OCT 12 — I remember being back in school, in my then-still-small hometown of Banting, seated alongside many other little sons and daughters of the land and being imparted with knowledge. Prominent in the midst of all the education and miseducation we received were certain key concepts — embodiments, or so we were taught, of everything that was (and is, and ever will be) marvellous about Malaysia and Malaysians.
These concepts appeared in many different forms, but I recall them orbiting largely around two oft-repeated terms: “masyarakat majmuk” and “masyarakat muhibah”.
“Majmuk” is the less abstract of the two, denoting simply plurality or diversity. “Muhibah”, on the other hand, is a far slipperier concept, nebulously signifying a state of community imbued with certain agreeable characteristics — if pressed, I’d probably name unity, harmony and fellowship, although these do not quite hit the nail square.
In any case, majmuk is what Malaysia is: the hard, historical fact of the nation, its undeniable heterogeneity. Muhibah, on the other hand, is what Malaysia should be: happy, prosperous, peaceful, etc, etc, thanks to the efforts of its people, who accommodate one another — here I roughly paraphrase my curriculum — not only tolerantly, but in a spirit of solidarity and mutual affection.
It was perhaps the lingering schoolchild in me who was most shocked by the cow-head protest in Section 23, Shah Alam two months ago. It’s curious that a society so fixated on standards of muhibah and majmuk could engender such an event.
It was shocking enough even before the man in charge of the soundness of our sleep, Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein, not only communicated with, but also apparently defended, those responsible. All the excuses and justifications are at best amusing and at worst enraging, implying as they do the near-total faith that Umno’s top brass seem to have in the gullibility of the average Malaysian.
The whole sordid affair put me in mind of a song by Nina Simone — forevermore to be all the diva the world needs, Diana Ross be damned — called “Mississippi Goddam”. The mighty songstress wrote this bouncy show-tune parody in response to the murder of American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and its lyrics manage in less than five minutes to deliver a crushing blow to the length and breadth of segregationist America. Never mind what I have to say about the song, though — if you’ve never heard it, you should go and read the lyrics for yourself.
And, of course, since a song always deserves to be heard rather than merely read, I recommend that you next go here. Or maybe even here, where you can watch her perform it live.
Of course the inequalities that the late Simone addresses in this song make our own nation’s pockets of turbulence seem comparatively petty, yet I can't help feeling a surge of acknowledgement whenever I listen to it. I love the way she starts off as though humorously, and then gradually ramps up the acid and bile until she fearlessly and fearsomely proclaims “this whole country is full of lies / you’re all going to die and die like flies”, and the crowd, who start off by tittering appreciatively at her one-liners, has fallen into an ashen, mesmerised silence.
So is our country full of lies as well? And is muhibah the biggest lie of them all? Many have remarked on how ironic it was for the cow-head protest to have ushered in Malaysia’s most flag-thumpingly, slogan-wavingly patriotic time of year — National Day. At around the same time that the cow head was receiving its ignominious kicking through the streets of Shah Alam, a group of Malaysian filmmakers was releasing a project called 15 Malaysia, curated by folk troubadour Pete Teo. It’s a series of 15 short films that attempt to express the complexity of the country, eschewing the clumsy simplicity of the “1 Malaysia” box concocted by our dear leader.
You can see them here — I won’t give anything away, beyond the fact that some are really rather good and others really rather terrible, and that the one titled “Meter” (which falls under the former category) is proof that the infamous Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin is both a skilled performer and the bearer of significantly more sophisticated — if no less opportunistic — politics than The Malaysian Insider comment thread consensus would lead one to believe.
In any case, regardless of their quality, many — though not all — of the 15 Malaysia projects share a desire to explore the muhibah. Despite having by and large enjoyed the films — most are well-executed, if not necessarily well-conceived — I have to admit I’ve become a bit jaded about the seasonal outpourings of patriotism and the celebrations of muhibah to which some of these films appear to pander.
The masyarakat muhibah is simultaneously — and perhaps paradoxically — our aspiration and our fall-back. We think of it as a kind of goal either entirely or partially unachieved, yet we also prize it as a uniquely Malaysian achievement, something we can always celebrate about our country. We consistently assume that the pursuit of muhibah has been worth it. But has it really?
