Small Acts

Etnik, Agama dan Raja ... Apa kata Orang Muda?

2009-12-16T16:34:00.004+08:00

by Carmen Nge

21st century Malaysian youth on the whole do not court controversy. Apart from attending the occasional konsert haram in droves or uploading scandalous clips on YouTube, our young people are relatively docile when compared to the youth citizens of Indonesia, Philippines and Europe. Malaysian youth are encouraged to shop, study and socialize but rarely are they given the space to dissect issues of national import and the freedom to dissent from popular opinion.

This may explain why the Forum Orang Muda or Young People’s Forum held in Kuala Lumpur recently was so well-attended: it provided a space for the young to come together to listen and to voice their opinions. The topic of the forum was as controversial as they come: “Ethnicity, Religion and the Monarchy: their impact on democracy in Malaysia.” Youth in their 20s made up about 70% of the 100-strong crowd, which was multiracial and predominantly male. [In fact, all the speakers were male too—a fact not lost on the organizer, who promised an all-female panel the next time].

The panel of five kicked off with celebrated independent documentarian Fahmi Reza, who mounted a slick slide show chronicling the etymology of the Malay term for government: Kerajaan. He explained that the term was derived from the word “raja” which partly explains why our form of government is a constitutional monarchy. Our Rukunegara requires us to pledge loyalty to the monarch and no-one questions this because the feudal mentality has been so deeply entrenched. A grassroots democracy cannot exist within such a framework because monarchs reign supreme and only look out for their own interests, Fahmi opined. Second speaker Lee Khai Loon, the Information Chief of PKR Youth, agreed with Fahmi, citing the Perak crisis as an instance where the monarchy’s power became a hindrance to democracy in the state.

In many ways, the substance of Fahmi’s talk is nothing new. Historians and public figures such as Farish Noor, M. Bakri Musa, Khoo Kay Peng and especially Tun Mahathir have clamoured for Malaysians to free themselves from their feudal shackles. To speak about a feudal mentality ultimately puts the blame on the shoulders of the rakyat but it does not address the economic system that sustains the monarchs. For example, no-one (not even Fahmi) dared to discuss the amount of taxpayers’ money being spent on the upkeep of our monarchs and their royal families.

Lee Khai Loon and fourth speaker Mohd Hariszuan Jaharudin both steered clear of this topic but the President of the University Malaya Islamic Students Association, Shazni Munir Mohd Ithnin was unceremoniously bold. In his rapid fire, oratorical style, Shazni stressed that Malaysia may be a constitutional monarchy but our monarchs hardly abide by the constitution. In fact, there has been more than one case of Sultans being above the law. Shazni would have no beef with constitutional monarchy if the monarchs themselves were beholden to the constitution!

Shazni reduced the audience to uproarious laughter when he proclaimed that even monarchs should have KPIs and their role should be as a check and balance for political parties and the ruling government. Ultimately, monarchs need to understand the needs of the people and rule within the context of the 21st century. Using Raja Nazrin Shah, the Crown Prince of Perak as an example, Shazni deemed it necessary for kings (and future kings) to be intelligent and knowledgeable of Islamic principles. As the Head of Islam, the monarch must have substantial Islamic knowledge in order to be seen as a credible Islamic leader.

Regarding the special position of the Malays, Shazni commented that as far as Islam is concerned, it is not proper to defend and take care of only one ethnic group. He believed that Malaysians who think this is right, have a view of Islam that is distorted and off-base. The poor, needy and disenfranchised—no matter what ethnic group or religion—must be helped because Islam is a religion that does not discriminate. True Muslims would never allow themselves to fall into the racial trap set by politicians and the ruling parties.

University student Hariszuan echoed Shazni when he expounded on the ‘boxes’ that limit, confine and define us. The ‘boxes’ he spoke of were metaphors for what is commonly known as stereotypes or labels. His evocation of boxes enabled him to speak of the physical segregation of people according to their class status, race and age groups. He said the problem of racism was not just at the level of political parties but pervaded all layers of society. He also criticized vernacular schools and ethnic-based trade associations for being racist and distilled the central problem as being that of identity.

“We Malays have a problem with our identity. We don’t have an identity! This is why we need to feel tied to Islam. After all, what is Bangsa Malaysia? 1Malaysia? It’s just rhetoric. The elite uses tools such as race and religion to maintain their power. We will be easily influenced if we were to follow loyally and blindly. If we do not ask ourselves what needs to be changed and how to change it and merely follow unthinkingly, then we are on our way to becoming a fascist state,” Hariszuan argued. He urged Malaysian youth to speak up and to reclaim what is rightfully theirs: the politics of dissent, of questioning and of change. This is the politics of young Malaysians and of young people.

The lone ‘oldie’ at the forum (who was also exceedingly, unfashionably late) was none other than Hishamuddin Rais, the forever-young-at-heart writer/blogger of tukartiub.blogspot.com fame. He was profoundly funny that afternoon and cracked joke after joke that were filled with pointed barbs at the government, monarchy, religion and ethnicity. This was Hisham at his element—brash, impudent and well-loved for it.

It was not hard to see why fans of Hisham in the audience proudly professed their devotion. The audience was smitten by his insouciant air and his courage to speak the publicly unspeakable. The younger speakers were unable to match his venerable wit, his acerbic tongue and his thoroughly jaunty Malaysian anecdotes. Hisham used humour to advance his views in a manner that the younger speakers were unable to do. Ironically, the gravity and seriousness of Fahmi, Khai Loon, Shazni and Harisz rendered them so much older than their years.

Hisham went on to lament the fact that the forum was held in a public hall rather than within the university arena, where truly democratic spaces for freedom of expression were sorely lacking. “This discussion SHOULD be in a university,” he cried. Furiously nodding heads reaffirmed what he already knew: Malaysian youth had a thirst for discussion, discovery and dissent that the halls of academia could not (and would not) fill.

But the growing numbers of young people squeezed into the hall that Saturday afternoon fueled hope for a future that not only invests in the youth but also unconditionally involves them in the process of its making. Hisham ended his speech by gesturing to the teeming crowd and quoting Mao Tse Tung: “Finally, the world belongs to the young!”

The applause at the end was a deafening rejoinder to this truth.

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This article was originally published in Off The Edge, Jan 2010 issue.

Ethnicity, Religion and the Monarchy: their impact on democracy in Malaysia . . . what say the youth? was a forum organized by GB Gerakbudaya and took place at the Chinese Assembly Hall on 24 October 2009.
For more information on future forums and events, please visit www.gerakbudaya.com

Malaysia’s Own Guantanamo

2009-09-08T18:59:00.004+08:00

By Carmen Nge

On the eve of Christmas last year, the Special Branch officers milling around the Bar Council were treated to a rare sight: makciks with their tudung labuh and grandkids in tow; gangs of punk kids in their black garb and combat boots; lawyers and youth of all hues and stripes; yuppies and the office-going crowd looking a little weary after a long day’s work; Malays, Chinese, Indians, Mat and Minah Sallehs, and Malaysians of indistinguishable ethnic origins; wizened aunties and uncles of various generations; families from as far away as Negeri Sembilan; social activists, political agitators, politicians, bloggers, netizens, Mat and Minah Rempits, the famous, the infamous and the not-so famous were slowly trickling into the auditorium on the 1st floor. To watch a play.

Theatre aficionados who flock to KLPac and various other urban, middle-class enclaves would have been surprised if they had shown up that night. There were no playbills, no glossy posters, no theatre café, no parking. Neither were there a proscenium stage, fancy lighting and well-designed restrooms. Tickets by donation were priced at a modest RM10 and all proceeds went to the families of current ISA detainees. This was indeed theatre for the masses and updated agitprop theatre at its best, the likes of which have not been seen in the KL arts scene for a long time.

Despite its no frills venue and staging, Teater Bilik Sulit proved to be a powerful, emotionally wrought and highly visceral performance by a group of young actors who were brought together to enact scenes derived from the real life experiences of former ISA detainees. The play was directed by the extremely talented young actor, Mislina Mustaffa and an aging hippie who had seen the world after university only to return home to see the insides of an ISA detention camp—he of tukartiub.blogspot fame, Hishamuddin Rais.

Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism, “Life imitates art” could not have been farther from the truth that night. Teater Bilik Sulit was the epitome of art imitating life and its successful attempt at performatively rendering a crucial slice of Malaysia’s sordid past and present history. It challenged Malaysian critics of the United States’ treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay detention camp to turn their eyes to their own shores, where ISA detainees are given similar treatment.

Abdullah, the protagonist and ISA detainee in the play, was decked out in a bright orange outfit, eerily similar to the ones worn by detainees in Guantanamo. Physically and psychologically abused by the Special Branch (SB) officers who interrogated him for hours on end, Abdullah remained mute and blindfolded for much of the performance. His cowering and trembling persona was well complemented by the brash bravado of the SB interrogators, so superbly acted that many in the audience remarked on their authentic portrayals.

The good cop-bad cop routine so familiar to us from TV crime dramas became larger than life on stage. Two clean-cut SB officers of very different proportions were Laurel and Hardy, SB-style —the more kinetic and physically assertive of the two was small-sized and wiry, full of a repressed fury that could not be controlled; his partner was tall and burly, managing to physically intimidate with his booming voice and, despite his potbelly, to assault Abdullah repeatedly. The lone good cop was predictably mustachioed but uncharacteristically good-looking, playing up his affability, coated with a veneer of condescension. Their language was crude, coarse, contemptible, and their conversation displayed unabashed vacuousness and seamy, sexualized banter.

These were not the TV cops with high levels of acuity. The SB officers portrayed in Teater Bilik Sulit were base and barbaric, corrupt and inhumane; they were rats in the sewers of Malaysian politics, where Datuks called the shots.

But arresting and disturbing scenes of humiliation and torture could not upstage the most powerful performance of the night, which was undoubtedly that of Abdullah’s wife. For the better part of the play, she was just a disembodied voice floating across the stage, asking questions of those who came to take away her husband in the night, demanding answers from police officers and lawyers, and reassuring her children with songs and jokes. We heard her but did not see her, we knew she was there but we did not see her plight. Under Hishamuddin’s direction, the female figure was relegated to the margins, hiding behind the scenes of the ISA machine.

As is the case with real life, the wives of ISA detainees are marginal figures in the media landscape, occupying a space hidden from public view and under the guise of privacy protection. In truth, these women are activists in their own right; some of them have continued to champion the cause in the absence of their husbands, many have fought hard for the release of their loved ones despite the futility of the task, and all of them have had to work tirelessly to feed their families as single parents. But few of us are aware of this.

For the final performance, however, (when Hishamuddin Rais was out of the country) the young actors decided to take matters into their own hands and to enable the physical emergence of Abdullah’s wife onstage. This spontaneous act of theatrical rebellion was the pièce de résistance of the night and dramatically heightened and explained Abdullah’s eventual retaliation at the dénouement of the play.

When Abdullah addressed the audience at the very end of Teater Bilik Sulit, his was a rousing call for continued struggle to fight for the abolishment of ISA and recognition that people no longer accepted such a draconian law. In many ways, these final lines of the script were predictable but the resounding applause of the hundreds of Malaysians who came to watch, night after night, proved to be emphatic endorsement of the play’s message.

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This review was originally published in Off The Edge magazine, Feb 2009 issue.

NOT TO BE MISSED!!!

2008-10-20T13:38:00.003+08:00

Emergency Festival : Preview
by Carmen Nge

From rumblings of party hopping and government takeovers to mud-slinging and racist remarks uttered by our so-called political representatives, a casual observer of the Malaysian socio-political scene may be tempted to classify our post-March 8 period as chaotic, a time of great instability and disorder. Historians would remind us that six decades ago, Malaysia (or Malaya, at that time) was going through a crisis of similar proportions involving more nefarious stakeholders in the creation of a new nation: the British colonial government, UMNO and the MCP (Malayan Communist Party).

The Emergency period, as taught in textbooks, was riddled with violence and state repression; the period also presumably signaled our national hatred for communists and eventually provided the conditions for our independence. Victor and villain, oppressor and oppressed, were carefully constructed and embedded into a static textual past, newly imbibed and inculcated each year into the young minds entering the Malaysian education system.

Fortunately, not every young mind is so wont to feed on the ‘truth’ advanced and propagated by the state. Off The Edge had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Teh, one of the young minds responsible for engaging with this tumultuous time in our nation’s history to culminate in a multi-arts event: The Emergency Festival, scheduled for mid-October at the Central Market Annexe.

OTE: Why the Emergency Project and why now? In what way has this period in Malaysian history captured your imagination as an arts practitioner?

Mark Teh: Because, contrary to popular belief, Malaysian history is damn exciting and sexy!

I suppose I have always been interested in the issues of authorship and ownership of history. Many Malaysians do not feel ownership of our history – it is dismissed as boring and irrelevant, or history is presented as irrefutable 'facts' cast in stone. Broadly speaking, I see our informal collective’s work as concerned with re-presenting and reorganizing, not just recording, local history. I am interested in exhausting the facts of history and using these as a starting point for dialogue because very often, the 'facts of history' are used to limit or end discussion.

The Emergency Festival! follows on from a series of projects that have attempted to examine and re-present marginalized Malayan-Malaysian histories. These have included creating installations for the Home Fronts (SENI Singapore 2004) and Crossovers & Rewrites: BORDERS over ASIA (World Social Forum 2005, Porto Alegre) exhibitions; the Directors’ Workshop 5 – CPM in 2005 (out of which the dramatic performance piece, Baling (membaling) evolved into a university and college touring production); Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari and documentary film, 10 Tahun Sebelum Merdeka. Conveniently, this year also marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the Malayan Emergency in 1948, and provides a good opportunity to reflect on this fraught period.

The Emergency is often presented officially as a period of great instability and disorder, but it was also a time of multiple possibilities and trajectories of identity, imagination and independence. So many things that still define our lives were forged between 1948 and 1960. Amidst the acts of ‘terror’ and propaganda perpetrated by the British colonial government and the Communists, instruments such as the Identity Card, the Internal Security Act, the New Villages resettlement plan, forced repatriations to China and other policies were introduced. These years also saw one of the biggest political negotiations and media events in our history – the Baling talks of 1955, between future Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and Chin Peng, the most wanted man in the British Empire. And of course, Merdeka in ’57.

Over the past few years, marginal and under-researched narratives of the Emergency years have begun surfacing, through declassified documents, new analyses by historians and social scientists, as well as the publication of many memoirs by early leftist leaders. Many of these publications have begun looking at the social and cultural dimensions of the Emergency, which were neglected by earlier historians. This has certainly inspired us to look anew and ask questions of the past, and consequently, the future of the country.

OTE: Do you think the Emergency period is still relevant today? How might it be relevant, particularly to young people like you?

MT: I think after March 8, as Malaysians come to grips with these changes and try to re-imagine the country with new strategies and vocabularies, the Emergency provides significant insights into the manifold contradictions, compromises, concerns and communities that are involved in such a process. The past holds many clues, lessons, patterns and scars but many of us don’t know this. The education system has been very successful in this regard, in implementing a politics of forgetting. Certainly one of the clear parallels with both periods is the political role played by young people in attempting to move beyond a racialist framework for defining Malaysia.

OTE: Why did you and your team decide to embark on an Emergency Festival and not just have a screening of Fahmi Reza's film about the period? What possible outcomes do you hope for?

MT: Because we don’t want to feed Fahmi’s megalomania, heh!

I think this is actually the logical step in our collaborations over the past few years. Our process as a group has evolved from the youth- and community-based art projects where we worked as facilitators, to the more recent documentary/history projects where we have worked directly on making installations; visual artist/filmmakers/designers performing, etc.

For me at least, engaging with different media allows for more diverse ways of seeing, thinking and experiencing the issues we deal with. We have pursued a collaborative mode of working, particularly with regards to content. And our content tends to look at and blur the lines between fact, fiction, fantasy and memory. We are not particularly concerned with arriving at an agreed perspective of the Emergency anyway; certainly, personally I am comfortable with presenting and negotiating a multiplicity of perspectives and narratives that can contradict or provide commentary on each other.

The other idea I think is to engage with different creative people who have done significant research into this area, even if they don’t perceive what they do as research (particularly in Re:Search Re:Source). There are many forward-thinking people who have built up impressive personal collections of Malaysian books, music, film, paraphernalia, etc – I think partly in reaction to the poor job that our institutions do. So, it is important to tap into resources beyond ourselves. And of course, to draw on their audiences!

I hope that the festival engages and connects Malaysians with their history – that they see it as exciting and sexy too. And that history can be highly creative and participatory – once again, issues of authorship and ownership really.

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The Emergency Festival! will take place at the Annexe@Central Market from 16 – 26 October 2008. This mini festival of performances, art exhibitions and installations, film screenings, talks and workshops will investigate and re-present narratives and images from the first Malayan Emergency, from 1948 to 1960.

Parallel to this, the festival will also look at the emergence of the early local film industry, which overlaps the same period. Film afficionados and historians will get to view rare films, propaganda and documentation made by the Communist guerillas during and after the Emergency as well as anti-Communist propaganda clips from the Emergency era.

One of the centerpieces of the festival will be the much-anticipated premiere of Revolusi 48, Fahmi Reza’s follow-up to the hugely successful, award-winning documentary film, Sepuluh Tahun Sebelum Merdeka.

In addition to the film screenings, there will also be performances led by Hari Azizan, Fahmi Fadzil and Mark Teh, which deal with themes, issues and events such as the setting up of the New Villages and the impact of resettlement on individuals and communities, and the Baling talks of 1955 between Tunku Abdul Rahman and Chin Peng.

For more information, please go to: http://www.fiveartscentre.org/

The Independence Project : Review

2008-04-01T15:24:00.001+08:00

by Carmen Nge

In our post-post-colonial world of global capitalism, multinational-ism and online interconnectivity, the idea of independence must be rethought. In the visual art world, contrary to what people may think, artists increasingly create in collaboration with diverse others. Collaborative efforts do not necessarily erode each individual artist’s sense of autonomy but they do challenge artists to negotiate with people who may or may not share similar artistic trajectories and visions. Collaboration entails risk and few artists are willing to heed its calling.

An initiative of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Independence Project is a collaborative exhibition between Galeri Petronas, KL and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne that celebrates two seemingly contradictory ideas: independence and collaboration. The exhibition commemorates the 50th anniversary of Malaysia-Australia diplomatic relations, which certainly have deep roots in the arts world.

A work that simultaneously epitomizes collaboration and independence is Wong Hoy Cheong’s Aman Sulukule, Canim Sulukule (Oh Sulukule, Darling Sulukule), a 14 minute video created by the artist and the kids of Sulukule, a district in Istanbul where the Roma community has resided since the 11th century. Although the Roma settlement is slated for demolition, the video manages to capture a vibrant and kinetic world peopled with children who continue to hope, play and dream like any other. The aesthetic influence of Michel Gondry permeates the video, which poignantly captures a transient society refusing to be demoralized by its impending eviction. The whimsy and carefree air of the children and their stories belie the numerous difficulties faced by the artist and his team when creating the film with the community of Sulukule. Within the gallery space, a cosy TV room is constructed which enable viewers to imagine Sulukule. Such an ambience help to situate and contextualize the work, thereby heightening the experience of viewing an unfamiliar community.

The rest of the works by Malaysian and Australian artists exhibit a wide range of predilections and tendencies. Paintings by Richard Bell and David Griggs, and Tim Silver’s photographic narrative explore independence as seen through the lived reality of specific marginalized communities: the aboriginal artist, urban youth of colour, and dark-skinned islanders, respectively. While Bell’s painting is glib, conceptual and tries too hard to embrace postmodern high theory, Griggs’ gargantuan triptych of garish colour is refreshingly unpretentious. A throwback to Basquiat’s pop/street art style but with a twist of social realism in the tradition of Filipino and Mexican muralists, the work is unusual for its daring; unvarnished and unframed, The Bleeding Hearts Club is raw, vivid colour. Like Grigg’s work, Silver’s photographs are the anti-thesis of beautiful, though well-executed. His desire to juxtapose island life with gore films, however, perplexes.

Helen Johnson and Mark Hilton appear to approach the theme of independence in a far more indirect manner. Johnson’s sketches of mundane human activities and familiar objects seem out of place in the gallery but their very ‘unbelonging’ is perhaps indicative of a wish to assert the artist’s identity, independent of the gallery space. Hilton’s double-sided lightboxes, on the contrary, are far from mundane. Luminescent and arresting, their suspension from the ceiling enables both sides to be viewed; the images resemble Persian miniature paintings and like most miniatures, deserve a closer look. Hilton is well-known for using lightboxes to explore tragic and criminal events in his native country such as gang rapes and murders that have claimed the front pages of Australian newspapers.

Of all the works by the Australians, Zehra Ahmed’s Permission to Narrate stands out. Tucked away in one of a few dark recesses at the gallery, this sound installation with video projection is visually and aurally hypnotic. Borrowing ideas from the late Edward Said, Ahmed weaves intricate layers of popular culture (hip hop, breakdancing, fashion) with identity politics, Islam and the Arabic language. The almost pitch black space lends the dark-skinned dancing figure—decked out in an all white outfit—an angelic aura. It is impossible not to remain riveted to the moving body as it goes through a series of fluid moves; the superimposition of Arabic script onto this embodiment of urban street culture calls into question the usual Western-centric distinctions of “cool” and “religious”. For a change, both terms co-exist, projected onto one body and for a few hypnotic minutes, they become independent of the socio-political contexts that confine their meaning to mere stereotypes.

Seeing as independent art spaces are as important as the work they inspire, a section of Galeri Petronas is devoted to presenting a library of information and material culled from such spaces in both Malaysia and Australia. Although not part of the exhibition proper, this resource enables artists and gallery visitors alike to appreciate the range and diversity of independent initiatives as well as their trials and tribulations. The documentation of independent spaces is further explored by Malaysian artist Yap Sau Bin, whose work could not have happened without Google Earth. He maps all known art spaces in Kuala Lumpur and viewers are invited to point and click these locations with a mouse. The work exploits our fascination with technology but its rather clinical method of spatial mapping reduces the lived reality of independent spaces into pixelated dots. For those already familiar with Google Earth, this work is but a pointless gimmick.

Ahmad Fuad Osman’s slide show and Kungyu Liew’s photographic sculpture choose to deal with independence in its more literal Malaysian sense. Using old photos from the 1950s, around the time of our country’s independence, Fuad plays with the idea of Merdeka, tourism and identity. What would a young person do if he could travel back in time to meet with political luminaries and to join in momentous events from a hallowed era? The results are at times scathingly hilarious and at others, predictably droll but the idea of being able to explore independence through the willful doctoring of historical photos and facts is cheeky, clever and a sign that Fuad is finally beginning to lighten up. Liew’s sculpture is intricate and kitsch beauty at its best but not a huge leap from what he has done before. This is characteristically Kungyu Boleh and undeniably Malaysian.

Vincent Leong’s Shut up! You’re Not Real video installation is work that would have benefited from less cute and more bite. Blatantly poaching from Tony Oursler, Leong’s soft toys with projected human lips solicited more giggles and squeals of delight from viewers than any other work. Although seemingly benign, these talking toys lip sync to random media news reports; Leong previous attempts to fuse the conceptual with the cute has garnered unusually nuanced results but this work lacks complexity.

