Written by Emad El-Din Aysha
Chuah Guat Eng is known as Malaysia’s first English language female novelist, whose works of fiction have since been translated into numerous European languages. Few, however, know of her singular, science fiction piece, Memoirs of an Aranean Harpist.
Written just before the turn of the millennium and completed after, the story began out of random, emerging simply from the writer’s play in a literary game of prompts.
As a genre in Malaysia, Science Fiction has not been the most popular among local writers, although lately, Malaysians, Cassandra Khaw, and Zen Cho have won accolades for their books.
Chuah’s Memoirs of an Aranean Harpist, while lesser-known, has captured the interest of one member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction, Emad El-Din Aysha, who describes the story as “intriguing, moving, and beautifully told.”
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
A refreshing difference for sci-fi audiences West and East. Tarron is a place teeming with life, sentient life-forms of multiple racial-cultural backgrounds, and with incredibly complex politics that are nonetheless recognisable to the discerning eye. The Tarronians are no more united than the races they learn to hate and persecute, and it’s partly their disunity that’s the cause.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
“This kind of sci-fi world simply could not have been created or so effectively depicted by a stalwart of SF from the West, let alone an author from the fledgling world of Arab SF. Neither would be familiar with this level of complexity in the real-world of ethnic and religious politics, with so many players and where things could easily go in one direction or the exact opposite, at a moment’s notice.”
Emad’s correspondence with Chuah on her sole sci-fi writing illuminates us about the writer’s process and imagination to create an entirely new world filled with character, culture, and ecology.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
What prompted this particular story, and how did you dream up such a wonderful race of people as the Araneans?
I can give you an account of the different ideas that entered my mind while I was thinking about and working on the story, but how all these different ideas came together and arranged themselves into the final shape is something I cannot explain. I’m an intuitive writer; magical things happen while I’m writing that astonish me but which I have no desire to probe too deeply or analyze too much.
The story was written in fits and starts over some 14 years. I began it in 1998/9 and finished it in 2013. It began as a literary game, with three prompts. The first two were words randomly picked from the dictionary – “Aranea” (garden spider species) and “fret” (part of a musical instrument, e.g. the guitar); from these words came the idea of an Aranean harp and harpist.
The third prompt was a spontaneously recalled childhood memory: when I was barely three, my mother died and I was looked after by my father’s aunt who lived in another town, in a huge house together with her grown-up children, two sons, and two daughters. I was the only child in the household, looked after by servants, and generally ignored by everyone else.
One late afternoon, as I was sitting quietly in the garden, aware of but not paying much attention to the grownups around me, my eldest cousin (already married by then) decided to play a nasty (but not sexual) trick on me. I was only three but I knew I had been deliberately humiliated purely for his amusement. I felt not only confusion and shame but also a strong sense of vulnerability, of being a stranger in a strange land, alone and unprotected.
That bully of a cousin was the inspiration for the Tarronians, a race given to gratuitous hostility and cruelty, incapable of laughing out loud and shedding heartfelt tears because they lack true humour; and from this idea of a humourless race came the concept of Tarron as an arid, waterless planet.
At the same time, the memory of my childhood feelings defined the central character, the Aranean harpist: a childlike, vulnerable, musical being forced to live in a hostile environment among beings whose cruel nature was as alien to him as the planet. The first rough outline and notes touched on only these aspects: the Aranean and his harp, the planet of Tarron, and the way the Tarronians respond to the music of the harp.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
Is the Aranean home world your idea of a Utopia? If so, how do you reconcile that with tropical storms and tidal flooding?
No, Aranea was not conceived as a Utopia. When the story first came to me in 1998/9, I had no clear idea what kind of world Aranea would be; apart from that, it had to be a world of gardens.
At that time, I had shown my initial notes to my daughter, then about 12 or 13, who spontaneously saw the Aranean harpist as me, Tarron as Malaysia, the Tarronians as Malaysians, and the whole narrative as an allegorical tale of the creative person marginalised and alienated in a society consumed by their unending struggle for power and material wealth, and lacking the capacity for true understanding and appreciation of art, music, literature, and so on.
