The Elephant and the Wins
Over the past weekend, a Malaysian movie won an award overseas. Roll out the kompang, beat the flag, wave the bunga manggar, or combinations thereof! But wait, it wasn’t one movie, it was two. No, I lie again (what’s wrong with me today?) It was three different movies.
All three were made on very low budgets (less than RM150,000 each) but managed to beat more expensively mounted productions from more developed countries, so this should make us feel all warm inside.
James Lee’s Before We Fall in Love Again won the Best ASEAN Feature Film award at the Bangkok International Film Festival. He had won the same award in the same festival two years ago for The Beautiful Washing Machine. Deepak Kumaran Menon’s Dancing Bells won the NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award at the Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival, New Delhi. And Woo Ming Jin’s The Elephant and The Sea won two separate awards at the inaugural Cinema Digital Seoul festival.
The first two movies have already received limited release in Malaysia. The third has never been seen here, which is why I want to talk about it.
The Elephant and The Sea marks a leap forward from Woo’s debut, Monday Morning Glory and also his “commercial” venture Salon. (The word is in quotes because the film did not actually make money). Many lesser people would have given up after Salon. But the California-trained Woo is, to quote a theatre performance title of some years ago, “bullish on bouncing back.”
It is set in a coastal town where a strange epidemic has just occurred, requiring quarantine. There are these two men, a young slacker and an older fisherman, each seemingly hopeless but actually in search of precisely “that thing with feathers.” The two never actually meet but experience parallel journeys.
What strikes you first is the visual beauty; aside from the small town, the landscape includes an almost surreal primordial jungle retreat. And then you notice the quiet dignity of these seemingly deadbeat characters. Gradually, the movie’s sense of humour kicks in.
Although set in a depressing locale during depressing times, there is an offbeat, frisky energy, such as the running gag of the expensive fish with the lucky lottery numbers. There is a scene where the young man needs to make up for an awful transgression to a young woman that must count as some kind of masterpiece.
There is very little dialogue, it’s kinda slow, and it might therefore fit into the cliche of the “everybody suffers, including the audience” perception of arthouse flicks. But it has a special feel to it that is devoid of both modish cynicism and cheap sentimentality, and that’s more that can be said of most flicks. You even get to see a real elephant, unlike that Gus Van Sant film that was called Elephant, so there!
Yes, they will be people who will whinge that The Elephant and The Sea, Dancing Bells and Before We Fall in Love Again are not “real Malaysian” productions because they don’t happen to be in Malay. But such people are welcome to kiss these awards.
The only festival I attended personally was the New Delhi one. There was even a panel discussion on the topic of “cooperative filmmaking”. It seems that the Malaysian model (of people helping out on each other’s shoots) is considered so inspirational that it needed to be introduced to young Indian filmmakers.
So we talked about our experiences. My quotable quote was, “If you don’t have money, you might as well have friends.” Along the way, we dished on how certain segments of our media have labelled these films as being “an insult to national sovereignty” for their choices of language, and therefore “for failing to portray the correct image of Malaysia.” As if all the ghosts movies we are now being served are a correct image of our reality!
But even while talking, I couldn’t summon up outrage. The truth is, the attacks have become amusing more than anything else. So I said, “The reason we stick together is so that we can annoy these bigots even more.”
When I got back, we got an email from the panel organiser. He said that our session had an invigorating effect and was much discussed. For this we can be glad.
Merdeka with The Simpsons
I wonder if any of our public-funded programmes for this month can come as close to articulating Merdeka as The Simpsons Movie.
Homer’s own bumbling actions get he and his family kicked out of Springfield by a vigilante mob. Swearing never to return, he is nonetheless persuaded that he will only be complete once he loves others as much as he loves himself.
Through the machinations of a ruthless politician, the town gets sealed by a giant dome. The image of townsfolk being held literally captive by “a man on a giant TV” is a brilliant parody of media control. In countries where the media is not so autonomous, it can also mean other types of control.
True enough, it is the combined strengths of these outcasts that saves the day. Like any self-respecting blockbuster, it pits ordinary mortals against overwhelming foes. The difference this time is that these mortals are yellow, bug-eyed and seemingly dysfunctional.
The portrait of grassroots resilience against occupation is stirring, but the heroes are not placed on pedestals. The Simpsons has always had a healthy irreverence for authority, recognising instinctively that veneration can create a culture of corruption. And instead of saying that evil only comes from the Other, it knows that oppressive power structures can easily be replicated anywhere, even in your own home.
These small-time heroes are not without flaws. But Springfield is capacious enough to embrace all its citizens; any spurts of anger are short-lived, because everyone realises, at one level, that they are all in this together. Everyone feels they have an equal stake in the town, which is why they can come together despite surface differences.
Despite its 2D images, the film is rich, and only a Mr. Burns type will leave the cinema without a happy grin.
Showing posts with label CURRENT NST COLUMN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CURRENT NST COLUMN. Show all posts
Thursday, 2 August 2007
Thursday, 26 July 2007
NST: 26 July
Ruby in the sky
You’ve heard of sky juice, of course. And if you haven’t, you probably would flunk one of those “How Malaysian Are You?” quizzes. The slang term for water seems to be unique to our shores. There is also another Malaysian original, Sky Kingdom. This is, or was, a commune of people on the East Coast who had some esoteric beliefs, not least of which was a fondness for giant teapots.
Well, there is also such a thing as a sky book. This is the kind of tome that makes ideal reading when you are in a plane. As I am such a jet-setter (but with unfortunately not the bank balance that the phrase might signify), I tend to do lots of reading thousands of feet about the ground. For the latest trip I took along a wonderful Malaysian book, As I Was Passing.
It is a compilation of columns by Sri Delima, which literally means “the glow of the ruby.” It even has a sequel, called (wait for it) As I Was Passing II. Both volumes have been recently reissued under the author’s real name, Adibah Amin, with different covers and rather large font-size. Some younger Malaysians, shame on them, would recognise Adibah solely through her hilarious turn as the priggish disciplinarian Cikgu Bedah in the film Adik Manja, her only foray into acting. If that is the case, they should check out these books at once.
I took along the original 1976 volume with me. It has been out of print for over a decade but I had purchased it at a charming second-hand bookstore, where I always feel the need to buy and to sneeze. The reissue is of course a good thing. The original is however more petite, and the fact that the author’s name isn’t explicitly mentioned somehow jibes with the self-deprecating wit contained within. The previous owner of my copy even left a name: “Khoo Mea Lee, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 1976.” Where is Khoo now?
As I Was Passing is priceless Malaysiana. It is the closest that prose has come to the magic of Lat. When you first read it, you are all aglow with the warmth of nostalgia. But there is an irony here: Many of the articles in it also seem to express nostalgia for an earlier age. One of the earliest and best pieces, “The Sweet Face at the Window” has a foreign-educated young man returning to his village to lament, “I have not changed , but everything else has.” The final paragraph of this article packs a real emotional punch, and we cotton on that Adibah is more tough-minded than a mere nostalgist.
Others, such as Kee Thuan Chye recently in The Star, have commented on Adibah’s embrace of cultural differences and how she sees plurality as a blessing rather than a threat. Her accounts of celebrating Deepavali, Christmas and Chinese New Year can attest to this. Kee says that Adibah’s benevolence and healthy curiosity are precisely what this country now needs to avoid descending further into factionalism.
What makes her writing special is that although she never seems to preach or hector, hers is an inherently moral vision. This isn’t the morality that is informed by petty spite and bitterness, but a luminous humanism born out of an acute awareness and love of her surroundings.
The fact that she was a woman in a male-dominated profession (journalism) is crucial to her persona, too. Many a piece would lacerate, oh so subtly, the male ego -- although she does seem to have a soft spot for a certain type of rogue. There are also criticisms of prudes, chauvinists and busybodies but delivered in an inimitable way, without malice, like in a modern folk-tale. Her criticisms are gentle enough that “ants would not die under her tread” -- a saying she uses more than once.
You can image some very serious readers using her column as a respite from the “hard news” of the day. But I wonder if some of her articles will then live in the reader’s memory long after the seemingly urgent news had gone with the wind.
Like Lat and a few others such as Usman Awang, her humanism is wedded to sensual appreciation.
Her descriptions of rituals, including the ones specific to her family, offer pleasure because, very often, they are about pleasure. At the risk of seeming like a perv, As I Was Passing is quite erotic.
The article on Hari Raya does not need to use theological dogma but richly describes how the day unfolded in her childhood, including how her “big brothers and boy-cousins” would stroll “through the kampung with faithful [her] in tow, softly strumming their guitars, seemingly unaware of glowing eyes behind fluttering window-curtains.”
Her accounts of dondang sayang and learning Hindi through songs are just two more examples of how much she appreciates the crucial naughtiness of life.
When she describes how addictive personal home phones are, it’s strikingly similar to how we now treat the Internet; when she predicts that latah will soon die out, you wonder why this has not been proven true at all; and when she says that the word ‘saya’ came from ‘sahaya’ (slave), you wonder why you never knew that.
Adibah is also known as a translator, and she demonstrates this in more ways than one. She translates her joy, intelligence and occasional exasperation to her readers in exquisitely fleet-footed words; she translates across communities and belief-systems in the spirit of sharing; and in the process translates back some home truths that no longer feel hackneyed or corny.
Her articles almost never mention people by name. When she would indirectly refer to a politician or poet or some other public personality, you are left to wonder who they are. The fact that her articles are not dated or footnoted also makes you want to know more about the specific circumstances that prompted certain allusions.
For example, “Dear Monster Revisited” describes a Deepavali visit to a formerly feared, but now gruffly affectionate, headmaster. He makes a reference to “the new forms of tyranny around and within us” and it ends with a description of his “sad, yet...trusting eyes.”
I wonder if some kind of socio-political trauma caused these sad eyes. After all, Malaysia in the 1970s went through many changes; not necessarily the physical ones of the subsequent decade, but certainly institutional ones that continue to have an impact today. But it would not be Sri Delima’s style to “ungkit” as to the causes; her (seemingly) more modest aim is to heal.
If you are reading her books for the first time, I envy you.
You’ve heard of sky juice, of course. And if you haven’t, you probably would flunk one of those “How Malaysian Are You?” quizzes. The slang term for water seems to be unique to our shores. There is also another Malaysian original, Sky Kingdom. This is, or was, a commune of people on the East Coast who had some esoteric beliefs, not least of which was a fondness for giant teapots.
Well, there is also such a thing as a sky book. This is the kind of tome that makes ideal reading when you are in a plane. As I am such a jet-setter (but with unfortunately not the bank balance that the phrase might signify), I tend to do lots of reading thousands of feet about the ground. For the latest trip I took along a wonderful Malaysian book, As I Was Passing.
It is a compilation of columns by Sri Delima, which literally means “the glow of the ruby.” It even has a sequel, called (wait for it) As I Was Passing II. Both volumes have been recently reissued under the author’s real name, Adibah Amin, with different covers and rather large font-size. Some younger Malaysians, shame on them, would recognise Adibah solely through her hilarious turn as the priggish disciplinarian Cikgu Bedah in the film Adik Manja, her only foray into acting. If that is the case, they should check out these books at once.
