
productive activity. Instead, his product is owned, controlled and sold by the
capitalists. Nature becomes a commodity, to be processed, consumed and
distributed into the market for human consumption, which in turn results in the
alienation of the labourer from the process of labour. Due to the capitalists’ control
over the conditions and the organization of the process of production, the labourer
is estranged from the process he is engaged with and is powerless. Alienated labour
also estranges the labourer from species-being because it deprives him of the
freedom to live with nature. The labourer is also alienated from other fellow human
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Reading Trauma in Keris Mas’ Jungle of Hope
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beings. The worker has no personal relationship with the capitalists and also with
other workers. Control over the forces and relations of production by the
bourgeoisie further reinforce this alienation.
The alienation of labour, according to Foster, also entails the alienation of
human beings from nature.7 This alienation further reconstructs nature as an alien
“Other”.8 Another interesting aspect of alienation is how people experience it,
which depends on their position in human society. In other words, alienation
affects people in different ways. As Marx has pointed out,
The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same
human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and
strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its
own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of
the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in
estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an
inhuman existence.9
Individual and Collective Production
Keris Mas wrote Jungle of Hope (JOH) based on his memories as a youth
growing up in Pahang. These memories, coupled with extensive research of
colonial history, were clearly utilized by Keris to reconstruct and critique the
environmental trauma produced by colonialism, particularly the alienation of
Malay peasants from their land. Keen to exploit the natural resources that were
abundant in Malaya in order to fulfil the needs to industrialize Europe, the colonial
authorities facilitated British investments in tin-mining and rubber plantations.
Fallow land (land previously used for shifting cultivation but temporarily not under
cultivation) was quickly earmarked for mining and plantation purposes. 10 In
addition, more and more land was acquired and converted to rubber plantations.11
The Malays were forced to either sell their land or take up rubber planting. Those
bent on cultivating wet rice were encouraged to do so as wet rice fields were easily
acquired and the peasants would usually offer minimal resistance to plantation land
expansion.12 Indeed, during the 1920s-1930s, the Malayan economy, which hinged
on rubber and tin, was already integrated into the global supply chain.
Prior to colonisation, much of pre-colonial Malay society was organised
around agrarian production at the fringe of forests. Largely dependent on the forest,
they either practised shifting cultivation or rice cultivation. Hill or dry rice
cultivation predominated most rice cultivation until the 1860s when wet rice
cultivation gained prominence.13 The Malay agricultural practices were said to be
technologically well adapted to the environment and quite efficient in relation to
ecological circumstances.14 Most Malays were living at subsistence level, with no
pressures to increase outputs or to exploit the environment as a commodity. The
environment provides the basic needs that they need: food, shelter and the
Zainor Izat Zainal
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materials they need to come up with rudimentary tools. They take only what they
need from the land for their survival, which means that ecological change was
generally limited as opposed to the more extensive and intensive forms of land use
enforced under colonialism. This relation defines the pre-colonial relationship
between the Malays and the environment around them. It is not merely a
physiological labour between the Malays and the natural world but also a cultural
one. The environment and its richness are not only the provider of their basic needs
but also the basis on which traditional lifestyles and beliefs are constructed; it
holds the family together, and it is around land that the social organization of
family and community revolves.15 As Kathiritambhy-Wells has noted, the
relationship that the Malays had with the environment around them was one where
“culture and nature are inextricably linked”.16
This traditional lifestyle continued to some extent during colonial
administration, as exemplified by Pak Kia in JOH. Although restrictive new laws
and regulations regarding the land were enforced, and tin mining and rubber
plantation become the order of the day, Pak Kia works religiously on his rice field,
continuing with the traditional lifestyle. All his life, he has been planting rice on
the ancestral land that he had inherited together with his brother, Zaidi. The
changes that happen around him do not deter him from pursuing the way of life
that suits him best. In contrast, most of the villagers around him have opted for
growing rubber. Enticed by the material progress that came with the new economy,
some “had money and some had property”.17 Pak Kia, on the other hand, works
even harder in the rice field.18 Zaidi’s advice to start a rubber plantation falls on
deaf ears. At one time, when droughts affect his rice fields, Pak Kia has no choice
but to tap rubber on Zaidi’s plantation. Still, Pak Kia is unhappy and has no wish to
plant rubber. “Tapping rubber, for Pak Kia, was sheer hell. He yearned to return to
his heaven, his ricefield”.19 Even though life becomes difficult due to natural
disasters, and people in his village start to grow rubber because it is the order of the
day and there is more money to make from it, Pak Kia continues to resist the
forceful imposition of capitalist modes and structures. The rice fields, rivers and
orchards were the world to him.20
Such resistance is grounded in the rural Malay culture, which has nurtured
non-capitalist relations of production. The new forces and relations of production
that are taking root in the land around him are radically different from the relations
of production nurtured by the pre-capitalist Malay culture. This traumatizes Pak
Kia, and he resolves this by refusing to give up his land and his vocation. The
autonomy – the capacity to be his own person in control of his labour with Nature,
without interference from manipulative external forces – is liberating to Pak Kia.
