(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 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 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”?
On Interregnum
One of my favourite novel series of all time is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
Anyone who has ever read any of these books will know that Isaac Asimov isn’t exactly Faulkner or Proust. His writing style can be a bit wooden, his characters often very thin vessels who help to carry his plots forward. But that plot! The imagination! The twists and turns of human drama!
In the Foundation novels, Asimov invents his own science of “psychohistory” to imagine a way for human civilisation to rebuild after the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire. Directly inspired by Gibbon, Asimov imagined an outpost, exiled in the farthest reaches of space, where the best and brightest of humanity could seek refuge as galactic civilisation shatters into pieces over the course of several centuries – much like the fall of Gibbon’s Roman Empire.
I have been thinking about the Foundation series a lot lately, whenever I think about the current state of Malaysian politics.
After unbending domination of many decades, the Barisan Nasional has lost its grip over Malaysian politics, reduced to a pale shadow of its former self. A succession of governments and Prime Ministers have come and gone – the narrative of Mahathir as saviour eventually gave way to a parade of expected and unexpected faces, and now, Anwar Ibrahim is at the helm.
The very manner of the cobbling of this Kerajaan Perpaduan, and the recent ensuing developments, suggests to me that Malaysian politics is now deep in the Second Empire phase of the Interregnum, and that we are now waiting for our Mule: that enigmatic, unexpected, random element that refuses to bow to the inexorable forces of psychohistoric prediction. The wild card. The red herring.
For now, the questions remain: How are we retooling the Malaysian economy for the challenges of a decoupled global economy? As multinational companies look to “friendshoring” and rejigging their supply chains, how is Malaysia charting its way forward? How do we set up our geopolitical stance amidst the rising risk of conflict in East Asia? Can we finally come to a reconciliation over the religious and ethnic fault lines that continue to divide our polity? How do we rebuild a consensus around development and civilisational advancement? What does it mean to be Malaysian in the 21st century?
All these questions will remain largely unanswered over these coming few years, it seems.
For now, we merely have to resign ourselves to our political class continuing to work through their neuroses, and hope that they will eventually discover, probably the hard way, that they will continue to be rejected by the voting public who only wants them to (finally) put the public interest ahead of their own petty squabbles and thievery.
For the rest of us, we must simply suffer what we must, until that bright Aurora finally comes.
Tentang Pengancil dan Penganjing
Satu dua tiga lekuk Pak syeikh, pak lebai aku ketuk. Empat lima enam lompat Abah muda, abah tua aku sebat. Tujuh lapan sembilan loncat Satu Malaysia kena hanat!
On Deliverance (A Prayer)
Ya Allah deliver this Nation from the grasping hands of these thieves who engorge themselves at the trough of the public trust.
Ya Allah bring Your Justice to bear on these arrogant ingrates who treat the public trust as if it is their own private sport – to play games with the livelihoods of millions of innocent souls.
Ya Allah punish them for their insolence and their greed and their selfishness and their corruption. May their Birkins and Brioni suits and Bugattis bear witness to the evils that they have committed on this Earth! May their ill-gotten gains become the very shackles that tie them down as they rot in your Hellfire!
On Religious Men
For most of those in my generation, we grew up amidst a time of great change. Our parents were a guinea pig generation: young men and women who were wrenched out of their villages and kampungs, thrown up into schools and universities far away from their origins, and then told to keep their heads down and rebuild a young nation, still reeling from the ashes of racial unrest.
This social upheaval, this march towards the utopia of development, wreaked a heavy cost on those who had to live through it, and I think it is not unfair to say that for many young Malaysians living through this period, many of them suffered through their own individual crises of faith. For some, the white heat of science and technology was so searing that faith was no longer something to be indulged in. For many others, the frightening pace of change meant that religion was not only a custom to remain loyal to, but a safe harbour for the mind and the soul.
My own version of living through this period of great social change was that I was sent to religious school in the mornings, prior to attending government school in the afternoons. A middle-aged ustaz, white turban ever-present, would be holding his thin sliver of rotan and teaching us to recite the Quran, and while the rotan mostly never did anything more than thwack down onto the Quran that we held in front of us when we missed a step, the threat of it was always heart-stopping. We learnt everything by rote: the letters of the abjad. The short verses of the juz amma. The fundamentals of Sunni theology: the pillars of the Faith, the pillars of Islam, the twenty attributes of God.
Like many of us then, I was taught to give due deference to the ustaz and ustazah. The implicit principle was that religious education was also supposed to purify you, to give you a moral grounding in what it means to be a good Muslim and a good human being.