Roslisham Ismail or Ise’s DEB, on the other hand, is potently political without being unduly overt. But Malaysian viewers would have no trouble figuring out the artist’s sly and sophisticated critique of the New Economic Policy. Using hundreds of business cards advertising loan, credit and money lending services, Ise fashions a collage shaped in larger-than-life size letters: D E B. Chinese, English and Malay name cards proclaim to be able to help rid clients of debt, dependency and destitution but at what cost? How successful is the NEP and who stands to benefit the most from such government policies? Ise is true to his pop art-collage roots in this work but ups the ante with its political sting.

Sharon Chin and Sooshie Sulaiman are two artists whose work would have benefited from a more concerted attempt at integrating interactivity into their display. Chin’s video gives viewers an inkling of what heart-to-heart communication could look like but the absence of a human being in the installation was sorely felt. Two stethoscopes were left on chairs, with a note explaining how to listen to the ‘true’ voice of conversation but no viewers took up the offer. Similarly, Sooshie’s art book would be better enjoyed outside their transparent casing. Wall text alone did little to illuminate the interactive nature of the work and keeping the book opened to one page and only frustrated this writer.

Taken as a whole, the Independence Project is a mixed bag of well-conceived new works, some of which directly touch on the theme in question while others only tangentially so. Nevertheless, the range of media, materials and artistic approaches is a positive reflection of just how essential it is for artists to be given the space to create as freely as they choose.

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This review first appeared in Off The Edge, Feb 2008 issue.

Feminism and the Women's Movement in Malaysia : A Review

2007-10-12T15:00:00.002+08:00

by Carmen Nge

Barisan Nasional MP Datuk Bung Mokhtar Radin must be simmering. The old adage, “loose lips sink ships” has never before proven so metaphorically true. His slip of tongue has resulted in an unstoppable torrent of public criticism from women and men alike. The DPM’s pathetic attempt at salvaging Bung’s rear end by claiming the remark was innocuous only smacked of complicity. I suppose this is what members of the old boys’ club do: they back each other up, they forgive and forget, and return to the task of running the country. What’s a little crass ribbing among MPs? Women should be more thick-skinned.

What the op ed pieces and newspaper reports don’t tell us is that Bung’s callous remark is a hardly an anomaly. Witness Datuk Seri Samy Vellu’s comment a few days after the infamous “bocor” incident: “A woman 50 years ago, she looks beautiful, but today she won’t look so beautiful.” He said this when referring to the RM90 million renovation work done on the Parliament House. Clearly, the old boys cannot stem the tide of their patriarchal lingo and prevent another sexist screw-up.

To surmise that all our MPs are sexist or male chauvinists would be an overgeneralization, but there is no denying that retorts against women are nothing new. Comments during Parliamentary debates about menstruation, sexy clothes, unmarried divorcees and outspoken women, in some ways reflect the limited influence that the women’s movement in this country has had on men in power. The fact that the female MPs from BN failed to publicly take Bung to task during Parliamentary debates also showed that partisan politics will always trump gender issues.

Perhaps the problem lies in how women are perceived by the ruling apparatus—not as equal and legitimate partners in the political process but merely as a voting bloc to be swayed for electoral purposes. This supposition is amplified and well-supported by historical research in a ground-breaking book entitled, Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia, published by heavyweight academic UK publisher, Routledge, and authored by three Malaysians: Cecilia Ng, Maznah Mohamad and tan beng hui.

Ng, Maznah and tan make a formidable trio; all of them are active in various women organizations and have research expertise in the area of women’s studies. Maznah and Ng are both academics, having taught at University Sains Malaysia and University Putra Malaysia, respectively. The former is currently Associate Professor and has a string of publications to her name. Tan is a member of the Women’s Development Collective (WDC) and the All Women’s Action Society (AWAM), which Ng helped found. Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia is a result of their collective effort to document the existence of a movement that does not consider documentation high on their priority list.

The strength of their book lies in a careful parsing of various strands of the women’s movement from socio-political and historical standpoints. Rather than focus on urban NGOs who are most vocal about issues such as violence against women and often take up concerns of the secular middle-class, the authors also scrutinize governmental bodies, namely the Ministry of Women and Family Development; mainstream Malay-Muslim women organizations such as Wanita and Puteri UMNO; and the women’s wing of Islamic NGOs such as Helwa ABIM and Wanita JIM. A chapter of the book on women and political Islam also covers the internal politics and complexities of women’s role in PAS, which is often stereotyped as a party unfriendly to the women’s movement. PAS Dewan Muslimat (Women’s Assembly) was established as early as 1953 and well-educated women do hold leadership positions, although these are numerically few and with marginal influence.

The depth and diversity of the book chapters in Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia are proof of the variegated nature of the women’s movement in Malaysia. The writers are, however, careful to point out the omission of East Malaysia in their project, citing the different relationship that women’s groups have with the states of Sabah and Sarawak due to different contexts and the federal-state government structure. Nevertheless, despite such limitations, the book manages to contextualize and critically analyze the scope and nature of women’s activism in the country.

In a fascinating chapter titled, “An unholy alliance?”, the co-optation of women’s NGOs’ concerns by the Ministry of Women and Family Development is carefully delineated. In a self-interested move, the Ministry used the Violence against Women (VAW) campaign—renamed WAVE (Women Against Violence) or OMBAK in Malay—to publicize itself and to dilute the issue rather than to sharpen its focus. Women’s NGOs boycotted the launch of OMBAK in July 2001 and the controversy was amplified in the press. In order to soften this public relations blow, Minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil sponsored a proposal to amend the Federal Constitution, Article 8(2) in a politically expedient move.

This anti-gender discrimination amendment had already been put forward by the Women’s Agenda for Change (WAC) as early as 1998 but due to lack of political leverage and connections, was not passed, gazetted or enforced. The tireless and thankless work of women’s NGOs over the past 20 years went largely unnoticed as the Ministry of Women and Family Development stole the media limelight. This event also highlighted the fact that women’s issues could win votes; as such, political parties are liable to play the gender card simply to garner votes rather than to genuinely fight for gender equality and women’s rights.

According to 1999 statistics, women voters make up 55.6% of the population and since the mid-1990s, women voters have tended to outnumber men. With the rising number of women university students, it is likely that this percentage will increase in the upcoming elections. Mainstream women’s organizations such as Puteri UMNO has successfully penetrated rural enclaves, utilizing young women of the party to register potential UMNO voters and to raise the public profile of UMNO in general. But such attempts to curry voters are not commensurate with a similar rise in the number of women MPs in the country.

According to United Nations 2005 statistics, the percentage of women MPs in Malaysia is only 9.6%, still below the Asian average of 10% and well below that of Vietnam, which stands at 26% and is ranked 11th in the world for women MP representation. Even our immediate neighbour, Singapore, has 16% female representation in Parliament. It is no wonder MPs Bung and Mohd Said are unapologetic; after all, women are such a minority in Parliament, it seems pointless to care what they think.

Nonetheless, for us to chastise Bung for his remark and to get upset with those members of Parliament who took it lightly is only the tip of the iceberg for what needs to be done. The fact remains that MPs such as Bung exemplify the absence of intelligent thought in Parliament. To equate the leak in the Parliament House roof with the menstrual cycle is to commit a commonplace logical fallacy—false analogy—that any student of critical thinking can point out. A woman’s menstruation is as natural and God-given as a leaky ceiling is man-made. To menstruate is part and parcel of being a woman (and even then, with a few medical exceptions) but for a million ringgit construction and upgrading effort to spring a leak? What else can it be but an effect of corruption?

Rather than throw red herrings into the august halls of Parliament, perhaps some of our MPs should pick up a book to sharpen their critical thinking skills, to cultivate rational logic, and to expand their sorely limited knowledge of the struggle and gains made by women in the past 50 years. It would certainly behoove our MPs—male and female alike—to give Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia a read. Merdeka is around the corner—it’s the least they can do.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge magazine, Dec 2007 issue.

I Don't Want To Sleep Alone by Tsai Ming Liang : A Review

2007-10-12T14:59:00.001+08:00

by Carmen Nge

At the tail end of 1998, during the most infamous trial in Malaysian courtroom history, a non-descript mattress was elevated to the status of scandalous visual spectacle. Purportedly containing DNA evidence that would incriminate a certain former DPM, this mattress was carted to the courtroom as proof of illicit sexual escapades. Although the victim of this political scandal was exonerated many years later, the mattress served as a powerful visual memory for many Malaysians, including Sarawak native and now Taiwan resident, filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang.

A queen-sized, well-worn and discoloured mattress inhabits countless frames in Tsai’s latest film, I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, which is set entirely in Kuala Lumpur. Migrant workers spy it in an alley and transport it back to their sleeping quarters, eager to experience its attendant comforts. Along the way, they stumble upon a beaten, bruised and black-eyed man—eeriely reminiscent of a certain former DPM in police custody—whom they rescue, bundling him up in their newly found mattress.

What follows next is a filmic narrative of exceptional neo-realism, exploring a subject exceedingly rare in Malaysian cinema: the lives of migrant workers in our nation’s capital. Shot almost entirely without dialogue, each frame is meticulously composed and Tsai, who is well-known for his minimalist style and excruciatingly long takes, allows us ample room to observe, soak in, reflect and ruminate on the lives of a group of people we take for granted.

The Malaysian Censorship Board originally banned the film, claiming that it depicted Malaysia negatively by focusing on immigrants and beggars, as well as the haze of 1998. There is no denying that Tsai eschews the typical icons of Malaysia Boleh; the Petronas Towers, Putrajaya and all other towering edifices of development were dismissed in favour of a semi-built, disused and abandoned multi-storey building near Pudu. Preferring to zoom in on the stark realities of the Malaysian urban landscape—dirty and dank city streets and alleyways; abandoned construction projects; decades-old kopitiams and cramped shoplots—Tsai’s film holds up a mirror to our so-called progress.

Malaysians in Tsai’s film are peripheral to the storyline, which revolves around three migrant workers, enmeshed in a quasi-love triangle. But the love that the two men and one woman feel for one another transcends the romantic; what the three migrants feel, if it can be called love at all, is indistinguishable from companionship, caring, and a craving to belong. These are alienated souls, eking a living in a city populated by other displaced and disenchanted persons, and who somehow stumble upon each other. The concept of home exists only within the paradigm of relationships, not a physical space. The mattress they carry with them is symbolic of their transience but it is also symptomatic of their desire to have some semblance of a home, regardless of where they end up staying.

I Don't Want To Sleep Alone is a powerful meditation on the what it means to be human, even in the face of decrepit conditions and cruel treatment. The slow pace of the film simultaneously accentuates the meaninglessness of existence and the ways in which unexpected encounters gradually blossom into relationships that fill the void of living. But more than anything else, Tsai’s film tells us a beautiful story of three people who manage to find solace in each other, despite residing in a city—KL—that has become increasingly cold, soulless and sullen. The fact that these three people are not Malaysians but instead, migrant workers who barely speak the same language, speaks volumes.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge, July 2007 issue.

John Perkins : Interview 2007

2007-10-12T14:32:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

In 2005, a silver-haired, retired American businessman resisted bribes, braved threats to his life, and hid away from the public eye, in order to write a book. The book was an instant bestseller and for months remained on Top Ten non-fiction books lists around the world, selling half a million copies since November 2004.

The term EHM or “economic hit man” entered common parlance and some readers of the book exclaimed that its contents were too unbelievable not to be true. EHMs were economics consultants and business professionals hired by American corporations to infiltrate countries that posed significant strategic interests for the United States. Over the last three to four decades, the American ruling elite, made up of corporate bigwigs and politicians, used EHMs to execute a masterplan of economic world domination.

The title of the book is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and its author, John Perkins, became almost instantly infamous for his expose. Now, more than two years later, Perkins has written a second book, The Secret History of the American Empire. Hot off the presses, his latest effort incorporates more confessions from other EHMs like himself and reveals more secret deals of the American government in cahoots with multinational corporations. True to form, The Secret History is already a bestseller.

When Perkins’ first book came out, Off the Edge had the pleasure of a lengthy telephone interview with the author. This time around, due to his hectic book tour in North America and travels in Latin America, we were only able to dialogue with Perkins via email. Below is the full, unexpurgated interview.

OTE: Can you tell us why you decided to write a follow-up to your first book?

John: I wrote it primarily for 3 reasons:1. to include stories from other EHM and jackals who contacted me after "Confessions" was published2. to bring things up to date -- what is going on around the world up through the beginning of 20073. to provide a detailed plan for what we all can do to make it a better world.

OTE: One of the areas covered in Secret History of the American Empire is Asia and the economic collapse in the late 90s. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you have discovered about this area of the world?

John: The book goes into depth about the Asian Economic Crisis -- also known as the IMF Crisis. Indeed the collapse was perpetuated by US-IMF policies.

OTE: Malaysia is now in the process of negotiating its free trade agreement (FTA) with the US. What is your view of FTAs? Do you think they are another way for the US to gain control over the economies of developing nations such as Malaysia?

John: No question that FTAs are vehicles for expanding the American Empire -- a bad thing for just about everyone in the world, except the corporatocracy.

OTE: You have been critical of the US's imperial ambitions, the IMF and the World Bank. Yet so many developing nations rely on the World Bank for economic support. What options are there if we were to reject the policies of the World Bank and reject the monetary support of the IMF?

John: As I discuss in detail in Secret History of the American Empire, the Latin Americans are showing us a new way, [they are] planning to develop their own regional bank -- as well as media networks. Countries around the world that are under the US yoke must band together, form alliances, refuse to pay their debts, and create their own financial institutions.

OTE: What is your view of Hugo Chavez and the nationalization of petroleum in Venezuela? Do you think he will likely be assassinated like Salvador Allende, Omar Turrijos and Jaimé Roldós?

John: The US is very afraid that we will lose Middle Eastern oil as a result of the Iraq debacle; so Washington is very dependent on Venezuelan and other Latin American oil. Coups and assassinations are always a possibility but I think the US knows it must tread softly in Latin America right now.

OTE: As an American, how do you feel about the anti-American sentiment spreading across Latin America and the rest of the world, particularly in Muslim countries like Iran and Indonesia? Can this sentiment be a force of change or do you think it will only fuel American military aggression further?

John: As a US citizen I take it as a strong message. Part of my commitment is to write and speak out in the U.S. about these things and to encourage my people to take them very seriously. If we want our children to inherit a safe, sustainable and peaceful world, we must listen and we must change. Now is the time for us to act responsibly!

OTE: Apart from Saudi Arabia, it seems as if Middle Eastern nations are more resistant to American economic pressure and political influence. What is your view? Do you think US has succeeded in making significant political/economic inroads into the Middle East?

John: I think we are on the verge of losing influence in the Middle East. When we leave Iraq, the rest of the region may well desert us. Israel is in a very tenuous position. We must develop a new approach, one that strives to address and solve the real problems of all the people in that region. Are we capable of doing this? I will work very hard toward that end.

OTE: What hopes do you have for the upcoming American elections? Do you think a Democratic win can reverse the global problems caused by the Bush administration?

John: A Democratic win can set the stage to reverse the problems but we must go way beyond partisan politics. "Secret History" is devoted to presenting a plan for changing things, for truly creating a better world. It is not about Democrats versus republicans. It is about changing the very system created by EHM since WWII. As you will see in the book, I am extremely optimistic that we can -- and will -- do so.

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This interview was first published in Off The Edge magazine, July 2007 issue.

Listening to the Singer by Shirley Lim : A Review

2007-10-12T13:56:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

I eat a green mango. Solid,
sour, it cuts the back of the throat, torn
taste, like love grown difficult or separate.
More chillies, more salt, more sugar,
more black soy—a memory of tart
unripeness sweetened by necessities.
(excerpt from “Mango”)

Shirley Lim is a poet of rich metaphors and a long memory. Despite having lived in the United States for a few decades, Lim continues to write of a past still hauntingly vivid, with metaphors grounded in a reality painfully Malaysian. Her most recent book of poetry, Listening to the Singer, is powerful volume steeped in a nostalgia emptied of romanticized nuances. Like green mangoes, her poems stimulate our awareness of the sharp, sour zing to come.

Lim’s most heart-wrenching poems are about her mother—a woman who left a gaping hole in her psyche that is present still. A luminescent absent figure, Lim’s mother inspires anger but the poet controls this emotion rather productively; hers is an anger distilled, lacking a venomous edge and ripened to aesthetic maturity.

Like most women, Lim’s mother desires the finer things in life: Western fashions, fancy cars and material comforts. The poet tells us that she “confused life with wanting” but the poems harbour a more complex subtext, one that paints the picture of a society that opens few pathways for women at the time. As a child, Lim would not have been equipped with a feminist lens but as an adult poet, she understands that being a woman is far from easy. The arguments and beatings her mother endures at the hands of her father compels us to empathize with both poet and mother.

Nevertheless, Lim refrains from demonizing her father. Poems about her father are loving portraits, although shot through with a bitter sweetness. Lim’s impressions of her father are concrete and vivid, full of the minute details of everyday life: what he ate when sick, the car he drove and the drinks he consumed for his many ailments. Here is a man the poet knows best, broken under the weight of family responsibility and wracked with health problems. Lim’s poems about her father are longer, less terse than those about her mother.

Lim’s poems about people are her strong suit. They are full-bodied and fleshed out, rich with thick descriptions that serve as metaphors for longing and loss. Her poems about places—Malacca, Santa Barbara, airports, beaches, to name a few—are objectively detailed and her adjectives clinically precise. Lim paints a picture of a Malaysia teeming with life—tropical insects (gnats, black spiders, moths, lizards) share the humidity of a monsoon clime with an ocean breathing waves and foam.

But the fecund physical and emotional landscape is tightly controlled; Lim often adopts traditional poetic forms—rhyme schemes that structure her memories into well-defined stanzas. Despite their perceived restrictiveness, these rhyming structures in fact amplify the musicality of Lim’s poetic voice. Some of her poems are like pantuns in English, adopting familiar forms like the pantun berkait.

Although she tackles an extended time frame that reaches into the present, Shirley Lim’s poems are strongest when they move into the bittersweet crevices of the past, scraping against abrasive memories and scooping out their soft, pulpy substance. Unafraid of their consequence, she excavates her personal history in a manner that reminds us how important it is never to forget and yet, how malleable and recondite our remembrances.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge magazine, Merdeka (September) 2007 issue.

Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari : A Review

2007-09-25T16:33:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

In June 1973, Krishen Jit, writing as Utih in his regular newspaper column, eulogized Awang Lah bin Pandak, the most renown Kelantanese dalang at the time and a masterful exponent of Wayang Siam. Commenting on Awang Lah’s demise, Krishen concluded that “the future of wayang is uncertain. […] Wayang will change, as it must.”

More than 20 years later, on a rainy night in the Central Market Annexe last month, a youth ensemble of three performers proved Krishen right. Huddled on the wooden floor, the audience was treated to drama wayang—theatre about wayang kulit—a new twist on an old story with a long history.

Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari is a tribute to two famous rival dalangs: the late Dollah Baju Merah and Hamzah Awang Mat. The performance is an intersection of two stories, different in tone and timbre; the first is a tale of the two master puppeteers and the second is the story of Betara Kala, a mythical, human flesh-eating giant who is captivated by wayang kulit.

Both stories are performed by a tripartite of actors: Fahmi Fadzil, Lim Chung Wei and Wong Taysy. The text for the first story is culled from interviews and newspaper articles with the two dalangs, in an attempt to bestow an aura of authenticity to their depictions. Additionally, this move to breathe performative life into our archived past appears to be a strategy favoured by Mark Teh, director of Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari.

But if the intention of the performance was to explore the rivalry between the two dalangs, then it failed. What emerged instead was a strange symbiosis between the two figures—like two sides of a coin, they complemented each other. Hamzah was the dalang who took his skills to the city, to teach and to survive. Dollah, the irreverent one, worked as a menial labourer and later, rubber tapper, when the PAS-led Kelantan government banned wayang kulit in 1990. Both were unwilling to give up what they loved but the former compromised whereas the latter did not.

Throughout Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari, the uncompromising figure of Dollah clearly dominated. Towards the tail-end of the performance, Fahmi Fadzil took on the persona of Dollah who pontificated about PAS, wayang and his ideals. This was a well-paced segment, quiet in its execution and shot through with a poignant sense of melancholy. By reining in his energy, Fahmi embodied an austerity so lucid it revealed the tensions simmering deep below the surface.

But these moments of intense reserve were few and far between. Most of the performance played up a madcap ebullience, replete with the booming voice of Betara Kala and the comedic encounter between the giant and the dalang whom teaches him about wayang kulit. Taysy and Chung Wei moved seamlessly together in most of their scenes, complementing their strengths and, together with Fahmi, formed a well-constructed triangulation of energies.

A performance about wayang kulit, however, would be incomplete without shadow play, but instead of traditional kulit figures taken from epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, shadows of texts and symbols danced on the white walls behind the performers. Using an overhead projector—a clever trick first used during an earlier play, Baling Membaling, also directed by Mark Teh—graphic artist and designer Fahmi Reza deftly manipulated two columns of words, juxtaposing random ideas to form new compound meanings. Politik:jahat. Melayu:Islam. Halal:haram. Duduk:diam. These potent shadows were silent yet effectively ominous, casting new layers of interpretation in their semiotic subtext.

This intentional juxtaposition of words, and of text and performance, is parallel to the ensuing competition between two artistic mediums: wayang kulit and wayang gambar (film). In this battle sequence, which mimics video games, the twin force of Chung Wei and Taysy (representing film), is pitted against Fahmi Fadzil (representing wayang kulit). In the hilarious and kinetic duel, the two sides argue the relative merits of their medium—comparing audience size and the amount of sponsorship received, among others—but in the end, no winner emerges.

Critics may wonder as to this dénouement; hasn’t film won the consumer battle hands down? But, if Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari is any indication of wayang kulit’s resilience and propensity to evolve and adapt to constricting circumstances—whether political, economic or artistic—it would premature to write off an art form that refuses to be cowed or contained.

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This review was published in Off The Edge magazine August 2007 issue.

The Art of Math

2007-04-10T19:47:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

Helaman Ferguson, Harriet Brisson, Thomas Banchoff, George Francis, Anatolii Fomenko—unlike Leonardo Da Vinci, these names are not household in the rarefied sphere of art. But like Da Vinci, the five share something atypical among artists: they are also mathematicians. From algorithms to geometry, these mathematicians whose work encompass a wide arena beyond lay understanding, live and breathe a field of knowledge that is also, surprisingly, steeped in aesthetics.

In their highly segregated fields of science and arts, our young über -specialists of compartmentalized knowledge departments are largely ignorant of a long tradition where experts in science, mathematics and the arts work in tandem, feeding off of each other in a mutually enriching environment. Within art history, the documented collaboration of Da Vinci and mathematician Luca Pacioli, as well as the influence of mathematician-physicist Henri Poincaré on Picasso, illustrate the symbiosis of two presumably divergent fields.

