Destabilising the Narrative
An interview with Fairoz Ahmad
Photo: Ethos Books
Fairoz Ahmad is a Fellow at a regional think-tank. Prior to this, he was a co-founder of an award-winning non-profit in Indonesia that empowered rural women to become solar lamp entrepreneurs, as well as a lecturer in Singapore. Fairoz serves as a Board Member of the Intercultural Theatre Institute, an independent theatre school in Singapore. Fairoz graduated with a Master of Public Policy (Distinction) from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Interpreter of Winds (2019) and Neverness (2024), both published by Ethos Books.
What we discussed
Chapter One of The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje
‘Autobiography' and the Novel’ by Salman Rushdie (from Languages of Truth, 2022)
Theophilus: What does the idea of making mean for you as a writer? I believe we both work in strategy or policy-type roles, where the work is rather conceptual, and I think the work of writing can also feel quite conceptual in nature. So how do you see this act of making?
Fairoz: It’s fundamentally tied to my experience as a minority in Singapore, and also dissatisfaction with certain things that I want to express, in order to enlighten the reader. A form of catharsis too – if I’m in the mood of wanting to start and finish a piece of work, it is probably due to something deep in me that needs to be released.
When I published my first book with Ethos Books, Interpreter of Winds, I was thinking about how to make the culture of Islam, and the Malay culture, more fascinating for non-Muslim readers. Equally fascinating for Malay readers too, to see the richness of the culture in a way that most have not thought of. But to be honest, that project was also driven by ego — I wanted to show off my technical skill as a writer. I think I’ve moved beyond that, I think there’s more humility now that I’m a bit older.
With Neverness, it was also a sense of dissatisfaction, coupled with loss, that if I do not get this down in writing, people will not know the history of this part of Singapore, this village, because the older generation that used to live there have all passed on. I keep mentioning my dissatisfaction, because I think the way Malay history in Singapore has been presented, or written, has always been tied to official ways of thinking about how the Malay community should be, while other stories and achievements are marginalised. Not because of bad intentions, but because they don’t fit into these narratives, right. And in time, this rich tradition of music, and movies, and hopes and dreams have been crushed and demolished due to rapid urbanisation.
There’s something else, too. When I was at NUS, right, I remember one professor shared a reading list that contained “great works of Singapore literature”, and I read a few. But for some reason, I couldn’t connect with them. To me, those were not Singapore literature, those were Singapore Chinese literature written by certain Western-educated Chinese about their own culture. All the characters were Chinese, and they used all these cultural references when speaking. I felt that I wanted to address this gap. It took me a while, you know. Because sometimes you think you want to write, but it takes years.
T: You mentioned that in your first book, there was this subconscious idea of wanting to show off the technicality of craft — though that has now shifted for you. What role does technique have for you now?
F: I think the big shift I noticed is that the technique still exists, but serves a different purpose. In Interpreter, I wanted to show how I could play around with certain ideas and words, and make this very beautiful, aesthetic experience through language. But it wasn’t meant for the reader, it was meant for me. It served my function and my purpose. But in Neverness technique came to serve the story, to serve the reader. I found myself thinking, Does this raise the quality of the story when the reader reads it? So I have put myself in the service of an imagined reader, whereas previously, it was me throughout.
The other aspect for me is, Where am I, the writer, in these works? In Interpreter, I am not there at all, I am completely detached. It’s like I’m only a third party and never vulnerable at all. But with Neverness, parts of me are inside certain characters, as well as members of my family and some of the people I remembered growing up with. The most vulnerable act was to put aspects of myself in Miriam, Alif, and Alia. This became a way for me to process how I felt growing up; a way of cathartic release. That was important — the vulnerability, the attempt to understand myself better, but through the lens of imagination and fiction, so it’s not 100% myself.
T: You mentioned that one of your driving forces is helping the reader better understand Malay-Muslim culture and heritage. Do you think that happens not just in the theme and subject of the book, but also the language and writing itself? Does your craft also serve that purpose?
F: Yes. I became more aware of this in Neverness, as a function of age as well. You see, there’s this complication of a Malay writer who has lost mastery of his native language, his mother tongue, to be writing in English about his own community and trying to capture the sensitivities of his language in English. It was quite a struggle. I didn’t want the language to sound Westernised. For instance, in the villages of the past, people spoke with a sort of politeness. You were not really direct, especially when expressing difficult truths or issues among neighbours or relatives, you might do so in an indirect or roundabout way. I tried to convey that sense of indirectness in the language, so that even in English, a Malay reader would sense that that’s how, probably, people would have communicated. There’s a lot of humour too, because humour is used to defuse tension, or to make a sarcastic remark without being direct about it.
