Book-length accounts of their experiences by former Internal Security Act (ISA) detainees in Malaysia and Singapore have been disappointingly few. Of the several thousand detainees since the late 1940s when communist militancy lent dubious justification to the extra-judicial measure of detention without trial, only a few have written about their sufferings. Since the majority of ISA detainees were from the left of the ideological spectrum -- leftists in both countries have had a greater affinity for the written word -- the paucity of literary witnessing by ex-ISA detainees is puzzling.

There must be salvation for people who suffered unjust detention in the witness and moral assignment of the writing act. A literary record of their oppression serves not only as antidote for terrible memories, but also as ammunition for a rectifying posterity to apportion blame and, more importantly, summon the effort to do away with the draconian ISA.

Here and there an Ahmad Boestamam and a Kassim Ahmad have captured in print the story of the midnight knock on their doors that extruded them into the "long, dark night of the soul where it is always 3 o'clock in the morning," to borrow from an unlikely combination of John of the Cross and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But aside from the works of Boestamam and Kassim, the shelf of detainee literature in Malaysia and Singapore is slender and undistinguished.

Malaysian Chinese educationist Kua Kia Song's Behind The Wire (1989) and Singapore lawyer Francis Seow's To Catch a Tartar (1994) were works that merely recorded their experience of being held under the ISA, but did not really evoke the random tyrannies, ragged living conditions and rousing friendships that were the lot of many ISA detainees. Admittedly, such a book would not be easy to write. To recollect in tranquility an experience compounded of fear, frustration and loathing, requires no ordinary powers of observation and memory; not to mention a ruminative bent. Such powers occur but rarely which explains the paucity of memoirs by ex-detainees.

The most recent additions to the shelf of detention literature, Meniti Lautan Gelora (2001) by Said Zahari and Two Faces (1995) by Dr Syed Husin Ali, are not likely to add lustre to the slender corpus of detention literature, but it is certain to make the continuing reticence of another - more famous ISA detainee - deafening. Said Zahari was editor of Utusan Melayu, in the immediate prelude to its takeover in 1961 by interests linked to Umno, while Syed Husin is a former University of Malaya professor with a long history of association with socialist struggles. Both spent long spells in detention - Said Zahari's at 17 years was unspeakably long - and came round to writing about their experiences long after their release.

Singapore-born Zahari was banished by former Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman for leading an Utusan strike against an Umno takeover of the paper in 1961. He went back to Singapore and after declining an offer to throw in his lot with Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party (PAP), became president of the Parti Rakyat Singapura. In 1963 Zahari, then 34, was detained in Singapore under the ISA for alleged communist sympathies. He was released in 1980.

Johor-born Syed Husin was caught in late 1974, together with former Umno luminary Anwar Ibrahim, in the ISA dragnet that followed University of Malaya student demonstrations in support of peasants hit by declining rubber prices in Baling. A Parti Socialis Rakyat Malaysia (PSRM) activist, Syed had addressed gatherings during that period of ferment in local universities where Anwar was then gaining renown as a religious and idealistic exponent of social justice causes.

As usual in these straits, Syed Husin was offered a circumscribed freedom if he admitted to engaging in communist class struggle. Syed refused, explaining to his captors that subscription to Marxist notions of social analysis did not necessarily make one a communist. His detention, relatively genteel initially, turned torturous about 20 months after he was taken into custody.

A series of ISA arrests in June 1976 saw Malaysia's most influential journalist then, Samad Ismail, and two deputy ministers, Abdullah Ahmad and Abdullah Majid, detained in an operation whose defenders, principally Home Affairs Minister Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie, claimed was necessary to thwart a communist conspiracy aimed at influencing senior Umno leaders. The arrests, which sent shock waves through both sides of the causeway, followed hard upon the detention in Singapore of Hussein Jahidin, a Malay newspaper editor who "confessed" to being a pawn in an elaborate plot inspired by "mastermind" Samad.

Then newly-installed Prime Minister Hussein Onn's lack of experience, ex-PAP convenor Samad's radical past in which a break with Singapore progenitor Lee Kuan Yew turned out to be especially bitter, Samad's close relationship with the recently deceased Tun Razak, Ghazali's vaulting ambition and rapport with Lee, were among the disparate strands of a volatile mix of motives and machinations that saw Syed Husin enmeshed in its tentacles. Syed's interrogators turned nasty when he refused to confess to being more than an acquaintance of Samad since his undergraduates at the University of Malaya in Bukit Timah in the late 1950s when Samad, who moved fluidly between diverse spheres of activity, was adviser to Malay literary and linguistic circles.

In Two Faces Syed Husin also claims that his captors wanted him to confess to being a conduit for the communist underground's contacts with both the then Deputy Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Cabinet Minister Musa Hitam. Syed says in his book that throughout his ordeal under interrogative detention, he could hear the whine of axes being ground; of scores waiting to be settled on the strength of a coerced confession; of driving ministerial ambition, temporarily frustrated, seeking through Red-baiting innuendo to advance to within a heartbeat of the premiership of the country.

Some details of the political scenario of Malaysia in the initial years of the 1970s need here to be recalled: an obviously wounded (by the turn of the May 13 tragedy) Tunku Abdul Rahman is rather unceremoniously shown the door; a leukemia-stricken (this was privy only to a few) Tun Abdul Razak takes over as Prime Minister with despatch and is increasingly uneasy with the mounting popularity of Selangor Menter Besar Harun Idris; reluctant politician Datuk Hussein Onn is brought into the inner cabinet as insulation against Harun; deputy premier Tun Dr Ismail succumbs, rather unexpectedly, to a heart attack in 1973; Hussein is chosen as Razak's deputy; Harun is charged with corruption; then Razak dies in January 1976 and successor Hussein, a man of rectitude but new to the wheeling and dealing of party politics, wants to pick supreme council member Ghazali Shafie as his deputy but Umno veeps Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Ghafar Baba and Dr Mahathir tell him it's either one of them or no go. A dithering Hussein names Dr Mahathir as deputy premier in April 1976.

Two months later, Home Minister Ghazali orders the arrest of, among others, the three Abduls - Abdul Samad Ismail, Abdullah Ahmad and Abdullah Majid - all reputedly influential with the late Tun Razak and rendered bereft by his sudden death. Syed Husin Ali, well removed from the vortex of Umno politics and languishing in Kamunting in his 20th month under ISA detention, is moved to a well-shrouded detention centre in Kuala Lumpur and is subjected to coercive inducement to implicate Samad Ismail and, as he claims, Dr Mahathir and Musa Hitam.

All these disparate strands of a complex web, gradually being pieced together through the recollections of that period's importunate victims, should give grave pause to those who claim that the ISA is needed even after the communist threat has evanesced. Ironists would recall Hegel's observation that events in history tend towards repetition - the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. More replays of the farcical can be expected in the way the ISA is wielded against political opponents. For that reason, Meniti Lautan Gelora and Two Faces are valorous additions to the body of literary witnessing against the ISA. Such witnessing is necessary until this repressive piece of legislation is expunged from the statute books.

Both books make the reticence of Samad Ismail, Magsaysay award-winning journalist and novelist, and confidant and adviser to the powerful both in Malaysia and Singapore, about his version of the arrests of 1976 curious, 20 years after his release from what was his third spell in political detention. It will soon be a quarter century since his reverberating detention of 1976. Samad, 76, owes posterity to write about it. Otherwise it will be hard to dispel the notion that he was not two-faced as his adversaries claim.