Latest news with #MalayanCommunistParty
Rakyat Post
29-04-2025
- Rakyat Post
Gone But Not Forgotten – Bukit Kepong's Final Witness Dies
Subscribe to our FREE Jamilah Abu Bakar, the last survivor of the harrowing Bukit Kepong tragedy, has died at her home in Taman Skudai Kanan, Johor Bahru, on Monday morning (28 April). She was 78 years old. According to a report by Her youngest child, 46-year-old Raja Zamzura Raja Buntat said her mother was showing signs of weakness over the past few days as she had lost her appetite. 'Mother had diabetes, but she had not been particularly ill these past few days. She had just been eating and drinking less. We noticed the changes, she was tired and weak last night, and then she passed away this morning. 'All of us siblings were by her side when she drew her final breath,' she said at the Bukit Aliff Muslim Cemetary yesterday. Jamilah's remains were laid to rest the Bukit Aliff Muslim Cemetary where her father, Constable Abu Bakar Daud, who died in September 1979, is also buried. Abu Bakar was a marine policeman at the Bukit Kepong police station and was among those who were severely wounded during the incident. Jamilah witnessed her family getting shot and killed by Communists Jamilah was said to have witnessed the Communist attack that claimed the lives of her own mother, Fatimah Yaaba, and her younger brother Hussin. According to Raja Zamzura, her mother was also shot in the arm. She added that Fatimah and Hussin were also burned. They were laid to rest at the Bukit Kepong war memorial. Raja Zamzura added that her mother would be invited to Bukit Kepong every year for the Bukit Kepong commemoration ceremony. 'Mother kept photographs and would often recount the incident. Every year, the police would invite her to attend the ceremony,' she said. Communist attack on the Bukit Kepong police station The Bukit Kepong incident was a key event during the Malayan Emergency, a guerilla war between British colonial forces (and later the independent Malayan government) and communist insurgents in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. In the early hours of 23 February, 1950, the remote police outpost was surrounded and attacked by communist insurgents. The wooden station was located on the river banks of the Muar river, about 59km from Muar, Johor. Image: Facebook | Bukit Kepong 55K Around 25 officers from the Federation of Malaya Police, mainly comprised of Malay policemen, made up the Bukit Kepong police station forces. Meanwhile, an estimated 180 communist guerillas from the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was on the attacking side. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the police officers put up a strong and brave defense for several hours. The attackers tried to force the policement to surrender several times, without success. Eventually, the building was set on fire, and many defenders were killed either during the battle, or after being overwhelmed. Fourteen police officers and five auxiliary policemen, along with several of their family members who helped defend the station were killed. The communists also suffered an unknown number of casualties, though it's believed several insurgents were killed or wounded. The Malayan Emergency On 16 June, 1948, British Commonwealth forces (later the Malayan government) were at war with a communist insurgency led by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), who aimed to overthrow British colonial rule and establish a communist state in Malaya. Muhammad Indera, also known as Mat Indera, leader of the MCP. Image: Facebook | Persatuan Bangsa Johor The MCP were largely composed of ethnic Chinese guerillas and made up the armed wing of the MCP called the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). They used guerilla warfare, applying tactics like ambushes, sabotage, and assassinations. The British responded with counterinsurgency tactics like the Briggs Plan – relocating rural Chinese communities into 'new villages' to cut communist guerillas off from local support. Why did the Malayan emergency happen? Well, it was due to a mix of political, economic, and social tensions in post-World War II Malaya. After the Japanese occupation (1942-1945) ended, the British returned to a war-torn and unstable Malaya. The economy, especially the rubber and tin industries, were in bad shape. Workers faced poor conditions and rising prices, leading to strikes and unrest, often influenced by leftist or communist unions. The MCP had gained popularity for resisting the Japanese during World War II through the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) and after the war, they saw a chance to take power and reshape Malaya as a communist republic. They then started organising strikes, protests, and assassinations of British officials and local opponents. Police talking to an old Malayan for information on communist bandits in the area. Image: Bert Hardy, Wikimedia Commons The British were keen to restore order and protect their economic interests, which were the rubber and tin industries as well as trade routes. In June 1948, after the murder of several European plantation managers, the British declared a state of emergency and banned the MCP. In summary, the Malayan Emergency happened because the MCP tried to seize power amid the chaos of the post-war years, but the British and later Malayan governments responded with military and political strategies to crush the rebellion. A movie titled 'Bukit Kepong' chronicling the events of the conflict was released in 1981. It was produced and directed by veteran filmmaker Tan Sri Jins Shamsuddin, who portrayed Sergeant Jamil Mohd Shah, one of the officers involved in the Bukit Kepong tragedy. Share your thoughts with us via TRP's . Get more stories like this to your inbox by signing up for our newsletter.
