Fingering history

We Could **** You Mr. Birch by Kee Thuan Chye (Kee Thuan Chye, 1994, 83 pages).

I was recently at a 99-year old secondary school in Ipoh. The auditorium had those boards that listed the sports champions through the years. I was surprised to find that one of the sports teams was named Birch.

Birch! I wonder how the kids assigned to that sports house would have felt. (I would have been perversely proud). JWW Birch, the first British Resident of colonial Perak, is not usually a name to be celebrated. Here was a man who did not understand ‘our’ customs, insulted ‘our’ traditions, and was suitably punished by being murdered in his (rather than ‘our’) bath.

Having a sports group in independent Malaysia named after him would be like having a team in a Taliban madrasah named after Kamal Attartuk. Or so it would seem. But were things really that simple? Was Birch the unrepentant rogue we have been led to believe?

When I got back home I dug up the text of this play. Now here’s a funny story: The original title was We Could Kill You Mr. Birch. But the licensing authorities of 1994 thought the word ‘kill’ was too rude. So the playwright Kee Thuan Chye changed it to four asterisks. The authorities approved, not realising of course that the title now seemed much ruder.

In case the cheeky title doesn’t give it away, this is not a straight-forward depiction of history. It’s more like a satirical interrogation. Actors play multiple roles and jump in and out of character, sometimes addressing the audience directly. It is post-colonial, post-modernist and has many quotable quotes that you can save on Post It notes.

Most of the action takes place during the last days of Birch in 1874. Some of the characters are based on real people but others are blatantly fictional. We know they are fictional because the characters helpfully tell us.

The idea of using composite or made-up characters to make us understand a historical era better is, of course, valid and good. This play also does something else: it invites us to reinterpret commonly held ideas and prejudices, including a surely crowd-pleasing one about comparative genitalia.

There’s a bit where someone cuts off not his genitalia but his middle finger. The digit then appears in a royal dream. It would appear than the play is also like a finger. A finger can do many things, not just tickle.

If Birch were such a bad guy, why did he want to free the slaves? Lest we forget, slavery was very much a part of Malay society then. How could a society that condoned such a barbaric practise claim the moral high ground? And were the noblemen who objected to him really concerned about customs and values, or were they just thinking of the taxes they wouldn’t be able to collect once his centralized system came into place? But on the other hand: did Birch’s piecemeal innovations cancel out the fact that he was part of a racist colonial machine?

Royalty played a big part in the machinations of that era. The choice of ruler was not something divinely ordained but born out of political negotiations, back-stabbing and blackmail. In this context, it is doubly amusing to read now even of liberal intellectuals who keep thirsting for the latest proclamations from this fundamentally undemocratic institution. What gives?

There are some deliberate comic anachronisms and uses of words that reflected the political scenario of 1994 (like “recalcitrant”) because the play is about an issue that continues to matter today: How do we ensure that those in power don’t simply get away with anything? (In an aside, the Federal government’s takeover of Sabah in the early 1990s is used as contemporary parallel. But the play script says that this can be adapted and updated to any suitable event).

It’s a subversive play in both form and content. Lest the audience be let off the hook, the ending takes place squarely in the present day, in a kind of existential capitalist hell, with the characters buying and selling shares. Which makes you wonder if we are any freer than we were back then. But lest we get all dour about it, the play seals its critique with a dance beat.

(Malay Mail, 20 August 2008)