Thus, he is determined to continue with his identity as a rice farmer, undertaking
the same kind of labour on the new (forested) land at Janda Baik. He is determined
to see that the relation that he has always had with the land would continue
undisrupted, “living the Malay way”. 21 In contrast, his fellow village men may be
6
Reading Trauma in Keris Mas’ Jungle of Hope
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working on their land growing cash crops like rubber, but they are subjected to
laws, restrictions and manipulations by the colonial administration and the global
market. They are not in control of the processes involved in using or selling the
product as these are quickly transformed into export commodities owned,
controlled and sold by the colonial capitalists and then disbursed into the global
economic market, which in turn regulates the price of rubber. Unlike Pak Kia,
those involved in growing rubber have to rely on other external production factors
in their labour. The fluctuating rubber price determined by the world market is one
factor. Keris highlights this through the hardship suffered by the villagers in Ketari
when the price of rubber goes down and money becomes scarce.22
To deal with this trauma, Keris affirms the role of the forest in shaping the
identity of traditional Malay societies. When his land - his source of livelihood and
sustenance - is destroyed, Pak Kia resorts to the forest in Janda Baik. The forest
offers hope for Pak Kia to make a living and Keris invokes this hope by making it
a site of refuge for Pak Kia, fleeing the onslaught of colonial drive for mining and
plantation agriculture. While the colonial administration sees the forest as a
resource for commodities, Pak Kia sees the forest as the provider of his livelihood
and a marker of his identity.
Personal and Political
JOH positions Pak Kia at the forefront of the changing environmental
reality that is sweeping Ketari, which he unwaveringly resists. Pak Kia, “whose
heart and soul were one with the earth, mud, buffaloes, paku shoots, kemahang
shoots, swamp fish” plays out his sense of worth, values, and knowledge to
advance his right to lead the kind of life he wants.23 To Pak Kia, to grow rubber,
which has become the order of the day, is to have the vocation for it. He however
finds his true vocation through rice farming, which has characteristically become a
major occupation of rural Malays. When his land – his personal sphere - is
threatened by the ravages of mining, fleeing to Janda Baik becomes his potent
means of defence and protest. Flight, according to Adas, was one of a peasant’s
means of defending himself and his family from malevolent forces which
periodically aggravated his already difficult struggle to make ends meet and this
“was not a step that was taken lightly, but an act that arose out of “a really
desperate situation”.24 Pak Kia is adamant that if he cannot grow rice in Ketari, he
will grow rice in Janda Baik. He is confident that he has the ability and the skills to
relocate to Janda Baik and do what he does best.
But I am strong. I am hard-working. I am sturdy. And I am at home with a
spade, a chopper and an axe. Let me go to Janda Baik. I’ll plant dry rice
first. Then I’ll start another ricefield, maybe better than the present one. I
have no faith in rubber planting.25
Zainor Izat Zainal
7
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Pak Kia’s sense of worth and values cannot be swayed by the changing
times. Nor is he swayed by money and all the facilities and technology that come
with modernity and the Eurocentric capitalist world. With what he knows and what
he can, he tries to resist the imposition of the plantation-base colonial capitalism.
He manages to do this by moving to Janda Baik and starting anew. The forest that
becomes Pak Kia’s site of refuge however, is not portrayed in a no-frills manner by
Keris. He does not romanticize the jungle life. In fact, the jungle poses many
challenges to Pak Kia and contributes further to his trauma. The treacherous jungle,
for example, takes Pak Kia months to clear. The death of his baby daughter is
another challenge. The threat of wild elephants and wild boars that usually destroy
whatever has been planted also lurks at every corner. These challenges also
culminate in Pak Kia being severely attacked by a wild boar. Eventually, his efforts
to make a living at Janda Baik bear fruit. However, towards the end of the story, he
seems pitted against the colonial “power over” as he relents and agrees to plant
rubber.
