Table of Contents

1. Grandma’s Gangsta Chicken Curry 2. A Time of Screaming and Slaughtering 3. Appeasing Pain 4. Dead Village Talking 5. Fourteen Nights They Died 6. Men Loving Men 7. Grandpa’s Kite 8. Blackie’s Blackest Day 9. Run! It’s An Alien Invasion! 10. The Velocity of My Memory 11. My Years of Living in Rock 12. My Gangsta Groovy Goal 13. Stinking Democracy 14. Ramadan, Einstein and a Memory 15. Summoning the Supernatural in Me 16. Poetry of My Hippie Sixties 17. Snippets From My Memory Palace

About the Author

Dr Azly Rahman grew up in Johor Bahru, Malaysia and holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in International Education Development and Masters degrees in six fields of study- Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies, Communication, Creative Non-Fiction, and Fiction Writing. He has written more than 350 analyses/essays on Malaysia. His 30 years of teaching experience in Malaysia and the United States spans over a wide range of subjects, from elementary to graduate education. He is a frequent contributor to scholarly online forums in Malaysia, the USA, Greece, and Montenegro.

He has edited and authored seven books; Multiethnic Malaysia- Past, Present, Future (2009), Thesis on Cyberjaya- Hegemony and Utopianism in a Southeast Asian State (2012), The Allah Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity (2013), Dark Spring- Essays on the Ideological Roots of Malaysia's General Elections-13 (2013), a first Malay publication Kalimah Allah Milik Siapa?- Renungan dan Nukilan Tentang Malaysia di Era Pancaroba (2014), Controlled Chaos- Essays on Mahathirism, Multimedia Super Corridor and Malaysia's 'New Politics' (2014), and One Nation under God, Bipolar (2015), a joint publication between Gerakbudaya and World Wise Books of New Jersey, USA, being a compilation of essays on Malaysian Cultural, Creative, and Critical Studies.

Reviews

"Rock questioned everything young Azly had assumed central to his world and his future. It dislocated him from his society and even the people he loved, and certainly from the educational system that constrained his days-secular in the morning, an Islamic madrasa in the afternoons. Rock and roll, especially the genre of classic rock, filled his free hours. The Malaysia of the 1960s and 1970s that he brings to such vivid life in these essays includes a rouges' gallery of 'gangstas'-assassins, tricksters, addicts, ghost stories, ritual dances, ceremonies, 'possessed' young girls in a boarding school, incipient radical Muslims. Beyond the clashes of cultures and traditions, the exposure to other beliefs and values allows the boy to realize the prejudices and injustices around him-abuse of the poor, ethnic oppression, political corruption. This awareness has been the source of the many books of political commentary written by the adult Azly Rahman, a man with a doctorate and several master's degrees, who possesses a deep analytical understanding of the wrongs and failures of those in power and of what must be accomplished to achieve fairness for all." Walter Cummins, PhD, Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Author, Publisher Emeritus at Serving House

"It is spellbinding reading the way Azly Rahman works the 'patois' of jargon hip and Malay, Islamic, Chinese, Indian, bling-bling hip hop, sixties and seventies American and British rock and roll, and original Malay and other magical realism and international ghost-lore (the personifications therein are certainly magic realism), a trace of style from [his] inherited and adopted languages - now poetic, now lyrical, now down-to-earth, now religio-ethical, historical, sociological, and economic post-colonial academic considerations - and renders it responsive to his subject matter. It is an integral part of his subject matter. I think of Junot Dìaz, without the footnotes, except that it is about Malay rather than Dominican, told in Azly Rahman's patois rather than English and Spanish patois; of Gordon Weaver's Foto Joe Yamaguchi in The Eight Corners of the World , except about Malay and the U.S. and the U.K. rather than about Japan and the U.S. with a Japanese-English patois; and a tincture of Alain de Botton's creative non-fiction books. This is contemporary, a Muslim view of the world married to an American and British colonial and post-colonial view . . . sorted out intelligently so that the humanistic, ethical values, through the dramatic, lyrical prose, stand clear. It has the value of irony, but especially of humanism and ethics." Thomas Kennedy, PhD, Author, Copenhagen Quartet , In the Company of Angels , Kerrigan in Copenhagen

"For Azly, this book was an almost therapeutic retrospective sense-making perspective of his childhood. For the reader, it's a valuable retrospective narrative about the personal challenges for a Malay youth in the kampong, back in the 1960s and 70s. In many ways indicating, challenges haven't changed much for this generation, compared to the generations before them. In general, the book also provides some window into how an ethnic American person reconciles their cultural origins within their American existence. This will be valuable in contemporary cultural studies." Eurasia Review