The Search between Ambiguity and Anti-Story in Zaen Kasturis Taman Uzlah

The development of the short story genre in Malay literature is reaching its first century. Malay short stories underwent an experimental phase in the 1970s. It brought about an interesting impact that should be analysed. The experimental decades influenced the short stories produced by young writers in the 1980s, such as Marsli, N.O., Azmah Nordin, Daeng Ramliakil, Muhd Nasruddin Dasuki, Zainal Rashid Ahmad and S.M. Zakir. This essay will focus on short stories written by Zaen Kasturi who not only continues to experiment, but is also creative and innovative in incorporating new and novel elements. This analysis utilises the “anti-narrative” framework to view the non-conformity experimentation model created by Zaen Kasturi. The analysis will focus on his collection of short stories entitled Taman Uzlah1 (2005, DBP) consisting of 20 stories from three earlier collections, Yuda2 (1992, DBP) Idola3 (1997, Sasbadi), Rapsodi4 (1998, DBP). Based on the short stories in Taman Uzlah, it is found that Zaen Kasturi generally portrayed the “search” as an authoritative subjectivity. Therefore, in many occasions in his short stories, Zaen Kasturi engaged an artistic audacity attitude when presenting an issue, in particular, dissent: courage with fiery emotion and artistic sentiments to state what he believes is the truth. Reading method used in this research can generally be used to clarify the message presented by the author.