I took along the original 1976 volume with me. It has been out of print for over a decade but I had purchased it at a charming second-hand bookstore, where I always feel the need to buy and to sneeze. The reissue is of course a good thing. The original is however more petite, and the fact that the author’s name isn’t explicitly mentioned somehow jibes with the self-deprecating wit contained within. The previous owner of my copy even left a name: “Khoo Mea Lee, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 1976.” Where is Khoo now?
As I Was Passing is priceless Malaysiana. It is the closest that prose has come to the magic of Lat. When you first read it, you are all aglow with the warmth of nostalgia. But there is an irony here: Many of the articles in it also seem to express nostalgia for an earlier age. One of the earliest and best pieces, “The Sweet Face at the Window” has a foreign-educated young man returning to his village to lament, “I have not changed , but everything else has.” The final paragraph of this article packs a real emotional punch, and we cotton on that Adibah is more tough-minded than a mere nostalgist.
Others, such as Kee Thuan Chye recently in The Star, have commented on Adibah’s embrace of cultural differences and how she sees plurality as a blessing rather than a threat. Her accounts of celebrating Deepavali, Christmas and Chinese New Year can attest to this. Kee says that Adibah’s benevolence and healthy curiosity are precisely what this country now needs to avoid descending further into factionalism.
What makes her writing special is that although she never seems to preach or hector, hers is an inherently moral vision. This isn’t the morality that is informed by petty spite and bitterness, but a luminous humanism born out of an acute awareness and love of her surroundings.
The fact that she was a woman in a male-dominated profession (journalism) is crucial to her persona, too. Many a piece would lacerate, oh so subtly, the male ego -- although she does seem to have a soft spot for a certain type of rogue. There are also criticisms of prudes, chauvinists and busybodies but delivered in an inimitable way, without malice, like in a modern folk-tale. Her criticisms are gentle enough that “ants would not die under her tread” -- a saying she uses more than once.
You can image some very serious readers using her column as a respite from the “hard news” of the day. But I wonder if some of her articles will then live in the reader’s memory long after the seemingly urgent news had gone with the wind.
Like Lat and a few others such as Usman Awang, her humanism is wedded to sensual appreciation.
Her descriptions of rituals, including the ones specific to her family, offer pleasure because, very often, they are about pleasure. At the risk of seeming like a perv, As I Was Passing is quite erotic.
The article on Hari Raya does not need to use theological dogma but richly describes how the day unfolded in her childhood, including how her “big brothers and boy-cousins” would stroll “through the kampung with faithful [her] in tow, softly strumming their guitars, seemingly unaware of glowing eyes behind fluttering window-curtains.”
Her accounts of dondang sayang and learning Hindi through songs are just two more examples of how much she appreciates the crucial naughtiness of life.
When she describes how addictive personal home phones are, it’s strikingly similar to how we now treat the Internet; when she predicts that latah will soon die out, you wonder why this has not been proven true at all; and when she says that the word ‘saya’ came from ‘sahaya’ (slave), you wonder why you never knew that.
Adibah is also known as a translator, and she demonstrates this in more ways than one. She translates her joy, intelligence and occasional exasperation to her readers in exquisitely fleet-footed words; she translates across communities and belief-systems in the spirit of sharing; and in the process translates back some home truths that no longer feel hackneyed or corny.
Her articles almost never mention people by name. When she would indirectly refer to a politician or poet or some other public personality, you are left to wonder who they are. The fact that her articles are not dated or footnoted also makes you want to know more about the specific circumstances that prompted certain allusions.
For example, “Dear Monster Revisited” describes a Deepavali visit to a formerly feared, but now gruffly affectionate, headmaster. He makes a reference to “the new forms of tyranny around and within us” and it ends with a description of his “sad, yet...trusting eyes.”
I wonder if some kind of socio-political trauma caused these sad eyes. After all, Malaysia in the 1970s went through many changes; not necessarily the physical ones of the subsequent decade, but certainly institutional ones that continue to have an impact today. But it would not be Sri Delima’s style to “ungkit” as to the causes; her (seemingly) more modest aim is to heal.
If you are reading her books for the first time, I envy you.
Thursday, 19 July 2007
NST: 19 July
Salaam to the south
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, back when he was still living in Iran, made a film called Salaam Cinema. It shows many Iranians auditioning for a film. It offered a charming glimpse at the hopes and dreams of ordinary, movie-mad Iranians. OK, I must confess: I never actually saw Salaam Cinema, but that’s not going to stop me from commenting on it.
This is a prelude to saying that I spent the last weekend quite agreeably holding auditions in Johor Bahru. Now, I blush to say that this was the first time as an adult I had ever been to JB. Well, I had no reason to go before this, did I?
So we had the auditions and were pleasantly surprised when almost 100 people turned up, despite minimal publicity. Many of them are involved in theatre productions and performed their lines with booming gusto. One had played Datok Onn and Hussein Onn in different plays and would soon, I am sure, get a crack at the third generation. Of particular interest were the young man who did uncanny impersonations of Que Haidar and Ako Mustapha, as well as the teacher from a religious school who acted out his own monologue in which he begged his step-mother to beat him. (Don’t ask).
Along the way, we chatted with the people who came. Quite a few worked in Singapore and had to wake up at 4 to cross the border; others were thinking of moving to KL; some spoke of the changes, the good and bad, their city had undergone.
The last time I had been in JB was in early childhood, and I always managed to be asleep as buses passed the city on the way to the checkpoint for Singapore trips, so I was not quite sure what to expect.
It does have some of the characteristics of a border town -- a place of flash and transience and opportunity -- that is as much a mental as physical state, beloved of certain people. Do Singaporeans see it the way we see Golok? Although I remember an entertaining chapter in Rehman Rashid’s A Malaysian Journey that described JB as somewhat dodgy, it must have cleaned up in the meantime -- or I wasn’t looking in the right places. There is even a waterfront eatery that seems to have been uprooted by tornado from Hartamas.
The movie we auditioned for is set entirely in JB. I am not sure if it will be the first, but it’s safe to say that previous JB movies, if they exist, do not number in the dozens. I certainly don’t recall seeing any, which accounts partly for my own lack of mental images.
My friend says it’s easy to differentiate JB folks form visiting Singaporeans based on how many colours they wear. And for sure there are local particularities that I might pick up on the more I go there. (We are shooting in September).
This is why it seemed particularly apt to cast, whenever possible, JB actors themselves. Aside from the fact that we will save on the accommodation budget (hah!) a local will be able to provide a certain verisimilitude, especially as this story is so specific to its locale.
But tell that to the KL-based aspiring actor who seemed quite peeved by our decision to hold auditions only in JB. He said that he was being deprived of an income and that we were being selfish! Not knowing him at all, I assumed he is the sort who thinks life owes him a living. But beyond that, there is also the sanctimoniousness of being in the centre.
I like living in the capital city, maybe because I am so used to complaining about it that I’m now too old to start complaining about a new place. In fact, I can’t really imagine living anywhere else in Malaysia. I used to think (oh, what will you think of me?) that anyone who chose to live outside KL simply has no ambition. My views have modified somewhat. But even now, if perchance I am flung into exile, I will always want to live in the largest city of whatever country I land in.
But increasingly it’s become apparent that so much of our media consciousness is KL-centric. (The fact that it’s Peninsula-centric is also obvious). It’s time I too started to listen more, which is why I took the chance to be involved in this JB movie. The writer/director grew up there.
So even though I am so KL-centred, it now gives me a twinge of sorrow that young people elsewhere, such as the ones who came for the auditions, feel the need to move to the capital. Yes, a reversal of my earlier stand; so sue me. Perhaps I have the selfish desire for KL to not become more congested, but it would also be great if most people can grow without being uprooted.
A particular concern of our educational and social policies has been the need to eliminate excessive “local” allegiances that might run counter to national cohesion. The worst-case scenario would be the mushrooming of separatist groups.
Simply put, it’s easier to rule if everyone thinks about the same things.
But the absence of community involvement, seen most blatantly since the elimination of local council elections, breeds something sad as well. If you do not take some pride in your immediate surroundings, chances are you won’t want to contribute much. And it’s precisely in the specific local communities that interesting stories can be found, and these can be fed to a wider audience, with all sorts of nourishing results.
And the stories are there, of course. Traveling around Perak two years ago for the making of Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, it was great to see how some people, mainly ethnic Chinese, went out of the way to document their own communities, either by building small museums or simply through discussions, often with no governmental support.
Johor has some of the same push, although it appears more top-down. There is even an annual Johor novel-writing competition! I don’t know of other states that have one. It was initially open only to Johor writers, but the doors have been opened to anyone who wants to write about Johor. Last year’s highest-placed entry was by Faisal Tehrani, who’s from Malacca but who would never let a small fact like that get in his way. May the contest survive for many years, and may other states follow suit.
Johor is not just the birthplace of Umno and Mawi, but Adibah Amin, Faridah Merican and Yasmin Ahmad, as well as the illustrious extended families of Ungku Aziz and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, so the nation’s discursive landscape already owes quite a bit to the state. But it’s always good to know more, and this is an admonishment I address squarely to myself first.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, back when he was still living in Iran, made a film called Salaam Cinema. It shows many Iranians auditioning for a film. It offered a charming glimpse at the hopes and dreams of ordinary, movie-mad Iranians. OK, I must confess: I never actually saw Salaam Cinema, but that’s not going to stop me from commenting on it.
This is a prelude to saying that I spent the last weekend quite agreeably holding auditions in Johor Bahru. Now, I blush to say that this was the first time as an adult I had ever been to JB. Well, I had no reason to go before this, did I?
So we had the auditions and were pleasantly surprised when almost 100 people turned up, despite minimal publicity. Many of them are involved in theatre productions and performed their lines with booming gusto. One had played Datok Onn and Hussein Onn in different plays and would soon, I am sure, get a crack at the third generation. Of particular interest were the young man who did uncanny impersonations of Que Haidar and Ako Mustapha, as well as the teacher from a religious school who acted out his own monologue in which he begged his step-mother to beat him. (Don’t ask).
Along the way, we chatted with the people who came. Quite a few worked in Singapore and had to wake up at 4 to cross the border; others were thinking of moving to KL; some spoke of the changes, the good and bad, their city had undergone.
The last time I had been in JB was in early childhood, and I always managed to be asleep as buses passed the city on the way to the checkpoint for Singapore trips, so I was not quite sure what to expect.
It does have some of the characteristics of a border town -- a place of flash and transience and opportunity -- that is as much a mental as physical state, beloved of certain people. Do Singaporeans see it the way we see Golok? Although I remember an entertaining chapter in Rehman Rashid’s A Malaysian Journey that described JB as somewhat dodgy, it must have cleaned up in the meantime -- or I wasn’t looking in the right places. There is even a waterfront eatery that seems to have been uprooted by tornado from Hartamas.
