the internet has turned me into a one-click activist. all i need is connectivity, a kind of name, an email address. i don't have to leave my room, i don't even have to get up from my chair, i don't have to experience or touch or smell. all i need to do is see through an interface, read and have a split second think. then insert my name and click.

today, i received an email that called for a petition to boycott an artist - Guillermo Vargas "Habacuc"- from representing his country at the Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008. I'm not sure what the event is, apart from being some kind of art exhibition.

he definitely caught a stray dog from the streets, leashed it with a rope inside a gallery in nicaragua last year as his art piece for an exhibition entitled 'Eres Lo Que Lees' - 'You Are What You Read'. The title is written on the wall with dog biscuits while the stray dog walks nearby, just out of reach, tied with a rope around his neck.

it caused outrage, understandably, and pictures were released and sent over the internet that showed the dog gradually starving to death. the gallery owner insists that the dog escaped and it was only tied for 3 hours during the exhibition, before which the artist fed the dog with food he brought himself. other petition sites pulled quotes from him here and there and concluded that he admitted to starve the dog to death.

whichever way the truth, there are currently more than 2 million signatures in support of the move to boycott this "animal-hating" artist.

on the flipside, the “One Million Signatures" campaign organised by Iranian women's rights activists since 2006, demanding for changes in laws that discriminate against women has to date only managed to get slightly more than 7 thousand signatures.

so let's see. artist drags stray dog to be exhibited as art, disputed intentions and conclusion of actual death, 2 million supporters. whole populations of women and men in a country facing clearly documented discrimination, violence and suppression, 7 thousand odd supporters.

so the one-click activist is not only lazy in terms of activism, but also lazy in terms of analysis.

give me some pictures, clear visuals of a starving dog, easy to understand terms, and i'll give you my name.

give me an actual complex reality of shit happening in the world, where i have to actually do some search because even information is clamped down, campaign sites filtered and blocked, people struggling to get some small measure of truth out in the open, i just can't be bothered.

too difficult. time is passing on too fast. hyperlinks are waiting, and only those dished out ready to be served with cute buttons and easy navigation.

give me a story, full of drama, heart-rending pictures, moral outrage and digestible ethics. i'll give you my name.

*click*

Every Malaysian is racist. Race is not a dirty language. Most Malaysians puzzle over the use of words like "ethnicity" or "origin" instead of the much richer and loaded language of race. Before any other form of self-identity, race comes first. then gender, or class, or sexuality, or brand affiliation, or anything else that needs to be named. Race as a marker is stitched so firmly into our psyche, our souls, our knowledge of the the self and our place in the universe, it's instinctive.

I learnt that I was one out of three chinese in my class when i was seven. Before that, I learnt that pig is dirty, just like Indians, except in a different way. I knew that there are differences in our way of life and theirs - theirs being a category that can always be interchanged as the familiar other. Racist jokes about politicians, nasi lemak, roti canai and chee cheong fun abound; lazy malays, money-faced chinese, stupid indians. And amidst the punch lines that carve our alienation from each other is the shadow of violence burning through the numbers, "May 13th 1969". Like the holy trinity, Malaysians are neatly cut up into a magical three that makes up the corners of a pyramid. With every other identity - Serani, Bengali, Orang Asli, Kadazan, Ang Mo, Indon and more - thrown into the darkness of corners, intermittently visible with a rare shift of light.

This morning, I chanced upon an abandoned Berita Harian at the next table during breakfast. Skimming through the headlines of Najib supporting Pak Lah and Hishamuddin abdicating his Pemuda UMNO leadership position, an advertisement caught my eye. Placed neatly across the bottom part of the front page, it enticed readers with a 70% discount on something. It took me awhile to figure out what the advert was about. Splashed in bold letters under the name of the company are the words, "100% dimiliki oleh bumiputera". Initially, I thought it was a property development project. The meta keywords "milik" and "bumiputera" immediately linked to make a cohesive picture of "satu lagi project bermutu oleh NEP".  Reading more closely, I realised that it was actually a sale of fabrics and cloth by a shop in Jalan Masjid India.

