My guilty pleasure during the MCO has been ordering local indie magazines. The first issue of Saya zine arrives at my door via Grab. It has a cover like one of those old-school composition books bound with black tape. A flip through the pages takes you across pastel palette micro verses with swirling typography and colours. The mesh gradients remind me of the rainbow paddle pops I had when I was younger, but in the case of this book the pools of colour seem almost reflective, as if enhancing what is written on the page. Saya is a curious word to think about for an English-speaking brain. Not just “I”, but “my” and “mine” it seems like a versatile way to fearlessly claim ownership without apologies or doubt. What better name could there be for this anthology of young writers interrogating what it means to be Malaysian?

When I look at other zines in my modest collection, a lot of the incredible writing and art I encounter within their pages couldn’t have been printed anywhere else. Where else would you find ink painting documenting Semai oral tradition than in Gerimis Art Project’s zine Cermor? Or visual journaling like Ugly Malaysiana v 2.0, which pays attention to the eccentricities of everyday design of menus, shop signs and rooms, if not in the pages of Process Magazine?

I love independent magazines here because they are the unfiltered testing zones for writing, not caught up in distilling writing into a style guide or a brand. There’s a playfulness in the writing featured here that’s far more appealing than the overt polish or blatant incendiary tones of more mainstream media outlets. To me, this is the real forefront of culture.