whom welcomed the chance to tell me about the corruption of the ruling party, which was preventing them from organizing the residents of the project. What to do? said the official. We sat cross-legged at a low table, with a video of traditional musicians performing on the screen above, and feasted with our fingers on beef, chicken, fish, petai (a paste made from pungent seeds wrapped in curry leaves), sticky rice, various vegetable dishes, fried bananas. Over coffee the official criticized the government for its inability to tamp down the ethnic tensions, which had newly risen over the fate of a national hero, the first Malaysian to climb Mount Everest—a Hindu, as it happened. Crippled later in life, the mountaineer was confined to a hospital bed until a Muslim shaman healed him—a miracle, the story went, that inspired him to convert to Islam. But there was evidence that he was delusional at the time of his conversion, and in any event his healing was short-lived, for he suffered a fatal stroke. When the religious police claimed his body, his widow filed an injunction in civil court asserting that he had been a practicing Hindu until his death. The matter was referred to a sharia court, which forbade her attendance, and so her husband was buried in a Muslim graveyard—which enraged the Indian and Chinese communities.
“What to do?” the official repeated.
What the volunteers next wanted to discuss, though, was a DVD being circulated of a documentary purporting to show that 9/11 was a plot devised by the CIA and Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service). How else to explain the fact that television cameras had been positioned to record the destruction if bombs had not been planted in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? The clerk who idolized Michael Jordan led the anti-American charge, and nothing I said could convince him that al-Qaeda had hijacked the planes flown into the buildings, not even when I reminded him that Osama bin Laden had taken credit for the attack. We parted on a sour note.
When we were out of earshot the official took my arm. “Do you see how their thinking has been corrupted?” he said. “And they’re more enlightened than most people in this country.” He did not expect to win his election.
Later that night, I hailed a taxi to take me to my hotel. The Tamil driver stopped at the light to pick up a young woman in a brown T-shirt and jeans, and at once began to lecture her, as if resuming a conversation, which seemed to verge on argument. From time to time she nodded, which led the driver, a wiry man with long hair and a thin mustache, to talk even faster, waving his hands, his two-inch-long fingernails gleaming in the headlights of the passing cars. The air conditioner was broken, gasoline fumes filled the taxi. Suddenly the driver turned to ask me where I was from and if I was a Christian. He gave my answers some thought, and then, pointing at the woman, said in a thick accent, We are anti-Muslim. I asked if he was Christian or Hindu. TOG, he replied, an acronym he had to repeat several times until I figured out that he was saying Tool of God—though something may have been lost in translation.
He fell silent, and then, inexplicably, turned onto an unlit road, which wound through a park or a rubber plantation. There were no cars or houses in sight, and when I asked him where we were going he pulled over to the side of the road and got out. The woman waited until she saw him light a cigarette before she reached for my hand. Do you want a massage? she said. Not tonight, I said. No problem, she replied, and called to the driver. He grimaced, stubbing out his cigarette, and drove me to my hotel without another word. The fare was sixty ringgits. He said he had no change for a hundred.
Khalil Ibrahim’s self-portrait, in a retrospective exhibition at a gallery in the Petronas Twin Towers, was an essay in double vision: the artist stood before a table, an unfinished floral painting at his back, the left side of his face in such thick shadow that only the arm of his eyeglasses could be seen. But it was impossible to tell where the light came from, since the blank part of the canvas behind him, which was as bright and harsh as sunlight, had a shadow of its own—as if another figure were lurking somewhere in the studo—or what the source of the different shadows might be. The artist’s lips were turned downward, few of the paintbrushes wedged into a dark can were illuminated, and it was difficult to decide which was more disturbing, the penetrating gaze of his lit eye or the speck of light in his dark one. The painting spoke to something essential about my experience of KL: it felt as if every conversation, gesture, and silence contained a shadow.
Yet the self-portrait seemed to bear little relationship to the droll, round man who warmly greeted me and his old friend Eddin, or to the other sketches and paintings drawn from fifty years of work for A Continued Dialogue, a whirl of flowing lines and vibrant colors, in images of dancing women and fishermen, of palm groves and boats on the sea, spread over all the flat and curving walls of the gallery. I took the title to mean that the artist’s dialogue was not only with his materials but with the complicated issue of identity that shaped so much of the national discourse, and I was intrigued by the stylistic variety of his land- and seascapes, which ranged from the abstract to the figurative. He painted in oil, acrylic, and watercolor; he made batiks and gouaches; he celebrated the human body, notably in a series of ink drawings titled The Spirit of the East, which featured groups of women on the beach, spinning and swirling and stretching toward the sky.
“Malays are a very sensual people,” said Eddin.
Ibrahim was born in a kampong near Kota Bharu, the son of a Sumatran sent to Kelantan to be educated in an Islamic school, and from an early age he yearned to be an artist, despite the traditional Islamic suspicion of figurative representation. (It is written in the Hadith, the stories and sayings attributed to the Prophet, that “He who creates pictures in this world will be ordered to breathe life into them on the Day of Judgment, but he will be unable to do so.”) Ibrahim drew, made shadow puppets out of cardboard, and took classes with a Singaporetrained art teacher. Ignoring his father’s wish for him to become a teacher, he devoted himself to painting, selling his works to British colonial and army officers; when his family moved to a kampong in Pahang his work brought him to the attention of a district officer, who convinced him to seek formal training abroad. And so it was that in 1959, two years after independence, Ibrahim won a scholarship to Central Saint Martins College of Art in London, and there he learned the elements of composition, color, and anatomy, tutored by artists steeped in the European academic tradition. He drew still lifes, worked with models, visited galleries and museums in London and on the Continent. A decisive encounter with Rubens: the Flemish artist’s portraiture fed his developing interest in the human form, and by the time he returned to Malaysia in 1965 (with a Swiss-born wife) he had not only internalized the history of Western art but discovered the rudiments of his artistic vision—in the body.
His subject, broadly speaking, was life in the coastal villages of Kelantan—fishermen and their boats, women walking by the sea, swirling figures in bright greens, yellows, reds, and blues: the lives of ordinary people, set against the lush backdrop of the tropics, and the communities that they form.
“I am deeply involved in the activities of people in groups,” he once said.
While Eddin asked him about friends they had in common, I took another look around the exhibit. From a painting of six women strolling into a splash of sunlight I turned to gaze through the window at the women passing by, laden with bags of designer clothes, and then it hit me: the planners of 9/11 had probably been here, had perhaps even wandered down this gleaming hall—a realization that made me shudder. I remembered how the ash was still falling when I visited Ground Zero late one afternoon in November 2001. The wooden walkway I climbed to peer into the twisted wreckage was slippery with soot; the stench of death filled the cold air. Men and women wept. Sidewalk vendors hawked American flags, T-shirts, hats emblazoned with NYFD and NYPD insignia. A young woman embraced a policeman. I circled the site, conscious of what was missing—and of how absence can be described through what is there: the skeletal remains of a building; a makeshift shrine of plastic flowers and teddy bears; a chamber orchestra rehearsing in a church with plastic sheets covering the pews. The mind reels before such destruction—which is why so many turned to poetry in the days following 9/11. For poetry, Robert Frost reminds us, offers a temporary stay against confusion.