I should qualify this question by saying that, personally, I think a masyarakat muhibah is an unqualifiedly wonderful thing. I’m just unsure if its wonderfulness justifies all costs. And several generations of Malaysians — my own included — have been fed the idea that harmony must inevitably come at a cost.
The masyarakat muhibah is part of a deal that Barisan Nasional (and Umno in particular) brokered amongst the different ethnic groups, right from the beginning of this nation. Some of our early political leaders sought to force into common sense the idea that the muhibah could only be yielded at the cost of other ideals. In the pandemonium following May 13, 1969 the stridency of this message — let's call it the Malaysian Deal — was simply cranked up even higher.
The Deal is founded upon the premise that there can be no masyarakat muhibah in Malaysia that is also a masyarakat saksama. Egalitarianism is the collateral in any bid for harmony. Any number of Utusan Malaysia pundits have repeated this line over the years: the Malays will not sit quietly and allow the land that is their birthright to be pilfered by trespassers who ought to be grateful to even have homes in the first place bla bla bla, etc, etc.
The warning is clear — our precious harmony exists only because the Malays are kindhearted, and the non-Malays do not transgress a prescribed sphere of entitlements. This is why Umno luminaries so often condone the inciting rhetoric and implicit violence that sometimes spew from their fellow partisans; the logic of the Malaysian Deal leads inexorably to racial strife as a side effect of any attempt to achieve equality.
However, if this BN argument is true, and muhibah and kesaksamaan are in fact inverse relations, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that we might be able to achieve a different balance between the two. As Nina Simone declares in my favourite line of “Mississippi Goddam”: “You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality”.
BN believes that you can’t have two equals of different ethnic groups living as neighbours, because they will eventually hate and envy each other — well, all right, if that’s the case then why do we want them to live as neighbours in the first place? I’m not sure which matters more, to be honest: whether Malaysians of all races merrily visit one another on festive days, or whether the state treats them all as equals. If the latter can only come at the expense of the former, well, who is to say that’s such a bad thing?
By all means let the different ethnic groups cluster into ghettoes, let our schooling systems become even more racially and linguistically delimited, let temples sprout where only Indians live and mosques where only Malays live, let mutual suspicion and animosity be accepted as the norm, and let people associate with however few or many other races as they wish — if this will allow for greater equality, it might actually be better than what we have now.
After all, our much-vaunted and long drawn-out crusade for a masyarakat muhibah has so far not even managed to stamp out the kind of barbarism that leads to severed animal parts being paraded through the streets. If after all these years that’s the best we can do, then maybe it's time to tweak the Deal and say we'll take less muhibah and more saksama, please, thanks.
Of course, all of this assumes that BN is right in portraying harmony and fairness as incommensurable ideals. But what if they’re not? What if they need not be mutually diminishing? Many Malaysians believe that we can have a masyarakat muhibah that is also saksama, and — despite the fact that their coalition’s actions seem to follow a different pattern — many BN members probably believe this too.
But if this is the case then a question presents itself — do we actually think it’s ever going to happen? Can BN’s membership — and specifically Umno’s movers and shakers — conceive of a time when all the races in this country live in both harmony and equality?
In spite of the temptation to make demands in the style of Simone (Too slow!), I am not asking for timelines here. We could be equal tomorrow, or next month, or in the next century, it doesn’t matter — the question is whether Umno actually thinks it will or even can ever happen. Never mind when or how it will happen, do we actually think it will happen? Because if the Malaysian Deal is so entrenched that it has entirely eclipsed the idea that one day, some day, we could be more than merely harmonious, then some of us will probably want to think long and hard about whether Malaysia is the right country for our children and our children’s children.
Who in Umno actually has the wherewithal to respond to this question? Well, Khairy, if you’re reading, then I’d like you to know that we get it: you’re very clever, you’re very cultured and you can differentiate cool from uncool better than any politician in the history of this land. But while uber-chic appearances in edgy short film projects are all well and good, they’re still sort of odd when juxtaposed against your sporadic bouts of parochial rhetoric. I think those of us who are paying attention would appreciate some definitive answers for a change.
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