The movie we auditioned for is set entirely in JB. I am not sure if it will be the first, but it’s safe to say that previous JB movies, if they exist, do not number in the dozens. I certainly don’t recall seeing any, which accounts partly for my own lack of mental images.
My friend says it’s easy to differentiate JB folks form visiting Singaporeans based on how many colours they wear. And for sure there are local particularities that I might pick up on the more I go there. (We are shooting in September).
This is why it seemed particularly apt to cast, whenever possible, JB actors themselves. Aside from the fact that we will save on the accommodation budget (hah!) a local will be able to provide a certain verisimilitude, especially as this story is so specific to its locale.
But tell that to the KL-based aspiring actor who seemed quite peeved by our decision to hold auditions only in JB. He said that he was being deprived of an income and that we were being selfish! Not knowing him at all, I assumed he is the sort who thinks life owes him a living. But beyond that, there is also the sanctimoniousness of being in the centre.
I like living in the capital city, maybe because I am so used to complaining about it that I’m now too old to start complaining about a new place. In fact, I can’t really imagine living anywhere else in Malaysia. I used to think (oh, what will you think of me?) that anyone who chose to live outside KL simply has no ambition. My views have modified somewhat. But even now, if perchance I am flung into exile, I will always want to live in the largest city of whatever country I land in.
But increasingly it’s become apparent that so much of our media consciousness is KL-centric. (The fact that it’s Peninsula-centric is also obvious). It’s time I too started to listen more, which is why I took the chance to be involved in this JB movie. The writer/director grew up there.
So even though I am so KL-centred, it now gives me a twinge of sorrow that young people elsewhere, such as the ones who came for the auditions, feel the need to move to the capital. Yes, a reversal of my earlier stand; so sue me. Perhaps I have the selfish desire for KL to not become more congested, but it would also be great if most people can grow without being uprooted.
A particular concern of our educational and social policies has been the need to eliminate excessive “local” allegiances that might run counter to national cohesion. The worst-case scenario would be the mushrooming of separatist groups.
Simply put, it’s easier to rule if everyone thinks about the same things.
But the absence of community involvement, seen most blatantly since the elimination of local council elections, breeds something sad as well. If you do not take some pride in your immediate surroundings, chances are you won’t want to contribute much. And it’s precisely in the specific local communities that interesting stories can be found, and these can be fed to a wider audience, with all sorts of nourishing results.
And the stories are there, of course. Traveling around Perak two years ago for the making of Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, it was great to see how some people, mainly ethnic Chinese, went out of the way to document their own communities, either by building small museums or simply through discussions, often with no governmental support.
Johor has some of the same push, although it appears more top-down. There is even an annual Johor novel-writing competition! I don’t know of other states that have one. It was initially open only to Johor writers, but the doors have been opened to anyone who wants to write about Johor. Last year’s highest-placed entry was by Faisal Tehrani, who’s from Malacca but who would never let a small fact like that get in his way. May the contest survive for many years, and may other states follow suit.
Johor is not just the birthplace of Umno and Mawi, but Adibah Amin, Faridah Merican and Yasmin Ahmad, as well as the illustrious extended families of Ungku Aziz and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, so the nation’s discursive landscape already owes quite a bit to the state. But it’s always good to know more, and this is an admonishment I address squarely to myself first.
Thursday, 12 July 2007
NST: 12 July
(NOTE: A few sentences were not printed or were shortened by the paper. See if you can guess which ones!)
Lagu IT and collective memory
While doing research for my upcoming book Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things, I was overcome by the need to quote from the IT song.
You know the IT song. If you were in Malaysia in the 1990s, you must know the IT song. Unless you were a Luddite who vigorously denied yourself the pleasures of TV and radio, you will definitely know the IT song.
Lagu IT (as it is known) was created by none other than the Information Minister of that time, Mohamad Rahmat. This jovial personality was sometimes known as Mat Setia, due to his admirable loyalty to the administration and also the Setia campaign some years before that. The latter campaign, which ran sometime during the late 1980s, included the relatively mirthless Jenaka Hang Setia programme on TV, and the Setia Bersama Rakyat (Semarak) nationwide roadshow. Oh yes, there was also the song Setia. It was quite a nice song, performed by the wonderful Francesca Peters. Unless you were an unrepentant cynic, your heart’s cockles would have surely been warmed by the song.
Why was there such a need to stress the importance of “loyalty” in the late 1980s? Well, this has to do with the UMNO deregistration, the setting up of Semangat 46, the constitutional crisis involving royalty, and so on lah. If you want to know more, pick up a book!
Anyway, back to the subject. Lagu IT was different from the Setia song. It didn’t warm anybody’s cockles. In fact, it probably popped a few blood vessels.
A version was sung by the wonderful Siti Nurhaliza. But as far as I know, Siti has not included it in any of her Greatest Hits CDs, or sung it at any of her Istana Budaya concerts. I don’t dare speculate as to the reasons for this omission.
This is the song that wants you, in fact commands you, to love Information Technology (IT). If you had the radio or TV continually on, chances are you would have received this hectic exhortation several times in a day. So insistent was this song on the benefits of IT that you got the sense that a refusal of IT’s charms would be tantamount to some form of treason.
It’s hard to convey how ubiquitous this song was. It either made millions rush out to buy their first modem to experience the delights of Jaring service, or it could have made people throw their computers into the nearest river. Someone should do a survey.
So I did a Google search for the lyrics. Astonishingly (hold your gasps) there were no results. I then searched Limewire, where you can download all sorts of stuff. Once again, nothing there. Even an official site called Suara Patriotisme failed to include its MP3 among the toe-tapping, spirit-rousing numbers that can be accessed.
What gives? Did I simply imagine this song in an unusually vivid and protracted nightmare? But no, there were fragments of the lyrics quoted in various sites. They all agreed that the words “Cinta IT” and “Guna IT” appeared in it somewhere. It was also agreed that the song was probably the tuneful equivalent of the famed Chinese water torture.
So, the song did exist. Phew! Many people did take note of it, although not with great affection.
So if the song was indeed known to many, why were the lyrics nowhere online? Before you dismiss this with a sclerotic “That’s why you must trust the PRINT media more than the Internet!” I should say that I even looked through the archives of this worthy organ and its sister publications, all of whom chose to be reticent on the matter.
There is an irony in this, and a lament. The irony is that it would take only a few months from the song’s unveiling to the administration’s realisation that IT wasn’t all hunky dory after all. This realization coincided with a spate of reformasi websites, which caused all kinds of concern about how they were funded and maintained. The chairman of an “anti-defamation panel” at that time even said that it takes tens of thousands of ringgit to set up each site. If he had “cinta IT” enough to do research, he would have known that most of those sites could be run for virtually nothing.
The lament has to do with collective memory. It could be said that the IT song was so annoying that nobody wanted to archive it. But it is, paradoxically, this widespread annoyance that should have ensured a form of immortality. This was our very own, public-funded equivalent of the Crazy Frog ringtone, or the Numa Numa song, or anything by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. But no one wanted to commemorate it, and this is sad.
It’s easy and respectable to be moved by the sad state of heritage-worthy buildings, but our collective memory is also composed of non-tangible things. Songs that bore their way into our consciousness, the way termites eat through wood, should be included. An architect once told me that a city without old buildings is like a man without a memory. Well, a country with no memory of annoying songs is like a man with no personality.
Then again, all sorts of things are being erased at the moment, or might be soon. A best-selling newspaper opined a few days ago that a new biography of P. Ramlee (by his son) was wrong to mention that the late entertainer was fond of mahjong. Mentioning it was equivalent to an attempt to aib (humiliate) the man. Since he is a posthumous Tan Sri, such things should just not be put into print. The son was told to just invent some other location where he hung out! This is censorship in the name of propriety. More of this, and the past will seem very boring indeed.
So anyway, I got a friend to break into the RTM archives to access Lagu IT. (Forgive us!) Oddly enough, it is listed as a 2003 song. Surely it’s older than that?
But anyway, thanks to me, I am now happy to say that the lyrics can be found online if someone were interested enough to do a search.
It’s not such a great feat. I didn’t save a centuries-old temple from demolition. I didn’t record a performance by the last practitioner of an art form before the said practitioner bit the dust. But in my own small way, I feel I have contributed to this thing called national heritage. And I don’t even need a posthumous title to be thanked, really.
I will leave you with some lines to ponder. No, they are not by some Dead White European Male. They are by one of us, and represent a stirring call to action. I could quote Shakespeare’s Henry V’s call to war, but how could those lines even compare to the end of the song I’ve been talking about:
Terima IT
Belajar IT
Sayang IT
Guna IT
IT!
Lagu IT and collective memory
While doing research for my upcoming book Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things, I was overcome by the need to quote from the IT song.
You know the IT song. If you were in Malaysia in the 1990s, you must know the IT song. Unless you were a Luddite who vigorously denied yourself the pleasures of TV and radio, you will definitely know the IT song.
Lagu IT (as it is known) was created by none other than the Information Minister of that time, Mohamad Rahmat. This jovial personality was sometimes known as Mat Setia, due to his admirable loyalty to the administration and also the Setia campaign some years before that. The latter campaign, which ran sometime during the late 1980s, included the relatively mirthless Jenaka Hang Setia programme on TV, and the Setia Bersama Rakyat (Semarak) nationwide roadshow. Oh yes, there was also the song Setia. It was quite a nice song, performed by the wonderful Francesca Peters. Unless you were an unrepentant cynic, your heart’s cockles would have surely been warmed by the song.
Why was there such a need to stress the importance of “loyalty” in the late 1980s? Well, this has to do with the UMNO deregistration, the setting up of Semangat 46, the constitutional crisis involving royalty, and so on lah. If you want to know more, pick up a book!
Anyway, back to the subject. Lagu IT was different from the Setia song. It didn’t warm anybody’s cockles. In fact, it probably popped a few blood vessels.
A version was sung by the wonderful Siti Nurhaliza. But as far as I know, Siti has not included it in any of her Greatest Hits CDs, or sung it at any of her Istana Budaya concerts. I don’t dare speculate as to the reasons for this omission.
This is the song that wants you, in fact commands you, to love Information Technology (IT). If you had the radio or TV continually on, chances are you would have received this hectic exhortation several times in a day. So insistent was this song on the benefits of IT that you got the sense that a refusal of IT’s charms would be tantamount to some form of treason.
It’s hard to convey how ubiquitous this song was. It either made millions rush out to buy their first modem to experience the delights of Jaring service, or it could have made people throw their computers into the nearest river. Someone should do a survey.
So I did a Google search for the lyrics. Astonishingly (hold your gasps) there were no results. I then searched Limewire, where you can download all sorts of stuff. Once again, nothing there. Even an official site called Suara Patriotisme failed to include its MP3 among the toe-tapping, spirit-rousing numbers that can be accessed.
What gives? Did I simply imagine this song in an unusually vivid and protracted nightmare? But no, there were fragments of the lyrics quoted in various sites. They all agreed that the words “Cinta IT” and “Guna IT” appeared in it somewhere. It was also agreed that the song was probably the tuneful equivalent of the famed Chinese water torture.