T: That’s very interesting — this sense of indirectness in language and dialogue. When you approach the making process, at the level of each line, or each passage or chapter, or the book as a whole, do you find that it requires a different kind of discipline, or a different state of mind, at each level?
F: I had the idea for this book for a long time, but there was a lot I didn’t know about the 1970s. I spent the first three or four months doing research on my own. I would read a lot, and listen to a lot of podcasts, interviews with Ramli Sarip, trying to get a feel of what it was like.
In the drafting process, it occurred to me that one of the main characters, Siti, was struggling to figure out her sexual orientation. And Alif was also struggling with some family issues, while Alia has depression. These are all very sensitive issues, and I wanted to find out how to portray them sensitively, and not caricature or stereotype my characters. So I spent a lot of time watching great plays online, and read the scripts, to understand how language could be used to convey difficult issues in a way that made people understand better, rather than give the sense that this guy just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I took another three months for the research, and this felt quite smooth — like I was doing research at university.
But once I started writing, it slowed down. Aesthetic considerations come in, and it gets quite slow. I don’t overthink it in the beginning; I try to aim for five hundred words per night, rain or shine. And it can be quite bad, the first five hundred. Really, if you think about craft like building a table, then the first version is quite ugly and wobbly. You then spend time sandpapering it, right? So the next three or four drafts was really paying attention to the language, and how I did this was to listen out for the lyricism or musicality in it, whether there was a cadence to it. This took me from the second up to the fourth or fifth drafts, before I sent it to Ethos. That was really fine-tuning it at the micro-level.
T: Did you make, in those four or five drafts, any structural changes to the flow of the story?
F: At the beginning of the essay I sent you by Salman Rushdie, ‘Autobiography and the Novel’, he says something that actually happened to me. Something like this: “You have this character in mind, but once this character is on the page, it takes on a life of its own”. People who do not write will think this is quite preposterous, because this is your creation and you have full control. But that’s not strictly true.
In the beginning, I thought that Neverness would be anchored by Miriam and Alia, while Siti and Alif were just side characters, helping to advance the plot. But as I was writing I realised that Siti and Alif would have to have bigger roles. Because without that, the dynamics between Miriam and Alia would not work. And Siti’s rich inner life would actually enrich the novel in ways I could not imagine when I first thought of her, as a bit of a troublemaker, like the joker in Shakespeare. She turned out to be quite important, to the point that the book cover actually shows her and Alia, rather than Miriam. That’s how things changed as I wrote and felt this is not working out, there’s something wrong with the character.
Ultimately, it is really about characters’ relationships. I think a novel of that size, with four characters – you can imagine them in a quadrant, each with oppositional values in life, different dreams and characteristics. This creates a tension that propels the story forward.
T: Your book rests on the strength of its historical characters and historical settings, and I wonder if that adds another layer compared to contemporary characters. Do you feel there’s a special responsibility that attaches itself to the craft when we write about history, in addition to our responsibility to the reader? Do we also owe it to our past sources and characters to get it right?
F: I don’t think in quite that way – which is to say, I don’t think a historical novel should be assessed as a historical text, created by a historian. A historical novel, as someone wisely said, is an aesthetic contemplation of history. You take certain aspects of history, and as long as the core remains true, you can add your imagination in the grey areas. There are things I take liberties with, but these are minor; they don’t really affect how people think about the past. For instance, I mentioned in one part of the Neverness that P Ramlee, the great actor, visited Miriam’s village. This is completely untrue, but it doesn’t really cause any harm.
When it comes to how certain people are being perceived, I’m quite careful, especially if they are being perceived wrongly. For example with the “padang hippies”, where I said the young Malay men would go there and smoke, that is quite factual. I don’t want to paint the community with inaccuracies, in order to just create an aesthetic contemplation of history. The part about Ramli Sarip being blacklisted is true; he’s still alive and you need to respect the person who is still alive.
One thing I wasn’t aware of until close to the publication date. I quoted a lot of songs in the book, including one called ‘Gurindam Jiwa’. We wanted to get permission from the late songwriter’s son to include the lyrics. So we sent him that portion of the text. And before the lyrics appear, I mentioned a bit about his father, and made a mistake in how I presented him. Rather, I didn’t make a mistake — it was my aesthetic contemplation! — but ultimately he objected to how I depicted his father. Although it was a very nice, beautiful description, he said “that is not true”. He wanted it to be written a different way, so I had to respect that. After all I’m just a writer, but to him, it’s the memory of his dead father. So I adjusted it to be a bit more factual. I believe there’s a balance, and it tilts towards accuracy when it comes to people or community. But otherwise, I’m quite relaxed about adding narratively to it.
