Iblis never bows & other short stories

Abstract

This MA thesis, Iblis Never Bows & Other Stories, consists of a collection of six short stories and an exegesis detailing my research and writing process. The stories attempt to show the lived experiences of Malay women in a new light and to reposition them in spaces where the familiar is defamiliarized.

The best kind of short story feels like a magic trick, like a rug being pulled out from under you in the best way possible. This optical illusion is something that I hope to at least impart a little of in my works. Above all, I am also fascinated by people who don’t do as they’re told and who don’t feel as they’re supposed to. They excite me. I am interested in figures that occupy indeterminate statuses and the way they negotiate power, in the “perennial underdogs”, unruly women with messy, nasty, petty feelings, those who both adhere to authority and at the same time attempt to uncover and produce sites of resistance, in writing itself as a site of resistance by shifting the lens to previously underrepresented groups.

I can only hope then that my writing, even if it is in the smallest of ways, shifts the reader’s attention towards what is often obscured and concealed on the margins, a reorientation of one’s viewpoint towards what has otherwise been cast aside. Through my writing and exegesis, I also wish to explore the ways stories can offer productive and heterogenous potentials by pulling readers into worlds and subjectivities that they might have otherwise been disinterested in.