Malaysian Dr Rajinder Jit Singh, 41, is the personification of such a symbiosis. Currently living and working as a microchip designer and electronics engineer in Singapore, Rajinder is a modern Renaissance man. Confessing to a love for studying, he has amassed an impressive array of degrees—from a PhD in Engineering Mathematics to an MBA from the US, this soft-spoken baritone is also completing a postgraduate degree in Philosophy of Art at the National University of Singapore.

Rajinder’s psyche is a fusion of math and art; his apprehension of reality manifests in equations and algorisms: “I can’t get away from equations; I like my equations. Some equations I like better than others. I do a lot of curve fitting in my head. I think of points and I think of how they would fit in 3D or 4D. Is it quadratic? What power would it be?

“I think about variables with coefficients, for example E=mc². C² is a coefficient, a weight to anything. [For instance] every sentence has a weight to each word. If you want to write an equation for the sentence you are speaking, the emphasis would be the weight. I am thinking about a weight to our lives: the ratios that you use in calculating or putting together a decision as to what you want to have for dinner. There are many different variables but there are also many different weights. Through computation you can come to a value of those weights.”

If life could be distilled into a set of equations, then what about art? Rajinder’s art is antonymous to the linear perspective painters of the Renaissance: Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Piero della Francesca, among others, who used mathematical equations to calculate depth, proportion and scale for their paintings. These luminaries saw math as a tool for artistic precision, resulting in a desired verisimilitude. Unlike them, Rajinder incorporates actual mathematical equations into his paintings.

“I use math equations in my art without there being meaning to them,” he explains. “I separate the meaning away from it [the equation].” In one of his newest work, Bin Bags, Rajinder inserts an equation based on the entanglement phenomena in physics. Even though a lay viewer would not be able to relate to it mathematically, this does not bother him in the least.

“I’m using the equation as it is, conceptually, because I think it’s pretty. I think it is pretty because I also understand what it is because I’ve read a lot about it. And I’ve used it before. I actually think the combination of symbols is quite pretty. This is not mathematical. It is about the aesthetics of [the equation].” He likens his work to that of Justin Mullins’ mathematical photography: taking beautiful equations from mathematics, framing them with captions explaining their context and meaning, and calling it art. The only difference is Rajinder’s equations are sans mathematical meaning and reproduced on a two-dimensional expressionist palate.

In many ways, Rajinder’s work invites us to reflect on the definition and parameters of beauty. Can mathematics, expressed in an equation sitting in swirls and swathes of colour, be elevated to art? Does the equation need to be mathematically sound before it can be transformed into a thing of beauty? Does our definition of art change when mathematics enters the equation?

Nurturing a love for math even as a child, Rajinder was drawn to what he terms “the preciseness and formality of math. I also like when the answers are correct, you knew. There’s a good feeling about it. Like a little buzz at the back of your head,” he smiles.

Yet, mathematical precision is never far removed from visual accuracy. As Rajinder puts it: “When I was doing my PhD, we used circles and lines as instruments to explain what we were trying to do. Even then it had to look “right”. The word “right” is weird here but I don’t know how exactly to explain it.”

According to Rajinder, Henri Poincaré says that all good mathematicians have a “delicate sieve”.

“When you are proving something or writing a math equation, you have an eye for it. Its complexity, its simplicity. When you’re doing that, you know when you’re correct, when you’re doing it ‘right’. That’s what Poincaré meant by ‘delicate sieve’. In my opinion, everybody has this ability even though Poincaré says only some do. It comes through practice and just through being familiar.”

This idea of the ‘delicate sieve’ closely approximates the idea of there being great artists with talent and bad ones without. What makes an artist great? Is it the monetary value of his works? Or does it have to do with something less concrete and more emotional, less predictive and more organic—a matter of taste? Who decides? Is taste arbitrary?

As Rajinder puts it: “One person’s good art will be another person’s bad art. Any distinction that you make through your senses, will necessarily be cultural, among other things. When you look at something and say this is better than the other, as soon as you make that decision, all your experiences, your whole history comes into play.”

Who can dictate which piece of artwork is valuable and why? One thing is certain: art is also about connection, an ephemeral but nonetheless significant communion between artist and his artwork, between artwork and viewer, and ultimately—though indirectly—between artist and viewer. Rajinder is testament to this simple logic.

“When I put the equation on my canvas, people react to that equation. Bereft of its meaning, when you see an integration sign, when people see it, it brings them back to their school days. With the mixture of that, along with the character of the painting, I am trying to build a dialectic, a contrast of emotion. I am trying to get a reaction and that reaction comes from several different aspects of the painting. The equation arises separate from its meaning. I am writing an equation in a piece of art. What is it doing there? By putting it on a canvas in a gallery I’m also questioning it.”

To question mathematics is to question the basis of its truth, its objectivity. Perhaps it is easier to question art because its foundations are subjective; interpretations can be challenged because they change. As do value. But how does one question math?

“Mathematicians look at the universe [in terms of] the whole grand unified theory—rules that guide the universe and our lives,” Rajinder concedes. Yet, he believes there exists a postmodern symptom in mathematics too, a symptom that rejects any notion of a grand theory of the universe.

“One person that I’ve read a lot about is Kurt Gödel,” Rajinder explains. “He did something that shocked mathematicians in the last century. Gödel said that if you have a system of rules that you develop and if these rules are all consistent and not contradictory, then there is no way you can conclusively prove the system is correct. Math is centered on proof—where we think we are completely correct all the time—but Gödel is saying that there is no way that that is possible.

“Gödel was saying something similar to the principle of uncertainty in quantum mechanics: that the person who is measuring is as important as the thing that is being measured. Math doesn’t like it when subjectivity comes into the equation. How can you bring the scientist or observer into it? It is a whole science based on objectivity, where you can conclusively predict. Otherwise it is not a conclusive statement and you can’t actually call it math.”

Rajinder likens visual art’s subjectivity to Gödel’s deconstruction of math’s inviolability. For Rajinder, Gödel brings us closer to what the former considers to be art. “At the end of the day, you perceive your reality based on your own experiences, based on who you are. That’s why I think art is so wonderful because it allows different people to have different interpretations,” Rajinder says.

But as a math practitioner, doesn’t the rigid and rule-bound nature of math cramp his artistic style?

“I have seen myself evolve. Many years of precise formal math, being very, very careful about how you write each symbol and how everything is put together because you cannot make a mistake. And now, the whole art thing kinda releases me. It’s a mark that I make. I could paint something that I do not want to make sense. I deliberately go out of my way not to be linear or formal. I feel that has opened up a different kind of understanding; it really opens up different ways of thinking if you do it long enough.”

For Rajinder, art also enables transcendence. An Indian of Punjabi origin, Rajinder has called many places home: Ipoh, as a boy; then Belfast, Ireland, where he received a higher education and spent a total of 15 years; and finally, Singapore, his place of residence for the past 11 years. But he feels at home nowhere and his abstract expressionist pieces reflect his fluid, transnational past and present. Wayang kulit characters and Indian men and women find their way into his many sketchbooks but so do samurai figures—hardly indicative of a nostalgia for his Malaysian roots.

“When I come back to Malaysia, I feel foreign. When I am in Singapore, I feel foreign and when I’m in Ireland, I definitely feel foreign. Why don’t I belong? I kinda want to belong somewhere but then I belong everywhere.”

While Rajinder is cognizant of the pressure to inject local colour into his work, to imbue his paintings with a more local identity—the sort of hometown boy-made-good, can-do Malaysian spirit—he elects not to subscribe to it. “It’s very difficult,” he admits. “If I try, it will be contrived. I just have to be me. I hope that who I am will come together in what I am doing. I cannot draw something that is foreign to me. I will never draw the Merlion,” he laughs. By the same token, neither will he draw a bomoh or a bunch of bananas. “Geometrical shapes, that’s what I do,” he says, matter-of-factly.

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This article was published in Off The Edge magazine, May 2007 issue

Wayang Protest, Wayang Deconstruction : Kampung Berembang meets Taman Tun

2007-04-10T19:45:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

FRU brandishing batons, pot-bellied men in blue, MPAJ (Majlis Perbandaran Ampang Jaya) bulldozers, physical assault, arson, forced eviction—these could well be the stuff of award-winning, hard-hitting documentaries. Rather, they were ominous icons throwing long shadows on a makeshift white screen, handled by a group of rambunctious, bright-eyed, children puppeteers.

In a performance too true-to-life earlier this year, the pre-teen denizens of Kampung Berembang (off Jalan Ampang) staged a wayang kulit show that would have made any dalang proud. It may not have had the hallmarks of a bona fide wayang because this kinetic troupe of grinning puppeteers could only boast a few weeks of preparation and rehearsal, but it was infused with something deeply authentic: the spirit of struggle.

Since December last year, these children of Kampung Berembang have continued to endure child abuse of the worst kind: emotional trauma from watching their homes razed over and over again; their relatives and friends threatened, cursed at, pushed, kicked and beaten; their mosque destroyed; their lives lying in ash and rubble.

When this writer visited what was left of the village after the second forced eviction attempt by the local and state authorities, Kampung Berembang resembled the West Bank or Gaza after a few rounds of shelling by Israeli forces. This is our very own Palestine, bleached by the searing equatorial heat, deprived of water and electricity, and a stone’s throw away from the eerie edifice of progress and prosperity: the Petronas Towers.

But the children’s persevering spirit never wavered. As the adults rebuilt one of the oldest pioneering urban settlements in the heart of the nation’s capital, this ragtag children’s group of various hues threw themselves into an art project. Aided by a small group of artist volunteers, who felt the children needed an outlet to channel their grief and anger, the art project developed into a full scale art exhibition culminating in a wayang kulit show.

After the resounding success of the first performance, held in a spartan space amidst broken concrete and hastily erected makeshift tents, the children were jubilant. This was art at its most spontaneous; created in a matter of days, the drawings, paintings and wayang puppets gave their creators expression. Although rough and rudimentary, the artworks communicated something more precious than technical virtuosity: life fervently lived and passionately felt.

A few days later, the state and local authorities—with their bulldozers—paid the children another visit. Their response? A follow-up exhibition and wayang performance in a different location, far from the disconcerting evidence of this more brutal second coming.

This was the genesis of Kampung Berembang’s wayang of protest. Ad hoc, expedient, retaliatory—these were the characteristics of an art form marshalled by the disenfranchised. Relatively simple to execute, using only cheap materials, and necessitating team work, this wayang was about democratization. Extracted from its ossified, state-dictated tradition, wayang was imagined anew by a precocious troupe who carried no weighty arts-identity baggage.

The men and women village folk, who witnessed this wayang testament of their lives, laughed while crying, and cried while laughing. The performance was an evocative distillation of the history of their 40-year old kampung, but more than that, it was a sobering reminder that their children were no longer innocent.

Far across the class divide, tucked in the suburban enclave of Taman Tun Dr Ismail and around the same time, a different wayang was being enacted. It was a performance of a different colour of protest. Less confrontational, more steeped in aesthete, but no less unconventional, Wayang Project was having its Malam Pembuka, to showcase the incipient promulgations of this beloved art form as deconstructed by another motley crew.

Comprising performers Fahmi Fadzil and musicians Aziz Ali and Azmyl Yunor, the Wayang Project (as part of the Krishen Jit Experimental Workshop Series) was a year-long effort intended to engage with the tradition of wayang kulit from Malaysia and the region. How does one transpose a centuries-old art form into a modern, urban setting? What stories will emerge and what shape will they take? What’s the challenge of reclaiming wayang kulit as a contemporaneous art form for young practitioners not apprenticed in the tradition? These are some of the questions that will continue to whet the creative appetites of a large group comprising visual and graphic artists, theatre practitioner and photographer throughout 2007. Malam Pembuka is only a prelude of what is to come.

Utilizing everyday objects such as cardboard boxes, fluorescent light bulbs and books, the trio of Fahmi, Aziz and Azmyl proved that wayang kulit Malaysia need not be the provenance of revered dalangs to be exciting.

Kicking off the show was wayang at its very basic: all puppeteer, no puppets. Manipulating only his hands, Fahmi narrated an overly long and involved story of Arif and his mother, punctuated by references to current events in the news (Kampung Berembang among them!) and humorous asides. The minimalist wayang tangan, however, was not new. Years earlier, Fahmi had staged the same form, but with different content, during Lebih Kecoh, a performance by youth theatre group, Akshen (of which Fahmi is a member). The performance in 2001 was more political and had a sharper sting. In contrast, wayang tangan in its current iteration was more cheeky, itinerant and somewhat superfluous.

Wayang lampu and wayang bayang-bayang, on the other hand, were tours de force in form, sound and imagination. Elevating the humble light bulb to evanescent heights, the trio created a dynamic light and sound experience that was profoundly beautiful. Lights danced, flickered and shimmered in the darkened studio, their random shapes and angles transforming the bare ceiling into an indoor nightscape, against the Aziz and Azmyl’s haunting, live atonal soundscape. Breaking down wayang into its essential components: light and sound, the performers captured a magical, even mystical quality about the art form that transcended story and characters. The artistry of this non-narrative interlude also highlights the visual power of wayang, broken down into its elemental forms.

But the pièce de résistance of the night, in this writer’s view, had to be wayang kadbod and its endearing and uproariously funny shadow duo of SK, the mousedeer and Mr G, the ape. With two simple cardboard boxes, (recycled light bulb containers) the three performers created characters that were easy to love because their story is universal: a chance encounter, burgeoning friendship, trust, naiveté and wrong decisions with tragic circumstances. The subsequent entrance of Mr Hunter into the wayang narrative then transforms the archetypal tale into a postmodern allegory. Lies and deception by the wealthy capitalist; land exploitation through mono-cropping for commercial profit; and disintegrating relationships in the aftermath.

Half spoken and half sung in Azmyl’s sonorous voice, the storyline of wayang kadbod was as aurally riveting as it was visually whimsical. Played live, the jaunty folk music accompanying the characters only added to the wayang’s hypnotic rhythms. Masterfully fusing form and content into a story simultaneously sweet, insightful and au courant, the performers delivered something audiences rarely experience: thoughtful entertainment.

The finale of the Wayang Project was wayang buku, another resurrected wayang from a previous workshop performance earlier last year. Cleverly adapting the talk show format into his high-energy, and generally hyper, routine, Fahmi delivered a rib-tickling and tongue-in-cheek show worthy of the laughs it garnered. Gleefully throwing around terms like “collective memory”, “Jungian” and “autochthonous’, Fahmi was the consummate host, taking jabs at the Censorship Board, the government and Krishen Jit in a large-than-life persona that only Fahmi could inhabit. Parts of wayang buku could have been cut short for it was draggy towards the tail end but the audience was clearly entertained.

As the crowd trickled out after the performance, this writer could not help but wonder if they knew what they had been watching. Here was an art form that escaped its formal confines and redefined our understanding of the wayang kulit genre. It did not matter what its creators called it—wayang lampu, wayang kadbod, wayang tangan—because in the end, the ebullient performance actively evolved wayang into a new relevance.
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This review was first published in Off the Edge, April 2007 issue.

The New Life by Orhan Pamuk -- Book Review

2007-04-10T19:44:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

“I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed.” In two years, this opening line propelled 200,000 copies of The New Life off the shelves and into the hands of a ravenous Turkish reading public, hungry for the words of their only Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, newly crowned last year. For a nation not known for its readers of literature, this statistic is staggering.
Since then, Pamuk has steadily gained international notoriety—for his prose as well as his politics. Outspoken against the atrocities committed by the Turks against the Kurds and the Armenians in the last century, Pamuk has been hauled to court, his books burned and his life under threat.

Critics have labeled his work “self-absorbed”, “cerebral” and “difficult”. But literary luminaries like Salman Rushdie and John Updike, as well as scores of book reviewers, have compared Pamuk to Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Franz Kafka. And to think, were it not for Pamuk’s own dogged persistence, he would have become an engineer—a career legacy of his wealthy, industrialist family.

The New Life, an earlier work, is the exemplar of the kind of postmodern text Pamuk has been praised for. It is complex and challenging, demanding a reading rigor that frustrates as much as it satisfies because the book is not a fast-paced, Dan Brown-esque page turner, even though it contains all the necessary elements of a bestseller: murder, mystery, mercenaries. Pamuk intentionally leaves gaps in the narrative, questions without answers, confusion that remains rather than gets resolved. Students and aficionados of literature and philosophy will most appreciate this highly enigmatic and symbolically rich novel. Others may find it tough because it requires something rare in readers of contemporary fiction: continuous contemplation.

At the heart of the novel is a book. Like most self-referential texts, this is a book about another, and both with the same title: The New Life. The protagonist is a young engineering student, Osman, who becomes obsessed with a book, his reading of which completely transforms him, rendering him incapable of continuing his present existence. To assuage his restlessness, Osman leaves his hometown and goes on a long journey lasting many months and passing numerous small Turkish towns on different buses.

Other than to discover the secret of the book through his journeying, part of Osman’s quest also involves a beautiful young woman. Janan, a fellow student, is the one who initially caught his eye with the book she carried: The New Life. Osman is inexplicably drawn to the book; through a series of co-incidences and accidents, he manages to secure a copy for himself and thereupon begins his intellectual and soul-searching quest.

On the surface, Pamuk’s novel appears starkly simple. It is a story of a search, a mystery encased in a book that is similarly mysterious because its contents are only alluded to, never revealed. It is a puzzle within a puzzle, a story within a story within another story and another, ad infinitum. To understand Osman is to understand the connectivity of the stories, and to follow the trail of literary clues left behind.

But more than just a personal quest, The New Life is also a well-crafted allegory of Turkey. On the outskirts of secular, modern Istanbul, lives the rural, poor periphery who struggles to make ends meet in the onslaught of globalization. As foreign consumer products invade the country, local goods and small businesses die out, unable to compete with the cash cow of Western capitalism. The despondency and subsequent rage of the people eking out a meager living are manifest in their religious fundamentalism and retrograde conservatism.

Turkey is a nation rife with contradictions—on the one hand, it desires to be part of the European Union and to partake in the attendant financial and political profits; on the other hand, it still represses freedom of expression and curtails opinion critical of the government and its policies. Caught in the cusp between religion and secularism, parochial and globalized modernity, this is a country that has been unable to reconcile its many strands and sects of Islam. Kemal Ataturk’s republic instead preached a different identity: secularism sans tradition and largely disconnected from the rich history of Turkish Islam and Ottoman culture.

Pamuk’s meditation on the complexity of being Turkish is mirrored by a narrative structure that detracts from a standard novel. Osman’s life is his own but his meditations on it are ours as well. As readers, we share in the protagonist’s point of view because we live in his shoes and see through his eyes. At the same time, by using narrative devices such as direct address and second-person pronouns in his novel, Pamuk wants us to know that he is aware of our presence in his text. In fact, he writes to speak to us; his anticipation of our responses assist in his storytelling.

The genius of Pamuk lies in his ability to disturb our novel-reading conventions. Osman’s quest in the book is our quest as we read The New Life: our journey of self, life, death, love. Though particular to the context of Turkey, the themes in the book are relevant to us in Malaysia, and hence, also universal. Pamuk never delivers clichés, even though the ideas he abstracts may appear to be so. Instead, he writes a book that invites us in, changes us and by so doing, changes the meaning of the book for us. As Osman puts it: “So it was that as I read my point of view was transformed by the book, and the book was transformed by my point of view.”

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This review was first published in Off The Edge, February 2007 issue.

Unspeak by Steven Poole – Book Review

2006-12-08T15:08:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

May 13. Sensitive issues. Apostasy. Malay special position. Keris. Whether uttered in the very public domain of live political meetings, or whispered behind closed doors, these words have the power to silence objections, dull criticism and promote self-censorship of the worst kind: thought erasure.

Steven Poole would call such words Unspeak because they carry with them “a whole unspoken argument” and “at the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one way of looking at a problem.”

In his new book, aptly titled Unspeak, Poole explains that politicians and the media are the ones guiltiest for devising, propagating and reinforcing Unspeak.

Himself a journalist, having written for The Guardian, The Times and other publications, Poole speaks from a position of knowledge as well as culpability. He argues that it is virtually impossible to extricate oneself from Unspeak because to do so would require the kind of time, energy, research and meticulous attentiveness that people just do not have. We rely on media to sift and analyze but this rarely happens.

In this era of information overload and sound bites (a paradox to be sure), media workers are forced to compress a huge amount of news into a tiny slot of airtime or a dwindling print space. Part of this problem is exacerbated by advertisers with fat budgets and a voracious appetite for media space. Media companies, who have to placate their owners and shareholders, comply by forfeiting or constricting their news slots. Politicians (some more adroitly than others) exploit this loophole by introducing sound bites of their own to compete with those from TVCs, marketing campaigns and numerous sales gimmicks.

But Poole argues that Unspeak is not new. Unspeak by any other name—propaganda, lies—has been around as early as Confucius; the only difference is that today, with mass media and the internet, Unspeak has become more efficient, insidious, and some may even claim, invincible.

So what are some of these Unspeak phrases that are being bandied around? Terror, terrorist, terrorist suspects. Abuse and torture. Freedom and democracy. Extremism. Regime change. Poole dissects and deconstructs a whole litany of terms that have snuck into common parlance by the dint of political machinations.

His description of the rhetorical contest between “global warming” and “climate change” is particularly lucid. Poole pinpoints the exact moment when the UN stopped using the former term in favour of the latter. In a 1998 UN General Assembly resolution, both terms were mentioned but a year later, another identical resolution was passed by the UN which completely dropped “global warming” from its lexicon.

Who is to blame? The US and states with oil interests, like Saudi Arabia, successfully lobbied to remove the term “global warming” from agreements and resolutions because the word “warming” clearly implied that something or someone was doing the warming. Since rising temperatures across the globe have been attributed to the burning of fossil fuels, not the only but certainly the most damaging of pollutants, it was obvious which countries had a far bigger role to play in contributing to global warming.

Instead of taking proactive steps to reduce their levels of emissions, countries like the US instead opted for linguistic takeover. “Climate change” was introduced because it did not point to a specific problem with specific culprits. The term suggests that nature, rather than humans, is responsible for such fluctuations in temperature. Being a natural process, it seemed ludicrous to put pressure on certain countries to stop contributing to “climate change” because change will happen, whether humans exist or not. Furthermore, change is never absolutely bad. Heck, “climate change” can even be a good thing.

Countries who lobby for linguistic variations or politicians who initiate a new lexicon do so because they implicitly understand the power that language wields. Words, as Poole attests, can be highly effective weapons. Unspeak “skews meaning for political ends” and “it wants to bypass critical thinking” because it is only through the latter that the “Unspeak virus” as Poole calls it, can be neutralized.

In our own backyard, where critical thinking is in short supply, the Unspeak virus is freely multiplying. The fallout from the UMNO General Assembly is testimony to the consequences of words uttered by keris-referencing politicians. But instead of analyzing why certain MPs and speakers chose to harp on racial and religious sentiments, leaders of component parties and opposition groups called for apologies and restraint. Some even proposed that internal party meetings should not be telecast live.

The media frenzy that followed was also unsurprisingly unequivocal about one thing: the PM was right, and should be praised, for calling for tolerance and mutual respect in his winding-up speech. Thus, the goal of Unspeak—make the citizens rally around the PM—was achieved. The planned outcome of the assembly far outweighed the backlash it inspired.

