An author, a poet and a graphic novelist, who are participating in the Singapore Writers Festival this month, discuss the power of prose, poetry and picture. In the first of a three-part series, author Suffian Hakim discusses how writing—and reading—feeds his soul
Suffian Hakim refuses to be put in a box. He has three published novels, Harris Bin Potter and the Stoned Philosopher, The Minorities and The Keepers of Stories, and each one touches on different subjects and is multilayered—just like the man himself.
“As an author and storyteller, my id is Douglas Adams, my ego is Neil Gaiman, and Yoda, my superego is,” he says, describing his personality through the lens of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and pop culture icons, while adding, “I think Freud is full of sh*t.” This, ladies and gentlemen, is Suffian in a nutshell—and it’s telling of the humour he pours into his books.
His novels are indicative of various points in his life, even though they are not exactly autobiographical. “Harris Bin Potter is really me exploring the disconnect between the Malay-Muslim Singaporean values that I grew up with, and the Western tropes in Harry Potter,” he explains. The titular Harris Bin Potter is an orphan who enrols in the fictional Ministry of Education-approved Hog-Tak-Halal-What School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in a bid to save magic from disappearing in Singapore—and hilarity ensues.
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The book was self-published in 2015—made possible through crowdfunding after the first few chapters he put on his blog while studying at a polytechnic went viral—and was sold at bookstores Booksactually and Kinokuniya, before home-grown publisher Epigram Books picked it up in 2017 and released an illustrated edition two years later. It also topped The Straits Times Bestsellers list. (Epigram is also the publisher of his other books, including the latest release, White Coat Tales, a manga he co‑wrote with undergraduates from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore on their journey to becoming doctors, with illustrations by Eugene Lim.)
The Minorities (2018) stems from the period in his life when he was becoming an adult. “I realised that what I was born into—the colour of my skin, my faith, my spirituality—flavours my experience of life.” The book is about four people, two of them illegal immigrants, living in a Yishun flat haunted by a pontianak. “I used the idea of the supernatural as a metaphor for the people who we pretend don’t exist, the people who are suffering to whom we turn a blind eye, because we’re enjoying our middle- to upper-class life.”
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