This is the pre-published version of my short review of Tash Aw’s novel, The South, in the November 2025 issue of the Mekong Review:
Tash Aw has written five novels. His newest, The South, is the first one that explicitly explores the homosexuality of a teenage Malaysian-Chinese boy on the cusp of adulthood. The titular ‘South’ is Johor, the southern-most state on the Malaysian peninsular. Connected by the causeway, Singapore is nearby, where many Malaysian Chinese have settled for better economic opportunities. It is the location of the boy’s burgeoning romance with an older teenager, Chuan – a poorer relation – while bearing many traces of social and topographical unsettledness. Aw wastes little time to set the scene; the novel begins with Jay’s first sexual encounter with his object of desire, his cousin Chuan. Its description is brief, as brief as the sex itself – less than two minutes by Jay’s estimation – yet it is a moment that would connect them ‘forever’, says Jay in his post-coital naivete.
It for these kinds of scenes from the book that have placed Aw in the crosshairs of Malaysian censorship in recent months. After the announcement of the novel’s nomination in the 2025 Booker prize longlist, the Kuala Lumpur branch of the Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya, the largest in the country, omitted Aw’s novel, the only one by a Malaysian author in the longlist, from its in-store marketing. It was an act of self-censorship to shield the bookstore from the homophobic outcry the novel generated online by local commentators some months prior. The fear of being perceived as promoting a local ‘gay novel’ proved too much for Kinokuniya in Malaysia to bear, a country where same-sex intimacy is a crime and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is sanctioned by the state.
Gay sexualities are not, however, unheard of in Malaysian writing. Due to heavy censorship and social opprobrium, they appear like a comet in the night sky, rare but when they appear they draw much attention and discussion. Karim Raslan’s short story collection, Heroes, has been dissected by scholars of Malaysian literature, while the local anthology of fiction writing edited by Pang Khee Teik and Jerome Kugan, Body 2 Body, published by Amir Muhammad’s Matahari Books emerged during the fleeting heyday of the now-defunct LGBTQ campaign group Seksualiti Merdeka. These books have fallen out of print and accessible only in research libraries. Under-examined and far less understood is LGBTQ writing in Malay, or rather, fiction writing about queer and trans people in Malay. Novels about transgender and queer characters in the Malay language, such as Rosmini Shaari’s Mak Nyah and Fazrin Jamal’s Bapuk, are rare despite reproducing the trope of the tragic trans and queer person who inevitably lose the person they love, fall deep into depression, and die. Granted, these books do not belong in the same caliber as Aw’s work and as a result have escaped the high-profile disapproval of state and corporate institutions, demonstrating the unevenness and futility of censorship in Malaysia. Many wonderfully transgressive Malay writings that cater to a plethora of sexual tastes are overlooked by authorities in the sheer efflorescence of cheaply-printed paperbacks and self-published fiction online.
The South is full of references to liminal states of in-betweenness. And stuck-ness. In a country where Malay-Muslims and other Bumiputera are granted by law social and economic privileges, non-Malay ethnic minorities who can leave the country for greener pastures but choose to remain are pitied as less competitive and unambitious. Johor in The South is a reminder of failed dreams. It’s where ‘everyone was waiting for something better’. Even the land is uncooperative. The barren farmland, a ‘wasteland’ located near the causeway, that Jay’s family is desperate to sell, is more an economic albatross than a good long-term investment.
As a person who finished school in the late 1990s, I identified with Jay’s inchoate sense of self: I remember being excited about adulthood, yet so completely unsure about what that meant. Although one thing was certain: the future appeared to stretch far into the distance, in inverse relation to the provinciality of Malaysian towns and family life. This sense of ‘being’ the future is acutely played out in the crumbling marriage of Jay’s parents and the wake of his grandparents’ deaths. The teenage alienation he felt, not just from the childhood he is exiting, but also from the nation’s narrow ideals of citizenship, rings true to me. A schoolyard scene captures his alienated location and yearning to escape:
I am at the far end of the sports field, shielded from the main school building by a low row of concrete storerooms full of broken tables and chairs, metal poles, and faded flags once used in ceremonies to mark Independence Day, but the teachers no longer have the energy to organise parades these days and we, the pupils, are only too glad to be relieved of yet another obligation. Our lives are full of duty, we don’t want any more of it, so these totems of nationhood now sit sadly in storage. Maybe we will celebrate the arrival of the new millennium, but by then I will no longer be here (86).
