Writing from the Other Side: Partisan Literature as Palimpsest of the Malayan Emergency and the Cold War

MCP partisan literature is a unique genre of Malay(si)an literature. It left behind rich resources for people to reflect on the Malayan Emergency, and communist lives and experiences. It promoted a constant questioning and reflection on the impact of the Cold War on Malayan history as well as the contemporary political, social and cultural situation in Malaysia. Jin Zhimang uses the language of realism, which is presumed to be relatively transparent and instrumental, to illustrate the Malayan revolution to the greatest detail. As a partisan writer and guerrilla fighter, Jin positions himself as a propagandist but avoids adhering to overly simplistic and one-dimensional narratives. This effort, to a certain extent, challenges the party’s official narrative and allows for multiple palimpsests to emerge and be reinterpreted. By collecting individual comrades’ stories, exposing the ambivalence of the ethnic Other in the national narrative, depicting the deep fear of guerrilla fighters, Jin’s partisan literature forewarns of the challenging future of the Malayan revolution. Through these diverse literary approaches, his work gives voice to the MCP fighters, humanizing them beyond the portrayal of faceless terrorists often seen in Cold War historiography. This chapter has shown that a historicized understanding of Jin’s literary works requires overcoming the Cold War legacy, in particular the intellectual and aesthetical preferences shaped by the binary rhetoric of the Cold War. Otherwise, partisan literature might continue to be excluded from Malaysian political, social and cultural narratives, or it may be assimilated into an abstract, universal cultural phenomenon with little connection to Malaysian history.