The culture of self-censorship is undeniably entrenched in our country. Politicians, media and citizens alike routinely evoke Unspeak phrases like “sensitive issues” and “May 13” to silence dissent and debate. Poole tells us that Unspeak phrases elide complexity and promote a dominant way of thinking about the issue at hand.

May 13, for example, becomes Unspeak shorthand for race riots and bloodshed; such inter-ethnic violence in our history should not be discussed for fear it would spark further conflict. But May 13, 1969 and the events leading up to the date, were also about a political struggle between various factions in the ruling party for dominance and control over the country. Some of the tensions could be attributed to racial sentiments but these were marginal compared to the political tussles that ensued. To silence discussion and to prevent academic and journalistic excavations of this period in our history is to collude in Unspeak and its political agenda.

As the saying goes, ‘Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.’ As citizens vigilant about our future, it is imperative that we rescue our history—past and present—from the logic of Unspeak, which is far less about truth and much more about political power. “Politics” this day and age is synonymous with profit and power, two sides of the same coin. If we say nothing in the onslaught of Unspeak, we will continue to suffer its ramifications, and no amount of speaking will be able to stem this tide when it finally comes.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge, January issue.

Francesca Beard : Interview

2006-11-30T17:01:00.000+08:00

Below is a transcript of the original, unedited interview (though slightly abridged towards the end) conducted with Francesca Beard at KLPAC on 29 Sept 2006

Carmen Nge (for Off The Edge): When did you start writing poetry? Did you start performing it before you wrote it?

Francesca Beard: I very much started writing it in the way that I think a lot of people write poetry, which is they write it for themselves, in a diary. They wouldn’t dream of showing it to anyone. It’s usually about feelings of love and anguish. Actually, how I really first started was I used to really love reading as a kid. And the first things I made were these little books called Maffy Paffy… you know Miffy the Rabbit? So I used to completely copy these books, kind of cut out the paper, staple it together and draw the things and I used to do these stories and made them for my brother. I was always really fascinated by books and writing and used to love to read. And then, as a teenager, I would write poetry but never ever thought that anyone would read it. Although I might have had some kind of fantasy that after I were dead, like Emily Dickinson, it would suddenly be discovered.

But then I was going out with a guy from New York. And in NY—it was already happening in London, there was a spoken word scene. So, performance poetry and spoken word. So it would be maybe rappers, stand up comedians who wanted to do something different, actors who thought, Oh, I want to write. So there was a scene and he said to me, you know your poetry is really good but you should go out and perform it because what are you going to do? You are never going to show it to anyone. And I was like, no way. That was just completely: Ooh No. I couldn’t possibly. And then he dumped me, saying you’re a coward, you’re never going to do anything that you’re interested in. Blah blah blah. For other reasons—he didn’t just dump me because I wouldn’t go and perform my poetry. It was also because of my terrible character! (laughs) And he left. He was like a kind of a minor rock star so he flew off to Japan. It was very glamorous.

So I was in my flat in London… you know when you’ve just been dumped… you just can’t be on your own and you can’t be with anyone and you’re just going kind of a bit crazy in your mind. So I looked through the listings magazine and I saw an open mic. So I went along to this open mic, I didn’t know anyone there and no one knew me—it was great!—with my poems and I signed my name to read and I was so scared.

CN: How old were you by then?

FB: I was quite old; I was in my mid, late twenties. Already well on the way of the journey of life without ever having thought that… you know. So I signed my name up and I read my poetry and it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a performance background or anything. But for that whole time that I was there and riding back on the tube on the way home, I just was completely high. And I’d forgotten entirely about this (emphatically in a whisper) bastard. And then of course I remembered. Then the next night, I looked and found another open mic. (smiles) And it became a kind of painkiller for the end of that relationship. And it was actually an incredibly empowering thing as well. (looking reflective) So that’s the very long story of how I got started. (smiles)

CN: Were the poems that you performed that first time about the relationship?

FB: No. No. I mean I hadn’t really had the chance to… Some of them might have been kind of inspired by the great love, you know… and I do remember choosing things that I thought would… I remember even having had no experience, looking through… it’s amazing what an effective editing process performing your work is… coz stuff that you think… oh, that’s beautiful, oh, it’s so sensitive, oh, how wonderful and then you think, I’m gonna actually have to get up and say this in front of people. And then you think: No. No. No. Cut that line. (voice gets louder and laughs)

So immediately there, also, that was quite a revelation—that it was a great editing process and I think, yeah, it was very very quick… it was very apparent to me immediately that this was a great thing to do and a very useful thing to do and not an egotistical thing to do because if you care about your writing, then it’s a way of getting instant feedback and a way of not being self-indulgent and actually not being egotistical, weirdly. Coz I think there can be something very egotistical about oh my work is so wonderful but I’m not showing it to anyone. Whereas if you actually stand up and read it out, you have to be prepared for other people to be bored or say that I disagree. You have be prepared for people to judge you and so you have to be a bit free.

CN: Brave too, I would think. No?

FB: Well, it’s a weird one, bravery, isn’t it? Coz it’s so close to stupidity! (Laughs out loud). No. I mean… I think for me it was about… (looking thoughtful). There was something necessary about it at the time. I don’t think I would ever have done it if I didn’t feel that I had almost no alternatives…

CN: Necessary personally as well as emotionally…

FB: But I’m quite evangelical about the great benefits of performing your work now. And it’s not just my experience. I’d say that a lot of my colleagues, my most respected fellow poets in the UK and also ones I’ve met internationally, I think we all feel quite similarly that it is a very democratic art form. By which I mean, you don’t need to have a degree, you don’t need to have an amazing… With painting you need a certain skill, and then you need to have the materials.

Really, with performance poetry, all you need is the desire to communicate with your peer group and the desire to communicate needs to take the form of spending enough time and energy to make it meaningful for people to listen to and to try and make it entertaining for them. It doesn’t have to be funny, as long as it’s somehow worth people’s time to listen. And I think pretty much anyone has the right to a stage, given that they’ve put the right amount of attention in it.

Whereas I couldn’t say, alright, I’m an architect. Here I go. (laughs) I think I’m an architect. Or I’m a fine artist. I’m a sculptor. I know some people who don’t even write their stuff down so you don’t even need pencil and paper.

CN: Like improv type things?

FB: For some reason, particularly a lot of rappers or people who love music, they can be quite dyslexic so they really write in their heads, so they’re kind of playing with couplets and lines in their heads rather than scribing it. Of course, it’s one of the oldest art forms. It’s oral culture and I suppose when you say performance poetry, people here think: poetry. Oh, how’s that going to?? Coz poetry in most people’s experience is slim lines in a little book or a big dusty book with words you don’t use anymore. Actually it’s not about that. I’d say there are storytellers who are classified as performance poets, there are comedians, there are performance artists, there are rappers. So really it’s whatever your particular skill is that you use.

And I think one of the reasons that there tends to be internal rhyme and certainly rhythm in the work, is that if you want to memorize long pieces, the language has to have a pattern to it. And memorizing is such a chore. It’s so boring to learn just an amount of lines that actually you have to know that the line is worth saying to commit to memory otherwise… you think oh really, am I really going to bother to learn this line? There’s nothing interesting going on. It’s not just about the ideas, it is about the language on that level. And that’s why it’s poetry because it’s about developing a style and a voice and also a love of language.

CN: What do you do to prepare for a performance? Other than memorization, is there any other way for you to get into the zone?

FB: I get so paranoid and neurotic before a performance, actually! (laughs).

I went with the British Council to Colombia—this is a bit of a sidetrack—it was this amazing poetry festival. There were poets from all over the world, international statesmen, you know—African, Asian, South American men and women who were politicians who had helped set up their countries, really great people—the International Festival of Poetry for Peace, in Medellin, the murder capital of the world. Pedro Escobar’s birthplace. Incredibly violent city, the people are gorgeous. And they have this amazing festival every year. I saw all these poets in their 60s, 70s, 80s.

CN: Wow, so old?

FB: Really! With great gravitas and huge experience, amazing poets. They were incredibly laidback and easygoing about most things but just before the performance they all got completely bratty. They were like Whitney Houston meets Mariah Carey: Where’s my water? I don’t want that sandwich! Take the blue Smarties out of the dish! (laughs)

I was like, oh, what’s happening? And then when they got on stage, it was amazing. They were in this state of grace, they were completely present. They were just emanating this positive energy to the audience and were completely emotionally available. It just gave me a real insight into (inaudible) behavior because you kind of need to be able to do that when you’re on stage.

For me it’s less so but for someone who comes with great expectations both from the audience and from themselves, there’s more pressure. You have to deliver. You can’t go out there and phone in your performance. You have to be really there. So, basically, going back to your question, the more experienced I get, the more nervous I get and the more I tend to, therefore, try and deal with the nerves in a useful way by preparing.

So yesterday, I arrived at 12 and we just spent the whole day doing the technical get-in, which is laborious but very useful because you’re just working out the lights and the sound levels. Really, the attention to detail is quite important because… you know, and just making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing. And for me, as well as remembering the lines, if I’m physically in a space and there’s a light, that’s a memory trigger as well… so even though it’s an hour show, I just thought I can’t speak as fast as I usually do because I can’t take for granted coz English is people’s second language. Although everyone has a really good understanding of English but my accent could be unfamiliar.

So, I’d say there’s quite a lot of preparation time that goes into it just from being in the right space. And also making sure you remember everything is important.

CN: But we wouldn’t know if you forget.

FB: No, you wouldn’t but I… if you forget… it’s like hurdles. Did you ever do hurdles? Because if you get the first one wrong, you’re screwed. It’s just a nightmare—you know you got the first one wrong and you see the whole line of hurdles stretching and it’s Oh Nooo… and the weird thing that happens with time and performance as well. I think it’s like sportsmen and women experience. You can be in a zone and it’s not like you’re in control of time but time is kinda somehow plastic and malleable and you can see things as they happen. You can go with the flow. It’s kind of like this material that you feel comfortable in and that supports you because like music particularly, with songs, it is like that because it is so durational. You’ve got to get the right kind of beat and with poetry as well. If you don’t get that right you’re continually trying to catch up. Or you think I’m going too fast and you’re out of it and trying to get back in. It’s so important to be in that zone because otherwise… and an audience will pick that up, that kind of tension. That Ooh God, where am I?

CN: You do bring in a lot of audience participation. Was that a conscious strategy? I don’t think a lot of people bring in audience participation into performance poetry.

FB: My partner is a stand up comedian and I was really inspired by watching stand up comics and watching how “live” they are. I don’t particularly improvise my work but if you have moments of improvisation, it instantly gives an energy to a performance. An hour of poetry is a really big ask, it’s very tiring to listen and following on from that, the other thing about the interaction is that I know from my own experience from being an audience member, I get very tired listening. Even if it’s the best thing in the world, after a while I get tired. The more active you are, the more work that you do with an audience, the more fun you find it. So that was the principal of it really. The fun element and trying to make the audience engaged in the most literal way.

CN: One thing that struck me is that you managed to weave in what the audience said into your performance. It coalesced very interestingly and it worked. Do you find that in certain places with certain audiences it doesn’t gel as well?

FB: It definitely depends on an audience. In a way it would be cheating if it didn’t. That’s the whole point: that an audience can really affect the whole… I’d hope that there was enough of a kind of buoyancy in the rest of the work, the way that I’d react to whatever I’d got given that it would be entertaining for people who were a bit subdued and weren’t really taking part. In actual fact people didn’t really respond that much last night… people are usually much more forthcoming and much more talkative. So, that would be an example of a night where people seemed really into the show but were a bit reticent in the audience participation. The really difficult ones are where the audience doesn’t seem that into it.

One of the things about performance… Well, there’s two things. The first thing is that even if everyone is smiling and laughing and having a good time, if there’s one person who is falling asleep or snoring or looking really pissed off, you just focus on them. So one of the things about performance is that you’ve just got to learn to get over that. I can’t remember the other thing now.

CN: It’s a contradiction or anti-poetry in a way, because poetry is about controlling the words and language and when you bring in the audience because you can’t control how the audience reacts.

FB: For me it’s very logical in terms of how I feel about spoken word and performance poetry because I love reading poetry on the page. I just recently finished reading a Caroline Duffy collection which… I just find her poetry amazing because, on the one hand, it’s so rigorous, which is obviously great and on the other hand it’s so entertaining, and that is what I aspire to. So it’s not that I don’t ever read poetry on the page because I love poetry on the page and that’s how I started out.

When I was writing poetry that wasn’t for performance, I very much had in my mind a Paul Celan poem. He was writing in the 1930s and he said that writing poetry was like sending out a message in a bottle basically, I think because you never really know if anyone is really going to pick it up and get it. So it’s an act of faith. And I found that really true as an experience and also incredibly moving and quite sad. So one of the things I love about performance poetry is that you don’t have to just send out your messages in bottles and never know whether anyone’s going to pick them up because you’ve got a live audience. So if you’ve got a live audience, for God’s sake talk to them. And not just talk to them but ask them questions and listen to their answers. And that seems to me very logical. That’s what…. it’s different poetry on a page, it’s different from performance poetry. You have a live audience. If you have a live audience, then deal with it. (raises her voice emphatically)

CN: You are also very involved in Poetry in Education. To me that takes poetry out of the individualistic mode and becomes a social thing. Can you tell us a little about the education part of poetry?

FB: I really love it. I’d say that it’s not… I think when I started out, and I wasn’t very good at it, I thought well, ok this is a way that I can make a living as a poet, by working in education and that’s cool, but now I’d say that it gives me as much fulfillment and personal job satisfaction as doing the performance. I find it really challenging and rewarding.

Like a lot of my contemporaries, I believe that performance poetry is a democratic art form and that actually, everyone can do it. And I know that’s a really risky thing to say; as soon as you start saying everyone can do it then you start kind of getting to lowest common denominator: if everyone can do it then what’s so special about it. But actually I think that everyone can do it and I really dislike the way that art has become, in certain cultures, this thing that only certain people do and other people don’t do. And I think that everyone has the right to express themselves creatively. And can. It’s like libido, your creativity. It’s part of who you are.

When I do workshops, it’s just really exciting to either be working with people who already acknowledge that in themselves and I learn an enormous amount from them. Or to work with people who I can see in the course of an afternoon or even a hour, just think: wow, I’m really creative. I can write poetry. I’m poetic. And it’s that simple. It’s like magic for me. It’s like this gift that I can give to people, which was given to me. It’s a really great thing. Everyone uses language and everyone has a right to play with it.

CN: A local professor once said that Malaysian poetry in English is more or less dead because very few people read it. Poetry is also not widely discussed in schools. So what is the reception of poetry in London and UK?

FB: I think performance poetry is really growing. In fact, what it’s getting to be called more and more now is live literature; it’s a new term that’s being used by the British Council and the Arts Council. I think it’s possibly a better definition because live literature also encompasses people who write novels but instead of just getting out some dry passage and reading it like that (makes a strange tone) on lecture tours or in festivals, they’re actually thinking: which passage am I going to be able to dramatize, which passage is going to be most interesting for an audience. And they’re really storytelling. So that can be live literature. And a rapper who’s taken the time to really think about their lyrics can be live literature. So live literature in the sense that it can cover everything that performance poetry can be plus authors who definitely write for the page but also like working with a live audience. And it’s a really growing scene in the sense that there’s more people doing it—there’s more practitioners—and there’s more audience for it.

In answer to that professor, I came through in April this year and I worked with a group of Malaysian poets. I was really blown away by the quality of the writing and the performance. It wasn’t just the writing that was really great, it was that people had in between banter and introductions and were really witty. And the audience was there as well, which was amazing. It’s not enough to have artistes, you have to have audience for it. It was at La Bodega with the Troubagangers. It was a fantastic evening and I was really impressed by the quality of the poets I met. So, just on that level it’s going on. And there were a couple of poets who performed in Malay and that was great and the audience loved it.

CN: How many languages do you speak?

FB: One. I speak one.

CN: In your performance last night you talked about the different languages spoken in London and also how certain languages are dying out. In terms of poetry, if few people understand the same language, they can’t access the poetry for its meaning. Do you think then that there needs to be a lingua franca in poetry? When you were in Colombia, for example, was the common language Spanish?

FB: Such an interesting question. What they did in Colombia, because they were working with so many international poets, was the poets that didn’t speak Spanish, they put with a translator and for me, because I’m a performance poet, they put me with an actor as well. So, I had my work translated and then an actress performed it—simultaneously kind of, to me. So I performed it and then she performed it.

CN: Wow, that’s really unique.

FB: Yeah. But why not, in a way, if you’re going to go for it. I’ve heard poetry spoken in different languages, like in Farsi or in Bahasa and I’ve really enjoyed the performance and I’ve got something from it. I’ve got some quality from it. I haven’t understood the sense of it but the musicality of it and also when you’re in an audience in a crowd, you kind of feel like a little kid. Coz everyone’s laughing and you start laughing and you don’t know why. It’s a nice feeling actually.

CN: Maybe that’s why performance poetry lives because there is the performative element even if you don’t understand the language.

FB: Absolutely, yeah.

CN: How long have you been in London? You were in Malaysia as a kid, right?

FB: I moved to London after university. From my twenties, really. So, I’d say a good fifteen years I’ve lived in London.

CN: What has it been like for you, as a poet and as a Malaysian, in London in those fifteen years?
FB: I love London. It’s actually one of the things that really inspires me. I feel very passionate about London actually and one of the reasons I do is because I didn’t directly go there. When I left Malaysia, I lived for a while in smaller cities in the UK and I found that quite difficult. I found that kind of English village thing very difficult to deal with and I was uncomfortable and I was just very conscious of being different. And what I love about London is that it’s so mixed.

When we had the World Cup, I don’t know of many other cities in the world where when Portugal wins against England, it’s just parties in the street and huge cheers and everyone goes wild coz you’re just going through a Portuguese area. Everyone goes nuts and celebrates. Or when Italy wins, everyone’s just hurray… Because there’s so many Italians and so many Portuguese, there’s so many Ugandans, there’s so many Ghanaians, there’s so many Cantonese, there’s so many Malaysians. It’s a really mixed city, it’s very multicultural and that can be stressful.

CN: In what ways?

FB: Well, in the way that you can’t assume that everyone has the same belief system and values as you. And in a very concrete way at the moment, with what’s going on with the Muslim community in London… I think there’s a lot of people who are very upset about the war and the situation and the fact that there’s becoming this terrible situation where it’s the West against the Muslims… which is ridiculous because we, I think, actually all share the same core values of respecting life and people and so, what’s going on in London at the moment is that there’s such a huge Muslim community there and the Muslim community has a voice and they have power. London’s now really having to deal with… what are we going to do? It’s not as simple to say oh, these guys are the enemy, oh these guys are bad. So because it’s so mixed, and there’s so many people come from different places, there’s got to be a real intelligence and subtlety to reaction and to behaviour and obviously sometimes that doesn’t happen and then there’s problems. Sometimes that does happen and that’s really beautiful.

CN: Are there Muslims performing, poetically?

FB: Yeah. A friend of mine is actually a comedian. Shazzier Moser (sp?). I think she’s from a Pakistani background, certainly Muslim. But yeah, people from all backgrounds are performance poets.

CN: Is there a possibility of seeing poetry as a kind of bridging point for people?

FB: Yeah, I’d say so, definitely. And I also think that the performances and workshops are very integrated and organic in a way. They can really go together. Ideally, what happens is that you have a performance and then you have a workshop and in the performance, hopefully, the audience can see that… I mean, when I do a performance, I don’t want an audience to go away thinking, Oh that’s amazing, I’m blown away but I could never do that. I’d like them to think, that’s really great, I had a really good time. I could do that. And so when you do the workshops then that kind of facilitates it and that’s what’s great about working with the British Council actually because I think they are committed to cultural exchange. And so then they do program workshops.

With performance, it’s not that interesting actually. You go in, you do your performance. I get to talk to the audience but I don’t really… you know… But in the workshop, you really do get an exchange I think.

CN: How was your workshop in Kuching?

FB: I did a workshop with 60 schoolchildren. It was really nice. We had a great reaction. Some of the teachers were a bit bemused. One of the teachers said, halfway through: Is this what you do? Because I think we only had an hour and I was just thinking, I’ve got so much to do with these kids. I didn’t do any performance until halfway through because I just wanted to get to the creative writing bit for them. I could sit down there and do a 60 minute performance. If I perform first, then it might… sometimes they just think: I have to do it like that Oh, I couldn’t do that. If you don’t perform at all then people think, well who is she? The exercises I do are quite fun really and quite like games. 16-18 year olds.

I like working with young kids. The youngest kids I’ve ever worked with are the 3-5 age range. It was so sweet. At that stage it’s really about language skills.

CN: Did you have good memories of your childhood?

FB: I had very dramatic memories of my childhood. I didn’t have a very relaxed, easy, idyllic childhood but I had a very beautiful childhood full of love. It was quite stressful. I wouldn’t change a thing. It wasn’t a great childhood. It wasn’t very smooth, it was quite up and down.

CN: How did your mum feel about you being a poet?

FB: My mum is called Lisa Quah—that’s her name before she got married—and Lisa Quah was a DJ for Radio Malaysia and actually she used to host Bachelor’s Hour! (laughs) When she was 18 she went to work for Radio Malaysia and so yeah, she was this kind of like girl about town DJ and then she met my dad and she gave it up. And she had me and my brother. She never went on about it. She was an incredibly humble woman, even though she had quite a glitzy lifestyle and was quite famous in her day. But she was AMAZINGLY supportive and just so sweet. Especially as she got slightly older because she was always very beautiful and quite glamorous but she had that kind of real charm where she didn’t really realize that she was very beautiful and glamorous and in fact would always kind of dress down. But she was amazingly supportive. She would sit there and not look at me, so as not to put me off. At first I was like, I didn’t want you to come, I didn’t want you to come. She died 3 years ago so one of the rituals I have before I go on stage is I always think about my mum.

My dad is English and actually, he met my mum when he was in a play with Faridah Merican.

Both my parents were amazingly supportive. My dad’s a chartered accountant so he was always saying don’t be a chartered accountant, don’t be a lawyer. Do what you want. So they were both really tolerant and supportive of us.

CN: Do you have any children?

FB: I have one child and I’m expecting another one.

CN: What are your hopes for them?

FB: I hope that they enjoy language. My daughter in fact is really keen on painting. I’m not sure if it’s painting or cleaning! Involves brushes of any kind. Brushes and water (laughs out loud). She loves painting and cleaning at the moment. I am completely unartistic but she really shows an aptitude for painting and cleaning! (laughs again)

CN: So what’s your next project?

FB: I write plays and the next piece I am doing is a theatre piece. I am attached to the Royal Court. I am getting into writing theatre. I used to be in a band. The guy who wrote the music for Chinese Whispers is not touring America in a solo tour with Ben Harper.

3 Fat Virgins Unassembled : A Review

2006-11-30T16:51:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

Student theatrical performances can be nerve-wracking events. The weeks leading up to opening night are often a volatile mixture of inexperience, inordinately high hopes and fear of the unknown: will audiences respond favourably or will the play be a flop? Anxiety plagues professional theatre practitioners as well but student actors have an added concern: they want to be evaluated as legitimate performers, not beholden to the yardstick of ‘student’.

