Review of Serge Jardin ed. 2023: Literary Excursions & Fortuitous Encounters. Areca Books, Penang, Malaysia. www.arecabooks.com
Prepared by Dr Christine Choo, Historian and Independent Scholar, Perth, Western Australia ©

Contemporary Malaysians and visitors to Malaysia can be forgiven for their failure to recognise and acknowledge the presence and impact of the French in Malaysia which never was a French colony.

Historically the French came to Malaya primarily as sojourners, missionaries, planters and miners. As a historian, having grown up in Penang with French in my maternal and paternal ancestry, I too was unaware of the extent and depth of influence of the French in Malaysia until I read French Memories of Malaysia: Literary Excursions & Fortuitous Encounters edited by Serge Jardin (2023). What a rich collection it is as it draws on stories, reflections, travelogues, monographs, novels and references to intrepid men and women starting from one, Vincent Leblanc from Marseille, who is thought to have been the first Frenchman to visit Melaka around 1575. French Memories of Malaysia can be read as an accessible history of the French in Malaysia.
With photograph on the front cover of a man, with baguette in one hand and durian in the other, facing an empty street of colourful shop-houses, this well designed and produced book entices the potential reader to enter and explore its contents. Jack Thompson whose photograph is used on the front cover describes it thus: ‘As beautiful as a fortuitous encounter between a baguette and a durian in a street of Melaka’.

The durian and the pantun, the traditional Malay poetic form, are presented as a metaphor for the connections between the French and the people of Malaysia over the centuries. The Epilogue (pp 433-438) states:

The durian is more than a Malaysian fruit. Endogenous to the rainforest of Malaysia, it has long been a symbol of the country. It is liked equally by all the communities and in a country divided along ethnic, geographical, language, and religious lines, it is really a shared memory. Seen from a French point of view, it is altogether a recurring and a cleaving issue.

… Equally endogenous to the Malay Archipelago is a poetic form, the pantun. The Europeans discovered the first pantoon [pantun] … in the The History of Sumatra written by the Irish orientalist William Marsden in 1783. … Over 40 years later [in 1829], a young poet, considered today as the greatest French writer, Victor Hugo, universalised the pantun, offering the pantoum to the world … We had to wait until the twentieth century to return to Malaya to rediscover the original pantun. (p. 433)

The juxtaposition of the French sojourners and settlers and their fascinating and rich stories, documented with appropriately acknowledged assistance of various authors, are arranged in chapters that cover individual states in peninsula Malaysia through to Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Of particular interest to me was the unique contribution of French Catholicism in Malaya through the establishment of schools by the Dames de Saint-Maur (Holy Infant Jesus Sisters) and the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes (Christian Brothers) in Penang and other centres, and the Catholic seminary serving the whole of South-east Asia by the Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) in Penang.
The book is rich in detail and is very well illustrated with recent and historic photographs that enhance the text and can be read as documents in themselves. It is well referenced with a list of Further Reading arranged thematically by topic, for example, ‘Archaeology and Ethnology’, ‘Art and Architecture’, ‘Biographies and Memoirs’ etc.

Congratulations to editor Serge Jardin, publisher Areca Books, designer Malvina Anthony, and printer Phoenix Press Sdn Bhd, Malaysia, for this most interesting and valuable contribution to the documentation of the French presence and influence in Malaysia.