Salleh Ben Joned and Nation Building (by Alima Joned)

Unity in Diversity (photo courtesy of the New Straits Times)

By Alima Joned

Salleh Ben Joned is a philosophic pragmatist who believes multiculturalism, colloquially known as ‘kebudayaan rojak’, is good for nation building. His sister Alima Joned reviews four of her brother’s essays on this theme, written nearly 20 years ago, after the unveiling of Malaysia’s Vision 2020 in 1991. She muses about her brother’s visions in the context of Malaysia today. 

After the publication of my blog piece titled "Salleh Ben Joned and the Art of the Pantun," I received a message that reads in part:

I enjoyed reading your post on LinkedIn about your brother’s poetry …. Wonderful demonstration of your love and admiration for your brother, and for your country of origin and culture. I particularly like this quote from his writing, “That’s why I like Lin Yutang’s unusual definition of patriotism (or eating, it doesn’t really matter which) as love for the good things one ate in one’s childhood.” We would be so much better a person if we all thought of “patriotism” in those terms. Beautiful piece.

I, of course, was thrilled that this high-priced lawyer (based in the United States, no less, and totally lacking knowledge of the cultural references made in my article) took a few minutes from his billable hours not only to read, but to make comments. Beyond giving me this (cheap) thrill, the comments affirm the universal appeal of the poetic language; it enables us to best make sense of our deep emotions, such as love for our country

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

I also like Lin Yutang’s food-based definition of patriotism. In this moment of the world we live in, this definition of patriotism is all the more important as the term is often confused with nationalism.

Consider, for example, how these terms are defined by The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Online. “Patriotism,” in this dictionary, is a “love of your country and willingness to defend it.” The term “nationalism” is defined as a “feeling of love for and pride in your country; a feeling that your country is better than any other.’’ Not everyone can see the distinction between the two.  Many do. 

Unlike patriotism, nationalism has political dimensions and implies superiority, often racial superiority. In today’s politically-charged climate in the United States for example, nationalism is associated with white nationalism, an ideology that entails a sentiment of superiority of the white race, and a belief that politics should advance the interests of white people at the expense of non-whites. This ideology runs counter to democratic ideals. Nationalism may be useful to unite a country when faced with external enemies, perhaps. Domestically, however, it can be divisive.

For Malaysians, the appeal of Lin Yutang’s idea of patriotism as love for the good things one ate in one’s childhood is unmistakable. What’s not to like about it? The love for Malaysia is the love for nasi lemak (coconut rice), roti canai (flat and flaky pan-fried bread) and char kueh teow (wok-fried flat noodles) – the foods we grew up with, and we feel this love no matter where in the world we end up.

Vision 2020 and the Challenge of Nation Building

In 1991, Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir articulated the vision that by 2020 Malaysia would be a fully developed nation “economically, politically, socially, spiritually, psychologically and culturally.” By 2020, the Prime Minister added: “[W]e must be fully developed in terms of national unity and social-cohesion, in terms of our economy, in terms of social justice, political stability, system of government, quality of life, social and spiritual values, national pride and confidence.” (Malaysia: The Way Forward - Vision 2020)

Having articulated this vision, the Prime Minister identified nine challenges that had to be overcome in order to realize this vision. The first of these was the challenge of establishing a united Malaysian nation with a sense of shared destiny. This had to be a nation at peace with itself, territorially, and ethnically integrated, living in harmony and full and fair partnership, made up of one 'Bangsa Malaysia' with political loyalty and dedication to the nation.

In response to a call by the Prime Minister for critical discussion of his Vision 2020, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Universiti Kebangsaan published a booklet called Wawasan 2020 dan Pembinaan Bangsa Malaysia (Vision 2020 and the Creation of the Malaysian Race).

This booklet, the outcome of a dialogue by a group of UKM academics in 1991, was the focus of Salleh’s column with the curious (but delicious) title, Rojak is Good for Nation Building (1st July 1992).

Rojak is a spicy fruit or vegetable salad and also a term meaning ‘mixture’ or ‘eclectic mix’ in Malay; kebudayaan rojak is a colloquial expression for multiculturalism or cultural pluralism.

Rojak is Good for Nation Building

According to Salleh, the UKM academics argued two reasons why a true Malaysian nation had failed to emerge. He took issue with both arguments.

The first argument was that a united nation had been hampered by the unwillingness of the majority of non-Malays and a section of the Malay elite to show a genuine and full commitment to the National Language. These recalcitrant Malaysians generally favoured the English language, allowing the language of our former colonial masters to dominate our public life. It really saddened these academics that a sizeable section of the Malay elite, especially businessmen, preferred to speak in English, not only to non-Malays, but also amongst themselves. Worst still, so the complaint went, “they even think in English!”

Salleh was also amused with the concern expressed by one of these academics that the widespread use of English, left unchecked, would have a fearful outcome: Bangsa Malaysia in the year 2020 may even be fluent in English. “I didn’t know that to be fluent in the lingua franca of the world is a bad thing,” Salleh wittily retorted.

Salleh’s position on the use of English is well-known. For him, English has an important role within our multi-ethnic society, not just as a tool to communicate with the outside world. In a column titled Once Again, English, Our English (5th January 1994), he argues in speaking English, Malaysians will not lose their Malaysian identity or their Malaysian soul. He says the English we speak belongs, not to the Mat Salleh (colloquially, ‘white men’), but to Malaysians themselves. He writes:

A language belongs to those who speak it. It’s as simple as that. Given this fact, and that language communicates experience and is capable of transcending the boundaries of the culture of its origin – given all this, then the English we speak in Malaysia today belongs to us. It’s our English; along with BM it expresses our ‘soul’, with all its contradictions and confusions, as much as our social and material needs.