One way to break free of this limitation is to take on a play that is both sufficiently challenging to showcase the amateur talents as well as sufficiently “adult” to indicate that the students are ready to break away from their university cocoon. Singaporean writer Ovidia Yu’s 1995 play, 3 Fat Virgins Unassembled, was indeed an apt choice for the first batch of students to graduate from Sunway University College’s Department of Performance and Media.

This writer attended their last show, curious to see if the young actors had the stamina to outlast their five-performance run. The ensemble of four female actors, directed by Zahim Albakri, held their own, adroitly navigating a rather tight space with a minimalist set, and playing to a full house comprising college mates, relatives and members of the non-Sunway affiliated public.

The play tackles themes that are decidedly gynocentric: girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, wife-hood, and the bane of a woman’s existence: men. Three actors—Cindy Tey, Helena Foo and Nurul Ain Mohammed Jamlus—interchanged the different women characters, while Joylynn Teh played the narrator and the men.

The performances were energetic and despite inhabiting different characters, each actor communicated a particular personality on stage. Tey was very versatile—endearing as the wide-eyed, science experiments-loving child and affecting as the serious proto-feminist. On the one hand she was stoic and no-nonsense with the overbearing and sexually crass men in her life; on the other, she was insecure and conflicted about her choice of career and sexuality.

Foo’s character explored women’s uneasy relationship with food, a source of both pleasure and pain. A remarkably entertaining actor, Foo made her audiences laugh out loud with her gastronomic antics and hilarious striptease; but she also infused the character of the dieting wife with a subtle melancholy reserved for those who want to be happy with themselves, yet at the same time, are desperate to fit into a body conscious society.

Nurul Ain was mostly confined to playing the role of wife and mother, which she infused with soft-spoken sophistication and executed with practiced ease. She was demure and domesticated, content to live the fantasy of motherhood bliss and oblivious to her lusty husband and his unabashed paramour.

If the women were decidedly feminine and frenetically frivolous, then Teh’s male characters oozed with bombast and machismo. Yu’s play chose to capitalize on stereotypically sexist male traits, which Teh camped and hyped up. There were more than one male character but they became an undifferentiated mass of testosterone. Teh’s resonant and rich-timbered voice also suited the role of the narrator—a calm but scathingly critical omniscient presence.

Unfortunately, the fragmented pace of 3 Fat Virgins Unassembled did not really give much room for this writer to ponder exactly what Ovidia Yu meant by her term “fat virgin”. The surrealistic ending of the play, which found the characters relishing their freedom in a virgin forest, was an ill-fitting and clichéd essentialist climax to an otherwise postmodern satire. The four women, however, proved that one does not have to be fat or a virgin to be actors of mettle, worthy of a rousing audience.

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This review was published in Off The Edge, 2006.

Transmission by Hari Kunzru : Book Review

2006-11-07T11:31:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

Techies are never given enough respect. We ridicule them about their anti-social behaviour and joke about their lack of fashion sense. We watch movies that exaggerate their thick-framed spectacles and satirize their loveless lives in front of their computer monitors.

But when robust viruses and sneaky computer worms infiltrate and decimate mainframes, servers and international databases worth billions, we genuflect at the feet of these geeks. We wait for their viral-busting verdicts and deplore the state of our own ignorance, secure in the knowledge that these masters of technology will prevail and save us from certain doom.

Let’s face it: computer geeks wield power. They are capable of binary-coded benevolence but they are also capable of unleashing great terror unto the world. Such is the thin premise of Transmission, a highly enjoyable, addictive novel by British writer, Hari Kunzru.

With his liberal use of spot-on adjectives, generous doses of sarky humour and sly snippets of satire, Kunzru takes us on a thrilling ride worthy of someone noted in 2003 as one of the twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta, the prestigious literary magazine.

In many ways, Transmission is an updated postcolonial novel; it traces the life of a young Indian computer geek, Arjun Mehta, as he chases his American Dream as an IT consultant in the Silicon Valley. The modern day postcolonial subject doesn’t just aspire to become big in Britain—he really wants to covet a slice of American pie.

“Amrika: Residence of the Non-Resident Indian,” Arjun’s interviewer, Sunny Srinivasan, is glowingly optimistic. “Good programmers like you are gold dust over there. Everyone knows American college students are only interested in cannabis and skateboarding.”

Thus, 23-year old Arjun takes a leap of faith into the imperial unknown, leaving behind his nouveau middle class family in BigCorp Industries Housing Enclave, a corporate-owned township for upwardly-mobile Indians. Arjun’s family is fawning and fiercely competitive, using their children as pawns in the one-ups-manship game that only relatives of huge extended families can play. But if life in New Delhi is suffused with ambition and suffocating, life in California is a void.

The American dream is a hoax and Kunzru paints us a picture of an economic dustbowl that is bleak, yet darkly funny. Life in suburban California is miles askew from Arjun’s fanciful imaginings. Left to rot in a low-income area full of black and brown inhabitants, he comes face to face with American poverty for the first time, something he cannot fathom because it doesn’t exist in his cinematic consciousness. This is the unadvertised America he has to get used to—take-out fast food, mind-numbing hours of trash TV, and the growing stench of joblessness coupled with the stale sweat of despondency.

Kunzru paints a picture of America that is perniciously poised on the precipice of emptiness. A country desolate and devoid of life—a manufactured nation, built on the foundations of its own public relations. This is a California far from the glitz and glam of Hollywood, ignored by those languishing in the seat of superpower status. A year later, Arjun was still at it—shacked up with Tamil Java programmers in a neighbourhood of enormous Samoans, resembling a scene from a WWF wrestling program in retirement—jobless more often than working.

But just in time, salvation arrives, wrapped in a package called Virugenix—global computer security specialist, “home of the Ghostbusters”—and nestled in the nature-infused municipality of Redmond, Washington, “a town with nice graphics and an intuitive interface”—an ideal town for a programmer. Working as an assistant tester, Arjun’s job was the next best thing to being a virus analyst.

As a novel, Transmission takes us on two very different plot and philosophical trajectories, which eventually clash and collide like a good art house film. Arjun’s out-of-control, haphazard postmodernist roller coaster ride to success—fed on the grand narratives of Bollywood romance with Amitabh Bachchan as hero—is matched by 33-year old “paper millionaire” Guy Swift’s carefully plotted modernist pathway to fame and fortune.

“Genetically gifted with height, blond with clear skin and a cast-iron credit rating,” Guy is all about visual perception, image-making and no substance. He is surface slick not inner depth—the quintessential postmodern hero. Sprightly world traveller—the neo-colonial in a technologically advanced world—Guy, cocooned in his international agency, Tomorrow, is ready to infiltrate new markets with his brand of Euro marketing strategy: TBM: Total Brand Mutability. An evolution of an earlier acronym, CAR: Cool, Attitude and Revolution. Guy helps sell sporting footwear, game consoles and snowboarding holidays. His future is the science of “deep branding—the great quest to harness the emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand”.

Kunzru’s novel is a meditation on the idea of belonging. Brand identity is about feeling a deep connection to a brand, embodying its identity, its signature. What is identity in a postmodern world? A man like Arjun craves belonging more than Guy but both men need it. Guy, as a means to mold and solidify his business, and Arjun, as a crutch with which to bolster his own self-esteem as a non-resident alien: never American but forever dark-skinned foreigner, potential security threat.

Yet, identity is an amorphous concept at best. It can be vacuous and slippery, highly unstable and bowing to the whims of national and personal idiosyncrasies and agendas.

Arjun is awed by surface trappings—free lattes at Virugenix, a refrigerated cabinet of free sodas, the geeky paraphernalia of the senior anti-virus team—and also confused by them. The high tech America of state of the art soft- and hardware, also houses the hippie, early 20-somethings eco-grunge workforce in dreadlocks and shorts, Birkenstock sandals and tattoos. This is a culture all about the visual, where identity is a surface marker.

Arjun is member of a generation fed on the social mores of computer alienation—holed up in his room for hours, trying to fathom and then master a binary code encased in a shell. These living and breathing computers birthed a new desire: touch. The longing for human skin on skin, something more than virtual massages of the mind. Arjun’s obsession with creating viruses was akin to procreation without a partner—it was the only outlet of a shy, quiet boy with no true friends but his PC.

Unleashing the Leela virus was Arjun’s way of dictating his future. From LA to Auckland, Europe to East Asia, a beautiful sari-clad icon was dancing on computer screens, systematically wiping out entire systems and years of database inventory, corrupting classified data, reorganizing information (George Bush Intercontinental Airport mysteriously changed to George Bush is Incontinent Airport) and driving corporations built on internet interfaces to their own destruction. This is the new face of terrorism and Arjun is its geeky, bespectacled Osama.

Hari Kunzru is a masterful storyteller of his time; his finger is firmly on the pulse of the here and now: the consolidation of Europe and the assertion of an EU identity; the plight of migrant workers, both legal and illegal; the torture of detainees and prisoners of conscience; the rampant commercialization of values; the ludicrousness of corporate-speak and senseless marketing jargon.

Yet he never loses his sardonic, acerbic wit nor does he compromise on giving us a damn good read.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge magazine, November 2006 issue.

"Everyone Can Do It" : Francesca Beard and the Performance of Poetry

2006-11-07T11:14:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

“Poetry in most people’s experience is slim lines in a little book or a big dusty book with words you don’t use anymore,” Francesca Beard says, candidly. “Actually it’s not about that.”

Hailed as the Queen of British Performance Poetry, this Penang-born, London resident chatted with Off The Edge while in KL touring her solo show, Chinese Whispers. Professing to be “quite evangelical” about the virtues of poetry as performance—rather than merely poetry as written text, lifeless on a page—Francesca is a vivacious and luminous testimony to the power of the spoken word.

Her two shows at the KLPAC last month were an unusual cocktail of poetry, comedy and banter with an audience expecting an hour of literary seriousness but then found themselves answering questions about the meaning of their names, pontificating their animal preferences and voting on how they’d like to die. When Francesca gleefully quipped at the start of her show that audience participation would be required, the parameters of performance poetry became decidedly elastic.

The primary offshoot of spoken word, which has its roots in literature, performance poetry flowered in the 1980s, and its advocates reveled in its grassroots appeal. Poetry and music collaborations were not unusual and performance poets from principally US and UK often traversed a wide artistic arena.

“I’d say there are storytellers who are classified as performance poets, there are comedians, there are performance artists, there are rappers,” Francesca corroborates.

The popularity of performance poetry lies in its interactivity. Rather than remain rarified as great literature in academic circles, poetry now mingles with regular people who don’t need a literature degree to appreciate the rhymes and rhythms of a live show.

“[Poet Paul Celan] said that writing poetry was like sending out a message in a bottle. Basically because you never really know if anyone is really going to pick it up and get it. So it’s an act of faith and I’ve found that to be really true as an experience and also incredibly moving and quite sad. One of the things I love about performance poetry is that you don’t have to just send out your messages in bottles and never know whether anyone’s going to pick them up because you’ve got a live audience,” explains Francesca.

The “live” element in Chinese Whispers is very much inspired by the poet’s fascination with stand-up comedians—her partner is also one—and their ability to entertain and engage the crowd. “If you have moments of improvisation, it instantly gives an energy to a performance. The more active you are, the more work that you do with an audience, the more fun you find it,” Francesca acknowledges.

She is also rather realistic about what she expects from her audience: “An hour of poetry is a really big ask. I know from my own experience from being an audience member, I get very tired listening. Even if it’s the best thing in the world, after awhile I get tired.”

Although a little over an hour long, Chinese Whispers managed to entrance. Francesca’s mellifluous voice proved to be a powerful instrument—oftentimes sonorous and resonant, rich with embellishments and rhetoric; other times light, airy and sotto voce in tone, capturing a merry sense of mischief and a jocular whimsy. When she sang, Francesca’s voice was hauntingly beautiful and her soft focus form, bathed in shadow and light, conjured up smoky cabarets and seductive tunes.

Francesca performed long, ruminative poems about the multi-cultural London scene and the cacophony of languages reverberating through its streets; interspersed lyrical memories of a Malaysian childhood with funny alliterative paeans to her pet dog Fluffy (who was anything but); impressed audiences with dizzying poetic factoids gleaned from hours sitting in front of the TV watching the Learning Zone; boggled the mind with awe-inspired lines about quantum mechanics; and spun sassy stanzas about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And her audience lapped it all up.

It’s really hard to believe that Francesca was really scared when she first dabbled in the art form in her mid to late twenties. She had just ended a relationship with a musician from New York, who had been pressing her to perform her poetry.

“So I was in my flat in London,” Francesca recounts. “You know when you’ve just been dumped… you just can’t be on your own and you can’t be with anyone and you’re just going kind of a bit crazy in your mind. So I looked through the listings magazine and I saw an open mike and I went along to this open mike. I didn’t know anyone there and no one knew me—it was great! I signed my name up and I read my poetry and it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a performance background or anything. But for that whole time that I was there and riding back on the tube on the way home, I just was completely high.”

“And I’d forgotten entirely about the bastard,” she says in a conspiratorial whisper. “And then, of course I remembered! So, the next night, I looked and found another open mike,” she continued, smiling. “It became a kind of painkiller for the end of that relationship. And it was actually an incredibly empowering thing as well.”

Apart from touring, and attending and participating in international poetry festivals and events, Francesca also works as a workshop facilitator in creative writing, poetry and performance. She has traveled to Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic and Russia to run workshops and master classes with the British Council Live Literature Department.

Live literature, Francesca tells us, is a new term used by the British Council and the Arts Council to encompass practitioners who are interested to animate literature, to make it come alive for audiences. Being a poet in education enables Francesca to make a living but she clearly derives a great deal of joy from her role as an educator.

“Like a lot of my contemporaries, I believe that performance poetry is a democratic art form and that actually, everyone can do it. I know that’s a really risky thing to say; as soon as you start saying everyone can do it then you start getting to the lowest common denominator: if everyone can do it then what’s so special about it? But actually I think that everyone can do it,” Francesca emphasizes.

“I really dislike the way that art has become, in certain cultures, this thing that only certain people do and other people don’t do. I think that everyone has the right to express themselves creatively. And can. It’s like libido, your creativity. It’s part of who you are.”

Workshops appear to be integral to Francesca’s vision of performance poetry because they facilitate the kind of poet-audience exchange that would not be possible in performance alone: “I think that the performances and workshops are very integrated and organic in a way. They can really go together. When I do a performance, I don’t want an audience to go away thinking, ‘Oh, that’s amazing. I’m blown away but I could never do that.’ I’d like them to think, ‘That’s really great. I had a really good time. I could do that.’ So when you do the workshops, then they kind of facilitate that [thinking].”

Francesca’s love of performance is deeply rooted in the social; poetry is, for her, not an individualistic enterprise. To her, performance poetry is “a way of getting instant feedback and a way of not being self-indulgent and actually not being egotistical, weirdly. I think there can be something very egotistical about saying, ‘Oh, my work is so wonderful but I’m not showing it to anyone.’ Whereas if you actually stand up and read it out, you have to be prepared for other people to be bored or say that they disagree. You have to be prepared for people to judge you and so you have to be a bit free.”

The freedom that Francesca speaks of is deep rooted in a desire to communicate, to engage with and to genuinely care about the dialogue between the performance poet and her active audience.
“Really, with performance poetry, all you need is the desire to communicate with your peer group and the desire to communicate needs to take the form of spending enough time and energy to make it meaningful for people to listen to you and to try and make it entertaining for them. It doesn’t have to be funny, as long as it’s somehow worth people’s time to listen,” she says earnestly.

In a world where the lines of communication are increasingly stifled or broken down, performance poetry continues to flourish—from the popular, celebrity-endorsed Def Poetry Jam on HBO in the US to open mikes in KL organized by local poetry outfit Troubagangers. Perhaps Malaysian youth will soon cotton on to the raw potential of performance poetry as a legitimate outlet for expression and real life connectivity. But not before Malaysian parents appreciate its worth.

“Both my parents were amazingly supportive,” Francesca reveals. “My dad’s a chartered accountant so he was always saying, ‘Don’t be an chartered accountant, don’t be a lawyer. Do what you want.’”

Her mother, once well-known DJ Lisa Quah of Radio Malaysia, would often attend Francesca’s performances, sitting quietly and not looking at her daughter so as not to put her off.

“She was amazingly supportive and just so sweet,” Francesca reminisces about her mother. “She died 3 years ago so one of the rituals I have before I go on stage is I always think about my mum.”

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This interview was first published in Off The Edge magazine, November 2006 issue.

Press Freedom Resources

2006-10-19T11:29:00.000+08:00

For my Journalism students -- a list of useful media organization websites.
Please click on the name and you will be directed there.

Aliran

Center for Independent Journalism (CIJ)

International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX)

Kumpulan Aktivis Media Independen (KAMI)

Reporters Without Borders

Southeast Asian Media Resource (SEAmedia)

Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA)

Writer Alliance For Media Independence (WAMI)

And interesting articles worthy of a read:

On Malaysian media control

Who owns the media of the world?

The 9 companies that dominate the world of media

What makes mainstream media mainstream?

Unreality TV

Wong Hoy Cheong : Bound for Glory

2006-09-13T09:30:00.000+08:00

For those of you interested in visual art, particularly photography, film noir aesthetics, digital video and charcoal drawings, please do pay a visit to my pal, Wong Hoy Cheong's (HC) latest art show, on exhibit at Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery along Jalan Telawi, Bangsar. It's FREE!

I've known HC since 1990 or so and this is his darkest work to date. But it is also a real experience--if you have never seen an entire gallery painted black, to make you feel disoriented and creeped out, then this is the show to visit! It's like haunted house but better because the pics all reference REAL people... legendary Malaysian criminals!

You can check out directions and viewing times for Valentine Willie at http://www.vwfa.net/

Wong Hoy Cheong's Latest Exhibition

2006-09-13T09:22:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

Murder. Armed robbery. Rape. Abduction. Snatch theft. We see it in the papers and hear about it in the news. We take extra security measures and circulate emailed safety tips to our friends. We live in gated communities and lock ourselves in. We fear.

Crime. It’s taking over the urban sprawl, ricocheting out of control. CCTVs. Vigilantism. Rakan Cop. Political machinations designed to calm us down.

We live in a world sustained by contradictions. We are aghast at the spiraling crime rate yet we continue to consume virtual crime in huge doses—in movies, video games, media. CSI. 999. Se7en. PS2 and X-box interactive crime simulations. Crime novels.

We fetishize criminals as much as we vilify them. In the West, Jack the Ripper and Charles Manson are celebrated figures, propelled to cult status. In our own backyard, we have Mona Fandey and Botak Chin—icons in the popular imagination, fodder for kedai mamak-talk, and the stuff of myth and legend.

Bound for Glory, Wong Hoy Cheong’s solo exhibition, is an exploration of crime, heroes and cityscapes, using a combination of video, black and white photography, painting, drawings and installation. This exhibition is only a slight shift away from Hoy Cheong’s usual interrogation of Malaysian socio-political history, which he still mines with a sardonic whimsy. Although comprising a few sets of different artworks, Bound for Glory is anchored by two: Chronicles of Crime, comprising a series of 10 black & white digital photographs, and Bukit Beruntung, Subang Jaya, a two-channel video projection.

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Film noir, in its height in the 1940s, emerged out of a post-war American context marked by urbanization, women’s entry into the workplace in increasingly large numbers, and a paranoia about crime due to changing racial demographics in the cities. With severe censorship restrictions at the time, filmmakers devised an ingenious strategy: create and embellish a universe filled with sex, greed and intrigue but contain these controversial elements at film’s end through death or nihilism. Censors were satisfied that the moral universe remained intact while audiences savoured every pleasurable second of the unfolding of a seedy, corrupt world with shady, hard-boiled characters.

Contemporary Malaysia is marked by a similar tension: we want to prevent crime but we are suckers for titillating crime scenes and climactic showdowns. Just like in the movies.

Chronicles of Crime exploits our fascination and obsession with homegrown serial killers and sexy victims, but without judgment. Just as there can be no light without darkness—complementary opposites that reinforce each other’s limits and boundaries—there are no clear-cut good or bad guys. The series of 10 enlarged digital photographs is a play off this visual schematic, appropriating the conventions of two genres that derive their structure and essence from the meticulous manipulation of light: film noir, and black and white photography.

Chronicles of Crime is loosely based on oral history and archival research of legendary Malaysian criminals Botak Chin, a local Robin Hood; Mona Fandey, a bomoh and murderer; Kalimutu, a trigger-happy folk hero; and beautiful, young victims of crime, Canny Ong and Noritta Samsuddin—women with hidden secrets. The photographs re-enact archetypal scenes of crime; some visual details are derived from news reports but more than a few reference famous classical works of Renaissance art.

Whether painstakingly inking intricate pseudo-real maps of an imagined hybrid colonial space (Map of Buckingham Street and its Vicinity, 2002) or carefully constructing human heads out of dried skins of fruits and vegetables (Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Skins, 1998-2000), the oeuvre of Wong Hoy Cheong has always been synonymous with a persistent, meticulous attention to detail. Chronicles of Crime is no different.

Hoy Cheong spent weeks and months preparing for his photo shoots, which were completed in a matter of days. He began with research and reading—signature Hoy Cheong—then constructed maquettes to help him figure out the best positions for light sources, cameras and shadows. With erratic monsoon weather, a limited budget and a large team of models, actors and crew, he could not afford reshoots. Like Hitchcock, he had to be precise.

Such clinical precision is undoubtedly manifest in the mise en scene of each photograph. Adopting the perspectival depth of Leonardo da Vinci but without the 12 disciples, Hoy Cheong recreates The Last Supper from behind bars. A remorseful Botak Chin doppelganger, seated at a glowing table, is about to tuck in to his final meal of KFC, his right hand upturned—a subtle nod to Christ’s stigmata. In Asphyxiation, a Noritta Samsudin lookalike is given an updated crucifixion, sans the blood. Bound and tethered to the bedpost with wires and cables, her body becomes the site of the interplay between religious symbolism and sado-masochism—apt bedfellows indeed. Michelangelo’s Pietà is similarly transposed onto Piss Off, an assiduously composed shot that contemporizes the iconic image of Jesus in his mother’s arms. Here we see a man kneelingt next to the bloody body of his dead brother. His gaze is transfixed, his expression unfathomable. To his left is the disproportionately smaller figure of the assassin, seemingly pointing his weapon elsewhere.

Such awkward, spatially skewed compositions that mislead using ridiculous proportions (Mandi Bunga), impossible scenarios (Carpark) and historical anachronisms (Magnificent), only serve to emphasize the mythic quality of both crimes and criminals. In his artist’s statement, Hoy Cheong calls his photographs tableaux vivants; they are recreations of visual artifacts appropriated from the media and aestheticized. By so doing, the artist introduces distance in the relationship between media-hyped events and those who consume their sensationalism. We become less enamoured with historical accuracy and the facts of each crime. Instead, we become complicit in a process of glorification and mythification—whether through Bollywood glam (Rooftop), Hong Kong glitz (Sawmill) or Hollywood gore (Burial). Not forgetting film noir homage, of course: Swimming Pool is an elegant rip-off from the opening scene of Sunset Boulevard.