The melancholia of the novel traces the unfolding years of the Asian Economic Crisis that began in 1997. Led by the then-prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia was largely shielded by the economic downturn that engulfed Southeast Asia. Known for being a political ‘maverick’, Mahathir’s ruthlessness took an unprecedented turn in the late 1990s with the sacking and imprisonment of his deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim for the trumped-up charges of sodomy by invoking the colonial penal code 377A, a law rarely summoned in Malaysia. The long-running Mahathir-Anwar court conflagrations unleashed on the unsuspecting public a new sexual vocabulary hitherto unseen on the nation’s newspapers. Splashed on the front pages almost daily were words like ‘sodomy’ and the Malay term for anal sex: ‘liwat’. Meant to fully extinguish Anwar’s outsized ambition, the scandal only exposed the paradox of the otherwise puritanical state and media institutions on matters related to sexuality.
I raised the foregoing events in my response to Aw himself at this year’s Hay Festival where the novel was launched; arguing that the coincidence of time and place of The South with the sexual awakening of the entire nation, not just Jay’s, was not insignificant. Aw, however, disavowed the notion that his novel was in any way ‘political’. Immediately, I was taken aback by his refusal to engage with my contention, and even felt a bit of shame as if I was reading his novel the ‘wrong’ way. At another book event with Aw, this time in Singapore where I encountered him again, he was also reluctant to discuss the novel’s reception in Malaysia, arguing that ‘there’s enough Islamophobia in the world without me having to add to it’, alluding to the Islamic authorities and conservative Muslims who have condemned the novel and calling for it to be pulled from local bookshops. In one sense, Aw is right. The Islamic authorities in Malaysia have a terrible reputation for wielding punitive laws against queer people as a show of moral strength. If anything, this reputation reinforces Orientalist prejudices about Muslims in Southeast Asia, most infamously in Aceh and Brunei.
Aw is not an apolitical author. He is attuned to the local and global implications of Islamophobia and how it undermines collective claims to justice due to Muslims, and by extension, Arabs. Like many people, myself included, Aw opposes the genocide in Gaza wreaked daily by Israel. For decades, the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation has been the championed by many Muslims in Malaysia. Long before the genocide that began in October 2023, Palestine was a political and religious cause for conservative ‘Muslim-first’ Malays, those who privilege their identification with the global ummah over their local, sub-national Malay identity. Although not all are anti-LGBTQ, as many of whom are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender themselves, conservative Malays are the among the loudest opponents of anti-discrimination on the grounds of gender and sexual orientation.
For the moment, Aw sits on the side of the same Islamic authorities and conservatives who condemn his novel, in their opposition to a more powerful oppressor. During this historic moment of immense moral catastrophe, one could be forgiven for forming these much-needed alliances that exceed the pettiness of homophobic righteousness. Still, one should wary about lauding the moral magnanimity of the marginal partner in this alliance, in this case minority voices. Their concessions, which requires them to bend to the will of the more privileged Malay-Muslim majority, are made by avoiding religious sensitivities as best they can, by making sure everything is halal, only reinforces the structural racial inequality in Malaysia. Considering the winds of change blowing rightwards towards the constrictions of gender and sexual rights across the world, an alignment with anti-LGBTQ factions even in strategic moments can be construed as a dangerous sell-out. Unfortunately, extreme times poses limits on moral alternatives.
To be sure, The South cannot be reduced to just a ‘gay novel’. It could reasonably be interpreted as one by some readers seeking to find themselves within its pages. Not that the ‘gay novel’ as a category necessarily impoverishes everything else it beholds; of places and people left behind, and the sensations one is desperate to relive. It is a novel about personal and social change. In his own introduction to the novel’s context at the Hay Festival this year, Aw described the social changes sweeping the country in the late 1990s for the mainly white, British audiences unfamiliar with their own colonial legacy in the Far East. His refusal to discuss the politics that shifted local consciousness, no matter how tawdry, seemed remiss to me at the time. For the politics of its time would not take away the novel’s sun-dappled beauty, its eternal freezeframe of lost innocence and delicious yearning.
Alicia Izharuddin 