I was so shaken by her insight that I couldn’t continue the story and had to put it aside, even though in the ensuing years she often pleaded with me to finish it because she wanted to know how it would end. It wasn’t until about 2011/12 that I went back to it.
By this time, I had written my doctoral thesis, published two collections of short stories, and my second novel; I was able to stand back from the story and dissociate myself from the Aranean harpist. With the advantage of distance, I saw that the logic of my narrative was leading me to a fictional reality where Tarron and Aranea are the opposite poles of whatever spectrum was trying to work its way out from my subconscious: Aranea and the Araneans must be everything that Tarron and the Tarronians are not.
Thus, if Tarron is a waterless planet, Aranea must be a water planet – not just a “watery” planet like Earth, but a planet covered almost entirely by water.
In conceptualising Aranea as a water-planet during this second phase of the writing, my main concern was to arrive at a plausible reason for the presence of the Aranean harp in my story. The task was to reconcile the demands of the narrative logic (e.g. Why is the harp so special and so important to the Araneans?) with the demands of physical laws as we know them (e.g. If the harps are made of wood, how do trees grow on a water planet?).
The rationalising process involved not only a lot of daydreaming but also a bit of research into scientific facts and speculative theories – about exo-planets, for instance. It was like a dialogue between Imagination and Reason. Each time Imagination proposed an answer, Reason would ask another question, and the interrogation would continue until Imagination could find a factual, possible, or plausible answer that Reason could or had to accept.
A simplified example:
Reason: Why do the Araneans need their harps?
Imagination: To solve the problem of life-disrupting oceanic turbulence.
Reason: What causes the oceanic turbulence?
Imagination: Two moons.
Reason: (Silence)
It was through this dialectical process that the nature of the Araneans became clear in my mind. In my first draft, they come across simply as gifted but naive and vulnerable victims of circumstance (hence, perhaps, my daughter’s response). In the second draft, however, they are shown in their evolutionary context: as highly successful survivors and managers of what is, objectively speaking, an extremely challenging environment – to emerge as well-adjusted, inventive, problem-solving, empathetic and wise beings, who have made a conscious choice to remain vulnerable because the alternative, violence, is repugnant to them.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
When it comes to the Tarronians, were you influenced in any way by Gulliver’s Travels?
No, Gulliver’s Travels did not enter my thoughts. If Swift’s work did influence me subconsciously, then it probably prompted me, during the second writing phase, to add details about the Tarronians’ origination so that they are not mistaken for Yahoos. The Tarronians are not by nature nasty and brutish. They are the products of genetic engineering, purpose-built to perform specific tasks in a specific environment.
Their lapses into violent behaviour are the result of faulty engineering. So the Tarronians are the victims of their creators (the Dizians) and the sponsors of their creation (the Qabaltuans). Incidentally, to ensure the plausibility of the Tarronians’ origination, I did some research on naturally occurring creatures that can survive long periods of dehydration (e.g. the tardigrade) as a gene-source.
How much was fiction and how much was ‘fact’ in the history of the Tarronians? Changing the images on the coins is an old, old political tactic from the days of ancient Rome, and took place frequently in Arab-Muslim history. Did things like this happen in Southeast Asian history?
There is quite a lot of fact woven into the story. Indeed, the social history of the Tarronians is modelled on the collective histories of all imperialistic and dictatorial regimes all over the world, from the ancient past to the present.
I’m not sure whether the practice of changing the images on coins occurred or occurs in Southeast Asia.
Certainly, Dr. Mahathir made changes to the appearance of paper money and coins during his first time as Prime Minister (1981-2003), as did Najib Razak when he was Prime Minister (2009-April 2018), although neither of them went so far as to have their own images imprinted or impressed on the money. But the changing of images on coins in my story is meant as a trope for self-aggrandizing acts undertaken by those who, once they in a position of authority, feel a compulsion to leave behind evidence of their power in the minds and memories of the people.