It is impossible to disengage the term “glory” from its religious associations. Webster’s definition adds a layer of aesthetic sheen; glory also means “dazzling illumination” and “great beauty and splendour”. The word conjures up images of halos and “rings of light”—iconic emblems of the divine. But just as Jesus’ crucifixion was a prolepsis to his symbolic glory, it also bound him to a chain of events he did not wish upon himself. (Matthew 26:39). The word “bound” in the exhibition’s title references this double entendre—on the one hand, a criminal’s actions underscores the inevitability of his/her infamy and on the other, such actions constrict his/her ability to travel a different path to salvation.

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Where there is crime, there are victims. Bound for Glory positions the middle class duo of Noritta and Canny as foils to the working class tripartite of Mona Fandey, Botak Chin and Kalimutu. The 2 groups never meet but their visual interrelation in the exhibition is not co-incidental. Crime is given media attention only when it infiltrates the idyll of suburbia: Bangsar and Sri Hartamas, where Canny and Noritta were killed. Yet, are the spaces inhabited by criminals and victims so different?

In 16th and 17th century London, suburbia was space appropriated by the bourgeoisie for their own capitalist consumption. Formerly the enclave of the working class masses during the industrial revolution, suburbia was stripped of its image as a place of sin, crime and debauchery, and subsequently gentrified. Desiring proximity to the economic vibrancy of the city without abandoning the stately wealth of their country homes, the bourgeoisie re-envisioned the suburbia of the working class as a utopia of their own.

In his video work, Bukit Beruntung, Subang Jaya, Hoy Cheong excavates twin conceptions of suburbia: one successful (Subang Jaya) and the other, a failure (Bukit Beruntung). The hill of profits, as is the latter’s name, nary lives up to expectations. A sprawling ghost town of derelict shop lots, vacant houses and desolate factory shells, Bukit Beruntung is a space of unrealized ambition—utopia overrun with lalang and left to rot. The wail of Woody Guthrie’s harmonica and the folksy-Western rhythms of Railroad Blues is an ambient track that is curiously upbeat and energetic—a jarring juxtaposition to the landscape of premature urban decay. (In an unexpected serendipitous twist, Woody Guthrie is also the subject of a 1976 film biopic entitled, Bound for Glory.)

Contrast this location with the bustling suburbia of Subang Jaya, where a never-ending parade of lights illuminate the corridors of consumption. Like diamonds in the sky, these lights are emblems of hallowed success. But the red carpet also ushers us into a location cut up and demarcated by highways and flyovers, where living and shopping occur in isolated spaces. The idyll of suburbia is the success of alienation—a city built for profit, not for people. Bert Kaempfert’s chirpy tune, Swinging Safari, is ubiquitous muzak befitting shopping malls and suburban sprawls.

Filmed from the vantage point of a wheelchair and a remote control toy car, Hoy Cheong’s 2-channel video flirts with the speed of mobility and its anti-thesis, the deprivation of unrestricted movement. Yet, the stereotypically sluggish wheelchair zips along in the right frame, navigating and maneuvering with fluid ease. The two slipper-encased feet focus our eyes to a mobile median whereas the camera atop the toy car captures a wider array of images that unfold less rapidly along a low horizon line. We are invited to see suburbia with fresh eyes, unencumbered by the usual urban accoutrements.

Wither crime in this cushy landscape of middle class security? Is it hidden or repressed? Lurking in parking lots and along quiet residential sidewalks? Is the illusion of safety intact, bolstered by politically-motivated assurances of frequent police patrols and newly acquired CCTVs? After all, it is easy to believe that the criminal element resides in the peripheries of success, voyeurs of a lifestyle they are unable to enjoy.

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In the 1960s, during the heyday of pop art, Andy Warhol predicted that everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame. In our media-saturated age of reality TV and sensationalism, individual glory is finally conceivable. Ordinary Malaysians vie to be idols and icons of a new generation; this is popular patriotism at its finest.

As visitors to Wong Hoy Cheong’s exhibition enter into Bound for Glory, they will feel this palpable sense of being connected to something radiant and dazzling. They will understand what it means to experience glory, to be king and queen for a day. Whether via criminal pathways or political byways, aesthetic ruptures or media fissures, all Malaysians have an entry point to celebrity.

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This essay was first published in the catalogue for Wong Hoy Cheong's exhibition, Sept 2006

Louis Vuitton and the artifice of Vanessa Beecroft

2006-07-14T08:20:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

“Shocking people is a very profound way to reach them,” pontificates the French high priestess of interior design, Andrée Putman, in reference to Vanessa Beecroft, the New York based Italian artist, who recently presented her work at Espace Louis Vuitton, the new 400-square-meter exhibition space of the leather goods giant.

For the Louis Vuitton flagship store along the Champs-Elysées, what could be more shocking than exorbitantly priced leather goods and accessories? But in the art gallery-esque space on the seventh floor of LV’s historic house, cow skin aficionados ogled at skin of a different animal: woman.

Beecroft, an artist best known for her live installations of nude and semi-nude women, inaugurated the opening of Espace with a three hour performance that employed the quintessential icon of boutiques: the mannequin. Instead of life-size synthetic replicas of human perfection, Beecroft used the real thing—black, brown, and white women artfully draped and posed on the shelves alongside LVclassics: studded leather suitcases, monogrammed handbags and pricey leather trunks.

Nude except for G-strings, these 30 toned models have their heads encased in transparent nylon skullcaps and their long hairless legs entwined in white leather straps, like ballerinas, but in LV heels. Their expressions are vacuous, their bodies motionless—live mannequins on display. Slender and silent, these women blend with their environment, their glistening, polished and shaved skins as deep-hued and richly coloured as the leather luggage that accompany them.

In the French language, there is no distinction between the word “fashion model” and “mannequin”. The same word, mannequin, is used to refer to both. What the artist has done is to inhabit the human model with the lifelessness of a mannequin and by design, to render the women as objects—as much “things” as their leather goods counterparts.

Will human skin someday be the new leather? Women, in particular, have been the palette for all manner of artistic interpretation for centuries. From the bodacious babes of Renaissance paintings to the thin-is-in fashion models of today, women have been valued as spectacles to be viewed, venerated and vaunted. It is only a matter of time before female materiality is recast as material goods.

It is not too surprising, therefore, to read that one of the audiences to a prior Beecroft live exhibition, titled VB46—showcasing entirely nude female models—enquired as to the price tag of the women on display.

Aside from the live performances, on the walls of the Espace Louis Vuitton, the artist hangs original artwork comprising 13 massive photographs. Entitled Alphabet Concept, these photographs are a playful representation of the all-too familiar Louis Vuitton logo. Once again using women—again, completely nude except for gaudy clown-like wigs—as her artistic tools, Beecroft recreated the logo anthropomorphically.

“My aim was to fold and bend the women to write the Louis Vuitton brand name, but in a way that also recalls classicism and beauty. Some of the women look like the pilasters of Italian Renaissance balconies,” the artist explains, in an LV interview.

Women as marble pillars, women as handbags, women as objects of art. It seems art has changed very little over the years.

In her interview with Clémence Boulouque, Andrée Putman remarks that Beecroft’s work suggests “the victory of a woman over the world of men” because a male artist could never execute such a work; to do so would be “unforgivable”. But what is it about Beecroft’s use of women that so entrances the critics?

Perhaps it is the satisfaction of being able to view live nude women, presented as objects, without guilt. Beautiful women on display can be enjoyed and delightfully pored over like LV handbags; in short, they can be willfully objectified without audiences fearful of being labeled politically incorrect. The French call it “porno chic”—the new face of art where sex and shopping, porn and advertising go hand in hand. “French luxury marques have always tended towards nudity and provocation,” confirms Isabelle Musnik, editor of the style magazine Influencia, to the BBC. How very postmodern.

And who better to tell us how to ogle women than a woman herself?

Vanessa Beecroft, who is widely known to have struggled with anorexia and exercise bulimia (psychiatrists define this as a compulsive need to burn off unwanted calories using excessive exercise), is the perfect conduit for our masochistic desire to flagellate ourselves on the altar of 21st century classical beauty. The live models for her show may be beautiful to look at but they are as lifeless and devoid of individuality as LV leather goods. Visually homogenous and united in their sameness, the race and ethnicity of the women are secondary because their skin tones define them. Their beauty lies in their ubiquity; their identities are culled from their surroundings.

Putman lauds the emptiness in the model’s look. She praises Beecroft for successfully recreating absence in her photographs of the feminized LV logo. The cavernous space within the Maison Vuitton allows the audience to experience a tangible sense of distance from the women shaped into alphabets. We see the logo before we see the women. When we move closer, the bodies, now visible, look like objects—artificial and motionless.

From models on the catwalk to models in advertisements, from pop stars to film stars, we have imbibed the culture of critical distance. In today’s mass consumer market, we objectify ourselves in an attempt to feel connected to a culture of rampant objectification. We scrutinize ourselves in the mirror, we angle our bodies to get a better view of the parts that need liposuctioning or body sculpting. We are DIY artists of the highest order and our bodies are our art tools. If we cannot shape the world, we can at least shape ourselves.

And what better shape to mold ourselves into if not a famous brand?

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This article was first published in Off The Edge magazine, August issue.

Tokyo Notes : An Interview with Oriza Hirata

2006-07-14T08:12:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

Theatregoers used to plays of the Actors Studio variety were rather taken aback by Tokyo Notes, an acclaimed and award-winning Japanese drama staged last month at the KL Performing Arts Centre. The play adopts a theatrical style that appears not to be very theatrical at all. Actors often had their backs to the audience; their voices were sometimes inaudible; and more than one actor would speak at the same time. It was acting that felt curiously like life.

The brainchild of playwright-director, Oriza Hirata, Tokyo Notes is the manifestation of “contemporary colloquial theater theory” a theatrical style that eschews theatre conventions in favour of “a theatre that is a direct portrayal of the world,” according to the director. The play is performed by Seinendan Theatre Company, which was founded in 1983 and has had a strong influence on the younger generation of the theatre community in Japan.

Winner of the 39th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 1995—the most important and prestigious award for Japanese playwrights—Tokyo Notes has been translated into 7 languages and performed in 12 cities in 9 countries since its premier in 1994. In an email interview with Off the Edge, Hirata reflects on the genesis of his play and the implications of its significance.

Carmen Nge: From my understanding of your “contemporary colloquial theatre theory”, it appears that you are celebrating real life more than theatre in its typical sense. You do not try to heighten the every day actions and realities of people to make them dramatic but instead, you present them as they are. If this is so, then why did you still choose to locate Tokyo Notes in a theatrical space? Why not have the actors perform in a real art gallery or in a public space to emphasize its realism?

Oriza Hirata: I am not celebrating the real life. My belief is that our lives exist only in reality and so there are no other ways for us but to depict reality. I'm not celebrating it. I take something from the real world and abstract it. That's how I create my pieces. It's not reality itself that I would like to delineate. I present my work, abstraction of reality, in a place suited for the piece, may it be a theater or an art gallery. We do sometimes present our show in a real art gallery.

CN: Your play has been labeled “non-dramatic” but at the same time, it has won many drama awards. What is your comment about this seeming contradiction? Do you still consider your work to be “plays” or “drama”?

Oriza Hirata: I have never once said that my work is non-dramatic. I only eliminated the incidents and events what had been considered 'dramatic' in the Western theater. I am creating very orthodox theater. There is a play script, a director and actors on stage speaking and moving in accordance with the script. And it is not my concern what it is called as the result.

CN: Tokyo Notes, written in 1994, is said to be your reaction to the first Gulf War. Why do you think you were so inspired by the war? What impact did it have in your life at the time?

Oriza Hirata: It was not so much the impact of the war itself. The impact I got was more from the fact that we were still leading our ordinary lives watching the war on TV.

CN: The setting of Tokyo Notes is in an art museum, usually a place where there is more looking and viewing than there is talking and dialogue. Why did you choose this setting? Is it perhaps symbolic of Japan’s position in the war—as neutral observers, commenting only on the sidelines but not directly involved?

Oriza Hirata: I don't mind your taking it that way.

CN: Tokyo Notes appears to be a piece that challenges the role of the audience as spectator to a dramatic event. According to reviews of your work, audience members have expressed frustration and discomfort when watching the play. How important is the audience in Tokyo Notes? What kind of effect did you want your audience to have?

Oriza Hirata: I always hope that the audience members feel as if they are also on the stage sharing the same space. I would like them to feel and think about what's happening on stage as if it is happening to them. It's different from audience sympathizing with the protagonist, which often is the case in many theatrical presentations. It's not like Brechtian plays that teach something to the audience either. I would like the audience to 'be there' when something happens on stage.

CN: Tokyo Notes is said to be your homage to Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Do you see any similarity between your own work and Ozu’s? How and why did Tokyo Story inspire you?

Oriza Hirata: Although Ozu is the filmmaker I most respect, I am not affected directly by his methods. From his Tokyo Story I only borrowed two things: the basic setting (that someone from the countryside comes to see the family) and the essential theme (who will look after the parents).

CN: Cody Poulton, your English translator, has said that your Tokyo Notes exhibits a new form that is a lens through which to gaze at the Japanese and how they see the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Do you agree with this characterization of your work? If yes, then how would you say the Japanese see the world today and is Tokyo Notes an accurate reflection of that?

Oriza Hirata: The Japanese do not see the world in any way whatsoever. The Japanese are surprisingly apathetic about the world. That is what Tokyo Notes is about.

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This interview was first published in Off The Edge magazine, August issue.

Book Review : Sister Swing

2006-05-19T17:09:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

Sister Swing is a robust and enticing piece of fiction. Even though its author has claimed American citizenship, this novel has deep Malaysian roots that refuse to wither. It takes us on multiple journeys of escape and enlightenment, single and shared road trips of Malaysian-American encounters that shape our understanding of growing up woman, different, intelligent, stifled.

In this second and most recent novel, Shirley Lim allows three Wing sisters—Swee, Yen and Peik—to tell their own stories of growing up in the shadow of a tycoon elderly father and his first wife and family. This first phase of their narration, firmly ensconced within a Malaysian environment, is resplendent with familiar sights and smells: “hot curry puffs and fried noodles” at recess time in school; bean curd “looking just like duck-breasts, beef-balls, red meat, pork cutlets, chicken livers, gizzards” at a funeral.

The three girls learn English in school, trying on foreign-sounding words that intrigue and empower: “School was full of eye-words, coloring pictures not in Malacca. Words sprouted vines, branched into pages, rustled in forests of books in which I hid all day.”

Sisters Swee and Peik are adroit with their English, and Swee particularly so. Like all post-colonial subjects well-versed in the colonial mother tongue, it seemed inevitable that the sisters would leave the cocoon of their childhood for greener pastures in the English-speaking West.

Swee chooses America, although we never find out why. Running away from arranged marriages and conservative traditions, she puts her incisive intellect to good use even as she embraces solitude and social uncertainty in an alien country. An illicit affair with a married Puerto Rican professor ends her New York adventures and she returns home only to leave again, this time bound for the West coast and California with her elder sister Yen in tow.

Unlike Swee, Yen lives in the realm of the senses and the sensual. She simultaneously embraces her new home and all its excesses without losing the pragmatism and wits derived from growing up Malaysian. Narrating in Manglish, Yen boldly announces her difference through inconsistent grammar and awkwardly constructed sentences. But never once does she berate herself for this linguistic deficiency, preferring instead to claim it with pride and gusto.

The two sisters take in an America that is a far cry from the liberal, intellectual bastion of the East Coast. Beer guzzling Vietnam veterans, fervently patriotic Harley Davidson aficionados, biker chicks and white supremacist groups—these are the characters who people the second half of Shirley Lim’s novel.

Later on, when youngest sister, Peik, comes to California toting a bible and preaching the Gospel, we are introduced to a non-white majority who zealously redeem their low-paid, illegal immigrant existence by attending service at the Mission of Eternal Light. Parishioners from Central America, the West Indies, East and Southeast Asia break bread with their Malaysian spiritual leaders, partaking in a ritual that unites them in voracious eating.

Sister Swing is a novel that slowly sucks its readers into an American milieu that is both familiar yet strange. We desire to fathom why a white supremacist would want to fall in love with a Malaysian woman but we also understand how a Vietnam veteran could so greedily devour sticks of satay with relish.

This is a novel about appetites sexual, physical, emotional and ultimately, linguistic. Some appetites have to be nurtured because they fragile, some are transformed in the interest of survival, and others are denied in an effort to be sane. But throughout the narratives of the three sisters, one appetite remains rich and riotous— the appetite for words, for linguistic mastery, for poetic succor and for literary empowerment.

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This review was first published in Off The Edge magazine, June 2006 issue.

Shirley Lim : Interview

2006-05-19T17:03:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

Malaysians have a habit of applauding our own when they make it big overseas or strike it rich. Tash Aw, our recent shining star in the publishing firmament is proof that people take notice when huge sums of money are involved.

But what about writers who labour to critical acclaim but modest financial fanfare? What of those who quietly put pen to paper at a time when there was no well-oiled publicity machine to speak of, no chain bookstores with long distribution arms, no agenda to champion English language as our new mother tongue? Malaysian women writers in English are particularly prone to the disease of neglect.

Janet Lim, Hillary Tham, Chuah Guat Eng—these are some of the names that have been quietly erased from our literary history, names occasionally resuscitated but their re-emergence never sustained.

Shirley Lim, a Malacca-born writer now residing in the United States, is someone who resists such erasure through hardwork and dedication to her craft. Having carved a name and niche for herself as a respected Asian-American poet-novelist for the past thirty years, Lim’s writing has been anthologized and won awards. She is currently a professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara and juggles writing, teaching and speaking engagements all over the world. Lim is also working on a new book of poetry and a young adult novel for Singaporean secondary school children, as well as editing essays for an academic project.

At 61 Shirley Lim is exceptionally bubbly and brimming with energy. She was recently in Kuala Lumpur to promote her latest novel and to lecture about Malaysian women writing in English to university students. Lim spoke to Off the Edge in a lengthy interview which covered a range of topics from writing in Manglish about strong women to Malaysia’s English language education policy over the years.

Carmen Nge: Where did you get the inspiration for your new book, Sister Swing?

Shirley Lim: In fact, I had written a first novel, Joss and Gold, but I hadn’t published it yet and I was stuck. It wasn’t quite finished and I didn’t know how to finish it. And I received, out of the blue, a grant. A lot of money. They paid my airfare from Hong Kong, where I had gone as a Chair Professor to Hedgebrook, on Whidbey Island [off the coast of Washington State] and they give me a month’s residency. A writer’s-in-residence. There were 6 cottages for 6 writers; we didn’t have to cook—we had 5 chefs for the 6 of us. And all we had to do was to write. So in that one month, I decided, since I was stuck with the first novel, that I would write a second one.

The first novel took me a long time and part of it was that I was learning how to write a novel. And I felt by that point, although I was stuck with the first one, that I wanted to just write a second one because I had already learnt how to write a novel. I took an old story that had won an Asiaweek short story competition in 1982 but that story has been anthologized all over the place. For some reason, it got a lot of attention and so it has been anthologized in Canada, in the United States and stuff. And so I thought this story has got legs. People around the world like it so there must be something in it.

And the story is about 3 daughters in Malacca who have a patriarchal father and they are the daughters of his second wife and so he leaves his first wife in Singapore and every weekend he goes to Malacca and it ends with the murder of the father by the oldest girl. It’s a short story. So I thought, all right I’ll begin with these 3 sisters and see what I can do with it. And so I rewrote that short story as a first chapter and of course it’s completely changed.

I said let me rewrite this short story and use it as a novel and as you can see, I radically rewrote it and one of the challenges I set myself was to write a funny novel. Someone said to me, ‘You know Shirley all your poems are so sad. Your writing is all really sad and tragic but when we meet you, you’re telling jokes, you’re laughing. You know, you’re really a funny person--it never appears in your writing. So I thought, Ok, This is the part of myself I’m going to put in the book.

But at the same time, I am very concerned about this serious issue. The issue of how to grow up woman in a world that makes it difficult for women to get their human rights and to become autonomous. For me that’s been a constant issue. So the issue of women in a patriarchal society—wherever you go: United States, Malacca, Singapore.

And then, the issue of race, which, obviously being originally from Malaysia, it’s an enormous issue for me. But, now that I’m an American, an American citizen, I can deal with issues of race that are not Malaysian issues. So, in some ways you can look at them as displacement of topics and themes that have been close to me as a Malaysian. But also they’re not displacement because race issues are central to the social evolution of the American state and society. And since I’ve been teaching Asian American literature, I am quite cognizant of what Asian American writers have been writing and not writing. And I know that there’s a huge gap in the representation of race issues other than white and Asian.

Most of the Asian American texts you read, when there are race issues, it’s white versus Asian. It’s sort of assimilation tension but I know that in present U.S. it’s Asian versus black or brown versus Asian. So there’s a lot of inter-ethnic tensions and racist problems, just not white versus Asian. Of course, that’s also a central topic for me, the white versus Asian, but I deal with other representations of race problems in the United States because I see that as a gap in Asian American writing. Another gap is representations of religion.

For some reason, Asian American literature has not really dealt with religion as a theme. The Christian movement is very very strong with Asian American communities—the Korean church, the Filipino charismatic church, born again Christians. So I make the youngest daughter a fervent Christian, who goes with her father-in-law, a pastor, to Los Angeles and works in a church there.

So, what I was trying to do was also, as a Asian American writer, dealing with themes that are important to Asian American communities but that have not been so widely represented or popularly represented. So, they are original themes, I hope. But as a Malaysian writer, what I was struggling with was to use Manglish because the characters are from Malaysia.

When we meet them, the 3 sisters are between the ages of 16 to about 20. At the end of the novel, 3 years apart and they are between the ages of 19 to 22. And those are the ages when young people come to sexual awakening so I had to deal with the sexual development and maturation, and I did it—I thought—quite openly, while trying to avoid being pornographic. So, it’s a little bit of a negotiation there, how to portray sexuality without being so graphic that it borders on the pornographic. But mostly the eldest sister is the one who is very sensuous and is sexually alert. And she’s not the bright one. The bright one is the second sister.

And as in a number of Malaysian families, intelligence is usually associated with good command of English and lack of intelligence with an inability to speak standard English. So I have Yen, the oldest sister, speak in Manglish. And then there are some chapters that are in her voice, the entire chapter. So, it isn’t just dialogue but interior speech and narrative voice. And I really struggle with that because I have split audiences.

My major audience, I think, is Asian American and Asian Americans have never heard Manglish except a tiny minority. And I know when they see that language on the page, that dialectical pidgin English, they will not be able to hear it. But if I were to rewrite that in standard English, then I lose that elusive quality, which is Yen. You know, this easygoing, crazy, bit of a lunatic, naïve young girl who speaks in Manglish. So, I really had to write and rewrite and rewrite over and over again in order to get what I call, in some ways, a compromised stylistics. A stylistics that is generally standard English but with enough examples of Manglish that you know that it is a different form of speech. It is a different speech act and therefore it comes from a different language sensibility. So that was a major struggle for me.

