The Other Malay: Nature and Subversive Sexualities in Dina Zaman’s King of the Sea (2012)

This chapter attempts to widen the discourse on Malay identity by exploring an aspect which is usually absent from the prescribed “identity canon”—that is, the ethnic Malay affinity with nature and the emergent subversive sexualities from the interfaces in-between. Using an ecocritical approach, it examines three stories by Dina Zaman from King of the Sea (2012) that represent nature’s complicity in enabling the expression of female desire and the construction of eroticised myths about nature. Her approach to sexuality can be regarded as subversive, in the sense that she represents cultural aspects which are conventionally deemed as unorthodox or forbidden in Malaysia, while also engaging with aspects of Malay-Muslim culture which set the parameters of what is accepted and allowed. In this sense, ecocritical readings and subversive sexualities frame a hidden Malay identity worth exploring further, thus suggesting how her fiction can be a dangerous repository of hidden knowledge.