Solihin Samsuri is a doctoral student in South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. His current research on speculative perspectives on literature from the Malay World builds on his earlier work on the maverick Malaysian poet Salleh Ben Joned’s Poems Sacred and Profane / Sajak-sajak Saleh as a deconstruction of nationalized Malay identities across linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines. Speculative thinking can identify precise points of contention through which hegemonic understandings of what is “Malay,” “Islam,” and “literature” in Southeast Asia can be problematized and pluralized.
Abstract: “Re-reading Hikayat Hang Tuah Speculatively in the 21st Century”
Sulalatus Salatin was declared as “the mother of all speculative fiction” by the esteemed Malaysian writer Faisal Tehrani in the foreword to Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore. If the “Genealogy of Kings” is indeed the grand progenitor of a more contemporaneous speculative literary aliran (movement) in maritime Southeast Asia, it follows that Hikayat Hang Tuah would surely be one of its most beloved offspring. This paper first argues that engagements with Hikayat Hang Tuah in the 21st century are, more often than not, re-readings of previous encounters with either the titular hero or episodes from Sulalatus Salatin. Considering the larger oral tradition the text belongs to, and the historical preoccupation with its interplay between factuality and the fantastic, re-acquaintances with Hikayat Hang Tuah are necessarily speculative. I then contemplate how one “reads” the hikayat while being attentive to its innate orality, positing that it is not simply a parable advocating loyal servitude, but a timeless tale about speaking to despotic power through the wiles of a commoner. Of specific interest is how such subversive manoeuvres are executed playfully through distinct forms of native erudition, a tendency accorded to Hang Jebat and Tun Teja too. As a text explicitly concerned with the futurity of the “Malay” world, my reading of the epic foregrounds its rather utopian vision of an inclusively cosmopolitan Malayness, one which literally shape-shifts and transcends both geographic and linguistic boundaries through the oceanic travels of its polyglot protagonist. Hikayat Hang Tuah’s rootedness in Islam lends itself to complementary readings of wonder as an aesthetic category, offering a celebratory treatment of the foreign other that steers clear of the ethnonationalist jingoism of “takkan Melayu hilang di dunia” (Malayness will never disappear from the world).