On Aidilfitri and Injustice
On Monopolies, and Following the Money
Tentang Pembalasan
Apa kau sangka semua perlakuanmu itu Tiada akan membawa kepada pembalasan? Kini tergelar banduan, kau rayukan kemaafan Setelah seluruh dunia menyaksikan tindakrakusmu? Binimu berhujankan emas permata Anakmu berfoya di pentas karpet merah Dengan rezeki rakyat yang mudah kau jarah Sekarang ini kau rayu maaf dengan juraian airmata? Tak cukupkah dengan harta yang telah tersakau? Tak cukupkah dengan nyawa yang hilang melayang? Tak cukupkah dengan tiangarash negara yang bergoyang? Semuanya harus bersujudturut demi engkau?
Tentang Melayu, 2023
(dengan pohonan maaf buat arwah Tongkat Warrant)
Melayu itu orang yang bijaksana,
Nakalnya beriring senyum,
Budi bahasa berbunga kuntum,
Kurang ajarnya tetap hormat,
Tutur kata tersusun cermat.
Tapi Melayu kini sudah mula berubah:
Bila menipu tak tau malu,
Bila menyakau berbilion disapu,
Bila mengampu lebat berkipas,
Taat pada bos tiada berbatas.
Tetap berani walau bersalah,
Walau ranap cembul khazanah,
Sudah jadi adat,
lidah menipu ligat.
Melayu di tanah Semenanjung luas maknanya:
Jawa itu Melayu,
Bugis itu Melayu,
Keturunan Nusantara adalah Melayu.
Sekarang ini taikun itu Melayu,
Peguam itu Melayu,
Akauntan itu Melayu,
CEO itu Melayu.
Tapi sayangnya,
Yang menunggang agama itu juga Melayu,
Yang memberi rasuah, Melayu,
Yang makan rasuah, memang ramai Melayu,
Yang sakau duit rakyat itu Melayu,
Tapi masih tergamak mengaku
kununnya dialah pembela Melayu.
Dalam sejarahnya,
Melayu itu pengembara berani,
Melawan penjajah demi pertiwi,
Melorongkan jalur bangsa merdeka,
Mentadbir negara adil saksama.
Namun sayangnya,
Begitu luas khazanah negara,
Dijarah disakau pengkhianat bangsa.
Melayu itu kaya falsafahnya,
Kias kata pepatah lama,
Tapi sayangnya,
Akalbudi pupus dibedal,
Kuasa menang melawan akal.
Melayu sekarang kuat bersorak,
Bangga rezeki Tiktok secupak,
Sedangkan kampung lama tergadai,
Sawah ladang tinggal tersadai,
Tali di tangan mudah dibuang,
Timba yang ada diberi orang,
Dengan harga seguni Birkin,
Amanah rakyat dibuat main.
Melayu itu masih bermimpi,
Walaupun sudah mengenal Harvard, LSE,
Sanggup merompak bangsa sendiri,
Berkelahi cara UMNO,
"Ready to fight" jadi laungan,
Tapi tak sanggup bertarunglawan,
Marahnya dengan diam,
Musuh dibidik dengan meriam,
Menangnya cara kasar,
Ghanimah cita sebenar.
Melayu asalnya menolak permusuhan,
Tapi Melayu hari ini tiada sempadan,
Kalau menang, menang terpaling,
Kalau kalah, ke lubang cacing.
Maruah dan agama jadi tunggangan,
Berlumba demi mencari gelaran,
Alphardnya hitam berkilat,
Lencana kereta mempamer pangkat,
Banglo besar di Bukit Jelutong,
Hidupnya berkiblat laba dan untung.
Baiknya hati Melayu itu tak terbandingkan,
Semua ujaran Presiden patuh diturutkan,
Sehingga tercipta sebuah kiasan:
"Nak hidup, bos!"
Bagaimanakah Melayu abad kedua puluh satu,
Masihkah sanggup asyik tertipu?
Jika yakin kuasa Ilahi,
Usah penyamun dijulangtinggi,
Jika percaya kepada keadilan,
Jangan malu perjuang kebenaran.
Jadilah bangsa bijak dan gagah,
Tolak penghasut tolak perasuah,
Peganglah erat talian Allah,
Jadilah tuan negara bermaruah.
Tentang Jalur Gemilang
Jalur merah putih itu,
Berselang seli menyulam darah dan keringat,
Memaksa sebangsa agar tekun mengingat
Pengorbanan dulu.
Medan biru melaut,
Kanton megah yang terhampar aman,
Lambang hikmah sebuah kebangsaan,
Padamu kami berpaut.
Sabit dan bintang,
Kuning payungan gemilang daulat,
Setianya kami teguh tiada bersyarat,
Selamanya dijulang.