So why was it necessary to speak so directly to its potential market that their money will solely profit only bumiputeras? Berita Harian is a Malay-language newspaper. Their readership consists mainly of 20s to 40s, middle income Malays: 93% in 2007. We are freaking out silently at the moment. The recent elections results have thrown our pyramid into slight disarray. We're a little unsure what the masses want - as informed to us through a select and concentrated number of individuals easily identified through icons and colours.

Tony Pua, my crisp and newly elected Member of Parliament, scoffed at MCA when they tried to assure voters post their recent elections "defeat" that they will continue to protect Chinese rights. He said, "They just don't get it". DAP is all about "Malaysians first", the pyramid scheme just doesn't hold political resonance anymore. But then a few days later he sputtered at Pak Lah's statement about Chinese interests being in jeopardy if inadequate (race-based, read Chinese = MCA) representation is made in the Parliamentary Cabinet. So who is not getting what?

I think Malaysians are truly quite fed-up of being told that we can only have particular rights if we have particular kinds of race. The magic May 13th number is a little too far in time to properly evoke palpable terror. The terror of not being told the truth, of being somehow cheated of chances, of having narrow corridors to carefully sail speech bubbles - they are a lot more real somehow.

And it's also thanks to the development discourse that have been regurgitated to visceral levels to justify all kinds of wayang. Somehow, earning a living has become our primary inalienable equal right. Getting information and communicating it, scaffolded by our accidental and ignorant bliss of an unfettered internet access - also fueled by the language of economics - have become our collective seeds of desire. Race has become an irritating fence that we just want to dismantle.

We have all been struggling against our automatic racism. But we can't seem to let it go. Because it simply matters. It is the history and the land upon which we are now building our dreams of hope, freedom, justice, equality, etc. etc. etc. Before articulating any form of change, before cartographing our future, the raw materials we have for transformation is the bone black of our racist, nationalised beings.

So what should we do? What can someone like Tony Pua do? When he is also left with the Chinese-interest legacy of DAP. Now together with PAS and PKR attempting to shed their skins and slither anew from the ashes as Pakatan Rakyat, attempting to assuage real fears and tensions of racist Malaysians to similarly let go of this lucrative pyramid and form something new. Whichever angle you take, it still looks like a triangle albeit with a different constitution. Perhaps Hindraf will get fed up that cries of "Makkal Sakthi!" being drowned by cries of "Reformasi!" or "Allah huakhbar!" and form a separate party. Then we could have a trapezoid. Or perhaps in time, PSM will finally get registered and we could have a pentagon.

I want a multi-headed hydra or a border-ignorant paramecium. The sad fact is, we are constructed by identity-politics. We are raced, we are gendered, we are genitalised, we are monetised, we are limbed, limed and slimed with categories and cardboard boxes. We're just at this moment in time, trapped in the room of race, prying the door handle into the room of class or perhaps gender. Obfuscating our racism by substituting Indian/Malay/Chinese-rights with rights of poor people, rights of women, rights of people living in rural areas, in the rain forest, in the office, in cyberspace.

But some rooms are more fluid than others. It is so much harder to get rid of your skin than say, changing your home address, credit limit, religion or genitals. And maybe one day, when there are so many rooms that doors take up a lot more space than walls, they will cease to matter as much. We just need to be brave and lift our one foot firmly cemented in the race room and try something a little different. Exploration has to start somewhere, so it might as well start with a careless jump.

"Closet Victim"

Nobody knows, somebody knows,
Sometimes it seems like everyone knows

My closet is made out of love
Twisted from inheritance of a see-saw -
I'm on the heavy end and you are light
If I walk away, you will fly in fear before you fall

My closet was made out of shame
Threaded from ideas of a price tag on my vagina
I'm on the cheap side and you are expensive
Even if I never chose the sale at all

My closet is being made out of words
Strung from ballooned buffoons blathering their might
I'm on the poster and you are eyes
When I start to speak -

Nobody knows, somebody knows,
Sometimes it seems like everyone knows

Then it happens

I just got my own handphone phone. It was quite an exciting period. Mobile phones weren't super cheap then, or subscription rates affordable. Pre-paid was only starting to be introduced. But I had a number to my name, and a device that meant anyone could get in touch with me, and me back, without having to go through 'gatekeepers'. I grew up in a pretty dense household. Grandparents, god parents, another aunt, 5 cousins, 1 brother, kids that my grandma and godma used to take care of for extra income, neighbours... there was always people around and simultaneous conversations making a kind of comforting background noise.