So, the song did exist. Phew! Many people did take note of it, although not with great affection.
So if the song was indeed known to many, why were the lyrics nowhere online? Before you dismiss this with a sclerotic “That’s why you must trust the PRINT media more than the Internet!” I should say that I even looked through the archives of this worthy organ and its sister publications, all of whom chose to be reticent on the matter.
There is an irony in this, and a lament. The irony is that it would take only a few months from the song’s unveiling to the administration’s realisation that IT wasn’t all hunky dory after all. This realization coincided with a spate of reformasi websites, which caused all kinds of concern about how they were funded and maintained. The chairman of an “anti-defamation panel” at that time even said that it takes tens of thousands of ringgit to set up each site. If he had “cinta IT” enough to do research, he would have known that most of those sites could be run for virtually nothing.
The lament has to do with collective memory. It could be said that the IT song was so annoying that nobody wanted to archive it. But it is, paradoxically, this widespread annoyance that should have ensured a form of immortality. This was our very own, public-funded equivalent of the Crazy Frog ringtone, or the Numa Numa song, or anything by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. But no one wanted to commemorate it, and this is sad.
It’s easy and respectable to be moved by the sad state of heritage-worthy buildings, but our collective memory is also composed of non-tangible things. Songs that bore their way into our consciousness, the way termites eat through wood, should be included. An architect once told me that a city without old buildings is like a man without a memory. Well, a country with no memory of annoying songs is like a man with no personality.
Then again, all sorts of things are being erased at the moment, or might be soon. A best-selling newspaper opined a few days ago that a new biography of P. Ramlee (by his son) was wrong to mention that the late entertainer was fond of mahjong. Mentioning it was equivalent to an attempt to aib (humiliate) the man. Since he is a posthumous Tan Sri, such things should just not be put into print. The son was told to just invent some other location where he hung out! This is censorship in the name of propriety. More of this, and the past will seem very boring indeed.
So anyway, I got a friend to break into the RTM archives to access Lagu IT. (Forgive us!) Oddly enough, it is listed as a 2003 song. Surely it’s older than that?
But anyway, thanks to me, I am now happy to say that the lyrics can be found online if someone were interested enough to do a search.
It’s not such a great feat. I didn’t save a centuries-old temple from demolition. I didn’t record a performance by the last practitioner of an art form before the said practitioner bit the dust. But in my own small way, I feel I have contributed to this thing called national heritage. And I don’t even need a posthumous title to be thanked, really.
I will leave you with some lines to ponder. No, they are not by some Dead White European Male. They are by one of us, and represent a stirring call to action. I could quote Shakespeare’s Henry V’s call to war, but how could those lines even compare to the end of the song I’ve been talking about:
Terima IT
Belajar IT
Sayang IT
Guna IT
IT!
Thursday, 5 July 2007
NST: 5 July
(NOTE: One paragraph was not printed in the paper. Guess which one!)
Sivaji and the politics of numbers
By the time you read this, the Tamil film Sivaji would have grossed about RM7 million in Malaysia. It has been screening for three weeks.
I don’t know if this is the most successful Tamil release in this country, but it is certainly more successful than any Malaysian film. The record for Malaysian film is held by Jangan Pandang Belakang, a fright-fest in which ghouls skate across the screen and flail about in the manner of R&B back-up dancers. It made RM6.4 million earlier in the year.
Now, these numbers are interesting. It’s one thing for a Hollywood film, amply endowed with international buzz, to inspire locals to choose it rather than the home-grown stuff. But a Tamil film?
True, the main actor Rajinikanth is famous, and anticipation had been running high among Tamil movie fans. When some early Malaysian screenings suffered technical glitches, some frustrated punters even went on a rampage reminiscent of those “Say No to Violence” posters of our 1999 General Elections.
But still, a Tamil film? Less than 10% of the population speaks Tamil, while almost all Malaysians speaks Malay to some degree. So how can a Tamil film, whose run has not even ended, sell more tickets than any Malay film?
If you are an upper middle-clas urban type who speaks mainly English (hands up, you shameless things!) it’s possible that Sivaji would have gone completely under your radar. After all, it’s not sponsored by any fast-food chain or telco. Then you might scratch your coiffed head that this film you’d never heard of will end up achieving around the same numbers as the first Lord of the Rings.
There are several possible reasons. Could it be that the non-Tamil speaking population has taken a sudden interest in subtitles? Or could it be that the small minority that consists of actual Tamil speakers like to watch this same film several times?
More pessimistically: Could it be that people who make Malay films, despite having had seven decades of practice, literally have no idea what our audience wants?
I suppose you can hire a market-research type to find out the reasons. But I like things to be a little mysterious. Life becomes more interesting that way. Besides, how often are market researchers right?
It’s great to live in a country where conventional wisdom can be turned on its head once in a while. For example, it’s just assumed that people would rather see a film in a language that they understand. It’s also just assumed that Hindi films would have more appeal than Tamil ones, as the former have a glossier, plusher image, but the numbers have often shown otherwise.
And is Sivaji a bit grittier than, say, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai? Well, it’s about a US-based bloke who returns to India to set up a charity foundation. But there are corrupt officials and greedy businessmen in his way. He bribes his way through but then is confronted with a test of his principles. There’s also a love story somewhere. And songs by the venerable AR Rahman.
The success of Sivaji also makes one ponder the politics of numbers. It’s usually assumed that the majority will be stronger against the minority. This is true in the case of, say, an election. Leaving aside the touchy matter of how electoral boundaries are drawn, the basic premise is still: You need to get more votes than the other guy.
But there are various mechanisms through which a minority can assert itself. A talent contest where the outcome is determined by SMS votes is a case in point, since people can just vote repeatedly. (This is, of course, if we subscribe to the depressing supposition of communitarian loyalty trumping subjective criteria like, erm, talent).
You can also make the point that a numerical majority might in fact be weaker in the case of competition, because majorities tend to be complacent, lazy, and perhaps prone to unproductive bickering. After all, this has been the basis for much of our post-Independence political scare-mongering: “Stick together or else The Others will Take Advantage!”
Our previous Prime Minister caused an international furore in 2003 when he contrasted the achievements of the Jews against the Muslims, despite the huge gulf in numbers. But without libeling any race, there is something to be learned there. What’s the point of numbers if the numbers don’t work for you?
This is why the panic over apostasy strikes me as odd. (Or maybe I am the odd one). What’s the point of inflating your flock with people who want to fly away? Best to marshal your available resources the best you can.
Back in the pre-Internet era, a scarily addictive board game of my post-SRP days was called RISK, where you basically try to conquer the world. The outcome is determined through rolled dice. What makes the game frisky is that even if you have a large army of plastic battalions, you might still get beaten by a smaller force. It’s the luck of the draw. The seemingly punier guy might just have better luck or (as I sometimes darkly suspected) he has a special way of throwing the dice. This taught me that the bigger force may not always win. It also taught me that I can be a very sore loser, but that’s a different story.
The plot of Sivaji itself comments on the role of the minority (in this case, an individual who wants to make a change) pitted against against a large, corrupt force of vested interests. The individual (presumably) wins. So you can say that the plot has an ontological relationship with its success.
The added irony here, of course, is that Sivaji is not such an underdog. At US$16 million, it is reportedly the most expensive Indian film ever. But that’s often the case, is it not? Almost all blockbusters are about the triumph of the little guy against a big force. In the first blockbuster, the force was a form of marine life with big teeth and a scary theme song. But in subsequent incarnations, it has ranged from aliens to what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”. These blockbusters are made by large corporations, which then touchingly need the contributions of millions of you little punters to keep them solvent. And we keep obliging because they make us feel good, these blockbusters do, and feeling good is not to be sniffed at.
After all this, I blush to admit that I have yet to see Sivaji. I was supposed to watch it at the Coliseum last Sunday but was then told that the queue was too long. I shall try again this weekend.
And I hope that this mania for Tamil movies will extend to the release today of Deepak Kumaran Menon’s Chalanggai (Dancing Bells), which was made entirely by Malaysians and shot mainly in Brickfields. I have a cameo appearance in it!
But even if I were not involved, I would recommend this sweetly observed tale of youthful dreams coming up against tough choices. It is also a true lepak [hangout] movie that makes you appreciate your surroundings. Go watch.
Sivaji and the politics of numbers
By the time you read this, the Tamil film Sivaji would have grossed about RM7 million in Malaysia. It has been screening for three weeks.
I don’t know if this is the most successful Tamil release in this country, but it is certainly more successful than any Malaysian film. The record for Malaysian film is held by Jangan Pandang Belakang, a fright-fest in which ghouls skate across the screen and flail about in the manner of R&B back-up dancers. It made RM6.4 million earlier in the year.
Now, these numbers are interesting. It’s one thing for a Hollywood film, amply endowed with international buzz, to inspire locals to choose it rather than the home-grown stuff. But a Tamil film?
True, the main actor Rajinikanth is famous, and anticipation had been running high among Tamil movie fans. When some early Malaysian screenings suffered technical glitches, some frustrated punters even went on a rampage reminiscent of those “Say No to Violence” posters of our 1999 General Elections.
But still, a Tamil film? Less than 10% of the population speaks Tamil, while almost all Malaysians speaks Malay to some degree. So how can a Tamil film, whose run has not even ended, sell more tickets than any Malay film?
If you are an upper middle-clas urban type who speaks mainly English (hands up, you shameless things!) it’s possible that Sivaji would have gone completely under your radar. After all, it’s not sponsored by any fast-food chain or telco. Then you might scratch your coiffed head that this film you’d never heard of will end up achieving around the same numbers as the first Lord of the Rings.
There are several possible reasons. Could it be that the non-Tamil speaking population has taken a sudden interest in subtitles? Or could it be that the small minority that consists of actual Tamil speakers like to watch this same film several times?
More pessimistically: Could it be that people who make Malay films, despite having had seven decades of practice, literally have no idea what our audience wants?
I suppose you can hire a market-research type to find out the reasons. But I like things to be a little mysterious. Life becomes more interesting that way. Besides, how often are market researchers right?
It’s great to live in a country where conventional wisdom can be turned on its head once in a while. For example, it’s just assumed that people would rather see a film in a language that they understand. It’s also just assumed that Hindi films would have more appeal than Tamil ones, as the former have a glossier, plusher image, but the numbers have often shown otherwise.
And is Sivaji a bit grittier than, say, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai? Well, it’s about a US-based bloke who returns to India to set up a charity foundation. But there are corrupt officials and greedy businessmen in his way. He bribes his way through but then is confronted with a test of his principles. There’s also a love story somewhere. And songs by the venerable AR Rahman.
The success of Sivaji also makes one ponder the politics of numbers. It’s usually assumed that the majority will be stronger against the minority. This is true in the case of, say, an election. Leaving aside the touchy matter of how electoral boundaries are drawn, the basic premise is still: You need to get more votes than the other guy.
But there are various mechanisms through which a minority can assert itself. A talent contest where the outcome is determined by SMS votes is a case in point, since people can just vote repeatedly. (This is, of course, if we subscribe to the depressing supposition of communitarian loyalty trumping subjective criteria like, erm, talent).