Now, as I am older, I think this assumption around the morality of religious preachers is fraying. Although the phenomenon of using religion as a means of waging politics is not new, it is telling that the Malay language now has a phrase for it – “penunggang agama“. And we can see the penunggangan taking place across the spectrum of contemporary Malay society: using religion to sell TV entertainment, using religion to sell tudung and telekung, using religion to sell bottled water. Religious preachers being arrested for lewd behaviour, for social abuse, for rape.
When I survey this sordid state of affairs in the religious life of the country that I live in, I am reminded again of that hadith narrated by Imam Malik in his classic work, Al Muwatta’: “I have been sent to perfect good character.” The implication here is that all your ritual, all your praying and almsgiving and Haj-going would be for naught, if at the end of it all, your personality and character remains untouched by His Message.
And it is this principle that has guided my interaction with others, especially with religious men and women. I try my best to read their character, searching through the tone of voice, the timbre and weight of words said, the nod of the head and the flick of the hand. How the words match against what is done.
Of course, for many of us, it is easier to just keep to a more basic heuristic: kalau pakai jubah or serban, mesti lah alim kan? And the next step: kalau alim, mestilah baik kan? But our experience surely must teach us now, that we need to look beyond the superficial. And the ultimate test of goodness, of morality, must surely be that your character reflects the dignity of your soul and the depth of your learning.
Harder to do, yes, but surely necessary in these troubled times!
Tentang Siakap (dengan Pohonan Ampun Maaf buat Tongkat Warrant)
Siakap senohong gelama ikan duri
Bercakap bohong besar-besar jadi menteri.
Kerapu ikan merah parang keli tilapia
Makan harta rasuah boleh ke Putrajaya.
Nuri barat-barat aji-aji buntal cermin
Curi duit rakyat boleh jadi Ahli Parlimen.
Kerisi kunyit-kunyit bilis pari sesirat
Menteri perut buncit rakyat hidup melarat.
On Speechwriting
For more than two years of my life, I was a speechwriter.
Speechwriting is one of those strange professions where your job is almost akin to being a translator: to bring forth someone’s thoughts and beliefs and intended promises, and wrap them all up in a speech that will helpful move, motivate, inspire. In politics, where the art of public persuasion takes its highest form (yes I am a romantic), speechwriters are the architects and the constructors of political promise and power.
Speechwriting is also strange because so much of the esteem that you may hope to hold in the eyes of others is really just reflected glory of whoever it was that was reading those words that you had worked on. No one wants to talk about the speechwriter to some aspiring up-and-coming town councilor in some rural state out in some third world country, but the speechwriter to the President of the United States of America will likely find his way into the pages of the New York Times, and into any dinner party in Washington D.C. that would have him.
I genuinely enjoyed the process and the craft of speechwriting. Of course it requires a love and appreciation for politics, but often it also requires someone with the patience and intellectual bandwidth for the minutiae of public policy. Every politicians needs to sell something, and the politician’s speech is the coin of the realm.
Add another interesting ingredient: poetry. The best speeches of our times – “ask now what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, or “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”, or “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – are not merely words to tell or to promise, but a intricate dance between speaker and audience, a soaring orchestra of rhyme and rhetoric that carries a politicians’ words far above the realm of the sordid, and lifts its audience upwards, to animate and motivate and inspire.
Unfortunately, in Malaysia, speechwriting is still mostly an amateur’s art. There are a number of speechwriters who gain a sort of anonymous immortality through the political acts and speeches of their principals, and any politician worth their salt will often have their own preferred wordsmiths, especially for the “big” speeches: the policy speech at the upcoming party convention, or a nationwide telecast speech in response to an unexpected global pandemic. But for the most part, the recruitment of speechwriters in Malaysia is still very haphazard, and entry into the profession – if it can even be called that, here – is still very much on a who-knows-who, often serendipitous basis.
In such political environments, speechwriting is often for the young political aspirant – willing to accept poor pay and long hours in return for the chance to live out their “Bartlet for America” dreams, and to purchase entry into the knife-fight that is Malaysian politics.
What does it take to be a good speechwriter? I’ve touched on some of these earlier, but it is useful to provide a summary: An abiding interest and passion for politics and history. The patience and grit to dig into the details of public policy. Ability to understand the audience one would be speaking to. Empathy and understanding of the principal’s personality, interests, and political priorities. Intellectual bandwidth and breadth of knowledge, buttressed by lots and lots of reading. A passion for language, poetry and rhetoric – and in Malaysia, the ability to operate fluently in at least Bahasa Melayu and English. Capacity for hard work.
I would like to think I was a decent speechwriter. Sadly I was not one of the lucky few who could carve out a living – let alone riches or fame! – through speechwriting in Malaysia. But I will never lose that fascination for the art and the craft of political speechmaking. (Ok time for another West Wing binge soon, I think!)