Petikan dari halaman: An Ecocritical Reading of Lat’s Graphic Novels and the Malay Home Garden

The graphic novels by the Malaysian cartoonist, Lat, represent autobiographical accounts of life in traditional Malay villages. Within these visual and literary texts, botanical elements are often relegated to the background or used metaphorically, but an analysis of Lat’s rich drawings of the village environment allows for an examination of plant life and the interactions with village life. In this way, the backgrounds are paradoxically foregrounded, and representations of the environment as a co-creation of human and plant life are further studied with support from scientific sources. Special attention is paid to the multifunctional compound around the house containing traditional home gardens known as the halaman. This essay outlines how they function as: (1) a network of ecological patterns; (2) a repository of genetic information that can be used to trace tales of long-lost prehistory; and (3) an intercultural archive of interactions. Perhaps by understanding this non-hierarchical space can we find more harmonious ways to resolve the complex interplay between natural and human elements, which upon closer reading are not as diametrically opposed as they may initially appear.