You can also make the point that a numerical majority might in fact be weaker in the case of competition, because majorities tend to be complacent, lazy, and perhaps prone to unproductive bickering. After all, this has been the basis for much of our post-Independence political scare-mongering: “Stick together or else The Others will Take Advantage!”
Our previous Prime Minister caused an international furore in 2003 when he contrasted the achievements of the Jews against the Muslims, despite the huge gulf in numbers. But without libeling any race, there is something to be learned there. What’s the point of numbers if the numbers don’t work for you?
This is why the panic over apostasy strikes me as odd. (Or maybe I am the odd one). What’s the point of inflating your flock with people who want to fly away? Best to marshal your available resources the best you can.
Back in the pre-Internet era, a scarily addictive board game of my post-SRP days was called RISK, where you basically try to conquer the world. The outcome is determined through rolled dice. What makes the game frisky is that even if you have a large army of plastic battalions, you might still get beaten by a smaller force. It’s the luck of the draw. The seemingly punier guy might just have better luck or (as I sometimes darkly suspected) he has a special way of throwing the dice. This taught me that the bigger force may not always win. It also taught me that I can be a very sore loser, but that’s a different story.
The plot of Sivaji itself comments on the role of the minority (in this case, an individual who wants to make a change) pitted against against a large, corrupt force of vested interests. The individual (presumably) wins. So you can say that the plot has an ontological relationship with its success.
The added irony here, of course, is that Sivaji is not such an underdog. At US$16 million, it is reportedly the most expensive Indian film ever. But that’s often the case, is it not? Almost all blockbusters are about the triumph of the little guy against a big force. In the first blockbuster, the force was a form of marine life with big teeth and a scary theme song. But in subsequent incarnations, it has ranged from aliens to what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”. These blockbusters are made by large corporations, which then touchingly need the contributions of millions of you little punters to keep them solvent. And we keep obliging because they make us feel good, these blockbusters do, and feeling good is not to be sniffed at.
After all this, I blush to admit that I have yet to see Sivaji. I was supposed to watch it at the Coliseum last Sunday but was then told that the queue was too long. I shall try again this weekend.
And I hope that this mania for Tamil movies will extend to the release today of Deepak Kumaran Menon’s Chalanggai (Dancing Bells), which was made entirely by Malaysians and shot mainly in Brickfields. I have a cameo appearance in it!
But even if I were not involved, I would recommend this sweetly observed tale of youthful dreams coming up against tough choices. It is also a true lepak [hangout] movie that makes you appreciate your surroundings. Go watch.
Thursday, 28 June 2007
NST: 28 June
(NOTE: Two sentences are, um, different in the print version).
Where have all the doctors gone?
Although I can’t claim to have known him well, the passing of actor Izi Yahya still affected me -- and made me angry.
During our brief working acquaintance about a decade ago, one could immediately notice his blokey appeal and his refusal to be bogged down by pettiness. And his laugh!
Best known for his villainous roles starting in 1985’s Ali Setan (where his dastardly deeds prompted the now-famous line from novice actress Sheila Majid, “Tipah tertipu bang!”) he gained inadvertent notoriety with his over-the-top Japanese commander in the public-funded Embun (2002). A rape scene in there had some people threatening to prosecute the makers for producing pornography!
But this unproductive fuss faded away, as they do. And when he did make the news again, it was for the most unfortunate reason imaginable.
According to a Bernama report, he died without regaining consciousness after a fall during the shooting of a documentary called Darurat (Emergency).
Why a documentary (unless it is an experimental one) would require actors, the report did not say. Perhaps there are elements of re-enactment.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the title alone gives the impression that it’s about the Emergency (1948-60), the longest and bloodiest undeclared war in the history of the Commonwealth. The fact that it’s produced during the 50th anniversary of the independence of Peninsular Malaysia might lead one to surmise that we should now be grateful for all we enjoy, thanks to all those who fought and died to keep us a democratic-capitalist state.
That in itself is not the issue. Such programmes seem an inevitable part of our discursive landscape.
But what angered me was that, after Izi fell, he required surgery for brain haermorrhage, and there were no specialists to attend to him in Seremban Hospital. Or even Selayang Hospital. Or Sungai Buluh Hospital. Or Kuala Lumpur Hospital. Or even the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre.
Is our country, despite all the progress we seem to enjoy, so lacking in medical personnel? Where have all the doctors gone? And how many other similar cases involving lower-profile people would have gone unreported?
Rabble-rousing documentarian Michael Moore is in trouble with the US authorities for bringing September 11 rescue workers to Cuba for them to check out the free socialized medical care they can get there, despite a trade embargo between the two countries. He has been accused of exploiting the misery of others to score points against the increasingly expensive American health-care system. But others would say that such a seemingly outrageous gesture is what’s needed to jolt viewers out of a certain complacency that everthing is A-OK.
But in this new Malaysian case, I wonder what the outcome would be. Will there be a call for an investigation to be conducted? Will such an investigation produce anything?
Perhaps we are still too reticent and fearful of pursuing such matters. After all, to question the circumstances of someone’s death and whether it could have been avoided might be seen as “going against divine fate”.
This is despite the fact that, through the centuries, the idea of “fate” has been used to keep powerless people down, and to escape accountability. Think of the example of a few years ago when a structure collapsed, killing people at a religious ceremony. The authorities in charge invoked “divine will”; they were very peeved that anyone could even suggest the deaths could have been avoided through better planning, since to do so would be tantamount to questioning God!
If there was indeed something that could have been rectified in the most recent case of Izi’s death, we should know about it. Although the prospect of ending up as a frantically litigious society is not an appealing one, questions should still be asked.
If they are not asked, the idea of celebrating the freedoms that Darurat is presumably asking us to celebrate comes with a bitter -- you can say fatal -- irony.
Back down, Sir Salman!
Back when I read it in my teens, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children struck me as the greatest novel ever written.
Its exuberant use of language, literary English and yet unashamed of different flavours deriving from its Indian locale; its plot that had the real, the hyper-real and the fantastical all rubbing up against one another -- everything combined to persuade you that the much-bemoaned Death of the Author had been greatly exaggerated.
It won the Booker Prize, but don’t let that put you off. I would still recommend it to anyone.
His essays too were lucid on a variety of contemporary and literary topics, sometimes to do with the ‘post-colonial question’. But then something happened to eclipse all that.
The fuss over The Satanic Verses, generated by people who had not read the book, sentenced him to live underground and made him many enemies. It had the unfortunate effect of tarnishing an entire community of believers.
A dense literary novel like The Satanic Verses surely is not on the same level as the Danish cartoons, produced for a contest calculated to provoke. But it led to a similar clash which some would even have dubbed a “clash of civilizations.”
Now he is to be called Sir. The decision to award him a knighthood caused a political backlash, perhaps not a major one as yet, and it would be naïve for Britain to claim that it’s unexpected.
But what’s bewildering, at least to me, is why he accepted the honour in the first place. As a leftist, why would he need validation from that kind of Establishment? It was one thing to seek protection from the police of “Mrs Torture” (as the British Prime Minister was dubbed in The Satanic Verses) as his very life was at stake. But to accept a title that just reeks of ossified values?
True, the experience of living in virtual isolation (save for the occasional surprise appearance with U2 on stage) may do certain things to you.
A less talented British writer, Benjamin Zephaniah, rejected the Order of the British Empire (OBE) when it was offered to him; he said it reeked of colonialism. I know Zephaniah is less talented because I saw him perform in Kuala Lumpur.
The local poets who came on before him had more fire in their bellies; one in particular was quite shocking. None of the locals would be offered a Datukship anytime soon; for this we should be grateful.
A knighthood is a bigger deal than an OBE, of course, but after all he has been through, you’d think Rushdie would be made of sterner stuff.
Where have all the doctors gone?
Although I can’t claim to have known him well, the passing of actor Izi Yahya still affected me -- and made me angry.
During our brief working acquaintance about a decade ago, one could immediately notice his blokey appeal and his refusal to be bogged down by pettiness. And his laugh!
Best known for his villainous roles starting in 1985’s Ali Setan (where his dastardly deeds prompted the now-famous line from novice actress Sheila Majid, “Tipah tertipu bang!”) he gained inadvertent notoriety with his over-the-top Japanese commander in the public-funded Embun (2002). A rape scene in there had some people threatening to prosecute the makers for producing pornography!
But this unproductive fuss faded away, as they do. And when he did make the news again, it was for the most unfortunate reason imaginable.
According to a Bernama report, he died without regaining consciousness after a fall during the shooting of a documentary called Darurat (Emergency).
Why a documentary (unless it is an experimental one) would require actors, the report did not say. Perhaps there are elements of re-enactment.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the title alone gives the impression that it’s about the Emergency (1948-60), the longest and bloodiest undeclared war in the history of the Commonwealth. The fact that it’s produced during the 50th anniversary of the independence of Peninsular Malaysia might lead one to surmise that we should now be grateful for all we enjoy, thanks to all those who fought and died to keep us a democratic-capitalist state.
That in itself is not the issue. Such programmes seem an inevitable part of our discursive landscape.
But what angered me was that, after Izi fell, he required surgery for brain haermorrhage, and there were no specialists to attend to him in Seremban Hospital. Or even Selayang Hospital. Or Sungai Buluh Hospital. Or Kuala Lumpur Hospital. Or even the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre.
Is our country, despite all the progress we seem to enjoy, so lacking in medical personnel? Where have all the doctors gone? And how many other similar cases involving lower-profile people would have gone unreported?
Rabble-rousing documentarian Michael Moore is in trouble with the US authorities for bringing September 11 rescue workers to Cuba for them to check out the free socialized medical care they can get there, despite a trade embargo between the two countries. He has been accused of exploiting the misery of others to score points against the increasingly expensive American health-care system. But others would say that such a seemingly outrageous gesture is what’s needed to jolt viewers out of a certain complacency that everthing is A-OK.
But in this new Malaysian case, I wonder what the outcome would be. Will there be a call for an investigation to be conducted? Will such an investigation produce anything?
Perhaps we are still too reticent and fearful of pursuing such matters. After all, to question the circumstances of someone’s death and whether it could have been avoided might be seen as “going against divine fate”.
This is despite the fact that, through the centuries, the idea of “fate” has been used to keep powerless people down, and to escape accountability. Think of the example of a few years ago when a structure collapsed, killing people at a religious ceremony. The authorities in charge invoked “divine will”; they were very peeved that anyone could even suggest the deaths could have been avoided through better planning, since to do so would be tantamount to questioning God!
If there was indeed something that could have been rectified in the most recent case of Izi’s death, we should know about it. Although the prospect of ending up as a frantically litigious society is not an appealing one, questions should still be asked.
If they are not asked, the idea of celebrating the freedoms that Darurat is presumably asking us to celebrate comes with a bitter -- you can say fatal -- irony.
Back down, Sir Salman!
Back when I read it in my teens, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children struck me as the greatest novel ever written.