CN: About the issue of language, do you find that no matter how marginalized Asian Americans may find themselves, that there is a way to enter into a dialogue about national identity because of a common language [i.e. American English]?

SL: Absolutely. Absolutely. But there has been, recently, a rethinking of what is American literature. An elite university like Harvard—you have to be at Harvard to do this—has started a center of rethinking American literature as multilingual American literature. A top scholar called Werner Sollors has come up with this thesis that you cannot think about a multicultural American literature if it’s all in English. It is not multicultural because it’s all in English. If you want multicultural then it has to be multilingual.

So in this center, he has scholars who work on Polish writing coming out of the United States, out of Spanish writing, out of Hungarian writing, Chinese, Japanese… of course you might want to translate them because not all of us have 20 languages at our fingertips. So although we may be able to read Chinese and English, we may not be able to read Polish or Hungarian. But all these literatures are what we mean by multicultural American lit.

I think he has a good opening position but he is bound to failure because the rate of loss of home language is very rapid. Within one generation, the children have lost the language of their parents. And they will write in English and they will read in English. So in some ways, his notion of multicultural American literature is first-generation. You know, one thinks of immigrants. And the huge core of multicultural American literature is in English by English writers and speakers who are still involved somehow in the retention or the recuperation or the re-memorizing of an original sending culture.

But why would children want to be bilingual, let’s say, in Hungarian, when they might want to learn Chinese instead and become globally competitive. So, you can have a Hungarian American student saying, ‘Well, English is my mother tongue, I have to learn another language, and I’m gonna learn Chinese.’ See there’s no guarantees that that young person will learn the “mother tongue.”

In Singapore of course there is a compulsory mother tongue policy, just as in some ways there is in Malaysia to some extent. But America is not like that. There is no compulsory mother tongue policy. There is always free choice, except for English because English is the medium of education, the institutional language. The erasure of the “mother tongue”, which of course is a very suspect term, begins very early in the United States.

CN: Do you find that this is a good thing because it does help people all speak the same language and there is a general understanding of each other because of language?

SL: Nothing is an unalloyed good. So, in terms of nation building, the loss of that original “mother tongue” and the assimilation into American society, being an English speaker, really is a harvested development, both for the individual and for the nation because it facilitates entry, it helps with assimilation. It’s possible for the child of an immigrant family to become a president of the United States and American, speaking English. If you were to have this mother tongue policy, it might be impossible because the child might be fluent in Hungarian and just halting in English because not all children can be fluently bilingual.

Of course you look at some European nations and you see that it has happened. In Switzerland for example, almost the entire population is bilingual. English is rapidly becoming the EU language so many Europeans now are becoming trilingual. If they are Swiss they might be German, Italian speakers and also have to speak English. But those nations have been around for a long time.

Language is always an iffy issue but a language under which an entire “national society” can find itself exchanging and communicating with each other is absolutely necessary, I would say that. Absolutely necessary.

CN: So what do you think of the recent move by the [Malaysian] government to push for more English in Math and Science, and to have more local graduates be more proficient in English. The big grouse of the government is that local graduates’ English is not up to par.

SL: By why should the government complain about it? That’s the consequence of government policy, isn’t it? I mean, it’s kind of ironic that the government, for a fairly long time, has deliberately downgraded the teaching and the learning of English and now the government complains that it has a whole citizenry that cannot speak English. In fact, the government should be very pleased that the citizenry has been submissive to government wishes and this is what the government has produced.

Now, if the government is complaining, the government should be very apologetic. And should really deeply apologize to the young generation that it has failed policies and should then transparently rethink how these policies fail and how to create more successful policies. It’s not as if the citizenry has deliberately worked to disappoint the government. In fact, the citizenry has deliberately worked to please the government.

Well, to be less facetious, the world has changed since the 60s and 70s but changed in ways that are very predictable. With modern technology, the world has become much more integrated. And even in a way that’s shocking to the United States, economies have become globalized, so national boundaries no longer protect national economies. And capitalism is the system that always works through the bottom line. If you cannot create profit, you cannot survive as a business. It’s as simple as that. With outsourcing, with a borderless world, with the way in which communications work through the internet—with the immediacy of financial processes—every society, if it wants to survive economically and not just become a subsistence basket-case, has to become part of a globalized system of production.

This globalized system—at this moment anyway—operate through the English language heavily. There are some people who predict that Chinese will replace it. I disagree and I disagree because the Chinese language is so difficult to learn. Maybe bilingual Chinese-English will replace simple monolingual English. I don’t know. But I think English will always be there because as a language, in some ways, it’s really quite simple.

It has an alphabet that is easy to learn, it has a vocabulary lists that can cross over and it has been an omnivorous language that has appropriated terms from Malay, terms from Arab, terms from Indian. So, in that way one might call English an imperializing language except it’s an imperializing language that does not take the wealth back to the mother colony. Any one can go to this language and by utilizing it, become himself or herself, if he wants to, an imperial subject.

This doesn’t mean that I think that we should all be imperialist but that the English language is accessible to anyone who will learn. And when you learn it and use it, it is not to the advantage of a mother colony. You can learn it and use it to the advantage of your own family and your own national community. And of course this is what has happened in India.

30 years ago I heard this argument—in fact coming out from Malaysia sometime—well, look at India, it was a British colony for umpteen years and only 2% of the huge Indian population was part of an English-speaking community. Would India be where it is now, finally having a thriving economy, if it wasn’t for the use of English? All this discussion now about India finally being able to compete, being the place of outsourcing, telecommunication, medical care and everything else, can only happen to a population to whom English is also a language of communication.

So where were all those naysayers in the 80s, saying there is no use for English in India anymore because only 2% of the population uses it? Compared to what is happening now when Indian parents are dying for their children to learn English. Not because they think English is an imperial language, because English is the tool by which their children can become economically empowered. I’d like all those naysayers to learning English, even as a second language, to be called to account now for all the people who are younger who cannot be employed. You know, let them be responsible. And of course, this is not only in Malaysia, it was in India, it was in lots of decolonizing states.

CN: In a way would you say that the project of a national language—because we are a small country and English is the lingua franca—has backfired?

SL: No, no. Not at all. It is not the project of the national language that has backfired but the way in which the project was implemented. To create a sense of Malaysian-ness, specifically in a society that is both indigenous and immigrant, arguably—I’m not saying it’s for sure—but arguably, having Bahasa [Malaysia] as the national language would serve as the unifying identity formation dynamic. But to implement that national language project in such a way as to make the citizenry monolingual is where the problem is. Today we all know that we all can’t just be national subjects, we have to be national and global subjects. The one thing they said about the human species is its flexibility, how nimble it is. This is what Lee Kuan Yew says all the time and which is repeated in Singapore all the time: Change or die. Really, it’s change or die.

Let’s say you’re making shoes and suddenly, shoes are made more cheaply in Vietnam, and you still continue to make shoes but nobody wants to buy your shoes, you’ll die. You have to say, ‘OK. I cannot make shoes as cheaply as in Vietnam. Let me make something else that the world wants.’

So, humanity as a species has evolved and can only succeed on flexibility: the ability to seize opportunity, to be nimble and flexible. And that is why for our children, we want them to be educated so that they can be flexible. So that they’re capable of looking at change and not freezing like a deer in the headlights of a car and be smashed to bits—look at change and to enjoy it, rather than to look at change and to fear it.

CN: Let’s switch gears a little. For some reason, we don’t tend to produce a lot of young Malaysian novelists…

SL: Do we produce young Malaysian poets, young Malaysian dramatists? So actually we don’t produce young Malaysian writers.

CN: Yes. Do you find it endemic that we don’t privilege creative arts or writing, or do you think our education system has failed in that respect? Or are we just too busy chasing after development status and this [creative arts] is considered peripheral to an education?

SL: I don’t know that I can speculate on some of these causes but let me talk about what I’ve observed. You have a lot of students interested in journalism and it seems to me that journalism and the professions that are associated with journalism are growing in popularity. In many of the Western world, some of the best writing comes out of journalists. I mean, you look at, even earlier, Ernest Hemingway was a journalist.

Today, there’re lots and lots of journalists who produce very very good books. So, I think that specifically in the writing profession—journalism, advertising and even to some extent, in teaching—there is a promise, for a new generation, at least of English-language writers because I can’t speak about the other languages.

In the past, there’s been active government discouragement of English language writing. So, of course, the consequence of that active discouragement is that there’s been very little English language writing per se. We humans are not stupid. We go where we can succeed. If, as a Malaysian, you’re told that English language writing is dead—as has been said openly, over and over again by Malaysian intellectuals and leaders—then of course you don’t want your children to do it and the children themselves don’t want to do it. Who wants to be attached to a stinking corpse? But unfortunately that stinking corpse is not a stinking corpse. That stinking corpse now is the globe.

I think Malaysians are smart enough to say: this was a false message, this is the reality of the 21st century in the world today, and so I do see that more and more Malaysians will become actively engaged with writing, whether they will write poems or scripts, film scripts, but they will do more writing. And I must say for those who write, the writer’s itch is very very strong. You might spend all your time writing advertising copy but the desire to do more than advertising copy is there. So, I’m not despairing. [chuckles]

CN: Creative writing in the U.S., it’s not a big field like English literature, is it?

SL: Oooh, you’ll be surprised. The latest Modern Language Association newsletter—the Modern Language Association is the largest association for university professors of English in the country, over 10,000 members—the new president wrote a newsletter saying that she looked at the last job market and there were many many more ads for creative writing teachers at the universities than there were for professors teaching 20th century literature courses.

Why is this? Because the young people in the United States want to do creative writing. They enjoy it, it’s part of their development of self and identity and expressiveness. That is where they begin to look at language from the place of the producer, rather than from the place of just the student who is told what to think.

American students are very resistant to being passive learners. You may give them an A but if you put them in a class where there is very passive learning, they’ll still give you a very bad grade. They don’t grade you highly as a teacher if you don’t engage them, if you bore them, if you just give them the answers and they repeat it back to you. They want to be stimulated, they want to be provoked, they want to be made to think and speak. And so, creative writing does that. It asks for the students to voice themselves.

So right now, in many of the universities, creative writing courses are among the fastest growing registration in the English departments. English departments one day might go the way of Classics. You know, the Classics departments were the departments in 19th century U.S. education. Nowadays fewer and fewer students want to study Milton, even Shakespeare. Keats, Dryden… forget Dryden right? I’m not saying forget Dryden myself because I love Dryden’s poetry. But in a higher educational system where students are permitted choice, they’re no longer forced. So you have to do Milton but you have a choice between Milton and creative writing. Guess what percentage of students will take Milton and what percentage will take creative writing? So the creative writing field in universities is the fastest growing field I would say.

CN: Do you see active learning as part and parcel of creative writing then?

SL: Oh yes. How can you write creatively if you are passive? The word ‘creation’ is an active verb. To create something means an act of making. You can’t make something passive. Passive is passive consumption—you ingest, you absorb passively, right? To create is to do something.

And this I tell my creative writing students because my classes are jammed—I have 50, 60 wanting to come in for a class of 20—and I tell them if you think this is going to be fun and games and it’s easy going, I’m gonna leave now. But of course all of them don’t leave. But it’s a lot and they often complain that they have to write a lot and they’ve never had to write so much. But I tell them it’s like playing tennis. If you want to be a good tennis player, you have to be out there hitting the ball over the net. You can’t be a good tennis player just by reading a book or watching it on TV. You have to be out there doing the practice and that’s the same with creative writing.

CN: What would you say are important components to being a writer?

SL: There’re a number of them. One is the ability to be solitary. Even if a writer has lots of friends and goes out drinking every night, sitting down to write alone is a solitary act. You’ve got no choice. The other, I think… you have to have a very good imagination. You can’t write if you don’t have a good imagination. There’s all that there is to it. Some people are very good writers but their imaginations are dead, they’re flat.

And thirdly, you have to have a very good command of the language. Whether it’s English or Chinese or Malay, in some ways, language has to be the writer, the writer has to be the language. You have to feel the language in your body, in your ear, you have to hear it. Language is not instrumental when you do creative writing. Language becomes what you want to achieve. It becomes your muse. It becomes your goal. It’s not so much you want to tell the story but you want that language so that the story can be told.

There’s lot of other things that are involved but I think maybe those are some of the major things.

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This interview was first published in Off The Edge, June 2006 issue.

Planet Simpson : Review and Interview with Chris Turner

2006-03-08T12:34:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

“Oh, Marge, cartoons don’t have any deep meaning. They’re just stupid drawings that give you a cheap laugh.” - Homer Simpson

Cartoons and caricatures have been courting controversy these past few months. Free speech and free press advocates have watched in horror as Muslims worldwide flagrantly denounced questionable caricatures of their Prophet. Cultural critics and media pundits questioned if Muslims were able to understand and appreciate the subtleties and daring of a brand of humour that held nothing sacred.

Even as these speculations were bandied around, a familiar American animated cartoon series was enjoying its 6-month sojourn into the Arabic-speaking media markets, courtesy of Dubai’s popular satellite network, MBC. No wise-cracking, rebel-rousing cartoon characters are as eponymous with satire as The Simpsons and this iconic TV family—now known in the Arab world as Al Shamshoon—will be a challenge to untested waters.

Dubbed in Arabic, the show’s yellow-hued characters were newly christened with Arab names, and voiced by leading actors from the Muslim world. Key plotlines were changed to accommodate Muslim sensibilities; according to the Wall Street Journal, references to things forbidden by the Koran, for example bacon, beer and bars, have been omitted. Homer, renamed Omar, now guzzles soda instead of beer and gobbles beef sausages instead of pork hotdogs. Some Arab fans of the cartoon have already blogged about how the Arabized version is a disaster and ruins the flavour of the original. Still, it remains to be seen if The Simpsons can incite a whole new socio-cultural milieu to laughter, as it has successfully accomplished elsewhere.

After 17 seasons and recently renewed to its 20th by Fox, The Simpsons is the longest-running sitcom (animated or live action) in United States television history. In fact, Bart Simpson is the only fictional character to appear on Time Magazine’s Top 100 most influential people of the 20th century list. American television’s most enduring cultural icon of a postmodern generation weaned on mass media and rampant consumerism has finally arrived. As proof of its respectability, a weighty book has been written about this wacky family, giving it richly deserved intellectual accolades.

Chris Turner’s book is a veritable Simpsonian magnum opus. With meticulous researched details, Planet Simpson will do any fan proud. From a trivia-filled recounting of the birth of the cartoon series on the Fox channel to spot-on analysis of the major characters and plotlines, Turner is cultural critic extraordinaire. Refusing to label The Simpsons as just another popular TV show, Turner lovingly deconstructs the residents of Springfield and in the process, draws us into a socio-economic, geopolitical, counter-cultural, technological and philosophical history lesson that is riveting for those who are wont to question what the hype is all about.

In an interview with OTE, Turner explains that the far-reaching impact of The Simpsons is largely due to its accessibility as a TV cartoon. “Other shows like it may be critical and anti-authoritarian but they exist at the margins. The amazing thing about The Simpsons is that it is not in the margins. It is as much a voice of dissent as something in the margins, though not coming from it. It also has a huge audience for something so unconventional in its thinking. That’s a great part of its power. [The show] feels like a saboteur that has snuck into the halls of power.”

In countries like Australia or New Zealand, where Turner has visited, the show is popular and well-loved. As he puts it, “Canadians, Brits and Aussies like to see something other than propaganda from the US. It is refreshing to have something outside of the superhero image. [The Simpsons] is where America stumbles along and don’t know what they are doing.”

Blending witty explication with droll humour in his book, Turner is earnest and exhaustive, singularly smart and undeniably obsessive. The footnotes that follow each chapter are marvels unto themselves, often recounting the minutiae of each episode with reverential alacrity.

In the first chapter, Turner give Simpsons fans all the factoids they can ever want and more. Matt Groening, an underground cartoonist with a penchant for the anti-corporate alternative press, and James L. Brooks, an acclaimed Hollywood producer who brought us The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi, are the two men most often credited as creators of The Simpsons, which made its debut as a filler for the The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987. However, few have heard of comedy and zine writer George Meyer, who Turner credits for The Simpsons’ spoofs, parodies and dysfunctional social realism. Together with John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti, this writing trio have written or co-written more than 90 Simpsons scripts, many of which are widely regarded as among the best. No easy feat indeed, considering that each episode takes about 9 months to produce from first draft to televised finished product.

In a highly organized manner that is antithetical to the Simpsonian ethos, Turner traces not only the show’s history but also extrapolates its ancestors. The Simpsons is not a one-off, isolated pop cultural phenomenon. Turner historicizes the animated series and in so doing, gives it a legacy that is deeply American, and Canadian too!

Excusing his native bias (Turner is himself a Canadian), the author explains that Canadians are known for their irony and self-deprecating humour, satire and self-effacement. Is it a co-incidence then that Jim Carrey, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, John Candy and Martin Short are all Canadians who have made it big in America? Turner doesn’t think so; he believes that Canadian humorists have been central to the development of American satire since the Second World War.

It is this deep-rooted satirical bent that gives The Simpsons’ its staying power. According to Turner, “for satire to work, you need to have it ring true. Even though it may be exaggerated but you need to start from something, an honest portrayal. So, [The Simpsons] is really aimed at a realistic and honest take on Western society.”

Take perpetually lazy, boorish and gut-baring Homer Simpson, the quintessential postmodern patriarch. According to Turner, Homer is the personification of America and the “stand-in for the average self-absorbed, self-important Baby Boomer” which he says is “the most coddled generation in history.” Homer is the American id: insatiable, out of control and greedy for more of the same, without any forethought of its consequence. Need more beef for your burger? Decimate another acre of rainforest for cattle grazing. Need more petrol for your SUV? Invade another country and install a puppet government that will give you all the petrol you desire. This is the Homer generation, Doh!

Turner casts Bart Simpson as the anti-hero in the TV show but one with a decidedly punk sensibility; deeply anti-authority, cynical of the media yet also fully absorbed in it, Bart is the Every-Nihilistic-Teenager of Homer’s Every-American. However, unlike Homer, Bart is no doofus. He only feigns stupidity in order to get away with having to do the hard work of thinking. Yet, Turner deems him an idealist because Bart bows down to no-one and is much loved for this.

If Bart is the offspring of Courteney Love and Johnny Rotten, then his sister, Lisa, must be the love child of Janis Joplin and Bono. She is the moral compass of the Simpsons: precocious at eight years, progressive in her politics, erudite and sagacious. Her over-achiever persona—she plays the saxophone, has a voracious appetite for books, is a Mensa member and a bona fide academic star—makes her much beloved in Japan. On home turf, Lisa Simpson is worshipped less than Bart and Homer but her fanbase eschews blindless mindless devotion in favour of ardent respect based on intellectual admiration.

Turner rounds off his analysis of The Simpsons by dissecting Marge, the blue beehive hairdo super matriarch, and the sniveling, sinister personification of evil corporations, Montgomery Burns, Homer’s boss and owner of the Springfield Nuclear power plant. Marge is as sweet and obliging as Mr Burns is a slimeball and oppressive. Marge allows the Simpsons a measure of familial love; she is the family’s moral, spiritual and psychological compass, emitting warmth and 1950s domestic bliss.

For Turner, however, Mr Burns is by far his favourite character: “He’s great fun and a fantastic villain. He is the symbol of the quintessential evil industrialist and therefore, when the plot focuses on him, the satire goes the deepest. We live in a world where corporate power is the single most important locus of power in society, so the satire goes deepest with him because they are attacking the largest source of power.”

Matt Groening is often quoted as saying that The Simpsons aims to “entertain and subvert” but does television’s ability to entertain far supersede its potential to subvert? Turner doesn’t think so. The fact that The Simpsons is a TV show does not diminish it, he believes. “TV has a power far greater than intellectual media [like print]. The whole world watches TV and you have to accept the fact that the medium is non-intellectual and about images but The Simpsons is unique because you may first watch it and think it is just cartoon but if you watch it closely and you get some of its cultural references, you realize it’s saying something very serious about American society and Western consumer culture in the hopes that people will see it in a different light and not simply endorse it.”

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This review+interview was published in Off The Edge magazine, the April issue.

Baling Membaling 1955 : Chin Peng meets Tunku

2006-02-07T13:24:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

The specter of communism is still robust and well. The Deputy PM’s announcement early this year that Chin Peng (and all former members of the Communist Party of Malaya or CPM) will not be allowed entry into Malaysia is every indication of its vibrant health.

But even as Chin Peng was denied the right to return to his birthplace, his memory refused to be cowed. It haunted universities and colleges, futsal courts and the space of public imagination last month in a bold attempt to be remembered as more than just another bogeyman in our nation’s history.

Mounted by Five Arts Centre, the performance tour of experimental play Baling Membaling reunited Chin Peng and Tunku Abdul Rahman in a restaging of the Baling talks, 1955. Although fifty years old, the event still has the power to captivate; it is a media spectacle not unlike those that vie for space and prominence in current daily headlines.

Powered by three formidable non-actors (visual artist Chang Yoong Chia, designer Fahmi Reza and filmmaker Imri Nasution) and an unassuming director, the performance of Baling Membaling proved that young Malaysians are far from apathetic and desultory. In fact, if their efforts in the play are anything to go by, these 20-somethings are subtle provocateurs, delicately peeling away the layers of history only to uncover even more.

Director Mark Teh, in an interview with Off The Edge, reminds us that CPM members were actually very young people being thrust into positions of power. “Chin Peng was only 23 when he became Secretary General of the CPM.”

“The way the CPM functioned then reflects the dispirited voices that are trying to articulate things now. There was a lack of communication and organization between the different regimens in the CPM. The acts of violence perpetrated were not all due to central command. Chin Peng was an easy target for the accusations levied against the CPM,” Teh added.

“Arguments that Tunku used against Chin Peng, they were fallacious, without rationale,” Fahmi Reza, one of the performers who played Tunku, opined. “They are arguments that appeal to emotion—the issue of loyalty to Malaya must be questioned. Loyalty to what government of Malaya? [Malaya was still under British rule at the time] Tunku was a British stooge.”

Although disagreeing passionately, both director and performer refrain from speaking off the cuff. Their views emerge from months of copious research into Malaysian history, Chin Peng and the CPM—a lot culled from books, manuscripts and archived materials and some derived from personal interviews and first-hand accounts. Their opinions may be incendiary but they are not ill-informed.

But how does one transform such intricate machinations of history into an arresting, attention-sustaining, one hour performance that will rescue Malaysian history from the annals of boredom for an audience of youth?

Working closely with his performers, director Teh managed to devise a sparsely furnished yet elaborately metaphorical stage and set. Three dapper performers in plain white shirts and black trousers, two black wooden stools, a long wooden pole, a white cloth screen on which images were projected using an overhead projector—these were the bare essentials of the traveling stage.

Here, in the brutally dichromatic black and white arena of Malaysian history, wooden stools signify status and power, authority and position. When the twin Tunkus lob them in wide arcs over Chin Peng’s head, they are at once visually arresting and terrifying. As audience we are immediately drawn in, mesmerized by the lure of power yet gasping for the fear of it befalling us.

