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On Being Originally Spicy

“I hope you don’t mind, I decided to order KFC for dinner today,” I said.

“Eh, no worries lah. Once in a while it’s ok.” Kat shrugged.

“Fuh, can you smell that?!” I took a whiff of the fried chicken, all jumbled up in the paper box, parts of chicken anatomy of various shapes in assortment like a fragrant game of Tetris. “I hope you don’t mind, I ordered the Mixed option this time around. I know you’ve been preferring the Hot and Spicy flavour lately, but my heart is still set on the Original.”

“Well, the irony is that to be Spicy is actually more Original,” Kat said archly.

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On My First Day of Ramadan

The details are rather hazy to me now (as it often is with memories that bring shame to our minds), but I think I was seven years old, and I was then in Standard One. It was not our first year of fasting, but that year was my first year of fasting while in “big school” (as I thought of it then), and I was very careful to make sure that I would make it through the first day of fasting that year.

We had just come back from school – both Abang Ijan and I were at St John’s Primary in Bukit Nanas, and I think at that time we were in the morning session, because I am pretty sure it was still some time away from Maghrib when this incident happened. 

First, an explainer: Abang Ijan and I are cousins, and we were just a year apart in age, he being just a year ahead of me. I was my mother’s only child, living in my grandparents’ home with another 11 or so cousins in the same house. Naturally, we spent a lot of time together, playing catch almost every afternoon and watching cartoons on TV, but Abang Ijan and I were especially close. He was the eldest of his three siblings, and I looked up to him naturally as a big brother. Despite my rather frail stature and my oh-so-geeky glasses, my primary school years went by largely without much incident or bullying – most likely because most of the kids in school knew that Abang Ijan was my “elder brother”. 

Anyways, as I said earlier, it was probably that time of year when we had morning classes, because this most certainly happened at home, around maybe five or six in the afternoon. Abang Ijan thought it would be a good idea – the day being so hot, and it was our first day of fasting, to boot – to take a shower. And not just any shower, but in Atok’s bathroom! 

Atok’s room was the inner sanctorum of the sprawling bungalow complex that we called home. Air conditioned, wood-panelled walls, carpeting – the room was always cosy and comfortable, and I am pretty sure now that it was only the audacity of well-loved grandchildren that made it conceivable for us to steal into Atok’s bathroom for a shower. Steal in, we did, and – as I am writing this, I can imagine eight-year old Abang Ijan winking at me, with an impish twinkle in his eye – as we were taking turns underneath the shower, Abang Ijan turned his face upwards and proceeded to glug a few gulps of the spraying water into his mouth. Naturally, I followed suit. 

There was a certain naughtiness to it – drinking from the shower in the middle of the day on the first day of Ramadan. I am quite sure that I didn’t tell Umi about it, not that day itself, certainly. We pretended to be fasting as usual for the rest of the evening, and when Maghrib came, we ate as ravenously as our cousins who, presumably, did not quite descend to our level of mischief that day. 

Now that I am older, I think of this incident almost every time Ramadan comes along. We are older now, and I don’t talk to Abang Ijan as much as I should, or would like to. I’m not quite sure what happened – although a lot certainly have, over those difficult years. But we’ll always have Ramadan, Abang Ijan. 

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On Guns, Israeli Settlements, and Other Sacred Cows

I woke up in the morning yesterday to read about yet another fatal shooting in America. This time, it was three children and three adults shot dead in a school in Nashville.

Every day, 111 people are shot dead in America. Every day. It seems like madness. For someone living in Malaysia, who has grown up rarely even seeing a gun, let alone seeing gun crimes being enacted, it appears like a collective form of psychosis. “Thoughts and prayers” have become the cynical refrain, every time someone is killed: some politician will promise gun control reforms, some other politician will claim that it is a mental health issue, then amidst the claims and counter-claims, more others will die at the end of the barrel of a gun.

I am no expert in gun control laws, but what little I know seems to suggest that it is very difficult to solve what might appear to be a straightforward problem for most other countries, when the obvious and proven solutions are in contradiction to some deeply-held public narrative.

In the case of the US, the story of America as a land of pioneers, and the ideal of “rugged individualism” has, over recent decades especially, cemented the belief amongst many Americans that owning and carrying firearms is somehow a constitutional right. That brandishing and unleashing a weapon is considered a sacred and treasured act in the name of self-defence. Never mind that most Americans no longer live in the frontiers with the threat of armed natives hanging over their daily lives. Never mind, either, that many other countries have ended the gun violence that continues to be a regular occurrence in America, through gun control laws that have curbed widespread ownership and usage of arms, without diminishing the sense of public security and peace amongst their citizens.