New York Times
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Tiny Press Took a Big Risk on Experimental Books. It Paid Off.
A few years ago, the translator Jeremy Tiang was browsing in a bookstore in Singapore when he came across an unusual book of stories. Written in Chinese under a pen name, the book, 'Delicious Hunger,' drew on the author Hai Fan's 13 years fighting in the jungles of Malaysia and southern Thailand as a guerrilla soldier with the Malayan Communist Party. Tiang knew it might be hard to land an English-language publisher for a story collection from a Singaporean author writing under a pseudonym. But there was one publisher, a small press in Britain called Tilted Axis, that was known for seeking out subversive, experimental works in translation. Tiang submitted a sample, and Tilted Axis snapped it up. Tiang's translation, released in Britain last fall, won an English PEN Translates Award, becoming the first book from Singapore to win the prize. Publishing it in the United States proved more difficult. 'Delicious Hunger' was submitted to 29 American publishers, but none made an offer. So Tiang was elated when he learned that Tilted Axis is expanding its footprint to North America. 'Delicious Hunger' will go on sale here this June, one of nearly 20 titles from the Tilted Axis catalog coming out in the United States this year. The first batch arrives this month. 'I don't know that the book would have found its way into translation or into the U.S. or U.K. distribution without someone like Tilted Axis to give it a platform,' said Tiang, who has translated more than 30 books from Chinese into English. 'All too often it's small, scrappy presses that take these risks, and they pay off.' Since its founding a decade ago, Tilted Axis has gained a reputation for bringing out a wide range of groundbreaking, genre-defying literature in translation. With only eight employees working part-time on a tight budget, it has published 42 books translated from 18 languages, including Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Eastern Armenian, Kazakh, Kannada, Bengali, Uzbek and Turkish. Publishing works from languages, regions and subcultures that have long been overlooked, they face little competition from bigger houses, which tend to gravitate toward established trends and books with a proven market (see Scandinavian noir and Japanese healing fiction). Perhaps for that reason, Tilted Axis has carved out a unique literary niche, and has caught the attention of critics and prize juries, landing major awards and winning acclaim for writers who were unknown in the Anglophone world. 'There are so many different forms of literature that people don't even know exist because we don't have access to them,' said Kristen Vida Alfaro, Tilted Axis' publisher. 'Every translation from different parts of the world has the potential to give you not just a different perspective, but a window into an entirely different imagination.' At a moment when nationalism and isolationism are rising in both Europe and the United States, the window that literature can provide into other cultures feels essential, Alfaro said. 'What we publish, and who we are and the community that we've created, it's exactly what this climate is trying to eradicate,' she said. With its emphasis on overlooked languages and narratives that often have a queer or feminist bent, Tilted Axis has helped to transform the landscape for translated fiction, which makes up just a small fraction of the work published in English, and remains heavily Eurocentric. The number of translated titles released in the United States has hovered around just a few hundred titles a year for much of the past decade. 'Literature from Asia was generally ignored before specialist publishers like Tilted Axis,' said Anton Hur, whose translations include the Tilted Axis title 'Love in the Big City,' Sang Young Park's novel about a young gay man's romantic escapades in Seoul. Translators and authors say Tilted Axis is also helping to transform the field of translation — bucking longstanding conventions around not only what gets translated, but who gets to translate, and how. For decades, the profession was dominated by white translators who came from academic backgrounds. Tilted Axis often hires translators from the global south, many of whom grew up steeped in the language and cultures of the books they are working on. Ten of their translators published their debut translations with the press, and several more first-time translators have books under contract. Tilted Axis put translators' names prominently on its covers from the start, well before it became more common. It also gives them a cut of royalties and sub-licensing deals, which is still not the standard. Its small staff includes several translators who collectively speak more than a half dozen languages. To draw more people into the field, Tilted Axis has organized translation workshops, including two programs in London last year that focused on Vietnamese and Filipino literature. It published a book on the art of translation, which explores the way colonial legacies have shaped literary translation, and features essays from 24 writers and translators. The anthology, 'Violent Phenomena,' is now taught at university translation programs in the United States and Britain. 'What translations get published, who gets to translate, all these issues are still a huge problem,' said Khairani Barokka, a writer who also translates from Bahasa Indonesia into English, and who contributed to the anthology. The Chinese writer Yan Ge said she was surprised to find an English-language publisher for her novel, 'Strange Beasts of China,' a surreal story about an amateur cryptozoologist who studies otherworldly creatures. Since its release in China in 2006, it had never drawn any offers from Western publishers. When Tilted Axis released the translation by Jeremy Tiang in 2020, it drew admiring reviews and comparison to works by Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Tilted Axis embraced the novel's weirdness, and helped her find 'space where I can exist as a writer in the English language,' Yan said. 