Pak Kia’s resistance is extended from the personal to the political sphere
when his kind of resistance is echoed by a number of Malays in his village like
Jusuh, who refuse to “work as coolies”, “clinging even more firmly to their old
way of life”, to “their original rice fields and village”, which “they felt, were their
last bastion”.26 This form of resistance has typically been propagated in colonialist
discourse, resulting in Malays being stereotyped as “indolent, lazy and
unproductive”.27 Adas however, sees this resistance as a typical avoidance protest
in pre-colonial and colonial Southeast Asia, by which dissatisfied peasants seek to
attenuate their hardships and express their discontent through flight, sectarian
withdrawal, or other activities that minimize challenges to or clashes with those
whom they view as their oppressors.28 Keris also compounds the trauma of colonial
capitalist exploitation through the breakup of people in Ketari into two: those who
refuse to grow rubber and choose to relocate to the forests, and those who willingly
embrace the plantation economy. The former communicates collective suffering,
creating a collective testimonial. This kind of resistance inevitably points towards
politics, where traditional farmers try to counter colonialist exploitation of their
land. Keris’ inclusion of the collective resistance provides agency for the formerly
“silenced” and “lazy natives”. In his vivid portrayal of Pak Kia and his struggle,
Keris allows the traditional Malay farmers’ hopes, fears, and anxieties to emerge
within the story.
Conclusion
Keris Mas’ Jungle of Hope foregrounds the environmental trauma of the
colonial era. Colonial capitalist schemes via mining and rubber plantations create a
trauma by not only degrading the environment but by disproportionately cutting
the Malays from their land, depriving them from coevolving with it. Pak Kia’s
trauma provides context to and alternative perspectives on events that took place
8
Reading Trauma in Keris Mas’ Jungle of Hope
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during colonial times, debunking “the myth of the lazy natives”. Jungle of Hope is
a compelling contribution to the contemporary postcolonial literature of trauma,
expanding the canon beyond the Western orientation. At the same time, it enables
us to ask to what extent Marxist theory of labour and alienation provides a
productive lens through which to understand and engage in issues of trauma,
particularly the tensions between individual and collective production, and the
personal and political spheres. These tensions, as Keris Mas has demonstrated, are
pertinent to the experience of postcolonial trauma.
Notes
1
Mairi Emma Neeves, “Apartheid Haunts: Postcolonial Trauma in Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift,” Studies in the Novel, 40,
no. 1 & 2, (2008): 112.
2
Jungle of Hope was originally written in Malay as Rimba Harapan. It was first published in 1984. The translated version
by Adibah Amin, Jungle of Hope, had been adopted as one of the compulsory texts for the teaching/learning of the English
literature component in secondary schools in Malaysia for the past decade.
3
Karl Marx, “Capital Volume 1,” Marxist Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
4
Chris Williams, Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 116.
5
James O’Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York, The Guilford Press, 1998), 36.
6
Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” Marxist Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm
7
John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000), 78.
8
David Layfield, Marxism and Environmental Crises (Suffolk: Arena Books, 2008), 88.
9
Karl Marx, “The Holy Family”, Marxist Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holyfamily/index.htm
10
Jomo, K. S., Y. T. Chang, and K. J. Khoo. Deforesting Malaysia: The Political Economy and Social Ecology of
Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Logging
(London, Zed Books Ltd, 2004), 63.
11
Jomo, K. S., Y. T. Chang, and K. J. Khoo. Deforesting Malaysia: The Political Economy and Social Ecology of
Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Logging
(London, Zed Books Ltd, 2004), 65.
12
Jomo, K. S., Y. T. Chang, and K. J. Khoo. Deforesting Malaysia: The Political Economy and Social Ecology of
Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Logging
(London, Zed Books Ltd, 2004), 63.
13
Jomo, K. S., Y. T. Chang, and K. J. Khoo. Deforesting Malaysia: The Political Economy and Social Ecology of
Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Logging
(London, Zed Books Ltd, 2004), 81.
14
Jomo, K. S., Y. T. Chang, and K. J. Khoo. Deforesting Malaysia: The Political Economy and Social Ecology of
Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Logging
(London, Zed Books Ltd, 2004), 65.
15
Harold Brookfield, Abdul Samad Hadi and Zaharah Mahmud, The City in the Village: The in-Situ Urbanization of
Villages, Villagers and Their Land around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.
16
Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Nature and Nation: Forest and Development in Peninsular Malaysia (Copenhagen:
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2005), 7.
17
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 7.
18
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 8.
19
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 9.
20
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 11.
21
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 72.
22
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 231.
23
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 57.
24
Michael Adas. "From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia."
Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 2 (1981): 232.
25
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 57.
26
Keris Mas, Jungle of Hope (Kuala Lumpur, Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia Berhad, 2009), 62-65.
27
Syed Hussein Alatas. The Myth of the Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977), 95.
28
Michael Adas. "From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia."
Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 2 (1981): 217.
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Zainor Izat Zainal is a lecturer in English literature at the Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti
Putra Malaysia. She is currently on leave, and is at the University of Malaya, doing her PhD on contemporary Malaysian
novels in English and the environment.