In another column titled Be Sophisticated and Silly All the Way (12th January 1994) Salleh discusses the then controversial policy shift to place emphasis on English while maintaining the National Language policy and the problem of translating English text books into Malay. There Salleh considers it a privilege, not an ideological shortcoming, for Malaysia to be bilingual.

The second argument made by the UKM academics was that a united Malaysian nation had failed because of the persistence of kebudayaan rojak - despite the demands by the Malay literati for a full implementation of the National Cultural Policy.**

The concern regarding the persistence of kebudayaan rojak is of special interest to me. As I live abroad, and live as a minority, I have become convinced more than ever of the value of multiculturalism - for both my country of residence and my native country.

Malaysian rojak (from lifestylefood.com.au)

It is obvious from my visits to Malaysia that the society is more divided then ever and the truly united Malaysia in Vision 2020 remains elusive. The reasons are many and complicated but the persistence of kebudayaan rojak is certainly not to be blamed for the failure of Malaysian nationhood. Still, back in 1991 the UKM academics argued just this.

As Salleh explains, the UKM academics at that time were troubled that the Government allowed English to be visible in many areas of public life and failed to apply the National Language law forcefully. So troubled they were that they proposed legislation, a National Culture Act to “ensure the end of kebudayaan rojak.”

Salleh makes the point that a law to end kebudayaan rojak was futile. Instead, he suggests, we should embrace cultural pluralism fully so that the vision of Malaysia developed in every aspect could be realized. In Salleh’s words:

As realists have often pointed out, kebudayaan rojak is inevitable given the multi-ethnic nature of our society in which no one race truly dominates in terms of numbers. Anyway, what’s wrong with kebudayaan rojak? Malaysians like rojak. It’s good for them, and it helps nation-building. Unity in diversity is certainly better for the vitality of our cultural life than the imposition of an artificially conceived national culture through legislation. A living culture, as everyone knows, grows naturally; it cannot be programmed or legislated according to an abstract recipe.

Indeed, unity in diversity, oneness notwithstanding different races, ethnics, faiths, languages will only make Malaysia all the richer in every sense.

Writers and Nation Building

2020 is now just around the corner. Yet we are no closer to meeting the challenge of building a united country, as envisioned by the Prime Minister back in 1991. Writers, like everyone in the nation, have a responsibility to help here.  In fact, as many of Salleh’s essays suggest, they have an awesome responsibility.

For example, in Different Lamps but the Same Light (9th September 1992), he calls on his fellow writers (the sasterawans) to use their art to promote racial and religious harmony. The essay was inspired by the dance performance of Mavin Khoo (along with Ramli Ibrahim and Guna) of Varnam, said to be the most challenging dance in the Bharata Natyam repertoire. Salleh found the dance dazzlingly beautiful and spiritual as it captured the intercourse between the “heavenly body and celestial earth,” enacting and celebrating the “concord between man and man, tribe and tribe, us and them, god earthy and God transcendent.” Writers, Salleh suggests, should meditate on the ultimate Truth, the One, and invoke the One - the Word- because they (the writers) can unite “words that divide.”

He writes:

Sasterawans of Malaysia, consider truly the unity of Truth, of Tawhid, and let your God-given imagination truly live in the many-in-the-one, and ultimately in the One-in-the-many; in the very breadth of God-the-Creator-God-the-Destroyer-God-the-Regenerator. Indeed, there is no god but God. Think of Mavin, Guna, and, of course Ramli behind them. Oneness of Being manifests itself through the vessel of their bodies. Why can’t the reality they affirm in the sacred dance of the body be similarly affirmed in the sacred dance of speech? The Word that unites words that divide – my fellow sasterawans, we must together meditate on it. 

So, he asks writers to use their imagination and their art for the unity of Malaysians, creating Bangsa Malaysia. He pleads with them not to use hurtful words in their writings. His exact words:

And [writers] please try to think twice, thrice, a hundred, even a thousand times, before you throw around words like murtad (apostate), kafir (infidel), syirik (polytheism), munafik (hypocrite) so indiscriminately, so self-righteously, sanctimoniously - and, may Allah be my witness, so un-Islamically.

(As a lawyer and a Malay who cherishes the best in my traditional and uncorrupted Malay upbringing, I, too, urge writers and all, especially those in the position of power, to be mindful of their language.) 

Malaysian literature, Salleh adds, needs poets and writers who are truly liberated from the constrictions of rigid doctrines and laws and who open their hearts and minds to the vision of the great Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi in his poem The Song of the Reed. If we can hear the Reed, he says, we will appreciate the truth affirmed by Rumi in another poem, the Masnawi:

The lamps are different, but the Light is the same: 

It comes from the Beyond…

This is one Truth that is true.

***

Deeply rooted in his Malay heritage, my brother has no fear about losing his Malay identity or his Malay soul simply because he also writes in English or promotes bilingualism. He also believes a writer must take the long view all the time and be alert to temptations that can compromise his art and the independence of his mind. He is a cultural pluralist, pure and simple. He is a Lin Yutang patriot, one who cares deeply for his country - for a united Malaysia that is at peace with itself and ethnically integrated, living in harmony and in full and fair partnership, made up of one Bangsa Malaysia. That is the vision the Prime Minister had back in 1991. That is the vision most of us share.

December 2019

-------------------------
Alima Joned is a lawyer in private practice in Washington, DC. 

** The National Culture Policy was put in place in the aftermath of the 1969 political crisis and was originally intended to encourage national unity, but subsequently emerged as an initiative to encourage national identity through the arts. 

The (Malay) Malaysian Writer’s Dilemma (1992)

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.

               

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