PETALING JAYA, Feb 16 — Five decades on, the May 13 race riots of 1969 are hardly remembered — except by a few history buffs and those who actually lived through it — to the point that supremacists dare to threaten a repeat of the dreadful tragedy.

It was a dark chapter in our history which must never be repeated and 33-year-old Hanna Alkaf’s debut young adult (YA) novel The Weight of Our Sky aims to tell its readers — especially the younger ones — why.

"My interest has always been in things that have been obscured or hidden, and missing, rather than the obvious. When something is told to you, it’s told from a certain perspective.

"You have to ask yourself: ‘what voice is missing from this narrrative?’” said Hanna who was born in 1985, 16 years after the incident.

"So in particular for May 13, we’re told very little, officially. When we were kids, in text books we’re told very minimal things,” she added, highlighting that most explanations are "sterilised” or rooted in official sources, and more inclined towards the aftermath, such as policies enacted afterwards as a response.

"To me it’s always fascinating to think about: what are they not telling us? Because those policies still affect us to this day.

"They had a big impact on the way we interact with each other as a community. But we’re not really told how we got there.”

Set on the very evening that the riots started and the subsequent curfew in the days that followed, the novel illustrates how senseless racial hatred and violence are: from the looting, the impunity granted to the security forces, down to the mobs that would lash at everything and anything when emotions cloud over reason.

In one particular pivotal scene, the horror dawns on you that all it took for one to be at the fatal receiving end of the hatred and violence of secret society members was being from the "wrong” ethnic group.

"There was no rhyme or reason. There were a lot of bodies of children in school uniforms. At the time, afternoon school had just let out when the riots broke out,” Hanna explained.

The sectarian violence happened following the 1969 Malaysian general election, in which opposition parties won significant gains at the expense of then ruling coalition Alliance Party — a precursor to Barisan Nasional that would end up governing the country for six decades until its shock defeat last year.

Official reports claimed only 196 people died, but as reported in foreign media and mentioned by a character in the book, it could really be as high as 600.

"There were sides, that was the problem. So when one side did something, another side decided they had to do something to retaliate. The body count just kept going up because of that,” Hanna commented.

According to Hanna, the horrifying details were all based on meticulous research of historical documents, published narrations, foreign reports, and interviews with survivors — who understandably "did not like to talk about it very much.”

And yet, May 13 is being thrown around casually for the sake of politics recently, with Malay rights group Jaringan Melayu Malaysia Datuk Azwanddin Hamzah using it as a warning against ruling party DAP, while PAS president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang cited it as an excuse to not have local council elections.

The deep dive for the story, however, was familiar work to Hanna, who graduated with a degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Illinois and spent over a decade writing for Marie Claire, Shape, and Esquire among others.

She also had a stint as an online copywriter in Chicago for several years after graduating, and was communications manager of education non-profit group Teach For Malaysia.

Being a born-and-bred KL-ite also helped. Brought up in Ampang and with her early education in Convent Bukit Nanas, KL is all too familiar to Hanna.

She published her first book in 2016, the non-fiction Gila: A Journey Through Moods & Madness, a collection of untold stories of people living with mental illness in Malaysia, interspersed with resources from patients, caregivers, psychologists, psychiatrists, volunteers and advocates.

As she turned 30, she tried her hand at fiction, winning the inaugural DK Dutt Award for Literary Excellence with a heart-breaking short story of a feminine boy trying out for a football team.

The first draft of The Weight of Our Sky was finished in just under three months after around eight months of preparation, and it did not take long after Hanna made some queries about a literary agent that one answered requesting her full manuscript — just under three hours after she hit "send” actually!

In two weeks, an agent had already offered to represent her. In total, five made offers out of the over 30 queries she sent, much to her surprise and delight.

"I wanted somebody with a proven record of working with diverse authors and stories. I wanted an agent who understood what I was trying to do,” said Hanna, who ended up choosing Victoria Marini of New York-based Irene Goodman.

"I don’t want to build a career that centres on the Western gaze. I’m very upfront about wanting to write Malaysian stories and not white-washing that in any way, not changing things to make it palatable to a Western audience.”

Fast forward, it was decided that the best home for the novel would be, a new imprint focusing on Muslim stories by Muslim authors for a young audience, under the prestigious publisher Simon & Schuster, also based in NY.

Led by executive editor Zareen Jaffery, herself a Pakistani-American Muslim, more recent titles under Salaam Reads include award-winning YA title Saints and Misfits by Toronto-based S.K. Ali.

Hanna is the imprint’s first South-east Asian author.

The novel’s protagonist is a 16-year-old girl named Melati, who is obsessed with The Beatles.

"I love George [Harrison] because I have a soft spot for Here Comes the Sun’, ” Hanna said, referring to the Abbey Road track written by the Beatles guitarist, which is also featured in the book.

But Melati is also captive to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) which she desperately attributes to being possessed by a malevolent djinn, in a time when mental healthcare here was pretty much non-existent.

Separated during the May 13 riots, Melati attempts to find her single mother with the help of a Chinese boy named Vincent — all the while haunted by repeated visions of her mother dying in grim and savage ways.

"I think people don’t really understand OCD much. Most people focus on the compulsions, on things you can see. But the things driving the compulsions, nobody really thinks about them,” Hanna said, relating that the story was inspired by her work on the abovementioned book Gila.

This comes as portrayal of OCD in pop culture tends to highlight "quirks” such as needing to keep things clean, neat and tidy. Hanna said a few readers with OCD have so far given positive feedback about her portrayal of the condition.

"What I really wanted was to just show she could have the strength within herself to overcome it when she needed to, but at the same time it’s not something that magically goes away. You can’t just cure it, you have to learn to live with it,” she added.

All in all, not entirely jovial or light reading. So much so that the book had to come with a trigger warning. "If this will hurt you, please don’t read my book. No book is worth sacrificing your own well-being for,” Hanna warns in her author’s note.

And definitely not a topic one would expect in a YA book.

But Hanna, herself a mother of two, believes that the genre is at the forefront of widening the diversity of stories being offered to readers.

And what better way to remind the public of the country’s history than speaking to the young?

"Humans are wired on story. Things we remember are things we read as stories,” said Hanna.

"I wanted to write particularly for younger readers because our generation, we didn’t learn that much and we don’t know that much.

"As the older generation who actually lived through it dies out, as the voices fade… then who carries this burden of remembering? If we don’t remember, we don’t learn,” she said.

*The Weight of Our Sky will be launched in Kinokuniya Books in Suria KLCC today at 5pm.