The only telephone in the house was next to the television, and the television was right next to the main door in the living room. There was almost zero-chance of having a private conversation.

So now, with my very own handphone, I could have a heart-to-heart with a friend even when I was having a pee. It felt really liberating. My own space carved through a rectangular, flip-cover, plastic black Ericsson.

I got an SMS one day. By a number I didn't recognise.


How strange. Who is this person? What does s/he mean? A friend I forgot to key into my phone?



What the fuck? I'm starting to feel a little creeped out. Who is this person? How the hell did he (no mistake now) get my phone number? Heard from where? From who? Suddenly, I didn't feel alone anymore, safe to shape my world, my space. Everyone I could have encountered became instantly dangerous, carrying a risk of ripping apart the skin I have made between myself and people I trust. I couldn't take it. I needed to know who this person was. I needed to establish some kind of knowledge, identity, name, space, context, something i can identify and remember. My handphone became a strange object, rattling with quiet fear. It took me some time, but I finally decided to reply.


Now I am angry. Pissed off beyond belief. How dare you intrude my phone, intrude my space, intrude my life, insinuate all kinds of shit, solicit me for sex, hide behind the cowardice of anonymity, spoil my beautiful day, my awesome week!! 

It was the first time anyone I knew had ever encountered this. I didn't know how to respond to it. I didn't know what I could do. How palpable is the danger? Is this person stalking me? Is it someone I know? Is someone watching me when I am not looking? Am I going to be raped? What is happening?

I was working in a domestic violence shelter at that time. I answered counselling calls, and I knew the law. There were no laws against sexual harassment or stalking, and there still isn't. Even if there was a law, it doesn't mean I will be protected. I know how toothless laws can be. How full of gaps and decay. But I'm still not taking this. I refuse to have one fuckwit spoil my experience and what having a handphone has meant to me. And if there is one thing I can't stand, it's assholes who choose to exert their power through sex. I spent 2 years of my life in primary school terrified of this guy who was threatening to rape my best friend - and me by proxy - for some unknown reason. Hanging out near our school, coming to the canteen when no one was around and saying the same disgusting things over and over. I had nightmares about him for years, dreaming of his death so the threat would end. I still remember his face. I'm not a child anymore. I should have told someone, made a report, kicked his balls. Done something. Anything. No more. I refuse to be paralysed by fear and shrink my already small space any smaller.

And they simply stopped. I still have his number, and phone numbers of all other similar stalkers who have made dodgy sms to my friends. I'm saving them up for a class action suit one day!

technorati tags: takebackthetech

this is just so i wont forget, and in case there are some unfortunate souls like me.

had to reformat harddisk (win XP) and so lost all thunderbird profile. but my mail was intact in a separate drive (partitioned: all programmes in c, all mails somewhere else)

i did a backup with mozbackup but it didn't want to restore. said it wasn't a valid file. which drove me fucking bonkers.

tried to do all manner of things. eventually found this thread. even though it was for a mac, decided to give it a go.

installed thunderbird. recreated new accounts.

created a new profile & deleted existing profile (no risk since it's basically a fresh reinstall). copied all my mail folders and file into "Local Directories" folder in "Mail" in the drive where my mail is.

didn't work.

luckily, i found a super old profile (sometime middle 2007) and copied all the files into the new profile folder.

although some of my settings still worked, i.e. accounts and passwords are there, but still couldn't detect my mails.

checked local folder settings in account settings, and saw where my global inbox was located. moved all files and folders there, pasting/replacing over everything.

it works!

the moral of the lesson is, back up firefox and thunderbird profiles!