Its exuberant use of language, literary English and yet unashamed of different flavours deriving from its Indian locale; its plot that had the real, the hyper-real and the fantastical all rubbing up against one another -- everything combined to persuade you that the much-bemoaned Death of the Author had been greatly exaggerated.
It won the Booker Prize, but don’t let that put you off. I would still recommend it to anyone.
His essays too were lucid on a variety of contemporary and literary topics, sometimes to do with the ‘post-colonial question’. But then something happened to eclipse all that.
The fuss over The Satanic Verses, generated by people who had not read the book, sentenced him to live underground and made him many enemies. It had the unfortunate effect of tarnishing an entire community of believers.
A dense literary novel like The Satanic Verses surely is not on the same level as the Danish cartoons, produced for a contest calculated to provoke. But it led to a similar clash which some would even have dubbed a “clash of civilizations.”
Now he is to be called Sir. The decision to award him a knighthood caused a political backlash, perhaps not a major one as yet, and it would be naïve for Britain to claim that it’s unexpected.
But what’s bewildering, at least to me, is why he accepted the honour in the first place. As a leftist, why would he need validation from that kind of Establishment? It was one thing to seek protection from the police of “Mrs Torture” (as the British Prime Minister was dubbed in The Satanic Verses) as his very life was at stake. But to accept a title that just reeks of ossified values?
True, the experience of living in virtual isolation (save for the occasional surprise appearance with U2 on stage) may do certain things to you.
A less talented British writer, Benjamin Zephaniah, rejected the Order of the British Empire (OBE) when it was offered to him; he said it reeked of colonialism. I know Zephaniah is less talented because I saw him perform in Kuala Lumpur.
The local poets who came on before him had more fire in their bellies; one in particular was quite shocking. None of the locals would be offered a Datukship anytime soon; for this we should be grateful.
A knighthood is a bigger deal than an OBE, of course, but after all he has been through, you’d think Rushdie would be made of sterner stuff.
Thursday, 21 June 2007
NST: 21 June
It's good to talk
Last week, Karen Armstrong came down to give a public talk! It is not often we get a famous author on these shores, so we were right chuffed. Who knows, another blonde woman scribe by the name of JK Rowling could be next. Then we’ll really get bring out the kompang and bunga manggar.
But all was not what it seemed. There was actually some anxiety among the population – oh all right, the segment of the population prone to attending public talks – that the event would be cancelled.
This is because several books by this religious historian and former nun are banned in Malaysia. The books are A History of God, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet and The Battle for God: Fundamentalism is Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Ironically, in the West, this same author is sometimes criticised by secularists as being too sympathetic to Islam!
I don’t think any proper explanation has been given for the bans. I doubt it has anything to do with the type of fonts or paper or binding that the books used. I don’t think our authorities had any quarrels with her grammar, either.
So we should assume that the ideas in them were considered somehow … dangerous. (But dangerous in what way? Do they have instructions on how to make bombs?) But maybe dangerous is too strong a word. Should we settle for iffy?
Iffy it is then. So if the ideas in the books are considered iffy, would they not be iffy in spoken form too?
The more alarmist coffee-shop pundits had visions of Armstrong being denied entry at the airport or a troop of enforcers marching into the hotel ballroom to arrest everybody. (Yes, bookish alarmists tend to pine for some drama in their lives). But thankfully nothing like that happened. Judging from reports, the appreciative crowd of 1,400 included quite a few VIP types and everything went well.
What makes matters seemingly weirder is that the talk was co-organised by the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations Malaysia (IDFR), which I have never heard of but which sounds frightfully official. This might point to some subtle contradictions within the Establishment.
Not quite a case of “the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing” but a matter of different priorities, agendas and interests coming into play. In the best cases, these contradictions then open up some spaces for the rest of us to swim around in. And so, even the Foreign Affairs Minister attended the talk -- but the books were banned by the Internal Security Ministry.
The phrase “internal security” itself is an intriguing one, is it not? (Then again, so is “foreign affairs”, but that’s a different story). It means that, even though we have padlocks on our external gates, there is something deep within our houses that is not yet secure. In which case, shouldn’t these internal insecurities be resolved by ourselves instead of punishing external agents such as writers who are knocking at our gate and just trying to flog a few books?
I am all for the books being unbanned, as I am now curious to read them, and a few other titles as well, such as the one on the Kampung Medan clashes.
After all, the Prime Minister this week said that Kua Kia Soong’s book “May 13” will not be banned as it does not contravene any laws. Just a day after it was launched on the eponymous date, some Senators (who would not have had time to read the book) were already calling for “action” to be taken against the writer. But I am glad that these reactionary voices did not have their way, and I hope the good vibes will spread even further.
There are some pro-choice (to borrow a term from the American abortion debate) readers who would say, rightly, that not many people read books anyway, so what’s the point of banning? This argument has a polemical purpose but is ultimately depressing. Are we so proud of the fact that we don’t read? And (let’s admit it) isn’t it boring to live in a country where there are no taboos?
The percentage of Malaysians who read books might roughly be the same percentage that goes to university, but I certainly would not make the elitist assumption that the two groups are one and the same. But the university analogy might prove a useful one: True, not everyone wants to go there, but there is always the choice. Just as in buying books.
Just as universities should be respected, so too should the rights of readers. It’s no use making a fuss about, say, maintaining the Universiti Malaya campus in its present location if we do not also put into practise the very ideals that a university is supposed to embody. These, by coincidence, happen to be not dissimilar to the ideals of reading.
Nude in Kelantan
Who says life in Kelantan is boring?
Even though it is run by a party that does not go out of its way to portray a partying image, there are some interesting things going on there.
A Bernama report of three days ago exposed the existence of a female bomoh with an unusual method of curing ailments. A woman who went to her with a mysterious illness (suspected to be the result of black magic) got a shock when this bomoh brought out some young men. No, these men were not there to perform a dikir barat for the patient’s entertainment, but to disrobe and dance in the nude around her. While this was going on, the bomoh was seated on a chair under a yellow umbrella, chanting.
The men were described as being “from a neighbouring country.” I wonder if this phrase was chosen out of an ‘all these foreigners look alike’ vagueness or in the interest of Asean discretion.
The place where she did the voodoo that she did so well is also interesting: Jalan Pantai Cahaya Bulan. Older readers will remember that the famous beach in Kelantan was renamed from Pantai Cinta Berahi, which was deemed too passionate. But a name-change has not deterred a certain sauciness, which probably burst forth from being suppressed under the repainted road-signs all these years, like something from a magic-realist novel of the Garcia Marquez or Rushdie mould.
The fact that it’s a female bomoh also reinforces the popular image of Kelantanese women as being more business-minded. And although I am enormously interested in Mona Fandey, it’s time that a few other female bomoh got into the news for other reasons. For a long time, Mona was in danger of spoiling the market. And the royal connotations of that yellow umbrella!
But one thing about the news report bothered me, though. It’s something that I would have expected any self-respecting news agency to have highlighted immediately: It failed to mention if the treatment succeeded.
Last week, Karen Armstrong came down to give a public talk! It is not often we get a famous author on these shores, so we were right chuffed. Who knows, another blonde woman scribe by the name of JK Rowling could be next. Then we’ll really get bring out the kompang and bunga manggar.
But all was not what it seemed. There was actually some anxiety among the population – oh all right, the segment of the population prone to attending public talks – that the event would be cancelled.
This is because several books by this religious historian and former nun are banned in Malaysia. The books are A History of God, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet and The Battle for God: Fundamentalism is Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Ironically, in the West, this same author is sometimes criticised by secularists as being too sympathetic to Islam!
I don’t think any proper explanation has been given for the bans. I doubt it has anything to do with the type of fonts or paper or binding that the books used. I don’t think our authorities had any quarrels with her grammar, either.
So we should assume that the ideas in them were considered somehow … dangerous. (But dangerous in what way? Do they have instructions on how to make bombs?) But maybe dangerous is too strong a word. Should we settle for iffy?
Iffy it is then. So if the ideas in the books are considered iffy, would they not be iffy in spoken form too?
The more alarmist coffee-shop pundits had visions of Armstrong being denied entry at the airport or a troop of enforcers marching into the hotel ballroom to arrest everybody. (Yes, bookish alarmists tend to pine for some drama in their lives). But thankfully nothing like that happened. Judging from reports, the appreciative crowd of 1,400 included quite a few VIP types and everything went well.
What makes matters seemingly weirder is that the talk was co-organised by the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations Malaysia (IDFR), which I have never heard of but which sounds frightfully official. This might point to some subtle contradictions within the Establishment.
Not quite a case of “the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing” but a matter of different priorities, agendas and interests coming into play. In the best cases, these contradictions then open up some spaces for the rest of us to swim around in. And so, even the Foreign Affairs Minister attended the talk -- but the books were banned by the Internal Security Ministry.
The phrase “internal security” itself is an intriguing one, is it not? (Then again, so is “foreign affairs”, but that’s a different story). It means that, even though we have padlocks on our external gates, there is something deep within our houses that is not yet secure. In which case, shouldn’t these internal insecurities be resolved by ourselves instead of punishing external agents such as writers who are knocking at our gate and just trying to flog a few books?
I am all for the books being unbanned, as I am now curious to read them, and a few other titles as well, such as the one on the Kampung Medan clashes.
After all, the Prime Minister this week said that Kua Kia Soong’s book “May 13” will not be banned as it does not contravene any laws. Just a day after it was launched on the eponymous date, some Senators (who would not have had time to read the book) were already calling for “action” to be taken against the writer. But I am glad that these reactionary voices did not have their way, and I hope the good vibes will spread even further.
There are some pro-choice (to borrow a term from the American abortion debate) readers who would say, rightly, that not many people read books anyway, so what’s the point of banning? This argument has a polemical purpose but is ultimately depressing. Are we so proud of the fact that we don’t read? And (let’s admit it) isn’t it boring to live in a country where there are no taboos?
The percentage of Malaysians who read books might roughly be the same percentage that goes to university, but I certainly would not make the elitist assumption that the two groups are one and the same. But the university analogy might prove a useful one: True, not everyone wants to go there, but there is always the choice. Just as in buying books.
Just as universities should be respected, so too should the rights of readers. It’s no use making a fuss about, say, maintaining the Universiti Malaya campus in its present location if we do not also put into practise the very ideals that a university is supposed to embody. These, by coincidence, happen to be not dissimilar to the ideals of reading.
Nude in Kelantan
Who says life in Kelantan is boring?
Even though it is run by a party that does not go out of its way to portray a partying image, there are some interesting things going on there.
A Bernama report of three days ago exposed the existence of a female bomoh with an unusual method of curing ailments. A woman who went to her with a mysterious illness (suspected to be the result of black magic) got a shock when this bomoh brought out some young men. No, these men were not there to perform a dikir barat for the patient’s entertainment, but to disrobe and dance in the nude around her. While this was going on, the bomoh was seated on a chair under a yellow umbrella, chanting.