Stories matter. Our founding myths, so crucial to the binding together of people into a united and coherent nation, can also become a psychological stranglehold that locks us into repeatedly and unrepentantly inflicting inhumane and mindless acts of violence on each other.

Take another example: the ongoing proliferation of Israeli settlements in Palestinian lands, displacing native populations and heaping insult and violence on one’s own neighbours, on the pretext that “this land is mine.” How could it be that honouring a Covenant with God ought to lead to such ungodly destruction and brutality?

But perhaps every nation struggles with this – the original sin of public narratives that lead us to believe that our unjust and inhumane actions have some justification in some ancient code, or some social contract. The hammering-together of peoples into one can often lead to the forging of exclusionary and narrow-minded narratives that lock us into a descending spiral of inhumanity.

In Malaysia, we too suffer from a similar bind. The narrative of Malay-ness, crucial to the forging together of a united identity across the Malays of the several colonised states of the Peninsula, was expanded somewhat into a larger conception of Bumiputera-ness, but still leaves a significant segment of the Malaysian population feeling as though they are being treated as second-class citizens. It has been more than half a century since Independence and the formation of Malaysia, and we are still unable to break out from the vise of ethnic exclusion, even when most of us Malaysians, no matter where our grandparents and great-grandparents have come from, can now imagine no other home other than our own tanahair.

And the vicious spiral visits itself ever onwards and outwards. Today, we are seeing more Malaysians being unafraid (and frankly, unashamed) to act in a racist fashion to the many migrants who have come to Malaysia to earn a living by helping to clean our homes, serve us in restaurants, haul our palm oil to the mills, and build our skyscrapers. Granted, the idea of citizenship is by its very definition exclusionary, but that does not give us the right to then treat non-citizens less humanely.

Guns. Settlements. Racism. These are all unjust and inhumane forms of violence, wreaked by Man unto Man, for the very basic reason that we have told ourselves stories that make us believe we are justified in performing random and consistent acts of inhumanity on our fellow humans. And human history has shown us, that sometimes no amount of reasoning can rid us of these warped beliefs. Often, it takes violence and revolution to erase past narratives, and to forge a new – and not always enlightened – founding myth in its place.

And such is the nature of the crooked timbre of humanity.

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On the Books I Would Write if I Had All The Time in the World, Part II

What do you do when you have grand plans of writing grand books, but have neither the time nor the discipline to actually write them? You just list down the titles, and berangan that someday you might miraculously find the time to write them, or (perhaps more realistically) inspire someone else to actually take the trouble to write them out. 

Here’s another list from my overactive imagination:

  1. One Must Wait Until the Evening: The Life of Rahmat Harun
  2. Mahathir dan Anwar: Sebuah Novel Puisi
  3. Malay Republican: Ibrahim Yaacob and His Legacy
  4. Candu Rakyat: Pengaruh Konservatisme Islam dalam Masyarakat Melayu di Awal Abad ke-21
  5. Sesak: Perancangan Bandar di Kuala Lumpur, 1974-2020
  6. Pak Lah & Endon: Damai Abadi
  7. Khairy Jamaluddin: Hang Jebat atau Hang Nadim?
  8. Novel Modern Melayu: Dari Ahmad Rashid Talu hingga Abdullah Hussain
  9. Monkey: The Life of a Well-Loved Cat
  10. Bumiputera: The Biography of an Invented Identity 
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On Writing Everyday

The other day, a friend of mine asked, “Where you find the time to write/update your blog on a regular basis?? Kasi tips sikit!”

I was tickled by this question, because of course writing is writing – you just pick up your pen (or keyboard, choose your poison) and write away. 

But then, upon further reflection, I realised that my friend did have a point: after sporadic bursts of writing for more than a decade (and when I mean sporadic, the gap between my writings were usually numbered in months, even years!) I have finally gotten into a regular rhythm of writing. It may not necessarily be elegant or beautiful writing (though I do aim to write well, or at least, progress towards eventually writing better as I get more practice), but this morning I checked my Jetpack app, and it greeted me thus:

“You’re on a 46-day streak on Essays / Esei!”

Astounding, even to me, because this must surely be the most sustained period of public writing I have ever managed in my life. 

Of course, I have been writing almost daily in my journal for almost a decade now, but this bout of public writing is a recent phenomenon. I would say two things have spurred this recent turn.