* how to manage profiles

somehow, since i turned 21, i haven't been in the country for any of the general elections. first was undergrad, then postgrad, and missed all the exciting stuff that was reformasi, pak lah mari, etc. now, finding myself happily in the country, registered and all ready to be whipped up into a frenzy of flags and flatulence.

signed up with Women's Candidacy Initiative - a bunch of energetic women and men who was supporting Toni Kasim as an independent candidate. for as long as i've known her, she has never ceased to amaze with her sharp take on injustice, sense of humour, boisterous commitment, breadth of activism and amazing humility. she's just super cool. i'd vote her in as prime minister any day.

but she's really quite ill now, and we're all biting our nails in worry. as a result, she's no longer running as a candidate. we're still trying to push for the WCI 10 point manifesto in the elections though.

missing an enigmatic leader, we decided to engage through the witty and larger-than-life persona who is Mak Bedah.

enjoy! :)

right click, save as and blog it!

original url at: http://www.wci2.org/images/banners/wci_blog_final.gif. just add this code to your site:

<img src="http://www.wci2.org/images/banners/wci_blog_final.gif" alt="women's candidacy initiative - show your support!>

News just in: Parliament has been dissolved today. Elections is not only looming, it's breathing down our faces! Support WCI and spread the news far and wide. It's time to try and make at least a dent of difference to how politics look in this country.

---------

The Women's Candidacy Initiative (WCI) is pleased to announce the candidacy of Zaitun (Toni) Mohamed Kasim for the upcoming 12th General Elections.

WCI
WCI is a collaboration of women and men who believe that the political participation of women at every level of decision-making is vital to advancing and upholding the rights of women and to better represent their concerns.  This will be the second time that WCI will field a candidate in the election. WCI made history during the 10th General Elections when it fielded Toni Kasim to run on a women's human rights platform in the Selayang parliamentary seat against the incumbent, Chan Kong Choy (BN). WCI polled 43% (26,144) of the vote in the constituency, slashing the winning margin for the incumbent from 38,627 in the 1995 general election to 8,835.
 
WCI's Candidate - Toni Kasim
Our candidate, Toni Kasim is no stranger to the women's movement and the larger human rights movement. She has worked tirelessly for the last 15 years in Malaysia, on a wide range of human rights and women's rights issue. She has been involved in various civil society organizations and movements to work on issues such as sexual harassment, domestic violence, poverty, HIV/AIDS, women's access to leadership and the impact of religious fundamentalisms on people's lives. Her work is based on the fundamental belief that women and men, and people of all races and religions should be equal before the law.

WCI - What we believe in
WCI believes that no one should be discriminated against because of their gender, religious beliefs, ethnicity or nationality - every person has the right to equal access to health, education and employment, the freedom of belief and practices according to the Constitution. We have the right to safe and affordable living conditions where we can live without fear or injustice or discrimination.

We also assert that politics belongs to all and that for a democracy to be truly representative, it must have the participation of civil society - ordinary men and women who make up this country, regardless of whether they choose to join a political party or not. WCI gave expression to this ideal in the 1999 general elections and this year, with bigger support and commitment, we are pleased to come together once again in the second phase of WCI to participate in the coming elections.

We believe in the growing importance of civil society participation in the elections process. However, trying to bring this ideal to fruition has not been easy. The voice of civil society has largely been drowned by politicians who have ruled over us for 50 years. Systems and structures have been put in place to make it very difficult for the diverse Malaysian voices to be heard. These include gerrymandering and increasing the deposits for candidates who wish to run in the elections.

With the limited resources available to independent candidates and an election system that is less than free and fair, there are numerous barriers for effective participation in the elections. For women, these barriers are even more pronounced. But this year, we are experiencing a thrilling second phase of our growth, and we are excited to be planning the campaign for an independent woman candidate once again, to make sure that women's issues are highlighted and do not fall off the agenda.
 
