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| Portrait of the Writer as a Young Colombo Plan Scholar in the Land Down Under (1963) |
An
intelligent and morally sensitive Malaysian of Malay origin to whom
self-respect and the dream of the brotherhood of man are as vital as the air he
breathes is not an enviable creature in the age of NEP (New Economic Policy). The
Government’s attempt to get his fellow Malays out of the “Malay dilemma” has
put him in a new one – the Bumi Dilemma.
Bumi is short for Bumiputera, literally, “son” or “prince”
of the soil, i.e., the Malays and other natives. It can be somewhat pejorative
term, at least when used by non-Bumis especially
in the post NEP era.
The “Bumi Dilemma” afflicts only a tiny
minority among the Bumiputeras. Under
certain circumstances, or at its most acute, it can be in some ways almost
Hamlet-like in its neurosis. To be or not to be part of a “protected species”:
that is the question. Whether it is
nobler in the mind to “opt out” for the sake of necessary pride and
independence and fidelity to ideas that transcend barriers of ethnicity – that,
or to commit some kind of moral suicide by accepting unquestioningly those
convenient pieties about ethnic survival and dominance. The Bumi afflicted with this dilemma may
accept the rationale of the NEP as a time-bound historical necessity. And he
may be able to see and acknowledge how, like other similar good-intentioned
“correctional” policies, it can be abused. He may even be willing to admit
that, though he as an individual doesn’t need the protection of such policies,
directly or indirectly, whether he likes it or not, he is beneficiary. But,
because of the kind of individual he is, the situation he can find himself in
as a result of being a member of a “protected species” is not an enviable one.
It is especially unenviable if he is a writer.
As I see
it, the most serious problem for the Malaysian writer of Malay origin has to do
with the question of fidelity or loyalty. And this question, because of its
peculiar implications and of the pressure of certain stubborn ethnic realities,
raises the question of a proper audience for the writer. The phrase “Malaysian
writer of Malay origin” that I use here refers to a tiny, very tiny minority
within a much bigger group. The majority of this group can’t be bothered with
fine semantic distinctions between “Malaysian writer of Malay origin” and
simply “Malay writer”. In fact, it’s a matter of pride and ideological
principle with many of them the latter is used without question, just as they
hardly ever question the givens of ethnicity and religion that make an innocent
term like “Malay writer” bristling with divisive connotations. And what is
truly, chillingly disturbing is that these givens seem to be becoming more and
more set, more shrill. The shrillness is the most immediately disturbing; it’s
the shrillness of ideological atavism that, I believe, is death to the creative
principle.
The vast
majority of Malaysian writers of Malay origin are, I believe, untroubled in any
serious way by the question of audience. They just know who constitutes their
audience, and they don’t have the slightest doubts about it. One sometimes gets
the feeling that they deeply believe and rather like it that things will remain
unchanged, the solidarity of their audience guaranteed, written into the
Constitution as it were, which, in a sense it is. Similarly, the question of
aesthetic, intellectual and moral fidelity doesn’t trouble them. Fidelity to
them is mainly a question of being true to certain ethnic pieties; truths and
ideals not narrowed by the myopia of race and religion don’t concern too many
of them. The best way to make the problem of audience and the issue of loyalty
something that can be concretely felt is for me to talk about it from my own
personal experience.
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| SBJ: bright young lad from Malacca |
I feel,
in fact, I know in my blood and my bones that I belong to the tiny minority.
Every time I sit down to write, I am bugged by these troubling questions: who
am I writing for, in actual fact and ideally speaking? What am I supposed to be
loyal to? In my pessimistic moments, I even wonder if I have any audience to
write for; if the element of stubbornness in my notion of loyalty and fidelity
have not condemned me to a no-man’s land. It’s quite easy for my conscious
self, the self moved by the will and governed by intelligence, rationality and
ideals of common humanity, to say that as a writer I recognize only one
loyalty: loyalty to truth and beauty, justice and freedom as I perceive them
with all the honesty I can muster, with an informed mind and an informed heart.
But in
this country, “loyalty” is a very difficult business, and if, like me, you
happen to be a writer somewhat alienated by your education from the dominant
values of your ethnic kind, a writer who stubbornly persists in trying to see
through and beyond the inherited blinkers of race and religion, what you call
“loyalty to truth and beauty, justice and freedom” can be considered a
betrayal. And for the Malays, this “betrayal” is a form of apostasy. People
like me, bilingual and untroubled by sentimental pieties, are particularly
vulnerable to the damning charge of “apostasy” – apostasy from the religion of
race, which can be a worse charge than apostasy from the religion of the race.
When I
came back to Malaysia after a decade in a foreign country, I made a conscious
attempt to recover my lost cultural self. Being a man of words, the attempt
naturally took the form of repossessing my mother tongue. But, as everyone who
has gone through it knows, such attempts can at best be only partially
successful. So was mine – and I don’t regret it. Quite frankly, I didn’t want
to recover my original cultural identity in its fullness and purity. The idea
of recovering something of the “purity” of Malay language itself might appeal
to the poet in me, but not those values whose “purity” or “Malayness” cannot be
distinguished from atavism. I am aware that I am in some ways quite Westernized,
and I am not embarrassed by it. In fact there are some elements in my Westernization
that I am quite happy about it, which I’d like to believe have made me a better
human being and hopefully a better writer. But I also feel I am still, in some
things, incorrigibly Malay. And I don’t regret that either. In fact, there are
things about “Malayness” (not to be confused with “Bumiputeraness”) and in the cultural heritage of my race that I am
terribly proud of it. That’s why like Lin Yutang’s unusual definition of
patriotism as love for the good things one ate in one’s childhood. I am quite
certain that these things, in my case sambal
belacan (Malay delicacy) and cincalok
(Malay delicacy), both literal and metaphorical, inform my writing, especially
the poetry. Directly or indirectly, they give much of whatever energy my
writing can claim to have.
Because
this energy is inevitably life-affirming, its source cannot be “exclusively
Malay.” The streams that water my being, my life, my dreams, my writings are
many and various, though the central one is no doubt Malay. I am a human being
as much as I am a Malay Malaysian; Malaysia is my country and so is the world.
Actually, my true country is not the world, but world literature. I am told
that in Tagalog, a cousin of Malay, the word “malaya” means freedom or
consciousness. Well, that’s the “Malaya” I love to inhabit and feel terribly
loyal to, a country that has no border with that other one – the country called
World Literature.
An
Austrian friend once gave me a poetry book called Song of Malaya by Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek. No it’s not about our
country; it’s about a prostitute, for the word “malaya” means that in Swahili. When I get depressed or angry
because of the atavistic fantasy of “Malaya” and “Melayu” befogging the already blinkered minds of our sasterawans (writers). I think with
bitter cynicism of that Swahilli word. There are many forms of prostitution. To
me, the worst is when the writer uses his talent to prostitute a collective
ideal. It is made even worse by his conviction that no prostitution is
involved; it’s all in the name of bangsa
(race) and semangat kebangsaan
(Spirit of ethnic nationalism), you see. (We must really do something about
that kebangsaan word; as long as we
use it to mean nationalism or nationality, we’ll continue to be trapped in the
dark alley of atavism).
The
Austrian satirist Karl Kraus (a Jew, of course) once ringingly announced his
crusade as a writer by describing language as “a universal whore” which he must
“turn into a virgin.” It’s a
big dream, a mammoth crusade, that one. But I believe every writer worth
his/her salt must commit himself/herself to it. Otherwise, he/she might as well
resign from the community of writers – and of human beings.
In other words,
commit literary hara kiri.
1 January 1992
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