The first is reading Montaigne’s Essays. (Yes, my current blog title is directly inspired by that legendary Frenchman.) Writing in a time of great religious and political upheaval, Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne retired from the turbulent politics of his day to take refuge in his castle and in his books, and began writing a series of essays that has not only enshrined him in the literary canon of the West, but has also inspired legions of similar writings across the centuries, including Francis Bacon and every other blogger today. Presaging the Renaissance, Montaigne made it an explicit aim to focus on himself as a subject of writing – glorying in his own joys and sorrows, his own rationalities and idiosyncrasies. He wrote about friendship and learning languages and parenthood and wisdom and literature and heroes and simple folk and fame and memory and marriage and death. He was certainly the world’s first true essayist, and reading Montaigne today, even in translation, would remind us of how modern his thinking was. Those of us grappling with issues of burnout and consumerism and the meaning of life, would find ourselves nodding vigorously, as I did, on reading Montaigne’s prognostications.

Reading Montaigne (the present continuous tense applies here – I am probably still only a quarter of the way through his voluminous writings) is inspiring to me. I have always wanted to write, and I have always known, since childhood, that I had it in me to write. Certainly not Shakespearean or Proustian levels of writing, but I have stories that I want to tell – like many of us. 

It just always baffled me, the art of writing: I would have moments (usually during holidays, when my mind suddenly has the space to roam, outside of the daily strictures of corporate life) when I would be inspired to write about something, or even struck by the idea of a grand writing project – a memoir, perhaps, or a novel in verse about Malaysian politics. As my own paltry output would testify, these were often mere angan Mat Jenin that would take root in my imagination, but die ignominious deaths, out of a lack of any real tangible action. 

The problem is that the blank page would always stare at me, almost taunting me: Kau siapa, nak tulis semua ni? Apa kau tau? My own insecurities and lack of courage would embarrass me into silence.

And this is where the second point of inspiration came along. One evening, several weeks ago, while glancing at the permanent pile of books hidden underneath our coffee table in the living room, I glanced at a copy of Carl Roger’s On Becoming A Person. I think I must have just finished a rather well-written book, because my common and ineluctable pattern is that right after reading a particularly satisfying book, I get into a restless and rather flailing mood. Gratified by the recent high of beautiful and profound writing, I would be casting around for another bout of the same intellectual and spiritual high. Often, after reading a very good book, I would be going through one book after the other, flitting through several pages, and eventually casting off one book for another, dissatisfied at not being presented with yet another magnificent read. (I know, it’s rather sad.) 

So it was in this mood that I discovered Carl Rogers, and sat down to read through his philosophy of client-centred therapy. His approach, apparently radical for his time, was almost laughably simple: he believed that the main task of the therapist is to provide a safe and non-judgmental space for the patient to fully express herself, to find within themselves the courage to try to live out their own unique individual self. Carl Rogers taught me, as he has certainly taught many others, that the path towards truly living is to have the courage to explore one’s own authenticity, and to embrace all sides of one’s self: the good, the bad, the sad, the happy, the glorious, the mean, even the most shameful parts of who we are. Being truly human is to accept our humanity, in all its ineffability.

I have written about Carl Rogers earlier, and I should not belabour the point. But what reading Carl Rogers did to me, was to encourage me – literally, to give me courage – to embrace who I am, and to decide: I want to make this journey towards better acceptance of who I am. And I want to use my writings as a means to explore this. 

And so I picked up my blog, which has been around since, oh maybe 2012, but had lain fallow through long periods of abandonment, and I promised myself: whatever and however my day would be like, I would make it a point to find time through the hours and days to make sure that I write enough to be able to publish something, every day. It would be wonderful if every day I could publish something profound and meaningful and elegant and beautiful – but if on some days, or many days, I don’t, that would be okay. I just need to write, and use that space to discover who I am, and this world that I live in. 

So that’s it. That’s the “tip”. I simply decided that of all the things in my life, this exercise in writing would take precedence, and be up there in my list of daily priorities, like taking a shower every morning, and praying five times a day (not always succeeding on this one, tapi bro cuba), and telling my wife everyday that I love her. And part of achieving this is also to let other, less important things, drop out of your life. I try to cut out TV and Netflix from my life. No more computer games – even Marvel Snap and Mini Metro get little time on my calendar now. I don’t go out much at night, except to have dinner with close friends and family, and even in that latter, it is mostly just spending time with my wife. I get into bed around 10, often even earlier. 