On First and Third Worlds
It was a typical balmy KL afternoon as we were driving towards Mid Valley. The sky was clouded over, and there was a faint promise of rain. As I was steering the car gently towards the basement parking entrance of the Gardens mall, the entrance booth slowly came into view. I did the usual instinctive thing, reaching out to the console on the car’s dashboard where I normally keep my Touch ‘n’ Go card. Just as I was about to lift the card out of its faux-leather sleeve, I noticed, at a glimpse from the corner of my eye, that the parking terminal accepted not only the usual cashless payment of Touch ‘n’ Go, but would also accept credit card payments, including MyDebit, with its distinctive Wifi-looking logo.
“Eh. Can pay with credit card now. I wonder if I can use Apple Pay for parking here.”
“Ooh,” Kat replied. “Try lah.” My wife knew me too well enough by now to know two things. One: I hate unfair and inefficient monopolies on public services, with a level of detestation that Kat herself would normally reserve for cat torturers. Two: ever since I was able to use Apple Pay on my iPhone, I have been constantly delighted at the ability to merely double-press a button, look at my phone to unlock the Apple Pay pay option, and then simply swipe my phone over a terminal to effect payment – my favourite First World-level dopamine shot.
I tried it – and voila, it worked! There I was, happily steering my car past the parking entrance booth with a big smile on my face. Never fails.
Anyways, some minutes later, I found a parking spot not too far from the lobby entrance (another pet habit of mine, the pursuit of which can sometimes drive Kat out of her mind), and as we were heading up the escalators and found ourselves walking past the shops on the lower ground level, a sudden thought came to my mind:
“Alamak! Now I remember: the last time I used Apple Pay to enter a parking lot, I couldn’t exit. This silly building in Bangi hadn’t updated its parking system, and so I could enter the parking with Apple Pay, but the parking terminal couldn’t recognise my Apple Pay when exiting. Hmm. I wonder if I might get stuck when we exit later.”
“Oh well,” Kat said, as she normally would when entertaining my sudden bouts of petty anxiety. “If we can’t exit nanti, you just hit the intercom and ask for help, lah. You’ll be that guy, but it won’t be the end of the world.”
“Hmm, okay.” I shelved the thought away from my mind, and for the next two hours, I didn’t think much of it: the movie turned out to be much more entertaining than I had expected, and by the final joke at the end of the movie credits, the entire hall erupted in whoops of delighted laughter.
“Good movie, huh?? Jarnathan hahah!!!” I was beaming.
“Yeah!” Kat grinned. We fell into talking about our favourite parts of the movie, excitedly. It was a good afternoon.
We did some errands at the pharmacy and the supermarket, and then it was time to head back home. As we got into the car, and I was driving towards the exit, I remembered again with distaste that there was a possibility that I might not be able to easily exit. What I was really anxious about, typically, was that getting stuck at the parking exit would delay others behind me whose lives would be unduely disrupted by something I had committed. The dictum of hidup jangan menyusahkan orang was something I held very closely to heart, and I was happy always to lambast those who would break it. Now it could well be my turn to menyusahkan hidup orang.
As the parking exit booth loomed closer, I slowed down the car to a halt, and pressed the button on my right to roll down the window. (Remember those days when you had to actually wind a crank to bring the window down? Amazing.) I lifted my iPhone from its resting place in the centre console of the car, did the usual Open, Sesame gestures on my phone, waved the front of the phone near the parking console, and winced quietly as the seconds ticked, until –
The exit bar lifted up! It worked! In a fit of delight, I did a little whoop, pumped my fist into the air and yelled out with the car window still down: “Oh yeah! First world, baby!”
As the car eased its way past the exit booth and climbed upwards through the exit ramp into the open air, Kat couldn’t resist: “Hmm. If Lee Kwan Yew could crow about bringing Singapore from Third World to First, I guess we can be proud that Malaysia already has First World moments while still in Third!”
Ba-dum-tishhhh.
Tentang Lebai Alphard
(dengan pohonan ampun maaf buat penulis lagu asal) Sepohon kayu daun berlendir Lebat bunganya serta buahnya Walaupun mulut berbuih "takbir!" Kalau dah tak ikhlas apa gunanya? Lihatlah, situ, si Lebai Alphard Kopiah putih, hidupnya mewah Rumah banglo tersergam megah Akhlaknya bau bak ubat gegat! Tunggang agama sehari-hari Elaun berkoyan poket sendiri Supaya nanti peroleh undi Kuasa duniawi dijunjung tinggi.
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.
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:
- One Must Wait Until the Evening: The Life of Rahmat Harun
- Mahathir dan Anwar: Sebuah Novel Puisi
- Malay Republican: Ibrahim Yaacob and His Legacy
- Candu Rakyat: Pengaruh Konservatisme Islam dalam Masyarakat Melayu di Awal Abad ke-21
- Sesak: Perancangan Bandar di Kuala Lumpur, 1974-2020
- Pak Lah & Endon: Damai Abadi
- Khairy Jamaluddin: Hang Jebat atau Hang Nadim?
- Novel Modern Melayu: Dari Ahmad Rashid Talu hingga Abdullah Hussain
- Monkey: The Life of a Well-Loved Cat
- Bumiputera: The Biography of an Invented Identity
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.