The men were described as being “from a neighbouring country.” I wonder if this phrase was chosen out of an ‘all these foreigners look alike’ vagueness or in the interest of Asean discretion.
The place where she did the voodoo that she did so well is also interesting: Jalan Pantai Cahaya Bulan. Older readers will remember that the famous beach in Kelantan was renamed from Pantai Cinta Berahi, which was deemed too passionate. But a name-change has not deterred a certain sauciness, which probably burst forth from being suppressed under the repainted road-signs all these years, like something from a magic-realist novel of the Garcia Marquez or Rushdie mould.
The fact that it’s a female bomoh also reinforces the popular image of Kelantanese women as being more business-minded. And although I am enormously interested in Mona Fandey, it’s time that a few other female bomoh got into the news for other reasons. For a long time, Mona was in danger of spoiling the market. And the royal connotations of that yellow umbrella!
But one thing about the news report bothered me, though. It’s something that I would have expected any self-respecting news agency to have highlighted immediately: It failed to mention if the treatment succeeded.
Thursday, 14 June 2007
NST: 14 June
(NOTE: Only one of the two articles got published).
Stop me if you've heard this before
Plagiarism in general and in literature in particular has always intrigued me, not so much as a moral but as a psychological phenomenon. This can take many forms, from the charmingly innocent to the tortuously artful.
Not too long ago, a senior politician sent a congratulatory poem to another on the occasion of a happy day. This poem consisted, as poems are wont to, of several lines. Well, wouldn’t you know it, every single line was taken wholesale from two previous poems not written by any politician!
Although the poem was published in the print media, the plagiarism exposé emerged only online, probably because newspapers had run out of paper on that day.
Now there can be many reasons for one to plagiarise; although none of these reasons is good, some are more contemptible than others. A student rushing for a deadline and with a wonderfully packed social schedule might resort to cribbing a few lines he’d read earlier. More sinister is a lecturer passing off a student’s work as his own, since someone who is older and more esteemed should presumably know better.
If you are a chic relativist, you might say that there are no original ideas anyway; all words have been in the mouths of others before, so just go ahead, but make sure to gargle first. But this is not the place for such cynicism.
In the case of the politician, what could have driven him to do such a thing? Could he have been persuaded by a few reports in our English-language papers that the poetry scene is really thriving in the Klang Valley, and so wanted to tag along for the ride? Or this might be a bit like that Umno General Assembly in the 90s when a few folks started talking about “Brutus”, although most seemed to have been very recently briefed as to what the play Julius Caesar was all about.
If a politician can brazenly take the words of others to pass off as his own, would it not be reasonable to expect other breaches of ethnics from this bloke? Or maybe the concept of moral right and intellectual property just isn’t considered such a priority; after all, it’s not like stealing money, where your victim will be literally poorer. Stealing someone’s poem will not make anyone financially poorer. A more psychologically lurid explanation would be that he was begging to get caught, as in “Stop me before I write again!”
A few days after this exposé, the press secretary of this politician clarified that he was the one responsible. He was the one who’d included the poem in the congratulatory message. He just forgot to credit the original writers. So that’s all right then.
I am a trusty sort, so let’s say I believe the explanation totally. (Didn’t I just say no to cynicism?). But it also makes things more interesting. Where does this leave the position of press secretaries (and speech-writers and spin doctors…) in the grand scheme of attribution? After all, there are so many educated people who can string a sentence together, and among the jobs open to them would be those that can be summarised as “putting words into the mouths of others.”
So can we now assume that the words uttered in official speeches are not those that came from the minds (or even minda) of the speech-giver? This would be sad. What if all those great quotes attributed to Gandhi – like “An eye for an eye and soon the whole world will go blind” – were actually penned by some anonymous hack who sold off these nuggets for a few rupee?
All the more reason, then, for us to cherish those off-the-cuff moments that could never have been scripted, since they provide a clearer glance into the minds behind them.
By the way, the first paragraph of this article is plagiarised from a Malaysian writer. See if you can guess whom.
A comic history that's no joke
A few weeks ago, I received in the post a photocopy of a Malaysian book. Yes, yes, I know photocopies breach copyright and all that, but this book has been out of print for years, so do forgive the sender and myself.
Titled Where Monsoons Meet: A People’s History of Malaya, it was written in 1979 by a group of people who chose to be known only as Grassroots. (Who were they and where are they now?) It is a comic history of the country; not comic as it rib-tickling but because it is told through lots of drawings and speech bubbles. Yes, a “graphic non-fiction novel” of sorts. True, it’s not as sleek as something by Neil Gaiman or Frank Miller, but it’s about us, damnit!
The version I have was published in 1987 by Insan. (What complicates matters is that there exists another, different book with the same title published in 1956, but with the subtitle The Story of Malaya in the Form of an Anthology.)
I think that Where Monsoons Meet (the comic, that is) should be required reading in all National Service programmes. In fact, even the kids’ parents should read it, instead of whining all the time about safety standards and whatnot.
Our nation’s history is told through a somewhat different perspective because it foregrounds the role of economic exploitation in the shaping of our society. There are lots of interesting nuggets that may not make it into standard history texts. For example, did you know that 59% of the revenue of the Straits Settlements a century ago derived from selling opium to immigrant Chinese labourers? And did you know that in 1947, well-organised workers’ movements managed 291 major strikes, resulting in the loss of 696,036 mandays to management? (If you don’t know what a strike is, perhaps this book can serve as a start).
Yes, it is didactic, but the facts and figures are often leavened by wit and sarcasm, courtesy of the drawings, and also a propulsion in the chronological structure.
The book also makes you consider parallel scenarios; for example, what would have happened if the British had not stopped immigrant Chinese and Indian workers from planting rice? We would now have a multi-racial peasantry, with arguably different repercussions for how we view ourselves now.
Although it ends in 1957, this is not a story marked by mothballs and cobwebs. A progressive history of this country is well worth telling. Although it has its blind spots, these can perhaps be better appreciated after reading the whole thing and contrasting it against the standard ethno-nationalist narratives with its ruling-class heroes, which you are presumed to already know about.
It would be great if an intrepid publisher can bring it back into print, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the lowering of the Union Jack on these shores.
Stop me if you've heard this before
Plagiarism in general and in literature in particular has always intrigued me, not so much as a moral but as a psychological phenomenon. This can take many forms, from the charmingly innocent to the tortuously artful.
Not too long ago, a senior politician sent a congratulatory poem to another on the occasion of a happy day. This poem consisted, as poems are wont to, of several lines. Well, wouldn’t you know it, every single line was taken wholesale from two previous poems not written by any politician!
Although the poem was published in the print media, the plagiarism exposé emerged only online, probably because newspapers had run out of paper on that day.
Now there can be many reasons for one to plagiarise; although none of these reasons is good, some are more contemptible than others. A student rushing for a deadline and with a wonderfully packed social schedule might resort to cribbing a few lines he’d read earlier. More sinister is a lecturer passing off a student’s work as his own, since someone who is older and more esteemed should presumably know better.
If you are a chic relativist, you might say that there are no original ideas anyway; all words have been in the mouths of others before, so just go ahead, but make sure to gargle first. But this is not the place for such cynicism.
In the case of the politician, what could have driven him to do such a thing? Could he have been persuaded by a few reports in our English-language papers that the poetry scene is really thriving in the Klang Valley, and so wanted to tag along for the ride? Or this might be a bit like that Umno General Assembly in the 90s when a few folks started talking about “Brutus”, although most seemed to have been very recently briefed as to what the play Julius Caesar was all about.
If a politician can brazenly take the words of others to pass off as his own, would it not be reasonable to expect other breaches of ethnics from this bloke? Or maybe the concept of moral right and intellectual property just isn’t considered such a priority; after all, it’s not like stealing money, where your victim will be literally poorer. Stealing someone’s poem will not make anyone financially poorer. A more psychologically lurid explanation would be that he was begging to get caught, as in “Stop me before I write again!”
A few days after this exposé, the press secretary of this politician clarified that he was the one responsible. He was the one who’d included the poem in the congratulatory message. He just forgot to credit the original writers. So that’s all right then.
I am a trusty sort, so let’s say I believe the explanation totally. (Didn’t I just say no to cynicism?). But it also makes things more interesting. Where does this leave the position of press secretaries (and speech-writers and spin doctors…) in the grand scheme of attribution? After all, there are so many educated people who can string a sentence together, and among the jobs open to them would be those that can be summarised as “putting words into the mouths of others.”
So can we now assume that the words uttered in official speeches are not those that came from the minds (or even minda) of the speech-giver? This would be sad. What if all those great quotes attributed to Gandhi – like “An eye for an eye and soon the whole world will go blind” – were actually penned by some anonymous hack who sold off these nuggets for a few rupee?
All the more reason, then, for us to cherish those off-the-cuff moments that could never have been scripted, since they provide a clearer glance into the minds behind them.
By the way, the first paragraph of this article is plagiarised from a Malaysian writer. See if you can guess whom.
A comic history that's no joke
A few weeks ago, I received in the post a photocopy of a Malaysian book. Yes, yes, I know photocopies breach copyright and all that, but this book has been out of print for years, so do forgive the sender and myself.
Titled Where Monsoons Meet: A People’s History of Malaya, it was written in 1979 by a group of people who chose to be known only as Grassroots. (Who were they and where are they now?) It is a comic history of the country; not comic as it rib-tickling but because it is told through lots of drawings and speech bubbles. Yes, a “graphic non-fiction novel” of sorts. True, it’s not as sleek as something by Neil Gaiman or Frank Miller, but it’s about us, damnit!
The version I have was published in 1987 by Insan. (What complicates matters is that there exists another, different book with the same title published in 1956, but with the subtitle The Story of Malaya in the Form of an Anthology.)
I think that Where Monsoons Meet (the comic, that is) should be required reading in all National Service programmes. In fact, even the kids’ parents should read it, instead of whining all the time about safety standards and whatnot.
Our nation’s history is told through a somewhat different perspective because it foregrounds the role of economic exploitation in the shaping of our society. There are lots of interesting nuggets that may not make it into standard history texts. For example, did you know that 59% of the revenue of the Straits Settlements a century ago derived from selling opium to immigrant Chinese labourers? And did you know that in 1947, well-organised workers’ movements managed 291 major strikes, resulting in the loss of 696,036 mandays to management? (If you don’t know what a strike is, perhaps this book can serve as a start).
Yes, it is didactic, but the facts and figures are often leavened by wit and sarcasm, courtesy of the drawings, and also a propulsion in the chronological structure.
The book also makes you consider parallel scenarios; for example, what would have happened if the British had not stopped immigrant Chinese and Indian workers from planting rice? We would now have a multi-racial peasantry, with arguably different repercussions for how we view ourselves now.
Although it ends in 1957, this is not a story marked by mothballs and cobwebs. A progressive history of this country is well worth telling. Although it has its blind spots, these can perhaps be better appreciated after reading the whole thing and contrasting it against the standard ethno-nationalist narratives with its ruling-class heroes, which you are presumed to already know about.
It would be great if an intrepid publisher can bring it back into print, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the lowering of the Union Jack on these shores.