It’s nice to know that it’s been 46 continuous and unbroken days of trying to write more honestly, more openly. In the same way, I am trying to be more honest, more open with my own self. To accept my failures and disappointments, as much as I take comfort in my “achievements”, however grand or meek they may seem in the eyes of others. 

Some years ago, bereft in what was certainly depression, feeling disappointed at how my life had turned out, I took refuge in a series of books about palliative care and mortality. I remember reading the final pages of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, tears streaming down my face at two in the morning. I came out of that particular period of reading with a determination, almost grim in its steely grip, of wanting to learn how to live well, so that I could die well. I wanted it so that when I finally come to the final moments of my life, I can look back at a life well lived. 

These writings are part of that project, and perhaps that also explains the tenacity of these past few weeks. To use the much-loved metaphor of a much-beloved mentor of mine, if this is my “Game of the Impossible”, then I want to play it well. I want to be present for every inning that each new day presents to me. 

And this is how I find time every day to write. 

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On Mat Som

One of the injustices of modern Malaysian culture is that so little regard and respect has been given to what I personally think is one of the top works of contemporary Malay literature: Lat’s singular graphic novel, Mat Som.

Perhaps it is because we associate Lat predominantly with saccharine cartoons on national unity, or nostalgic depictions of kampung life (both of which, of course, remain as indelible contributions from Lat to the Malaysian public discourse.) Maybe it is because we do not have any real tradition of the graphic novel as a legitimate and respectable vehicle for aesthetic expression and cultural commentary. The graphic novel, in the Malaysian mind, is too easily mistaken for its adolescent cousin, the comic book.

This is why there is hardly any discussion in the public space about the contributions of Mat Som to the narrative of modern Malay culture. Even amongst Lat’s abundant oeuvre, Mat Som is so often overlooked.

For more astute readers of Malay culture, Mat Som is an invaluable and singular artifact of a fracturing Malay polity, forced to undergo one of the most rapid and dizzying socioeconomic transformations of the modern age.

Within just a generation, thousands of poor young Malays were taken out of their villages, and handed the keys to education that would unlock opportunities beyond their wildest dreams. Many were sent overseas to learn the secrets of modern science and technology, and told to come back to serve the nation. Most of these young Malaysia came home with burning ambition, but were also deeply confused: they were told that to study overseas, and to go to the cities and get a corporate job and to enrich themselves beyond their parents’ imagination, was a noble vocation – but as they sought to find their place in their new urban settings, they were also told that many of the habits they had taken to be emblematic of what it meant to be “modern”, were shameful and to be castigated. The very modernity that they were told to seek, was labelled as “budaya kuning”, worthy only of disdain and censure.

In Mat Som, Lat would dramatise the rapid social change of the late 20th century amongst the Malays, but from a more rooted perspective: that of the young Malay from the kampung who makes his way to the city to earn a living with words. The young journalist finds himself attracted and entranced by the whirling pace and the glittering lights of the city, but is repulsed by the crass commercialism and the capitalistic striving of the rising Malay middle class. Lat, in Mat Som, romanticises the poet, the working journalist, the common Mat on the street.

Mat Som puts into stark focus the cultural confusion of the Malays of that generation, forced to choose between traditional values and the modern world that threatens to unmoor the Malay from familiar ground. If Umno’s Revolusi Mental and Mahathir’s Malay Dilemma were loudly exhorting the Malays to change their mindsets and embrace modernity, to discard old-fashioned values that were seen to be holding back the community, then Lat’s Mat Som was a cri de coeur for the common Malay man – that the way to traverse the rapid currents of social upheaval was to hold fast to the wisdom of old.

To be fair, Mat Som was not a blind rejection of modernity – Yam could be at ease in a baju kurung, or wear a pair of jeans if she wanted to. But the ideal Malay, in Lat’s telling, was someone who was not merely throwing the baby out with the bath water, when it came to the values that would anchor and centre the Malay. One could be modern, and still be Malay, without merely aping the West.

Lat’s genius, of course, was to wrap all this cultural commentary within a simple and heartwarming story of a young man trying to find his way, and his heart, in a city that can often appear heartless and cruel. Bridging that gap between modernity and tradition is still an ongoing dilemma for the young Malay today, and Mat Som reminds us that there is a path through the thicket of confusion, if we only remain clear-eyed about who we are and where we came from.

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On Tarawih

I was well into high school before I had known that it was a thing to be praying 20 rakaat for Tarawih prayers during Ramadan.

