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.

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.

On Keeping Your Head Down (or, the Hang Nadim Problem)

In my first few months of boarding school, a well-meaning dorm mate of mine pulled me aside and explained, “You got to keep your head down. Don’t be so proud. I see when we were taking our class photos, you were putting your head up, looking too proud. Don’t.”

Naturally, I bristled at this.

It took me a while – being a boy from KL who suddenly found himself in a boarding school with 600 other boys and girls, most of them being Malay kids from kampungs across Melaka and Muar – to realise that I was entering a different world, with a different moral code at play.

Jangan tunjuk pandai.

Jangan eksyen.

Jangan pasang butang baju yang paling atas, nampak sangat macam geek.

Jangan baik sangat dengan budak puteri, nanti ada orang ingat kau try nak kacau awek diorang.

Over my six years in boarding school, I got used to the rules of the game. It didn’t always make sense to me – why is it a problem that I can speak English fluently, and why should I take pains to hide that fact? And at the start of my time there, I chafed against these rules that seemed to be arbitrary and mindless.

But in boarding school, where you are pretty much left to your own devices, potentially defenceless against boys much bigger and stronger than you, you learn very quickly to fit in and play along.

If there was an overarching principle in all those years in boarding school, it was to keep your head down. Malay culture certainly puts a premium on being humble and grounded, but in the hothouse of a boarding school environment, the imperative can almost seem like a necessity for survival.

All these lessons from my youth were heavy on my mind during the last general elections, when Khairy Jamaluddin went all out, in the face of heavy anti-UMNO sentiment in his Sungai Buloh constituency, to declare that he wanted to be Prime Minister someday.

Uh-oh, I thought. That’s a no-no.

In Sejarah Melayu, the tale of Hang Nadim is a cautionary one – don’t make yourself appear too clever, such that you end up appearing to be a threat to others. Yes, I suppose Malays have a problem with hasad dengki, but isn’t this basic human nature at work? Even for the best of us, we have a responsibility to maintain our viability, to avoid getting “assassinated” for posing a threat to others.

Maybe Malays will always have this Hang Nadim problem. We can complain about it – or we can accept that to survive and thrive in any human community, some amount of keeping one’s head down is necessary – if only to keep one’s head when everyone else is losing theirs!

On Things I Wish I Had Known When I Was 25

For some years after I had just turned 25, I would joke with my friends that my “internal mental clock” was stuck at 25. This lasted for some time, until of course the fiction could no longer be maintained as the body increasingly refused to play ball with my gentle conceit.

This year, I will be turning 45. It won’t be as harrowing as when I was turning 40, I think. By now I’ve come to some amount of reconciliation with who I am and what Life means. I recognise that in many many ways, I have been stupidly fortunate, and remarkably undeserving of many things that have graced my existence of these few decades.

I also recognise that to the extent that I still hold feelings of Envy for others, and Self-Pity for myself, for the many missed opportunities and desired achievements that have eluded my ham-fisted grasp, there is still work to be done in learning on how to become a better human being.

Maybe the lesson will never be fully learnt until my time on this Earth is up.

I am now old enough to know that time travel is a fanciful idea, nothing more – but if I could go back in time and talk to that blithely-hopeful young man of 25, I would be telling him a few things, like these:

  1. It’s ok to make mistakes. All your life, you will fear making them, and you may well have missed out on any number of wonderful things that could have been part of your life, if only you had that little extra ounce of Courage to try and risk failing. You will find, ironically, that some of the best things in your life will come out from what you may have thought, from the outset, was a regrettable and irredeemable error. Be prepared to be wrong, often.
  2. There is no such thing as “The One” person for you – this is mere hogwash invented by movies and Hallmark cards to make money off your naivety. When you truly Love someone, your concept of Love and Self will grow to encompass the larger person that you should and will become as a result of loving that someone.
  3. Family will hurt you and disappoint you. Because they, too, are human, and will commit the mistakes and mishaps that humans do. Some of them might never deserve your forgiveness, but at the very least, you can learn to live with the hurts and the disappointments, and save room in your life and in your heart for the ones who truly love you and care for you.
  4. Ambition is important to your personal growth and livelihood, but never forget that these are all means to a far more important end: to learn what it means to be who you are, and what you are meant to do on this Earth.
  5. In work, try your best to gain the right Skills that will make you useful as you grow older. Since you weren’t born with Wealth, you must sell your Labour like most others on this earth – gain the right skills that can make your Labour useful and worthwhile, to yourself and to others.
  6. What you might think is desperately and shatteringly important to you today, will likely end up being something rather “meh” as you grow older, and your priorities change and grow to encompass the bigger and better and more mature person that you become.
  7. Friendships – you need to pay attention. Too often, in the past and in the years to come, you will let friendships lapse and wither out of lack of tender care and attention. Don’t do this. Spend the time to reach out. At least drop a text from time to time – better yet, make the time to meet over coffee. The friends you have are the most precious gift you will have in this life – we are all ships passing by silently in the night, but it is no small consolation to know that we can sail alongside each other for a while and make that loneliness a little easier to bear.
  8. Reading will save your Life. Not merely the influx of information, as mundanely important as that might be. Rather, reading offers you a window to constantly reflect on Life and the big questions that will increasingly haunt you as you get older and closer to your own mortality. Some of the best highlights of your life will come from the epic, beautiful and haunting reads that lie in wait for you.
  9. On the point of mortality: Death is the ever-present phantom, the one thing that makes you truly human, that bittersweet pill that each one of us will need to take one day. Raging against Death will serve you no purpose: running away will only lead you astray, and cause you to twist and turn in the most unnatural and transmogrified ways. The only truly human way to live life is to constantly think of Death, and look Death in the eye – and embrace what it means to live well so that you can die well.
  10. Love yourself. You will find that you are one of the lucky ones on this earth, who can count on a good number of people in your formative years as well as in your later years, who have loved you truly and unconditionally and unreservedly. More than anything, and despite everything, this has been the best gift of your life, because it has taught you that you can love yourself. In the end, all you will have ever have is yourself, to live within and to live with.

