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

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!

i wonder how it looks like. if violence can no longer be as evident as an ugly bruise on the face, then how do you tell it is violence?

did a piece on saturday. supposed to be around words and music. mei chern came up with the context and language idea, and we tried to develop it to see how it'd actually work. i don't know if we managed to carry it through. i wrote some stuff around the construction of meaning using words. pulling from butler, mckinnon (!), and some theorists of malay language as a language of art. i think i was threading my own words, and words of others, including newspaper articles, with each other and trying to render it ridiculous. but i think the music, which was supposed to be an important aspect woven through this entire piece, didn't speak as loud as it could have. juls reckoned mei chern should have sang in between. which makes a lot of sense. duh. if we had one more rehearsal, we probably would have gotten there... but such is life. creations suffer at the hands of lazy creators.

anyway, i have been thinking about the technology of violence for awhile now. my brains are kinda fuzzy from jet lag and lack of sleep to articulate it properly. but i'm going to give it a small go.

if digital spaces means the construction of subjects happen without a physical form, or rather through a construction of form through imaginary psychical mapping, then what would be the instrument of violence? assuming that the event did not bleed into physical spaces, and that the violator is someone physically sitting in front of his computer or hanging on to his phone thousands of miles away. how does his text or voice that gets carried into the privacy of my room, become an instrument of violence? would it make a difference if it was merely textual? how can words hurt me when i can choose (or even unintentionally) read words differently?

if i deliberately changed the context. how would the container render the content ridiculous and unintelligible? maybe this was something we were trying to do for the words and music thing, but didn't push it far enough. if i was being serious in my communication, and the other person was not, but the only 'objective' mediator of 'truth' is a machine that lacks in the capacity to carry nuances,  would the violence that occur be the fault of the articulators, or the medium?

okay, i am aware of foucauldian discursive constructions of subjects, locis of power, disseminators of discourses etc. but what else? i am a little resistant to surrendering all definitive powers to discourse alone. it relegates embodiment to becoming an output of discourse. what happens if there is no body to speak of as context or content or disseminator, repetitor or originator?

i might be working myself into a twist. going to get more sleep before i attempt this further. i can hear myself gurgling in the corner. 

happy international human rights day!

ka-BLOG!

heh.

technorati tags: takebackthetech

Eduardo Recife - 1 and 2
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it's been awhile since i have used this space for myself. i hardly know how anymore. i feel like i am speaking to a known audience. that scares me. my lack of anonymity frightens me. what does that mean when a person can only speak what she feels or thinks to an unanswering wall? a wall or space of emptiness that knows no language. or can not name?

i suppose it can mean that she is afraid of being asked to answer for the many things she says. it can mean that i am afraid that someone willl recognise me and life ceases to become one stream of interesting mundanity after another, but instead, become like the focussed aesthetics of a camera lense. violently obtrusive. every pimple magnified.

or perhaps a form of mindless flowing into norms. calcifying modes and methods to what is given value, or already named. chance and creations squandered through repetitive motions of a different pattern. telling, multiplying, reifying, performing. linking. attempting significance through the same. attempting invisibility through the same.

or maybe casting another layer to the skin. one more cleaving of the self into another private, another public, another common, another test of trust. one more incomprehensible poem to wade through before realising truths that lie in indistinct textures that change with every contact. slipping like the alchemy of perfume and sweat.

there is no reason for one to lay her life within the palms of another; the blackened cold pupils of another. the only safety and sanctity in being is the innate ability to disappear into silence.

yet we persistently attempt its rupture and destruction through evolving calculated guesses. intimate as instinct.

language, signs, codes, logos, gestures of the limbs, flickers of the lips, making histories, burdening every accidental occurence with meaning, dates, numbers, time, locking every colour, line, smell and light into an eternal prison of unforgiving memory. compelling the impossible feat of free falling from every random ressonance. calling every hesitant resistance as betrayal.

am i truly walking around, searching for my name? as it burns onto new tongues and rebelliously squirms its misrecognition, does the yearning stay the same?

one of the 43 things i would like to do is forget myself and laugh. but i truly think i lack this thing called humour. some will tell me it indicates a shallowness of intelligence. knowing the inside cosmic joke means understanding the cosmic pattern itself and the ludicrousness of its continued self-perpetuation. but the more i find out, the sadder i become. my bafflement produces no self-effacing snigger. or the clarity it gives. every dive bops me up to scummy depths.

if i were a cartoon character, i would be a morose tadpole.

