In which I read Hanna Alkaf's The Weight of Our Sky
To be honest, when I first heard about what The Weight of Our Sky was going to be about, I wondered if we would even be able to sell it here. May 13th 1969 isn’t something many people write or talk about, and the last non-fiction book about it was detained by our authorities for some time before they finally released it and allowed it to be sold. In my high school history class, we learned a sanitised version of it - basic information that didn’t tell us much other than it happened. My grandmother mentioned it a few times when I was a kid, but I don’t have a clear memory of those times, and all that remained with me were vague images and the strong impression that it was a scary time for her. My parents, who were around Melati’s age when it happened, never talked about it at all.
I read Lloyd Fernando’s Green Is the Colour in college, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I knew that it was an important book - it was one of the first local fiction in English, and the only one I knew of that touched on May 13th - but most of the characters were rather flat, and it struck me as too simplistic. The main characters struggled to survive the riots, but most of the people rioting were depicted as cold/inhuman, and there was even a main villain who was benefiting from the riots. It was written at a completely different time, and was trying to say completely different things (like how race was a social construct and that the riots were used by certain politicians for their own gain), but because it’s the only other novel I’ve read about May 13th I couldn’t help but compare them in my head.
When I told my former lit teacher about this book, he was intrigued and asked me if it picked sides, if it named a cause for the riot. It made me think about how YA is so much more complex now, that it could present this part of history without having to find a clear villain.
The Weight of Our Sky started with Melati and her best friend Saf going to watch the latest Paul Newman movie. This immediately reminded me of my mom’s stories about her sneaking out to watch Help! (the Beatles movie.) There were also moments that made me immediately recall - not exactly the stories my grandmother told me, but how I felt, listening to them. It was a strange experience, and a harrowing one, because Melati’s story is a difficult one to read - especially when it started in a part of town where I spent a lot of my teen years, and involved an important part of Malaysian history. I was sitting in a cafe in Pasar Seni when I read the bits in the cinema, and the beginning of Melati’s experience of the riots, and I felt like it was really happening around me.
This book also touched on the subject of mental health, as Melati had OCD, and it was bad enough to the point where she imagined it manifesting as a djinn telling her lies and making her do things she didn’t want to. As someone with severe anxiety, I truly appreciated the honest depiction of how mental illness was perceived in the 60s, and how those who are mentally ill might be treated. I also appreciated the content warning at the beginning of the book, because while it wouldn’t put me off reading TWoOS, it definitely helped me choose a better time to start.
I loved the Auntie who saved and sheltered Melati, and her family. Perhaps they might seem a tad unrealistic, and there were certainly scenes that reminded me of Petronas advertisements (Malaysians would know what I’m talking about), but I was the child of two mixed-race parents (my Japanese friends joke that I’m not a Half, but a Quarter) and that meant I grew up with SO MANY AUNTIES. And the fact that this book had aunties in them made me very happy. More books with aunties, please!
My favourite thing about this book, though, was the relatability. I’m an adult reading a YA book, and Melati would be closer to my parents’ age now, but Hanna wrote her in a way that felt recognisable to me, and that reminded me of my own teen years. Perhaps this resulted in inconsistencies in terms of historical accuracy sometimes, like characters using turns of phrases that I know my parents might not have used in their time, but it helped me really step into Melati’s story instead of feeling distanced by it. And that helped me put her story in perspective, thinking about the fact that my parents, too, were that young when they survived that time.
In the end, my reaction to this book was rather personal, and while I think it has its flaws I can’t help but love the fact that it exists. It IS a difficult read (I’ve been avoiding talking too much about the content but it’s about the race riots, so it contains violence and racism and OCD/anxiety triggers) and that means it’s not as rereadable as I would like, but I. Am. So. Glad. This. Book. Exists.
Thank you, Hanna.
Edit: Last week, my mother read my copy of The Weight of Our Sky. She asked me to buy her a copy, and she finally talked about both her and my dad’s experiences during the riot. Apparently, my mother was in boarding school in another state and was pretty safe on that day, but my dad was watching a movie and the same thing happened as described in the book - both of my parents are biracial, and my dad was saved because he was grouped together with the non-Malays that were made to leave the cinema. My mother also talked about the riots and the book with her friends, and she told me one of her friends lived in Kg. Baru during that time and shared her friend’s experiences with me. I’m even more thankful to Hanna’s book now, because it helped these conversations happen.