Page 117 - The Guide To Sarawak

THE GUIDE TO SARAWAK
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Sarawak in World Literature
Sarawak has inspired writers since the late 19th Century. Rajah Sir James Brooke
was the inspiration for Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (1900). W. Somerset Maugham wrote a number of short stories set in Sarawak in the inter-war years, including The Yellow Streak, The Outstation, Before the Party, Flotsam and Jetsam, Neil MacAdam and Virtue, all included in Maugham’s Borneo Stories (1976). Characters from
19th Century Sarawak also appear in Emilio Salgari’s Sandokan. Modern authors include Nicholas Montserrat, who wrote White Rajah in 1961, Pierre Schoendorfer, whose Farewell to the King (1969) was also made into a feature film, Hugh Hickling, who describes the social
and political upheavals of Colonial Sarawak in Festival of Hungry Ghosts (1997), and C.S. Godschalk,
histories and folk tales. Examples include Heidi Munan’s four volumes of folk tales, Iban Stories (2005), Bidayuh Stories (2005), Melanau Stories (2005) and Orang Ulu Stories (2007). Angela Yong has published six books - four collections of original anecdotes of life in Sarawak’s Hakka Chinese community, a book of retold tales from the South Seas and an English translation
of Foochow proverbs.
Other recently published works include Short Stories from Sarawak: Death of
a longhouse and other stories (2004) by Cecilia Ong; and Double-Boiled Ginseng is Good for the Mind (2004), a collection
of anecdotes by a team of English lecturers from UiTM Sarawak Campus.
For an interesting take on modern Sarawak, journalist and author James Ritchie’s works cover a range of subjects ranging from Man- Eating Crocodiles of Borneo (1993) to a biography of an
eccentric Swiss activist in
Bruno Manser: The Inside Story (1994).
Interesting biographies include countless books about the various Brooke Rajahs and their families, too numerous to list here. Some modern biographies give a good insight into the inner workings of Sarawak. These include James Ritchie’s The Life Story of Temenggong Koh (1999) and Tun Ahmad Zaidi - Son of Sarawak (2000), about
a famous Iban Paramount Chief and the late Head
of State respectively; and Vinson Sutlive’s Tun Jugah of Sarawak (1992) about the Father of Independent Sarawak. Notable autobiographies include those by the late Tan Sri Ong Kee Hui, Footprints
in Sarawak (1998) and the late Tan Sri Stephen Yong, A Life Twice Lived (1998); both were founders of Sarawak’s first political party, the Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP).
whose
Kalimantaan
(1998) offers
a fictionalized account of the early Brooke Era.
Modern Sarawak Literature Much modern Sarawak literature is based on oral
A selection of locally-published titles.