Initial D...

i am a bit ketinggalan to be watching it only now. one of those things, shove at the back of my mind for later. important but later. one lunch hour has turned into two. it's quite addictive. hard to explain. the illustrations are clunky, bit dated, and very manga-ish. okay for awhile, as it skips from super cool serious to super cartoon exaggeration, but you have to be committed to enjoy it. not really 'user-friendly'.

the car and boys thing is very predictable, the school girl in a super short skirt and close up shots of her ultra long and white thighs even as she is eyed by a disembodied father, is in a way, also very predictable.

and i am catching myself wondering, through whose eyes am i watching this? mulvey here she comes. i don't identify with anyone. there is a distance, wearily predictable as i consume, and fast forward, and wait for the showdown time attack race between the rich, bad, out-of-town boys and the local, proud and under-resourced boys. classic marxist symbolism. who you gonna root for? not the dehumanised borgeouise of course. but the anti-hero that is embodied through the diamond-in-the-rough son of a tofu shop owner.

so whose eyes am i looking by? hitching on the instinctive collective liberal dream of "anyone can make it"? but at the same time, a little miscegenation. not classical liberalism, where everyone is born the same, should have the same opportunities, not really. it's also about instinctive talent. the inequalities of genes. throw in a little cyborg theory, where modern man is also necessarily machine. the connection and the mastery no longer clear. is it the unity between the driver and the car, functioning as one coherent being and as such celebrated as a hero, or is it the complete control over a machine that is man made that signifies success?

how is it that five 20-minute cartoon acts can bring on a theoretical headache?

havent even started on the symbolic phallus, the freudian compulsion, the transmission of property -- here the "gift" cyborg-ism -- from father to son. or the car as signifier of phallic power. boring, boring. what is interesting is the invisible father. when the girl is placed as object of the camera. why is the father always disembodied? why are the viewers given the same sort of visual perspective as where the father would be? what does it mean when they present the father's dialogue as though he is a pimp? giving the daughter extravagant allowances because "she is worth it", right after a close shot of her betis and a first comment of "you look best when you're in uniform", trailing a series of signs that denotes the sexualisation of those short skirts, one step away from hentai fantasy, one step beyond school girl pornography?

of course the audience is imagined as male. of course the audience is imagined as being able to participate actively in the pornographication of the female characters, or to share an intimate affinity to the phallic power that grounds the series. but what happens when a queer feminist female becomes an audience, and derives pleasure? what is the nature of this pleasure? where are the points where the pleasure arise (phnar phnar)?

i balked at the female character. spoilt, innocent, 'lovely', giggly, super fantasy young grrl femme.  it's not even funny.  but i enjoyed the scenes where the cars were racing each other, taking hair-pin corners, was truly thrilled, and even though i knew that of course the pretty boys from out of town was not going to win over this local nobody who did not know his magic, i wanted to watch the defeat unfold.

maybe it is the narrative that drove me. maybe it's the cyborg dream, becoming one with the machine. maybe it's because i enjoy driving my manual car. maybe it's because when they are driving, i cant see the faces of the characters or remember their gendered roles, it transformed into universals: crappy machine vs super canggih machine. maybe i am deluding myelf. maybe i just secretly want a penis.

hah.

i don't think so.

maybe i should stop analysing every damn thing i watch.

"Hurt" - Nine Inch Nails

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of shit
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end

You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

I am a moth, but they insist
that I flutter amongst them like
butterflies.
So I put on high yellows,
twin electric blue eyes
and sew up my brown skin
till night.