In spite of an election system that presents numerous challenges to our candidacy, we are committed to run a campaign that is clean, fair and ethical:
•    As an independent women's candidacy our campaign will not be based on monetized politics, because we want to be accountable to the people, not to businesses.
•    As believers and defenders of universal human rights, we will ensure that issues of public importance are tackled critically and with humanity.
•    As supporters of women's equal access to leadership, we will ensure that women's voices are heard and heeded.
•    We will also ensure that our campaign does not waste resources unnecessarily.

How you can be a part of the WCI campaign
We would also like to use this opportunity to invite other Malaysians who believe in democracy, justice and equality to lend your support to WCI this coming election. Because we are an initiative driven by ordinary people who believe in fairness and equality, we need all the help we can get. There are many ways in which you can help. You can contribute by donating in cash or in kind, or you can volunteer your time and energy to help us put this campaign together, or you can simply spread the word and help us make some noise.
 
Finally, you can contribute by not voting inequality, but by voting for EQUALITY!
 
Toni Kasim was the right candidate for WCI in 1999, and she is the right candidate this time around. It is therefore with great pleasure that we hereby officially launch the 2nd phase of the Women's Candidacy Initiative, and our candidate for the upcoming 12th General Elections.

End discrimination, Vote Equality.

To know more about how you can contribute or volunteer, please call WCI at 017-302 7030.

WCI is conducting a volunteers workshop. Please register by calling WCI at 017-302 7030.

WCI Volunteers Workshop
Date: 16th February 2008
Time: 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Venue : Pusat Janadaya (Empower), 13 Lorong 4/48E, Seksyen 4, 46050, Petaling Jaya, Selangor

For more information, log on to www.wci2.org

once there was a bunch of people scared of a lot of things. they could perceive that their bodies were soft, that it breaks, splits apart, and unknown liquids flow out of them. they were aware that their bodies were in fact, full of fissures. holes, where some things enter, and some things depart.

it did not matter before, when drawing lines were a little less important. and where morphing and moving were part of life. but when it became more urgent to stay in one place and make that work, lines began to take root. they began to have names, rituals, ceremonies, heroes, lores and processes. they became so fat that it was possible to have pockets of anarchy, sarcasm and despair pock-marked within them.

these people lived in such a time. a time of lines, and deferrence to difference. the hallowing of stories and tales was an important way to preserve the sanctity of lines, and contain the messiness that lines create.

the mermaid is one such story. she swims in acknowledgment of untamed female sexuality. her voice - the capacity to legible communication - is woven with seduction at its core, with power to destroy the communal respect for lines. her naked breasts glisten with wanton disregard for the convention of undergarments and metal corsets entombed by lace and needles. she thrives in a mysterious world, unknown to man and his land. the fantastic and phantasmagoric.

and appears when men are most vulnerable, most out of his safe and comfortable universe, where he consciously sail to seek the edges of lines currently known.

but the most fearful of what is female, the biggest monster to the impermeability of lines, is her vagina. it is constantly reproducing mysteries; wetness, blood, womb, human, decay, life, orgasms. in logic as yet unchoked by machinations.

so these people masked it in the form of a fish. instead of legs, she has a fish tail. she cannot walk, or gape her legs and visually demonstrate her puissance. there are some fears so large that you cannot give them a name, or a description. because even to utter would be to empower further.

the mermaid is a nod, begrudging, fearful and in awe, to a might that flows around life as they currently knew it. and how she transforms in time, is how the servants of lines learn how to tame her.


---
do you remember how it feels like
to lose concentration
in a phone conversation
that stretched so long
about nothing and everything?

such careless intimacy
is a great privilege.
---

watched flower in the pocket by liew seng tat last week. mainly because i caught one of his shorts a couple of years ago and was blown away by his weird sense of narrative and perspective. can't remember what the short film was called, but it featured a grandmother's fantasy and active desire with an old love - a young boy (starring seng tat himself) wearing a communist beret. they pranced around - she in her existing embodiment as a coquettish old woman, and he as a nubile smiling young man - and then have sex together. he goes down on her with a pure and satisfied smile. lovely! a very wonderful story that is at the same time humourous, light and moving.