On Dignity

This morning I woke up
And walked to the bathroom
I saw my face in the mirror
Those dead eyes, swimming in doom

God, please, I said
Give me a way out, any way out
Thirty years, all this time
Like a cornered rat, without redoubt

These choices I have made
Now I drown in a sea of regrets
My friends, their laughter echo loud
I sink beneath Life’s parapet

God help me now to find
A path out from my ragged mind.

Tentang Pengakhiran

Dihujung hayat aku terlantar
Minda terjerat dibawah sedar
Sepuluh jari terketarsusun
Merontajerit memohon ampun

Wahai Tuhanku! Aku bermohon
Berilah aku sedikit masa!
Nyawaku ini jangan Kau runtun
Hamba Mu masih belum bersedia

Belum masanya mandi gaharu
Barkapur barus - tunggu dahulu!
Belum masanya berhijab kafan
Berkuburtalqin, kumohon: Jangan!

Berikan aku sedikit masa
Jiwaku masih berlumur dosa
Berikan aku ruang bertaubat
Sebelum jasad beku termayat

Belum masanya Ya Rabbul Jalal
Jangan biarkan aku tersial!

On Foiled Dreams (or, If Not This Life, then Next)

Some days Life kicks you in the teeth
and tries to bury you beneath
Reminds you that you're down and out,
defeated in your final bout.

In youth, you dreamt of summits' heights
The culmination of long nights
and days of striving, willing toil -
Yet here you are, your hopes all foiled.

For no one's owed a just reward -
as hostages to Life's sharp sword,
we all shall suffer what we must:
the lashings of Life's roaring gusts.

This bitter Truth shall have its round:
To some, all riches shall redound
while others must make do with this:
If not this Life, the Next holds bliss.

On the Oldest Dream

It was darkness. Pitch black.

Up ahead, a glimmer of light. A heavy tome, its pages old and yellowed, sandwiched amidst thick gnarled leather.

Then suddenly, the book flies open, and the pages are flipped open in quick succession by an invisible hand. And all around, a raucous laugh, echoing and unremitting. Not laughing at anyone or anything, but delighting in the act of laughing, with just a hint of menace, a steel edge to the tone of rejoicing.

Then I wake up.

On Buying and Reading Books

Hi, my name is Ziad, and I am a bookaholic.

Like, yeah, addicted to books.

I should be specific, of course. I have been a reader since I first learnt my alphabet, back at the age of 3. (My mother never fails to remind me of the story of how she was told by a pediatrician that Yes, your son is short-sighted, and Yes, you need to teach him his ABCs real quick so that we can get him tested. And that’s why all my toddler photos are of geeky Ziad in too-large glasses.)

So yes, I have been reading for as long as I can remember. And it makes my reading habit even more inevitable that my mother was, for many years, a librarian at a teachers’ training college. My entire childhood has been surrounded by, comforted by, engulfed by, and flooded with books.

But around about the time I had just finished graduating, and started to work, I fell prey to a related, but far more pernicious disease: I became addicted to *buying* books. The constant logic is that Oh, at least I am spending my hard-earned money on Knowledge, rather than frivolous things.

And that is how my books at home kept piling up.

When I moved into my in-laws’, and later on when I moved into our own home, I kept up the habit. Whenever I got depressed, my usual destinations would be McDonald’s, or Kinokuniya. On really bad days, both.

It got to such a ridiculous level that I now have books piled up on bookshelves, by my bedside, on my working desk, and on the floor, flush to the wall near our patio. I have books in the car, books on my working desk. Everywhere. We have started to donate books to charities and non-profit bookstores, but it has hardly made a dent in our ever-growing pile of books.

So, as a New Year’s Resolution for 2023, both Kat and I resolved not to buy any new books for the entire year. The only exception was for books that we could buy if we were travelling overseas. (I have recently discovered a loophole – downloading books on my Kindle! – but I reason to myself that I haven’t broken my resolution since no money is changing hands. Yeah, very Clintonian, I know!)

It helps that I now try to focus my reading via my Kindle, which of course is more portable, and can contain many more books that my bookshelves at home ever could. I miss those moments of “bookbathing” in Kinokuniya, and I still make my way there from time to time, though so far I have been very steadfast with my resolution.

Yes, my name is Ziad, and I am, indeed, a bookaholic.