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62 Intimating the Sacred linked to the denial of a woman and her death. Halfway through the narrative, Fernando recounts the tragic story of A. Neelambigai alias Fatimah binti Abdullah, a “young woman whose body neither her relatives nor the Religious Department would claim” (52). Her relatives are unwilling to claim the body because she has converted to Islam, and the (Islamic) Religious Department has declined because, as the assistant of the department tells Dahlan, who is looking into her case, the department does not have proof of her conversion. According to critic Wong Soak Koon, the fate of this woman brings to the fore “communal narrowness” and the way in which “modern bureaucracy (the authorities’ insistence on documented evidence of her conversion) can erode that compassion which lies at the heart of all great religions”.64 This is a valid point, but I want to proffer another possibility as to why this woman has become an untouchable, one that ties Neelambigai’s death to the state of inhospitality. To do this, I invoke a psychoanalytical concept which, in my opinion, is not only linked to the notion of the “(im)possible” that is the foundation of the hospitable, but also exposes the “surplus” within secularized religions that quietly threatens to undo their borders: abjection. In her transgression of “racial and religious boundaries” (80), Neelambigai has relinquished her subject status to become the abject. Her death, I argue, is merely the culmination of abjection. As Julia Kristeva notes, the abject is what “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite …”65 But what establishes Neelambigai’s abjection even more substantially is the (im) possibility of her professing two faiths.66 She is both a Muslim convert (which indirectly also suggests a relinquishment of her racial identity), and a Hindu, as records of her conversion cannot be found. It is because of her impossible, abject identity that her relatives and the Religious Department have denied responsibility for her. Her body, both in life and death, is a pollutant that contaminates sacrosanct space (that is, religion) which must necessarily enact ideological borders to ensure its “purity”. But abjection is not only about defilement. Part of its danger is also the fascination it inspires, a fascination which insinuates that: nothing is exhaustive, there is a residue in every system — in cosmogony, food ritual, and even sacrifice, which deposits, through ashes for instance, ambivalent remains. A challenge to our mono-theistic and mono-logical universes such a mode of thinking apparently needs the ambivalence of remainder if it is not to become enclosed within One single-level symbolics, and thus always posit a non-object as polluting as it is reviving — defilement and genesis.67 What Neelambigai announces is not only the unspoken “surplus” within secularized religions that continuously vexes their mono-logical spaces, but the possibility of these spaces to “house” something other than what they are. In other words, the abject reveals that embedded in any ideology is its own “other”, or double. The brand of religion that individuals like Tok Guru Bahaudin, and Panglima (and even Neelambigai’s own family, to an extent), promote is a monological, secularized one grafted onto a nationalist agenda. Such a religion is necessarily hedged by boundaries because it must clarify the “us versus them” dichotomy. The danger is not so much what falls outside the border, because in this case, it is recognizably the other, but what clings onto the border’s faultline itself. Neelambigai, as an abject configuration, brings to relief the impossibility of the border for divisive purposes and the instability of any monological systems. Like Sally in Scorpion Orchid, Neelambigai’s multiplicated identity plots her as hospitality because upon her body is the “possible” commingling of divergent races and religions. This, following Levinas, is what true religion should be — “the relation with the Other, explicitly distanced from ontology”.68 Religion is the relinquishment of the ontological self (in its adamant relations to my being, my belonging, my subjectivity, my faith, and so forth) to encounter the Other without prejudice or a desire to subsume the latter into the categories of the self-same. And as Derrida further deliberates in “Violence and Metaphysics”, “the other is the other only if his alterity is absolutely irreducible, that is, infinitely irreducible; and the infinitely Other can only be Infinity”.69 The same appreciation of the irreducible Other/Infinity/God should be extended to the racial...

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