Marina Mahathir in her own write

Malaysiakini talks to Marina Mahathir about her book, ‘The Apple and the Tree’, published by Penguin Random House SEA, scheduled for release on Nov 23.

Malaysiakini: I had expected when you told me you had this manuscript, oh, she probably submitted a few chapters for her Masters dissertation, but you actually wrote something else for submission.

Marina: Yes, I did.

So when was this book conceived?

I did write parts of it during the course, because every couple of weeks we had to write something and it is work-shopped. The early chapter about my childhood house in Kedah was an essay I submitted with my application for the course.

For my dissertation, I had wanted to expand on a piece I had written about a time when I was in the AIDS Council, and we hosted a controversial international conference. In it there was a bit about a transgender speaker.

My supervisor said that was interesting, I should write about that. It was an “Aha” moment, “Yaa!” So my dissertation was a lot of interviews with trans people, a portrait of six or seven.

I hope to turn that into a book sometime because their stories are fascinating. I wanted to show that they are human and cannot be defined just by their gender.

I talked to one of them in Negri, the one who was in a constitutional case. She’s a sex worker. She’s also a prize-winning cat-breeder and cavy-breeder (N.B: Cavy – a South American rodent kin to the guinea pig.). She had all these trophies. She read books on how to breed cats and cavies, how to prepare them for shows. I mean, who would think?

Another amazing interview was when I was in England, June, 2019. My parents came because dad was speaking at Cambridge or Oxford. Because it was Raya time, the High Commission had an open house – in the garden, tons of people, stalls. I was hanging out with my friends when this tall woman in red came up to me.

“Hi, I am M....”

“Hello.”

“I’m the first transgender Crown Prosecutor in the UK.”

“Are you Malaysian?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got to interview you.”

I went to see her in court in north London. Imagine, someone from a conservative family in KL, non-Muslim, who left, studied law, rose to become a Crown Prosecutor.

I gave the manuscript to an agent in England, but she wanted to give it to...