T: You sent over two texts — Salman Rushdie’s essay as well as the first chapter of a novel, The English Patient, and what struck me there was the unfolding nature of the story. In the beginning we have no idea who the characters are, and only find out bit by bit. This way of noticing what happens is similar to how we as humans notice what happens, and it’s an observational quality that also comes through for me in Neverness. You reveal detail at a very human pace – the same speed that we would notice things.
F: As someone who wanted to write, I was really influenced by The English Patient. You must read it if you have the chance. I’ve never found something like it anywhere else, and I read it fifteen years ago!
I wanted to write Neverness as how a real person would experience events. We don’t experience it all in totality, there’s a languidness with which Miriam notices things. Only in the fifth chapter does she even tell people that her name is Miriam. This is how people think about themselves, this slow unravelling of information. As readers, we want to know what happens as soon as possible. But when Miriam is recounting her story, that’s not what she wants to say in the beginning. She wants to describe her memory first, she wants to go through it at her own pace, and only later on will she tell us what is going to happen.
The second thing that I was trying as well, was the idea of “show, not tell”. For instance, I wanted to let the reader know eventually that Siti has feelings for Miriam. But how do you reveal this without it being a sudden surprise, right? And how do you do it in a way that is very respectful to Malay cultural sensitivities about this issue? I had to put in certain subtleties about how Siti behaves towards Miriam so that people won’t be surprised by the revelation. They will realise oh, this is what happened in the earlier chapters, that led to chapter 11. I didn’t notice it, but now I get it.
T: When I finished Neverness, I felt like I had to go back and read it again — just so that I could look out for the Easter eggs!
F: Sometimes the Easter eggs aren’t on purpose — sometimes, certain ideas keep coming up in our conversations without us being aware of their significance. For example, the concept of water appears quite a lot in Miriam’s narration, and later on you will realise how important water is to her, it’s where she and Siti sat down by the river, it’s also where Miriam would discover Alia. Subconsciously, fifty years on, water will play a big part in her thinking about this. That’s how I’m interpreting some things in her mind. Because when people narrate stuff that happens fifty years ago, they are rarely logical. It’s not A to Z precisely, and they will detour to information that may not sound relevant.
T: Was that the reason why you sent over The English Patient, or were there other observations you had about this chapter?
F: It’s the book that inspired me to think about what good writing can be, and what a good introductory chapter can be. The use of language is also so fresh that I began to think, oh, I did not imagine we could write this way for something so obvious and typical. For instance, I didn’t imagine a desert could be depicted so succinctly and counter-intuitively.
There are elements that you’ll miss if you read too quickly. Take the passage where Hana is reading to the patient. You’ll realise that as she is reading the passage, her mind actually drifts — to what her father told her, about the beautiful smell of a dog’s paw. So she’s only passively reading the text, but thinking about something else. And the patient, as he’s listening, is also not really hearing the words, but drifting about his memories. This was quite a fascinating way to think about language at two levels.
The other thing this chapter did really well is how it moved across time and space. They are at the villa in the dying days of World War II, and it moves towards a memory of the desert, and very smoothly, back to the villa again. The author adds a layer of complication later on – we learn that the English Patient has been so badly injured that he relies on opium and morphine, leading him to hallucinate. We realise that his recollections may not be entirely true. Is he partially dreaming, due to the effects of morphine? So not only is he moving across time and space, but he is also destabilising the narrative. And we wonder if he is really telling us the truth.
Finally, there’s this character of Hana. I’ve read this book so many times and to be honest, she’s the least interesting character for me — maybe because I’m a male reader. Of course we have the English patient, but later on there will also be a spy, who enters the villa looking for the patient, and a Sikh soldier who will meet Hana and stay there for a few weeks, and they fall in love. Each of these male characters is actually more interesting than Hana, but the author situates Hana prominently, front and centre. It turns out after a few readings that she is actually the most emotionally vulnerable one; she ties the three male characters together. The English patient knows her as a nurse. The spy knew her as a neighbour back in Canada, but wants access to her to get to the patient. And the Sikh soldier falls in love with Hana. Everything passes through Hana, the entire web of relationships passes through her. I realised that creating character webs is very important; it’s not just four random characters talking but they’re all connected, and she is the fulcrum that connects everything.
T: Coming back to the Salman Rushdie essay, I laughed as I was reading it because in the first section he’s so insistent on keeping the work of fiction separate from the “higher gossip” of the writer’s life. But in the second section he ends up delving into autobiography anyway. What’s the relationship for you between what happens in fiction and what happens in “real life”?
