For the universal fraternity of drug fiends, decadents and university drop-outs who make up the vast army of the world's unwashed and debauched, Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1) has to be one of the greatest works of literature to grace their mouldy shelves. Indeed, when the book first came out it was heralded as a classic of its time - for both the best and worst of reasons.

The confessions of Thomas de Quincey still reads like a rambling narrative of a deranged madman driven to the peaks of ecstacy and the depths of despair. Written in the earlier half of the 19th century (while Europe was slowly coming to terms with its first truly European war, occasioned by Napoleon's dreams of Empire), de Quincey's book was a testimony to a lost generation of European youth who already realised that the myth of European civilisation was nothing more than an illusion underpinned by oppression, violence and the horrors of everyday life.

More so than any other book it its time, it also captured the multifarious shades of the opium addict's sordid and lonely life. De Quincey himself was a drop-out of the highest order. Kicked out of Oxbridge because of his debilitating habit that was slowly eating up both his sanity and his health, he was forced to send himself into a wretched exile in the dingier quarters of London and later to other lonelier towns that dotted the English isle.

De Quincey's confessions reveal the true portrait of the opium addict, long before the likes of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg ever put their fevered imaginings down in writing. He was, for many, the grandfather of the beatniks and the hippies- though his life was not nearly as comfortable and easy as it was for those latter-day hash fiends who enjoyed the luxury of having hip parents with packed bank accounts who could always bankroll their offsprings' degeneration.

No mere junkie

But before the prudes and fanatics among us start screaming and accusing me of glorifying a man who was, in the final analysis, a victim of his own addiction, let me point out a thing or two. The confessions of Thomas de Quincey also happens to be one of the most erudite and accomplished works of English literature ever.

The narrative, jumbled and confused though it may seem, is a treasure trove of historical facts and vignettes about life in England and Europe at the time. It was truly a timely work of art in that sense.

Where else would you get a commentary on Ecclesiates, a critique of Grotius, a critical commentary on the virtues of Rennaisance art, a multi-sided debate on the virtues of traditional Islamic historiography vis-a-vis orthodox Christianity, a discourse of the true nature of tragedy and a treatise on humankind's lot, all interspersed between vivid and explicit descriptions of the ecstacy and anguish of drug adiction? No mere junkie was our man de Quincey.

De Quincey's laudatory paeans to the pleasures (and subsequent pains) of opium should therefore be read against this backdrop of social, political and cultural upheaval taking place in England and Europe at the time. Rage Against The Machine could have taken a few pages from de Quincey's book and applied it to their own shallow analysis of the ills of postmodern society.

Against the empty promises of universal brotherhood and the fraternity of men and women, the nihilistic de Quincey argued that it was in the basest reality of drug addiction that we are all equal:

'Oh, just, subtle and all-conquering opium! That, to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds that would never heal, and for the pangs of grief that tempt the spirit to rebel, bringest an assuaging balm; Eloquent opium!

'That with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath, pleadest effectually for relenting pity, and through one night's heavenly sleep callest back to the guilty man visions of his infancy,and hands washed pure from blood;- O just and righteous opium! That to the chancery of dreams summonest, for the triumphs of despairing innocence, false witnesses and confounding purjury, and dost reverses the sentences of unrighteous judges.'

Opium, in short, was for de Quincey the only poison-remedy to the ills of a society driven base and corrupt by itself. It was the asylum of the lonely and the oppressed, the downtrodden and the marginalised.

False though its promises may be, it was the only escape for many. In his deranged and idle wanderings and fantasies, de Quincey could at least find momentary refuge from a world that was evil, degraded and corrupted from what it once was.

It was the final equaliser that brought high and low, rich and poor down to the same level of the basest humanity. (Today we have karaoke instead, which equalises both the gifted and the criminally untalented in a medium of universal mediocrity.) Cold comfort for one who was thoroughly sickened by life in a sick world.

Enter the Malay from nowhere

Now one of the most amazing encounters in the confessions of Thomas de Quincey takes place at an inn that he was living in while on his nomadic travels across the English countryside. In his own words:

'One day a Malay knocked on my door. What business could a Malay have to transact among the recesses of the English mountains was not my business to conjecture, but possibly he was on the road to Seaport, about forty miles distant'.