so i was all ready for another brilliant film, and flower in the pocket didn't disappoint. the story centres around two young boys and their father. it's quite a simple tale, but as with his previous short, it's really the relationship between the different characters that drew me in.

the first half of the movie slowly unwraps the things that these two boys do - at school, not completing their homework, playing around drains, forming new friendships by bullying and being bullied, tasting food, shitting, cleaning, sleeping - all the minute mundanity of life coloured through intimacy. it's full of tangible silences that sutures the whole story together. each character is rich and complex without falling into a stereo/archetype, and are revealed through interactions with the spaces they inhabit, the relationship they are de/constructing with each other, needs and desires, and best of all, minimal drama.

the younger boy - mah li ohm - speaks no malay, and a know-it-all classmate, maria, translates every single sentence that their bahasa malaysia teacher utters perfectly to him. even then, miscommunication happens, as he tried to tell a story about "keluarga saya" from his drawing of himself and his brother, mah li ahh. maria thought it's her name, and asked why his drawing of a boy has a girl's name? the intricate and chaotic linguistic landscape of the country is presented through such small moments - which was quite refreshing for me after two marathon days of cinta and mukhsin - which brings up sepet and gubra. they were all good cinematic stories about malaysian life, love, cultural and raced heterogeneity, but got a little predictably soapy after awhile. i loved sepet when it first came out. it presented outright the kind of differentiating assumptions we carry and enact through everyday life - mixing of chinese music with arabic calligraphy, scholarships given on race-based NEP quotas, the destabilisation of borders through peranakan identities etc. but when orked came out again in mukhsin, and the romantic, nostalgic and rose-tinted treatment given to play, poverty and conflict, i got a little weary of festive-seasoned advertisement moments.

or maybe it's because the protagonists had different ethnicities. i could relate a little more to a poor chinese family from somewhere near jinjang than i could to a middlish-class malay family from an unnamed but beautiful kampung. even though i have encountered both, i experienced them from a different positionality in raced identity. either way, it's really good to have more diverse takes to a complex reality.

so anyway, back to flower in the pocket. they were befriended by a tomboy malay girl, ayu, who gave them "glamour" names so she could more easily pronounce them - azman abdullah and azmi abdullah. and the beauty of priorities in childhood is presented by a simple "boleh" - quick assent for the convenience of knowing. ayu called herself atan and claimed the male identity to be able to play with them easier, but shed this simply when she brought li ohm and li ahh back to her place for lunch one day. when the two boys found a stray puppy, she cycled home and put on a helmet and gloves to be able to continue playing with them and the haram puppy. there is no hysteria, high-tension, drama or sudden change in background music. it's just a mellowed, routine negotiation of identity in constant flux and reenactment. very wonderfully done.

the father is a man withdrawn from life and his children, presumably because his wife left them (he tore her picture and tried to swallow it at the later part of the film), and works with mannequins together with a malay man, mamat, who has a strong physical and emotional bond with his wife. the tale evolves to his gradual awakening of his children's existence and his subtle and awkward demonstration of love and care to living things surrounding him.

the second half of the movie, when the story centred more around the father than the children, got a little too silent at parts. the small moments that reveal a lot more than is narrated gulfed question marks that weren't too titillating. maybe it's because i know the actor - james lee - who played the father. so i couldn't suspend my disbelief as well. or maybe it's because his character was focussed on interactions with inanimate objects, spaces and stillness. not sure, but it can't be easy to sustain and fold a story well without resorting to tried-and-tested techniques of contradictions, subtlety and drama.

either way, i'm going to try and get a copy of this film on DVD. it's something that makes me feel all wobbly and smile when thinking of film-making in this country, and the tentative steps we're taking to capture slivers of our life in this time. right down to the blurring out of the puppy when azan was sounding the background, and the bleeping off of "melayu" when li ohm asked to tear a page off his exercise book to wipe his bum after he had a poo :) hopefully, they'll do something about the uneven sound throughout the film before releasing it on DVD.

gush over!