F: This book is actually quite earth-like to the community, and I could not separate parts of my lived experience from writing it, like growing up with my grandma. But I am also challenging that experience, putting some resistance to some aspects of it. For example, I’m mildly critical of overly religious people. There’s a character here who isn’t so positively portrayed — Tok Ali — and that’s my way of telling the reader that passive mimicry of Arabic culture is not good because you’re not thinking about how you can live religiously in your own culture. So that’s some form of active resistance to certain things.
There’s also this challenging of narrative around Malay rock, that it is always tied to drugs. Now most people still think that in the late 70s, if you are a young Malay man, long hair, if you played rock music at the void deck or on the streets, you are likely into drugs. But I showed that Malay rock was actually seen as an alternative form of success for young Malay men, back then, who may not have been able to get good jobs, and saw the success of Sweet Charity as a role model.
T: Rushdie’s argument is interesting to me because it’s not a linear one – he pivots quite a bit, and towards the end of the essay he adds that he has also published a memoir, precisely the sort of thing he says a novelist should avoid. I wonder what you thought about the way in which he makes his argument.
F: I think the way he wrote that essay mirrors how complicated it is when the author’s life and fiction meet, in chaotic and messy ways. And that non-linear way of writing shows that there’s a constant back-and-forth between fiction, imagination and real life. When I was writing Neverness, I never imagined that I would put parts of myself into Miriam, into Siti, or into Alif. But it happened. I tried to pull back a bit, but it just didn’t fit if I pulled back too much — Alif needed to behave like this, because it’s the person that he had become in the story. It was also a way to exorcise my demons as a young boy, because Alif reminds me a lot about myself. Trying to be important around adults. There’s a lot of back and forth, tension between the writer and his art. That’s how I interpret this particular essay.
T: I think what your book shows me is how the stories that we tell exist in the context of other stories — and the reader will come to the text with their own stories in mind, their own understanding of history. And as you said earlier in this conversation, you resist some aspects and you nudge at other aspects.
Was there anything else, earlier in the conversation, that you wanted to pick up on or say in relation to the way you think about craft?
F: Not really — I just think it’s a lot of hard work. In Singapore, as a writer, you probably wouldn’t do this as a full-time job, you juggle family and work — that’s a big trade-off that’s non-ideal. If you were in another country where you could be a full-time writer, you might be more prolific. Because the more you write, the better you are. But currently, I think I’m not where I would imagine myself to be, because it takes much, much longer to get to that level of writing.
T: Are you already working on something next?
F: Yes, yes. I’m actually 95% finished on another book — a very different one from Neverness. It’s a non-fiction book on race and discrimination in Singapore, but written with a novel-like structure. It’s based on lots of academic research, my personal experience, how I blend them together to make them sound story-like and easy to read, rather than academic and serious.
T: It's interesting to me that you describe this nonfiction book as also novel-like in structure. And I wonder how do the techniques of fiction allow you to tell this nonfictional story? Which are the techniques that you borrow?
F: I reject things I do not like about the classic essay — the use of bombastic words, very distant language, hiding behind complicated stuff that takes a certain training to understand. The idea here is that someone who isn’t trained in understanding race and discrimination, and they open this book in the MRT station, it’s like they are reading a story, but they are learning along the way.
As a writer of fiction, you can design the story — for instance, with a twist at the end, to go in a different direction without people expecting it to meander. The traditional essay doesn’t allow that to happen. The other thing is to make the story as readable as possible, by including lots of personal experience, adding layers of detail, so that you can read this from that same perspective.
T: I’m really looking forward to it!
F: I think it will probably be my last nonfiction book. It gives me much less pleasure than writing fiction, because it’s too close to reality.
T: Just one last thought — this idea of pleasure in writing fiction. What gives you the most joy in writing fiction?
F: Sometimes when I’m writing, a beautiful sentence will appear — and I’m like, wow, where did this come from? It’s so beautiful and meaningful, and the heart will feel something. Just two sentences that seem to come from nowhere. That’s one.
Second, the characters that I’ve invented, like Miriam or Alia, sometimes I will feel very attached to them as I watch them blossom. And I will look forward to the next day — what will Miriam do next? These give me pleasure: the aesthetics of writing and the development of characters. For example, maybe tonight I think Miriam will do this, and tomorrow she moves in a different direction. In ways that are unexpected. For those who don’t write, this is preposterous, because they think you control the character. But that gives me pleasure, to keep this world, this unexpected world that’s your own, you have it to yourself before you show it to others. That’s really meaningful.
T: Sounds like it comes back to the element of surprise.
F: Surprise and beauty. I think beauty is, in large part, my excuse for writing.
Presented at the Supper House installation at Journey East, Sept 2025.