This mysterious Malay (whose name we never learn) happened to chance upon the same inn that de Quincey was staying in that night. The inhabitants of the inn were just as surprised as de Quincey, and all were in a state of panic, not knowing how to greet this extraordinary stranger.

The servant girl, 'who had never seen an Asiatic before', was dumbfounded by the sight of the solitary Malay who spoke no English. (Needless to say, her knowledge of Malay was hardly any better). As the crowd stared at the Malay (who only stared back), it was left to de Quincey to break the ice.

De Quincey himself admits that his only knowledge of the Oriental languages were the Arabic word for barley and the Turkish word for opium. Not much help under the circumstances, but at least he had to courage and common sense to realise that what stood before him was a human being with ordinary human wants and needs.

He therefore saw to it that the Malay was given food and a place to sleep for the night - while the rest of the inhabitants of the inn slept, no doubt, with their loaded muskets close at hand.

When it became clear that the Malay had had his rest and was about to leave, de Quincey offered him a token gift in the form of a lump of opium. What happened next is best recounted by the author himself:

'I was struck with some little consternation when I saw him suddenly raise his hand to his mouth, and bolt the whole, divided into three pieces, at one mouthful. The quantity (of opium) was enough to kill some half-dozen dragoons, together with their horses, supposing neither bipeds nor quadrupeds were trained opium-eaters.

'I felt some alarm for the poor fellow, but what could be done? I had given him the opium in pure compassion for his solitary life, since, if he had travelled on foot all the way from London, it must have been at least three weeks since he could have exchanged a thought with any other human being... the mischief, if any, was done.

'He took his leave and for some days I was anxious; but, as I never heard of any Malay being found dead on any part of the slender road between Grasmere and Whitehaven, I became satisfied that he was familiar with opium.'

Malays were tougher fellows (or chronic addicts) those days, obviously.

Free agent

Now de Quincey's encounter with the mysterious unnamed Malay from nowhere has to be one of the more curious vignettes found anywhere in English literature. From this one encounter alone we learn so much about the Malay world then.

That the Malay was travelling by foot on his own across England is proof of the fact that the Malays were really an international people who were used to travelling abroad.(Yet another salvo to be fired against the Orientalist school that claimed that the Malays were really a sedentary people).

That he could have made the journey on his own also shows that he was an independent free agent who was free to exercise his own will. He was not stopped or prevented from travelling and staying wherever he wanted, and he travelled with all the confidence and bravado of a man with his own sense of purpose, identity and destiny.

Who this Malay might have been, we will probably never know - but one fact remains: He did cause a stir in that little inn tucked in between the hills of England.

The return of the repressed

Now the rest of de Quincey's narrative plods along at its own inebriated pace. His bouts of rabid addiction, anxiety, fear, depression and moral collapse take their toll and as the days wear on his health deteriorates further and further. His days grow shorter as his nights grow longer, and in the darkest hours of the night he is tormented by nightmares and visions of paradise. The stage is set for de Quincey's next encounter with the Malay from nowhere ...

Later in the text, de Quincey recalls a particularly troubling and powerful dream he has, where he sees a vision of the mysterious Malay once again:

'This Malay,- partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days,- fastened afterwards upon my fancy and that upon my dreams, bringing with him other Malays worse than himself who ran am-muck at me, and led me into a world of nocturnal troubles ... that Malay has been a fearful enemy for months.

'Every night, through his means, I have been transported into Asiatic scenery ... Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful dreams and associations. As the cradle of the human race, if on no other ground, it would have a dim, reverential feeling about it ... the mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, above all their mythologies - is so impressive that to me that the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual ... man is a weed in those regions.

'The vast empires, also into which the peoples of Asia have always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with oriental names and images ...'

The author goes on to describe the strange and fascinating images that were conjured up by the Malay in his dreams. His mind wandered to wonderous landscapes, filled with the most exotic forms of jungle growth, huge and wonderful temples, beautiful idols and strange customs.

