Malaysian author uses folk-inspired tales to teach teenagers life lessons

Hanna Alkaf woos young readers with her layered stories

Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf's latest work explores complex relationships and mental health. Azalia Suhaimi

When a little girl inherits a dark spirit after the death of her estranged grandmother, she delightedly welcomes her new companion. What Suraya does not know is that inheriting a pelesit, a supernatural creature in Malaysian folklore, comes with hidden dangers because these critters can play spiteful tricks when they get angry. Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf's recently published second novel, The Girl and the Ghost, revolves around the unstable friendship between a young girl and a pelesit and how it is possible to wring out peace from even the most strained relationships.

“In Malaysia, we’re very familiar with our ghosts,” says Alkaf says. “We grow up with the knowledge that the boundaries between the supernatural world and our own are thin and permeable, and that we must make accommodations accordingly. I really wanted to write a story that got that idea across.”

Alkaf takes a layered path to highlight the permeable boundaries between the real and imagined world. When Suraya angers the pelesit, it retaliates by making her see and do extraordinary things, raising questions about her mental health, and making possible to view the narrative through two different lenses – as events arising out of the actions of a supernatural being or as the manifestation of a mental disorder.

“One of the things I want readers to take away from this book is that you can be haunted by many things – ghosts or spirits, failure, loss, memories, the past and that these hauntings can shape you in different ways,” Alkaf says. “Allowing that room for doubt – what is real, what is imagined – drives home how thin the borders are between what we think of as supernatural versus what we think of as real.”

Alkaf started her writing career as a journalist and turned to fiction only in her thirties, except for a short story she wrote when she was 18. Then she wrote her first novel, The Weight of Our Sky. Published last year and set against the backdrop of the race riots in Kuala Lumpur on May 13, 1969, it also has a parallel narrative touching upon a combination of supernatural intrusion and mental health issues. Sixteen-year-old Melati believes that a jinn lives inside her, commanding her constantly to perform counting and tapping rituals to make sure her mother stays alive. But when racial tensions between the Chinese and Malays come to a head one day, Melati and her mother are separated in a burning city without any means of getting in touch with each other.

This story of heartbreak and hope looks at Melati’s journey in finding the courage to escape from the violence on the street as well as the insistent voice of the jinn, so she can get be reunited with her mother.

Of the recurring theme of mental health in both her novels, Alkaf says, “The thing about the way mental health is usually written into the narrative is that it’s a very western interpretation of mental illness and treatment.

In Malaysia, mental health cannot be separated from culture and faith, and I try to write these stories as truthfully as I can – from experience, and based on research – so more kids get to see themselves and their communities in the stories they consume, and so others can expand their understanding of what mental health means in different worlds.”

With The Weight of Our Sky, Alkaf says she wanted to tell a story about the riots and imprint the incident into minds because it is not discussed much in the country. "Humans are built for a story; if I could write something that would evoke an emotional response, if I could cloak it in an engaging narrative, people would be more likely to remember it, and talk about it."

The Weight of Our Sky was met with acclaim worldwide and won the US Freeman Book Award for Southeast Asian Literature last year. Alkaf's third novel is a murder mystery, titled Queen of the Tiles, and is scheduled to be published in 2022.

A tale by Alkaf appears in the young adult short story anthology, Once Upon an Eid, edited by Aisha Saeed and S K Ali, and published in May 2020. The anthology brings together a canvas of narratives from Muslim authors hailing from diverse cultures. Alkaf's contribution, a prose-poem titled Taste, centres around a young girl trying to rise above the void created by her mother's sudden absence by creating the traditional Eid meal just as she and her mother had initially planned.

In each of her works Alkaf makes it a point to have her characters reach inside and pull out the courage to face challenging situations in spite of their fear. In The Girl and the Ghost, Suraya has to face a lot of anger-from the grown-ups around her, classmates, besides a furious supernatural force, but instead of backing off, she marches ahead in spite of the dangers.

Alkaf says through this story, she wanted to show children that while life is full of scary things – which may or may not involve ghosts or ghouls – everyone has the strength and courage to overcome almost anything, and that no darkness is too overwhelming when you realise that you have it in you to generate your own light.