The History of the Sea

Sarah Kanowski March 01

In the Malaysian state of Kelantan, the ancient art of shadow puppetry, or wayang kulit, has been officially outlawed by the local PAS government since 1990, for fear of what its culturally ambiguous roots might mean for a model Islamic state. Yet, through a strange mix of leniency, collective desire and most particularly the passionate work of the colourful Eddin Khoo, the practice has survived, if barely. In the December issue of Meanjin, Sarah Kanowski takes a journey to the outskirts of Kota Bharu to discover a forbidden form of theatre that is about faith, tolerance and, above all, ‘epic imagination’. A brief extract is below. You can read the full essay on our editions page.

‘Policy can’t kill culture, because culture is something people actually need. However much you tell a sixty-year-old Kelantese man that he shouldn’t do a wayang kulit, he needs it and he longs for it.’

Eddin Khoo leant forward through a thick fog of cigarette smoke. This urbane, immensely civilised Malaysian, a self-described half-Chinese, half-Indian bastard mix, translator of Moby Dick, expert on Islamic art, and hopeless political junkie, was telling me why he believes the tradition of wayang kulit, Malaysian shadow puppetry, expresses nothing less than ‘the history of the world, the secret of civilisation’. And why it has been banned in its home state of Kelantan by PAS, the Islamic Party of Malaysia.

The laws against wayang were introduced in 1990. Khoo had just returned from studies in England and was working as a journalist in Kuala Lumpur. He went to Kelantan, in the north-west of the Malay Peninsula, to write a piece on the bans and fell in love with the place and the art form, and later studying it himself under the last of the great old-style puppeteers, Pak Dollah Baju Merah or, as he was known to audiences, ‘Abdullah of the Red Shirt’.

Kelantan is a world away from the frenetic pace of Kuala Lumpur, with its high-rises and full-speed embrace of modernisation. Things are still different on the west coast. The steamy sociability, invoked by one-time colonial officer Anthony Burgess in The Malayan Trilogy, continues. Life is languid, good-humoured, and overwhelmingly Malay and Muslim—the large Chinese and Indian populations that characterise the rest of the country are notably absent.

Khoo has a tremendous passion for eating—not the refined passion of a gourmand, more the peasant’s hunger for fat and sinew—and that night as he worked his way through Peking Duck and most of an exorbitantly priced steamed fish, he regaled us with descriptions of the shadow plays and what he believed they meant for Malaysian history and identity. Two years or so later his stories brought me to Kelantan to see a ritual performance of wayang kulit.