The Malay served as the trigger which unleashed a flood of images that literally overwhelmed the dreamer himself: De Quincey was blown over by images of Shiva, Vishnu, spirits, Gods and demons. He felt himself crushed by the weight of Asia in its entirety.

De Quincey, had, in other words, experienced what has been termed the return of the repressed. In his nightmares we witness the encounter with the modern European subject and the exotic Asian other. The unnamed and unknown Malay stands before the Englishman and makes him feel puny and 'weed-like'.

De Quincey admits that he could only have a 'dim, reverential feeling' about Asia and what it represents. The Malay, on the other hand, embodies a huge culture and civilisation, and interestingly, the Malay for him is also the inheritor of all the cultures and civilisations of Asia. He is, for de Quincey, the embodiment of the great cultures and civilisations of India, Southeast Asia and China.

He is at once primordial and timeless - he carries with him a history that spans four millennia (while Europe was then merely an infant civilisation barely learning to crawl and already too drugged up to walk properly). The Malay, in short, was Asia embodied, with all its past, its depth, its hidden mysteries and unknown horrors.

The unknown Malay today

Now back to our friends the prudes. There will, no doubt, be those who think that books like Thomas de Quincey's deserve only to be thrown into the fire or at best recycled as toilet paper. I will not dwell about such misplaced sensibilities as it would be both tiresome and counter-productive.

I have already tried to show that it is much more than the mere confessions of a drug addict: The Confessions of Thomas de Quincey was (and remains) a classic of its time for the simple reason that it spoke of the anxieties and fears of its generation.

It is one of the most honest (and painfully difficult) portraits of the lost generation of the early 19th century, and the author will go down in history as the one man who had the guts and will to describe his own failings as well as the failings of his culture and his generation.

But for us in Malaysia today, Thomas de Quincey's encounter with the mysterious Malay from nowhere is of special importance as well. For what the encounter reveals (and this is really underscored in de Quincey's paranoid and nerve-wrecking nightmares) is the antiquity of the Malays.

The Malays, for de Quincey, were among the oldest people of the world. It is clear that for him the Malay is someone whose history predates that of Europe's.

Today, Malaysia is also grappling with its past. Like de Quincey, we too are overwhelmed by our history and the politics of writing that history. We dream of placing ourselves at the forefront of the developing world, and of presenting Malaysia as the one country that encapsulates and accommodates all the cultural variants of Asia.

But for this to happen, we need to learn a lesson or two from the unknown (and forgotten) Malay of the past. Lest it be forgotten, Malay culture and history is so deep, so rich and so vast only because the Malays of the past were themselves the inheritors of the traditions from all of Asia.

Added depth

Today those of the Islamist tendency want to erase this pre-Islamic past, claiming that Malay civilisation only came into being with the coming of Islam. Some of them who are even more short-sighted and close-minded have gone one step further, claiming that it was Islam that made the Malays civilised (as if we were all savage animals before that!).

That such prejudice can rear its ugly head at all is already a shame for all of us who call ourselves Malays. But for such puerile nonsense to creep into the hallowed halls of academia makes a mockery of the educational system of the country, and reduces our history to nothing.

The encounter with the unnamed and unknown Malay of the past should therefore remind us of what we were and what we have lost. Malay civilisation, like all civilisations, is a hybrid amalgam of many civilisations.

We were Hindus and Buddhists before, and before that we were pagan animists who lived at peace with nature. The coming of the great religions - Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam- and the arrival of new modernist schools of thought should not be seen as distinct episodes that keep our histories apart.

Instead they should be seen as layers of civilisational acculturation that have added depth to our collective sense of identity, who we were, who we are and who we want to be in the future. Thomas de Quincey may have been unnerved by the arrival of the unknown Malay who triggered the return of the repressed in him. (Such things do happen after a bad trip).

But we need not fear our past and the unknown. We would be able to face the future with much greater confidence if we could admit our own internal heterogeneity and complexity, rather than continually trying to deny the past and to homogenise the present into one flat, monolithic discourse of sameness.

Endnotes:

(1) For this essay I have used the edition of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater published by the Folio Society of London, 1948.