'They don't try to shoehorn anything to fit into this imaginary English reader's taste,' she said. 'They respect how it's done in its original language and how it relates to its own cultural values.' The novelist and translator Thuận, who writes in Vietnamese and French and lives in Paris, had published seven translations of her books in France before any of her fiction made it into English. In 2022, Tilted Axis published her English-language debut, a translation by Nguyễn An Lý of her novel, 'Chinatown,' which unfolds in a single unbroken paragraph and takes place on a stalled Metro in Paris, where a Vietnamese woman gets lost in her past. Thuận, who was born in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, had long wanted to see her books in English — not only to reach more readers, but to counter stereotypes about Vietnam that persist in Western literature and film. At an event held by Tilted Axis in London last September to celebrate 'Elevator in Sài Gòn,' Thuận's latest English-language release, a mostly young crowd packed into Libreria, a small bookstore near Brick Lane, occasionally posing questions in Vietnamese. Speaking through an interpreter, Thuận described how having her work released in English has taken her fiction in new directions, and gave her an idea for her new novel, 'B-52,' she said. 'When I learned that my books would be translated and published by Tilted Axis Press in English, I immediately had the idea for a war novel for Anglophone readers,' she said. 'There's still very little written from the perspective of North Vietnamese on the topic, and I believe the Americans still don't understand the war if they don't understand how North Vietnamese people experienced the war.' From the start, Tilted Axis stood out for its unconventional taste and willingness to publish quirky, boundary-pushing work. The press was co-founded in 2015 by the translator Deborah Smith, who made a name for herself when her translation of Han Kang's novel, 'The Vegetarian,' won the International Booker Prize. It was Smith's first full-length translation, and the first English publication of a novel by Han, a Korean novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature last year. Its first books included Prabda Yoon's surreal, postmodern short story collection 'The Sad Part Was,' translated from Thai by Mui Poopoksakul, 'Panty,' Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's erotic novel about a young woman's sexual awakening in Kolkata, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, and Hwang Jungeun's fantastical novel 'One Hundred Shadows,' about a rundown neighborhood in Seoul whose residents' shadows detach from the ground and rise, translated from Korean by Jung Yewon. Within a few years of its founding, the press caught the attention of prize committees and foreign publishers. In 2022, Tilted Axis had three of its books on the longlist for the International Booker Prize, and won with Daisy Rockwell's translation of Geetanjali Shree's 'Tomb of Sand,' a formally daring Hindi novel about an elderly woman who won't get out of bed. Still, surviving as a small press has often been a struggle. To fund its translations, the press, a nonprofit, often relies on grants. The budget is so tight that its eight employees all have other jobs. Even its publisher, Alfaro, who took over when Smith left in 2022, works part-time at a publishing house specializing in art and children's books. Alfaro hopes the press's fortunes will improve this year with Tilted Axis' expansion into North America, which will give them access to a much larger market. Until now, Tilted Axis has had to license its translations to American publishers to get its books into the United States, and just nine of its titles were acquired. Now that it can sell directly through American bookstores, Tilted Axis is bringing out a mix of new books and older works that never landed a U.S. publisher. The first batch of 11 titles arriving this month offers a sampling of the press's stylistic and geographic range, with works like 'Again I Hear These Waters,' a collection featuring poetry by 21 Assamese writers, translated by Shalim M. Hussain; 'I Belong to Nowhere,' a poetry collection by the Dalit feminist activist Kalyani Thakur Charal, translated from Bengali by Mrinmoy Pramanick and Sipra Mukherjee, and Hamid Ismailov's novel 'The Devils' Dance,' translated from Uzbek by Donald Rayfield. Ismailov, who fled Uzbekistan under threat of arrest in 1992 and settled in Britain, originally published 'The Devils' Dance' in Uzbek on Facebook, chapter by chapter, after finishing it in 2012. A sample translation caught the attention of Tilted Axis, which published it in 2018. The novel — which interweaves the story of the Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy, who was executed in 1938 during Stalin's purges, and the historical novel that Qodiriy was unable to finish — became the first major literary work from Uzbekistan to be translated into English. Its success led to the translation of several more of his books. Ismailov credits the press with 'giving voice to the silenced, making the unheard heard, and supporting banished writers from all over the world,' he said in an email. 'To this day, I remain banned in Uzbekistan as a writer, as a name,' Ismailov said. 'Tilted Axis was bold enough to publish my work.'