Thursday, 7 June 2007
NST: 7 June
(NOTE: Some sentences did not appear in the paper).
Masculine/feminine
The second reprint of the fourth edition of the venerable door-stopper Kamus Dewan (2007) is out. It no longer contains a few words considered derogatory to some Malaysian Indian associations. So you can search for Keling karam (a noisy person) and Keling mabuk todi (someone fond of talking nonsense) but you will not find them.
This journey to shorten the dictionary began four years ago with protests against the publisher, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Then came the police reports and lawsuits. It looks like the pressure succeeded to a certain extent. Since they are no longer in the official dictionary, does this mean these words will no longer be uttered? Who knows?
My own view is that a dictionary should compile rather than proscribe. This was in fact the view taken by those who didn’t see what the fuss was. It seemed like a case of political correctness run amok. And yet, no one seemed to notice that the dictionary was silent on arguably more popular terms, such as janji Melayu (unreliable promise). But memelayukan (to make Malay) and meyahudikan (to make Jewish) are both reassuringly there, albeit with rather different value registers.
I say, let all the insults and stereotypes be displayed, at least for sociological reasons. Of course, if someone were to use the words in polite company or in a less polite place like the Parliament, then they are merely advertising aspects of themselves that will be to their own detriment, or so we hope.
But a gamelan performance, of all things, that I saw a few months ago did something interesting with the gender terms in the same dictionary. The women in this show simply read out the definitions of laki-laki (man) and perempuan (woman). A good actor is supposed to make the phone book seem like riveting material when reading it; but our dictionary doesn’t require much of an additional push.
The usage examples of laki-laki (on page 870) uniformly describe positive values: hatinya memang laki-laki (he has a manly heart). There’s also a bloke who sounds like the best catch since Raja Nazrin: Alias memiliki sifat kelaki-lakian yang tulen, jujur, ikhlas, berhemah tinggi serta berupa kacak. (Alias has true masculine virtues, he’s honest and trustworthy, polite and dishy too).
Contrast this with the distaff side on page 1182. You get penyakit perempuan (female disease, i.e. syphilis), perempuan gatal (‘itchy’, lascivious woman), perempuan jahat (bad woman), perempuan jalang (prostitute), perempuan joget (dance-hall girl), perempuan jungkat (another lascivious woman) and perempuan simpanan (mistress).
Check ‘em out! With all these bad girls in our midst, it’s a wonder how anyone can get any work done, in between partying away at dances, registering new phone numbers so the wife won’t find out, and of course checking into VD clinics.
“Frailty! Thy name is woman,” said that dithering boy Hamlet. But it looks like he could have used a few other choice names as well, although perhaps not directly to his mother’s face.
I wonder if any women’s associations will take up this issue with Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. But wasn’t it recently women leaders who were up in arms at the thought of “little dragon ladies” from China coming over here to steal their husbands? So perhaps they have other concerns.
Disapproving footnotes
We were mooching around a bookstore last week and one of us picked up the newly-launched Malay translation of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922). While flipping through it, he said “This translation is so funny.”
I expected the usual howlers along the lines of movie subtitles that say “Itik!” when a cop tells someone to “duck”. But instead there were footnotes which said things like “Amalan ini bertentangan dengan agama Islam” (This belief is against Islam). This is the first instance I have come across of footnotes, presumably from the translator, cautioning us against the text.
Why choose this book to translate in the first place, then? Wouldn’t the title alone give an inkling that it deals with a religion of the Other? The novel is set during the time of Buddha although the protagonist is someone else, but it’s about a process of spiritual enlightenment too.
And yet, and yet. Perhaps there was pressure from some kind of third party, as they don’t just exist in court trials. If some people can discover this German Nobel laureate through this book, then so be it. It’s better than nothing.
Actually. the most offensive footnote I have ever read comes in a translation of Kama Sutra, of all things. But it’s so outrageous I’ll get into deep trouble for reproducing it here. So I will just think of it now and gasp anew.
Bestsellers at last?
Two recent books, in English, by Malaysian writers have been spending months on our best-seller lists, and I am frightfully jealous.
Dina Zaman’s I Am Muslim and Kam Raslan’s Confessions of an Old Boy are both enjoyable reads. Sure, they cheat a bit by putting together previously published pieces (in Malaysiakini and Off the Edge respectively) but it’s good that they are reaching a new audience. Stylistically they are rather different (where Dina is saucy and dishy, Kam is droll and ironic) but both books are slices of the Malaysian pie to be savoured.
I am sure there is another local bestseller out there; it has a red cover but I can’t recall much about it at the moment, though.
For years, publishers have been moaning that local readers do not like to read local books – in English, that is. Well, perhaps the time for moaning has passed although perhaps we shouldn’t break out the sparkling grape juice yet.
True, most local books in the past were packaged in a very boring way; they had all the sizzle of text-books without any of the exam-boosting potential, so why bother? Placed there on the shelf next to some sexy foreigner, they looked doubly sad. It was like the way some opposition parties campaign in elections; they are so used to losing that they don’t even make an effort.
But these new books have a shiny, cosmopolitan confidence. The writers have been toiling away in the print media for years. Rather than hacking their lives away, they have honed everything they needed to hone. And although some of the best Malaysian writing these days take place in blogs (not necessarily the most newsworthy ones), it is always reassuring that honest-to-goodness books are still being published and consumed.
Their success has made me think many things, chief among them “Me, me!” Yes, dear reader. I plan to come out with my own volume later in the year; it’s called Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things. It is a compilation of 100 quotes that have gobsmacked us over the years, accompanied by some charming drawings. I am almost done with the selection but if you have urgent suggestions, do let me know!
Masculine/feminine
The second reprint of the fourth edition of the venerable door-stopper Kamus Dewan (2007) is out. It no longer contains a few words considered derogatory to some Malaysian Indian associations. So you can search for Keling karam (a noisy person) and Keling mabuk todi (someone fond of talking nonsense) but you will not find them.
This journey to shorten the dictionary began four years ago with protests against the publisher, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Then came the police reports and lawsuits. It looks like the pressure succeeded to a certain extent. Since they are no longer in the official dictionary, does this mean these words will no longer be uttered? Who knows?
My own view is that a dictionary should compile rather than proscribe. This was in fact the view taken by those who didn’t see what the fuss was. It seemed like a case of political correctness run amok. And yet, no one seemed to notice that the dictionary was silent on arguably more popular terms, such as janji Melayu (unreliable promise). But memelayukan (to make Malay) and meyahudikan (to make Jewish) are both reassuringly there, albeit with rather different value registers.
I say, let all the insults and stereotypes be displayed, at least for sociological reasons. Of course, if someone were to use the words in polite company or in a less polite place like the Parliament, then they are merely advertising aspects of themselves that will be to their own detriment, or so we hope.
But a gamelan performance, of all things, that I saw a few months ago did something interesting with the gender terms in the same dictionary. The women in this show simply read out the definitions of laki-laki (man) and perempuan (woman). A good actor is supposed to make the phone book seem like riveting material when reading it; but our dictionary doesn’t require much of an additional push.
The usage examples of laki-laki (on page 870) uniformly describe positive values: hatinya memang laki-laki (he has a manly heart). There’s also a bloke who sounds like the best catch since Raja Nazrin: Alias memiliki sifat kelaki-lakian yang tulen, jujur, ikhlas, berhemah tinggi serta berupa kacak. (Alias has true masculine virtues, he’s honest and trustworthy, polite and dishy too).
Contrast this with the distaff side on page 1182. You get penyakit perempuan (female disease, i.e. syphilis), perempuan gatal (‘itchy’, lascivious woman), perempuan jahat (bad woman), perempuan jalang (prostitute), perempuan joget (dance-hall girl), perempuan jungkat (another lascivious woman) and perempuan simpanan (mistress).
Check ‘em out! With all these bad girls in our midst, it’s a wonder how anyone can get any work done, in between partying away at dances, registering new phone numbers so the wife won’t find out, and of course checking into VD clinics.
“Frailty! Thy name is woman,” said that dithering boy Hamlet. But it looks like he could have used a few other choice names as well, although perhaps not directly to his mother’s face.
I wonder if any women’s associations will take up this issue with Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. But wasn’t it recently women leaders who were up in arms at the thought of “little dragon ladies” from China coming over here to steal their husbands? So perhaps they have other concerns.
Disapproving footnotes
We were mooching around a bookstore last week and one of us picked up the newly-launched Malay translation of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922). While flipping through it, he said “This translation is so funny.”
I expected the usual howlers along the lines of movie subtitles that say “Itik!” when a cop tells someone to “duck”. But instead there were footnotes which said things like “Amalan ini bertentangan dengan agama Islam” (This belief is against Islam). This is the first instance I have come across of footnotes, presumably from the translator, cautioning us against the text.
Why choose this book to translate in the first place, then? Wouldn’t the title alone give an inkling that it deals with a religion of the Other? The novel is set during the time of Buddha although the protagonist is someone else, but it’s about a process of spiritual enlightenment too.
And yet, and yet. Perhaps there was pressure from some kind of third party, as they don’t just exist in court trials. If some people can discover this German Nobel laureate through this book, then so be it. It’s better than nothing.
Actually. the most offensive footnote I have ever read comes in a translation of Kama Sutra, of all things. But it’s so outrageous I’ll get into deep trouble for reproducing it here. So I will just think of it now and gasp anew.
Bestsellers at last?
Two recent books, in English, by Malaysian writers have been spending months on our best-seller lists, and I am frightfully jealous.
Dina Zaman’s I Am Muslim and Kam Raslan’s Confessions of an Old Boy are both enjoyable reads. Sure, they cheat a bit by putting together previously published pieces (in Malaysiakini and Off the Edge respectively) but it’s good that they are reaching a new audience. Stylistically they are rather different (where Dina is saucy and dishy, Kam is droll and ironic) but both books are slices of the Malaysian pie to be savoured.
I am sure there is another local bestseller out there; it has a red cover but I can’t recall much about it at the moment, though.
For years, publishers have been moaning that local readers do not like to read local books – in English, that is. Well, perhaps the time for moaning has passed although perhaps we shouldn’t break out the sparkling grape juice yet.
True, most local books in the past were packaged in a very boring way; they had all the sizzle of text-books without any of the exam-boosting potential, so why bother? Placed there on the shelf next to some sexy foreigner, they looked doubly sad. It was like the way some opposition parties campaign in elections; they are so used to losing that they don’t even make an effort.
But these new books have a shiny, cosmopolitan confidence. The writers have been toiling away in the print media for years. Rather than hacking their lives away, they have honed everything they needed to hone. And although some of the best Malaysian writing these days take place in blogs (not necessarily the most newsworthy ones), it is always reassuring that honest-to-goodness books are still being published and consumed.
Their success has made me think many things, chief among them “Me, me!” Yes, dear reader. I plan to come out with my own volume later in the year; it’s called Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things. It is a compilation of 100 quotes that have gobsmacked us over the years, accompanied by some charming drawings. I am almost done with the selection but if you have urgent suggestions, do let me know!
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