It has been suggested, for instance, that many of the gigantic sculptured faces in Angkor Wat belong to the ruler, Jayavarman VII. In Malaysia, newly appointed Education Ministers have a habit of making changes to the education policy or system; the most recent is a ruling that schoolchildren must wear black shoes, not white.
The Galactic Plenary Council’s imposition of economic and other sanctions on the rebellious Tarronians is an allusion to the USA’s almost addictive use of sanctions to “punish” and bring to heel nations they perceive as being non-compliant or not submissive enough. The ludicrous name-banning battle among the seven imperial houses of Tarron is a satirical treatment of a specific event in Malaysia known as “the Allah controversy”.
In 1989, the government passed a ruling prohibiting non-Muslims from using 42 Arabic-Malay words relating to Islamic theology and practice; e.g. Allah, salat, and Ka’bah. The ruling became an issue in 2008, when the government banned the Roman Catholic Church from using “Allah” to translate “God” in its Malay-language newsletter intended for Malay-literate Christians. The Archbishop challenged the ban and, on 31 December 2009, the High Court decided in favour of the church. This gave rise to heated debates and social turmoil (not amounting to violence), which raged through 2009 and 2010 and beyond.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
The Infowall in the story that the authorities use to spread their propaganda, I presume this is an allusion to globalisation and satellite televisions and the internet and social media. But why a ‘wall’?
Yes, the Infowall is about propaganda, but I don’t mean it as an allusion to globalisation and the internet. Quite the opposite. I mean it to convey the overwhelming and claustrophobic nature of the Tarronian government’s control of information.
It is a “wall” because that is exactly how I imagined it. I wasn’t thinking of a gigantic TV attached to a wall like we have on Earth. What I imagined was the whole wall of a room being treated with some kind of super high-tech plasma and equipped with super high-tech devices that “hook” it up to the central government’s information-churning machinery.
If you recall, every room in every Tarronian building is equipped with an Infowall, which cannot be switched off. It just pours out only what the government wants the inhabitants of the planet to know – day and night. Everyone on the planet sees and hears the same thing at any given time on any given day. They have no choice. In my mind, therefore, it is more than just a means to spread news and propaganda, it is a brainwashing tool.
Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.
How important is ‘music’ to you, as a person and a writer? Have you studied music, do you play the violin, for instance?
I have not studied music formally. I did try to learn how to play the classical guitar and the piano, but didn’t get very far because my fingers are not nimble enough. Nevertheless, music is very important to me. I’m most familiar with western classical music, and I usually have a CD on when I am writing.
One of the major characters in my first novel is a musicologist and he plays the harpsichord. When I was writing the parts involving him, I played Corelli’s Concerto Grossi almost non-stop. And, of course, when I was working on “Memoirs of an Aranean Harpist”, I listened to harp music.
Is transcending gender boundaries a theme in the story? The Harpist is a man, but the immaterial essence of the character is made out to be female when the human explorer encounters it if I remember correctly.
I wasn’t conscious of having the transcendence of gender boundaries as a “theme” while I was writing, so I suppose the answer is “no”. It is closer to the truth to say that, while I was writing about the Araneans, they came to me as highly empathetic and even telepathic and, with their harp, can transcend most boundaries conjured up by our minds. You may have to read the last part of the story again.
You are right in concluding that the being the Terran finally communicates with is the “essence” of the Aranean harpist and that there is a kind of a time-loop in that when the Aranean starts to “speak”, he uses the very words with which he begins the story we have just read (here I was playing with idea of a circular story, one that ends where it begins).
As for the female form, you will remember that the Terran’s experience of the alien planet is somewhat magical in that every thought and memory he has immediately becomes his reality. The female figure the Terran sees and touches is therefore not the “real” or “material” Aranean; it is the manifestation of the Terran’s memory of a girl he had once loved and lost. Remember, all this is happening at the very beginning of the Sanikuppa (12-year cycle) of the Fabulous Phoenix of Liquid Moonlight, which ordinary Araneans call the Sanikuppa of Undying Love.
Cover image by Goethe-Institut and Stephanie Claussen.
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