For most of my childhood years, I was living with my mother in my grandfather’s family home. It was a sprawling bungalow complex at the edge of the city centre, just several minutes’ walk away from Taman Tasik Titiwangsa. For Umi and me, we were living in Kuang and Sri Petaling, before moving back into Titiwangsa after Umi’s divorce. Six of my grandfather’s children lived within this complex, most of them well into their thirties.

For Tarawih, Atok would be leading all of us in prayer: his wife, his six children and their spouses, and a flock of granchildren who numbered in the teens while I was growing up. It would be eight rakaat of Tarawih, three of Witir, then we would adjourn for the evening. Some would turn to the TV, some would be having some snacks while chatting.

We were a universe unto our own.

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On the Dark Side of Malaysia Boleh

All Malaysians of a certain age will remember the boisterous confidence of the 1990s. The stock market was booming, the economy was the darling of investors, and everyone was making money. Politically, Malaysia had come through a rough patch at the end of the 1980s, and everyone was eager to look forward, beyond the traumatic events of Ops Lallang and the deregistration and rebirth of Umno and the fiercely-contested general elections of 1990 that saw Kelantan fall back into the stewardship of PAS. Many were still disgruntled, or fiercely opposed to the iron fist of Mahathirian authoritarianism, but the rise of Anwar at that time gave hope that there was a more liberal future in store for Malaysia. Understandably, some Malaysians looked at the political upheavals of the late 1980s and decided “that’s enough for me, I’m off“, leaving the country for different shores. But for those left behind, the 1990s had a balming effect of soothing the wounds of the body politic with the elixir of rising wealth and prosperity.

One of the slogans (and there were many, during the Mahathir era) that truly captured that moment in time was “Malaysia Boleh“. A pithy and confident assertion of can-do positiveness – our very own version of the American Dream. After the trauma of 1969 and the political battles of the 1970s and 1980s, Malaysians were finally ready to step into the sunshine of economic prosperity. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to a unipolar world, in which the US presided over a new age of globalisation, as the tendrils of capitalism extended outwards into the frontiers of the the Third World, and Malaysia was standing ready to welcome intrepid investors into the brave new world of emerging markets.

Never one to miss a grand opportunity, Mahathir parlayed his utter political dominance into a flourish of edifice-building and infrastructure investments. The North-South Highway had whetted his appetite – and likely enriched his party’s coffers as well! – and he took Malaysia into a new era of infrastructure investments: KLIA. The new stadia and new hotels and new train systems for the Commonwealth Games. The Petronas Twin Towers. And for the coup de grace, Malaysia was to unveil a whole new capital city, built from scratch with petrodollars out of the marshes and oil palm plantations of Prang Besar.

Much ink has been split, of course, over the eventual economic boom-and-bust of the 1990s. There was definitely irrational exuberance, and the collapse of many of the premier conglomerates of that age were textbook cases of corporate overreach. “Malaysia Boleh” became licence for frantioc dealmaking, and everything was being fueled by cheap credit and a stonkingly-bullish stock market. There was already blowback even then: “Malaysia Boleh” came to be viewed with bitterness and cynicism by a number of Malaysians who saw their country’s transformation into “Bolehland“, where anything goes, as long as one had the wealth, or power (ideally, both) to push one’s way through the red lines of regulations and morality.

But there was also another, darker psychological side of “Malaysia Boleh“: the race for performative “achievements” became a favourite mode of expression, especially for those eager to curry favour with those in power. The longest Malaysian flag. The longest satay barbecue. Biggest cake. Biggest ketupat. Swimming over the English Channel (as if there weren’t already hundreds, if not thousands, of others who had already done the same.) Climbing Everest.

Not to dismiss some of these deeds – I cannot ever imagine climbing Everest, or even having the desire to, really. But too many of these “achievements” were clearly low-ball efforts at garnering attention. And it laid bare the contradictions at the heart of the “Malaysia Boleh” project – we wanted attention and recognition from the world, but often unwilling to do the hard things that would be truly meritorious. Biggest flag, tallest flag pole – boleh. Eradicating politik wang, weaning the economy off cheap foreign labour, paying Malaysians fair wages for the work that they do – these ones tak boleh.

And this frustration strikes at the core of today’s Malaysia Madani project: what are we doing now that is so different, now that we have a man who was probably unjustly imprisoned and shut out of power for more than two decades, now at the helm of the government? Two decades of calling for Reformasi. What is so different now? Why are we still playing the same old games of state propaganda – the slogans and the logos and the theme songs? Why are we still treating appointments to state agencies and government-linked companies as ghanimah? And why is it that for the truly hard and necessary measures that we need to enact, to bring out the potential for our great nation, the answer is still “tak boleh”?