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Shahnon Ahmad's No Harvest but a Thorn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

Edwin Thumboo
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Extract

No Harvest but a Thorn opens with a sentence whose emphatic brevity outlines the macrocosm governing the interlocking spiritual, emotional, and physical environment inhabited by Lahuma and his family. That

Life and death, dearth and plenty, are in the hands of God. In the hands of Allah the Almighty. (p. 1)

is simultaneously religious doctrine and empirical attitude, declaration of faith and supplication. Moreover, the quartet of primeval forces, announced with stark simplicity of tone, creates a powerful, complementing sense of time as a cycle felt through significant events. Thus marshalled, the four key words emphasize further both their antithetical and complementing relationships (life-plenty, death-dearth) and the degree to which events, and the processes they embody, control the rhythms of life in Banggul Derdap. Allah presides over cause and effect. As the pair of sentences occurs four times in the first eight, relatively short paragraphs of Chapter 1, the realities of these basic equations are installed as constants in the readers' awareness. A vital point regarding what constitutes an essential part of Lahuma's existence is being urged vigorously for their benefit. Their world view, limited though it proves, derives from and remains utterly dependent on these dominant elements in the macrocosm. Village life, which takes hard, unremitting labour for granted, is prone to sudden, tragic turns — a fact that alters the scale we are inclined to adopt when assessing the tenor and the general quality of life.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1979 , pp. 89 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1979

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References

1 Citations from the text (with page references given in brackets) are from Adibah Amin's translation published by Oxford University Press (Kuala Lumpur, 1972).

2 See Johns, A.H., “Man in a Merciless Universe: The Work of Shahnon Ahmad”. Search for Identity, ed. Davis, A.R. (Sydney, 1974), p. 67.Google Scholar

3 Adibah Amin, Introduction to No Harvest but a Thorn, p.v.

4 Johns, op. cit., p. 69.

5 See Adibah Amin's Introduction, op. cit., p. vi, and Johns, op. cit., p. 66.

6 Shahnon's prose strategies are worth analysing to show their range and the manner in which they contribute to structure, characterization, and the sustained development of his themes.