The twin Tunkus are emblematic of our late Prime Minister’s multiple facades—at times conciliatory and diplomatic, often uncompromising and firm, and occasionally unyielding and harsh. Fahmi and Imri—both lean, statuesque and bespectacled—alternate the roles of menacing incipient leader, ingratiating stool pigeon, and refined aloof statesman with practiced ease.

Together they eroticize the space of power in a dance of interlocking bodies and intertwining desires. This is the Tunku who dreams of an independent Malaysia with full foreknowledge that such ambitions rested on his ability to draw Chin Peng out of the jungle for the Baling talks. As Said Zahari mentioned in his memoirs, Meniti Lautan Gelora, Tunku told him privately that he (Tunku) never wanted the peace talks to be successful.

“Chin Peng’s hope was that he and Tunku would work together to fight the British. The British feared Tunku because they didn’t know him well and he was not their running dog. Chin Peng knew that Tunku has no power because the British were still in control,” Fahmi explained.

But Teh feels that Chin Peng and Tunku were not dissimilar in that both had strategic interests in the Baling talks: “Several months before Baling, the Communist Party of China (CPC) indicated they were not sure if Chin Peng should go to the Baling talks. At the time, the CPC said they would not give as much financial and ideological support to the CPM as before. This is how the concept of Malayan Chinese evolved. It was in part because Chin Peng felt abandoned by the CPC.”

The parameters and intricacies of Chinese identity in Malaya are never elaborated in Baling Membaling but the character of Chin Peng—performed by the only Chinese among the ensemble cast—is hardly the inimical figure touted by history books. Chang Yoong Chia’s Chin Peng is mostly stalwart and resolute but his voice betrays a warmth and emotion that his demeanour never relays. More earthy and corporeal than Tunku—who is more calculated and controlled in his movements—Chin Peng responds to the peace negotiations with a range of motion that leaves him ragged in appearance and energy.

But the tenor of the talks is best exemplified by the final vicious battle sequence between the almost balletic twin Tunkus—who use each other for physical and political leverage—and the articulate, defensive Chin Peng. More than any other, this is the scene that visually captures the visceral and belligerent undertones of political maneuvering. Chin Peng: on his back, overpowered, defeated. Tunku: standing high, triumphant, gloating.

Could we have achieved independence without Chin Peng or the CPM? Did the fall of a leader determine the rise of a statesman? Winston Churchill’s famous quote: “History is written by the victors” is apropos for the history education of Malaysian youth today because history textbooks often evacuate elements that are subversive and that threaten the existing power structure.

For the cast and crew of Baling Membaling, the act of presenting a slice of Malaysian history that is an alternative to what has been presented in schools is not without its risks. But just as the British eventually caved to political configurations of a higher order, it stands to reason that Malaysian youth will ultimately desist being passive recipients of a history they had no part in writing and in so doing, restage their own.

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This article is published in Off The Edge magazine, March 2006 issue.

Fathi Aris Omar blogs!

2006-02-04T13:09:00.000+08:00

sebuah buku, seorang pengarang, berjuta-juta kata dan hanya satu idea: kebebasan

So reads the tagline of a cultural critic and intellectual compadre of mine who I see so rarely but respect greatly. Fathi writes in both Malay and English on a whole host of subjects ranging from culture, religion, politics, journalism, books, etc.

Malaysiakini contributor, voracious reader and writer, vitriolic critic of everything shallow and mundane, Fathi was in Indonesia on an API fellowship and is back with a vengeance! And all this while, I didn't even know he was online and blogging. Apologies Fathi.

Please give his blog a healthy dose of attention at http://patahbalek.blogspot.com

The Truth about Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, MD

2005-11-14T00:28:00.000+08:00

Book Review
By Carmen Nge

How much are you paying for your prescription medicine? Too much, according to Marcia Angell, currently Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine and formerly Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most respected medical journals in the world.

Perhaps it would not be too much if the money you spent went directly into R&D (research and development) for newer, more innovative drugs for critical illnesses. But the travesty, Angell tells us in her new book, is that what you pay for is the cost of heavy marketing, billions of dollars in legal fees (for when pharmaceuticals fight for their right to extend patents in order to monopolize profit) and dubious ethical practices such as paying off doctors to promote a particular company’s drugs.

The Truth about Drug Companies reveals the corrupt machinations of an industry that rakes in US$400 billion in profits worldwide every year. Half of that sum comes from US drug spending alone and it does not even include drugs sold to hospitals and doctors. Is it any surprise that this industry has consistently been rated the most profitable in the US since the 1980s, and only recently ranked third after crude oil production and commercial banking.

Malaysian readers will wonder what the American drug industry has to do with us but the reality is that American drug companies and their European counterparts control a multi-billion dollar global industry that supplies medicines for the rest of the world. GlaxoSmithKline and Astra Zeneca are British companies; Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Wyeth are American.

Last month, the BBC reported that American drug companies, through the arm of the WTO, have pressured developing countries to buy American manufactured drugs for the treatment of AIDS instead of allowing the former to produce their own generic versions of the drugs. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, generics are usually around 70 to 90% cheaper than branded equivalents; sometimes they can even be 200 to 300% cheaper! Buying locally produced generic drugs to treat critical illnesses like AIDS not only enables governments of developing nations to save millions of dollars a year on drug spending but it also ensures some measure of financial and political independence from Western (and specifically American) influence.

Earlier in February this year, Médecins Sans Frontières reported that India, the largest producer of generic medicine in the world, will now bow down to WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. What this means is that India, who used to be able to produce and sell generic drugs at a fraction of the cost, will no longer be able to do so. In deference to international patent laws that favour big pharmaceutical companies’ ever expanding profit margin, the Indian people as well as those of us here in Asia who import generics from India, will pay through our noses for drugs that used to cost significantly less. Public access, in developing countries, to affordable, life-saving drugs has clearly taken a backseat to profits. What is troubling is that the WTO has become complicit with big pharmaceuticals in denying the poor a right to a longer and healthier life.

In addition to lambasting profit mongering in the drug industry, Angell also criticizes its lack of innovation. Contrary to popular belief, R&D efforts have not resulted in brand new drugs; if anything, the production of truly innovative drugs—what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration calls “new molecular entities” (NMEs)—has been declining. Angell states that so-called new drugs that hit the market are merely variations of old drugs.

Most NMEs are not considered priority review—meaning drugs that likely offer a “significant improvement compared to [existing] marketed products”. In 2005, only eight priority review NMEs were approved, compared to 16 in 1998. Basically, Angell argues that drug companies spend most of their R&D developing modified versions of old drugs instead of creating new drugs that are needed by the public. Why do they do this? Because it is a quick and easy way to reap more profits.

Writing in clear, accessible language, Angell exposes the industry for what it is: a profit-mongering colossus that does not care who it tramples. With over 20 years of editorial experience in medical reporting, she manages to explain a complicated industry to the layperson without any trouble. Her book is a veritable page-turner, offering one insight after another that builds into a fitting climax: practical steps to take to protect our rights as vulnerable consumers.

Apart from arming ourselves with knowledge and asking our doctors the right questions when it comes to drugs—what is the evidence that this drug is better than an alternative one or some other approach to treatment? Are you being paid or do you receive special discounts or benefits from drug companies?—Angell also advocates a complete overhaul of the current drug industry. This would mean that countries would have to work together to ensure that big pharmaceutical companies do not continue to exert political and economic influence on global health care.

Ultimately, public medical welfare cannot and should not kowtow to the interests of capital. Drug makers have to understand that saving a life cannot be synonymous with making a profit. Sadly, the very fact that the drug industry has become a multi-billion dollar business indicates that drug companies and those who profit from them no longer care about people or ethics.

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This review was published in Off The Edge magazine, January 2006 issue

BROGA : Environmental Travesty in our own backyard

2005-11-01T10:37:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

BROGA. Tucked 9km away from Semenyih, it used to be just an ordinary farming village but a fledging young documentary filmmaker has now put it on the world map. Alice Lives Here is a 25-minute short film that visually narrates the disturbing story of a village soon to be the site of a RM1.5 billion incinerator waste from the Broga project will soon seep into the vicinity’s soil and water. As a water catchment and farming area, Broga, situated only 2km from the incinerator, is in danger of being hazardously polluted. What is unknown to members of the public is that residents (approximately 1.5 million people) from Bangsar, PJ, Puchong, Subang, Klang and Shah Alam are supplied water from Broga. Whether we like it or not, the incinerator project will soon have a tremendous impact on our lives.

Knowledge is power, of that there is no denying. People who had a chance to view Alice Lives Here at the recent Freedom Film Festival organized by KOMAS at the Actors Studio understood this truism. Armed with political will and information about the harmful effects of incinerators, the residents of Puchong—the original proposed site for the incinerator—successfully protested the project in their backyards. But what about the residents of Broga?

Ong Ju Lin, the 34-year old amateur filmmaker and former Star journalist, spoke to Carmen Nge about her documentary on Broga and its residents’ fight for their land and the health of their community and its future generations.

CN: Why Broga? What is it about this story or Alice that makes it so appealing for film?

JL: Actually it’s by chance because I knew I wanted to make films for a long time but at the time, I was quite demotivated. I just came back from UK and was wondering what to do. A friend, Kar Yin, gave me a camera. In fact when she gave it to me I really didn’t have the motivation to do film yet. It was like… oh! Great gift but I hope I have the motivation soon.

So I guess it feels like it was fated because a week later, we went to this CIJ [Center for Independent Journalism] talk on freedom of information. I was just sitting down and listening and Alice [Lee] spoke about Broga. She was such a powerful speaker. I had no inkling that the largest incinerator was going to be built in Broga. I had never heard of Broga before. So, it’s the combination of Alice being such a powerful speaker and the issue itself that motivated me. When I interviewed her, my first instinct was: I need to talk to this woman to find out what this Broga thing is about, what this incinerator is about. She has never been a politicized person. She’s a clerk in a furniture factory and then this thing happened. Immediately I felt that there’s such a good story to tell. In my mind I thought, Ah! This is actually the person who can carry the story. It’s partly the issue but it’s also the story that I see that is so tell-able.

CN: It’s a story about Alice but in a way, it is her politicization that interests you.

JL: Yes. In the beginning we were wondering how to carry that story because here is this person, a very interesting character, but the issue was even bigger—this incinerator that nobody knew about, the media blackout, the impact of it on our environment and health. It was so big. In fact, our first instinct was: let’s just do this documentary about this incinerator. And then, upon sitting back and talking to people, I realized it could even be a more powerful story if we focused on a central character and who better else to carry this story than Alice, who we were so inspired by.

CN: The way you talk about your central character makes you sound less like a documentary filmmaker and more like a feature filmmaker. What attracts people to feature films are the protagonist and a compelling story whereas documentaries mostly revolve around issues. Have you thought about this?

JL: Yes. When I chose to do that [focus on Alice] it’s because being a journalist and a feature writer, we have always been told to write personalized stories because this is one way that people can get into other people’s lives and how they can empathize with another person. They can imagine—if I were in her shoes, this is what I would do.

I feel that my job as a writer or journalist or as a story-teller is to widen the imagination of people, to let them know why oppressed or marginalized groups or people fight against big powers, government and corporations—why do they do that? Do you think that they just want to rebel for no apparent reason? Just to be anti-government? No! It’s because they are desperate. They need to struggle. I always feel that my role is as a messenger, to try to widen that imagination. And I have used my writing to do that. I have used my photography to do that. And now I want to use film—moving visuals and audio—to impart that which I feel is very powerful.

CN: So, do you think that as Malaysians, we suffer from a dearth of imagination?

JL: (laughs) I think that with the environment we’ve been put in, being so fearful of expressing ourselves because there is such a culture of fear that we are just quite comfortable with thinking within our own world. It’s more comfortable if you don’t have that imagination to imagine yourself in another place. I don’t think we are lacking in imagination cells, that capacity or capability to imagine. But we’ve been put into an environment where in school we just listened to the teacher: don’t speak, don’t express. Then when you are an adult, the ISA, the Printing and Publications Act, all these laws and the type of TV we are fed. That is definitely restricting our imagination.

CN: In your documentary, you used Alice as a starting point but then brought us to the larger community of Broga. Do you think we have a difficulty imagining what we can do as a collective, that it is easier to imagine what we can do as individuals?

JL: Actually we wanted to show more of the collective effort because even Alice told us that it was impossible for her to do it alone. In fact, she wasn’t actually the first person to start the whole thing. She was part of a committee and we found out that she actually broke away from the committee to take matters into her own hands to sue the government. So, it’s definitely a collective project but I find that in film you can’t tell so much of that.

In order to make it powerful, you have to really tell some partial truths in a way. Or one side of it. It’s true that Alice really took it upon herself to do all that but you really have a choice of including how much she actually put in or how much the people around her put in. That’s what people say is artistic license and you really have a lot of power to tell the story the way you want to tell it. So it’s a challenge to that person who’s doing film to find the angle that is attractive to people, appealing and gets the message across. And there’s the ethics of how much of that can you do, whether it’s how aware are you of the ethics of showing that side of things.

CN: What has been audience feedback thus far? Have you asked what people think of your film?

JL: Yes, we always ask people for feedback. Some of the comments we’ve gotten back… Beth Yahp said that we romanticized it too much, the whole issue and Alice. That we talk about Alice like some super duper human being. There is too much emphasis on her. Otehrs want to see more of the issue. Some of them are not convinced that the incinerator is bad. They want more of the issue, statistics and stuff. A friend, Jacklyn, felt that the issue could be balanced out better to equally cover all parts of the issue—Alice, the media blackout and the community struggle. It is hard because it’s our first effort. We also made a concerted attempt to make it not more than half an hour. We could have made it longer but we didn’t want to bore people.

People can criticize it for not being an objective piece but it is not our intention to do that. It was our intention to show how the Broga people and Alice struggled against the project. We didn’t intend to make a conventional documentary where we have experts speaking and pro and anti incinerator people speaking about this and that. We wanted a personal story of Alice and she is the conduit that opens up to this issue and why they were fighting so hard.

CN: So this is not a story about Broga in a true journalistic sense. Would you say then that your documentary is part of a new genre people are calling film activism—about creating a kind of awareness that brings people to an active state of wanting to do something, to make a change?

JL: Yes. Because it moved people to want to know. If I were to do a conventional documentary, people would just watch and go back and sleep. I am so angry with how things are reported in this country that I want to do things my way, how I see it and I want to show that part of it. You can actually blame me—that I am doing the same thing like the oppressors who use the media as a propaganda to advance their own agenda instead of being objective. Why shouldn’t I? (laughs) If I have that power to use it and I know I am fighting on behalf of people who have been so oppressed for so long, why shouldn’t I use that same weapon, to use film to move people to do something?

The Q&A session after the screening was very telling because people were moved and that was what I wanted to happen. And it did! You can criticize me for not being objective but people were moved and they decided to do something about it. They started asking all these questions: How come we don’t know about this? The factual things can come later, when the interest is already there. My documentary didn’t have to do all of that because that may have actually spoilt it. People would have to sit through all these facts and lose interest. The first thing that moves people is the heart and then the head would come next. It moved them enough to want to find out more.

CN: Did Alice and Broga residents agree to cooperate with you because they hoped the film would do some good for their cause?

JL: They were very skeptical though. (laughs) It’s so funny. Yin San (the producer) just told me that Alice’s sister said “Aiya, you think with that small camera they can come up with anything!” They did not believe that we were serious. But Alice feels that if anybody wants to help then she is going to help them help her. So she was open to the filming. But they were actually very surprised when it came out. Not only did it come out but it won a prize. Not only did it win a prize but it was featured on NTV7 and so many papers covered us, Sun and NST. So they were very happy that the issue was brought up because they couldn’t get the media to cover them. They are such a marginalized and oppressed group; they really didn’t have a voice.

CN: So what is the status of Broga now?

JL: Well, not good. Their interim stop work order has expired. So, it looks like the project has been revived. We went to film on August 10th and they are starting work—digging the soil and all of that. The hearing [of the main suit] scheduled for August 26 has been adjourned to October. Now they are debating whether Alice has the right to represent the people of Broga and the only reason why they are saying that is because she is not a landowner there. But she is a resident there and her mother is a landowner but the legal debates continue. The court may be the last resort they have.

CN: What is next on the horizon for your film?

JL: We want to make a more professional cut which we hope we can show to a wider audience. Alice has the conviction and innocence that if the government and more people understand where she is coming from, they would support her cause. I feel she is a lot like me because I feel that if people can know what it feels like to be in another person’s shoes facing that, they would understand, they wouldn’t fight them.

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This interview was published in Off The Edge magazine, October 2005 issue.

The Death of Art

2005-10-27T10:38:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

(for full pics please see Ong Ju Lin's blog at http://ww.sangsuria.blogspot.com/)

Art for art’s sake died along Jalan Raja Laut the first Friday of Ramadhan this year. It was laid to rest at the steps of Suhakam, alongside the cadaver of campus democracy. Draped with a Malaysian flag, their shared coffin was bold and black, and their entourage, young and defiant.

Traffic and tourists witnessed a sight reminiscent of Reformasi—young Malaysian citizens marching from Masjid Negara to Merdeka Square and on to Menara Tun Razak. The downpour, which began right after Friday prayers, did not deter them. Clad in black, this long line of mostly university students plodded along patiently, waving long stalks of white chrysanthemums, chatting as they walked in the rain. The coffin bearers, on the other hand, looked more grim as they negotiated walking in unison while watching for oncoming cars. No-one tried very hard to keep dry. It was a funeral march; the rain was only fitting.

This was indeed performance art like no other. If not for the ubiquitous cloth banner with “Kembalikan Demokrasi di Universiti” in black block lettering, the entourage performing death rites could easily have been mistaken for the real thing.

But what are demonstrations if not performances of the people writ large? Just as we perform compliance and conformity each day, we occasionally can be compelled by indignation to perform protest.

Yet, rarely do Malaysian art (or artists, for that matter) enter into the fray. Unlike the social realist and activist art impulses of Indonesia and the Philippines, Malaysian art is often self-involved, preferring to languish in its own ivory tower (or within the white cube of the gallery equivalent), observing society and drawing inspiration from it but never directly immersed in the conflicts of the present day.

That contemporary Malaysian art has become lamentable is nothing new. Faced with the onset of global economic crisis, massive unemployment, spiraling HIV infection rates, and environmental degradation, the notion of art for art’s sake is destined for demise.

The artwork for this particular street funeral was certainly not meant for pristine gallery walls but its symbolism is rich with clarity. This was neither sculpture trying to be obtuse nor performance art trying to befuddle. The coffin, banners and placards were constructed with purpose in mind—purpose beyond the realm of art but also dependent on it.

What began as a conventional protest march became a visually provocative publicity vehicle for the demands of the university students. Representing all 11 public university campuses such as UM, UIA, UiTM, UPM and UKM, among others, the students personified collective strength against the unfair election practices of their universities. Citing interference and harassment by university officials during campus elections, pressure to vote the university-backed aspirasi candidates, as well as restrictions placed on non-aspirasi candidates from campaigning, the students were univocal in their call for re-election in campuses nationwide.

The student organizers understood that a conventional march would not garner as much visual interest or media attention as their funeral procession along the streets of KL and subsequent memorial service on the steps of the Human Rights Commission office. In short, they realized the potential of art to radicalize public interest and appreciated its power to affect a different good.

This was not art sitting in a rarefied space, consumed with refined senses by the elite set, able and willing to buy. Its market is a public too caught up in the trials and tribulations of everyday to be able to afford the luxury of taste. But its impact can still be huge.

Campus democracy is dead and the notion of art for art’s sake is fast decomposing but there is no denying that student power!—that raw-throated and brazen refrain throughout the memorial service—lives. And it looks certain to inject the Malaysian art scene with something it sorely needs: courage and relevance.

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This article will be published in Off The Edge magazine, November 2005 issue. The magazine will be available on the newstands starting October 29.

Malaysiakini is NOT like a blog!

2005-10-26T17:18:00.000+08:00

I don't often use my blog as a ranting space but today, I have to because I am powered by fury.

Today, I attended a forum on Malaysian Press in the Era of Technology where Bunn Nagara, Associate Editor of The Star, made this completely baseless comment when asked what he thought of Malaysiakini. He said, "Malaysiakini is like a blog" and he deemed the news site unprofessional and unprofitable.

And how does he define professionalism? Well, Malaysiakini is not professional because they don't publish news on Saturday and Sundays.

Yup, there you have it folks. If you don't work a 7-day week, then you are not professional. Remember, that is from the mouth of Mr. Bunn Nagara himself. And all those hard-working, experienced journalists at Malaysiakini are mere bloggers.

Thankfully, I have some critical thinking students who know better than to accept this bit of opinion as fact. And we wonder why our media is in trouble.

Haze Malaise

2005-08-11T17:36:00.000+08:00

It's everywhere--the smell, the smoke, the sense that doom is upon us.

Some say it's the wrath of Ayah Pin exacting toil and trouble on a judgmental government and moralizing Muslim populace. Some say it's Mother Nature awakening from centuries of troubled slumber. Some say it's Armageddon--but without Bruce Willis to come save the day.

I'll warrant an educated guess that the haze is directly (and indirectly) caused by our own human greed gone unchecked; our unlimited desire for bigger buildings, more gargantuan displays of status, mammoth projections of power, spiralling out of control; our capacious sense of self without regard for our surroundings.

Nature can no longer suffer the onslaught we mete out. Nature has a logic more rational and humane than our own. We are a part of its cycle and we now sow what we reap.

The Native Americans say it best: We do not inherit the earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.

But we have forgotten about a future beyond our immediate present. Or perhaps, we choose to deny it for the sake of our own gratuitous pleasures. There is no other word for it but selfishness.

My brother told me a few weeks ago that he had a discussion with a colleague about the Shell CEO's recent comment that the world will run out of petroleum in about 20 years and impressed upon the latter that humans will have to begin thinking of alternative modes of transportation that are not so-petrol dependent. His colleague's reply?

"Aiya... why think of these things? 20 years is still a long way away. Let the Americans figure it out. I am sure they will think of something before then."

I could only shake my head in despair when the story was told to me. This is the state of our nation, of our people, of ourselves. Sure, let some superpower do its thinking for us, like it has been doing so damn successfully.

Why do we want to bother about doing a little extra towards reducing global warming when we will be dead before the atrocities hit us? Why should we think about our children or their children if we have nothing but naive illusions about the future?

We refuse to educate ourselves. We deny truth when we see it and yet we continue to demand less lies. Are we able to face up to the facts when the haze clears?

What will we do when we find out the Malaysian companies are the ones responsible for logging and forest clearing in Indonesia? What will we do when we realize that forests are self-combusting because the world is getting hotter and we are cutting down trees to make way for more development and contributing to the escalating heat index? What will we do when we come to our senses, understand that the world is as we make it?

It may be impossible to reverse the consequences of centuries of abuse on Nature and our environment but the response is not to continue this way into the next millenium. If we were to think that way, we will perish sooner than we think and we are indeed selfish beyond hope.

3 Young Contemporaries : Review

2005-07-21T16:30:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

A tongue-in-cheek whimsy and an engagement with the everyday marked the recent exhibition at Valentine Willie Fine Art, which showcased 3 young contemporary artists from the region: Eko Nugroho, Vincent Leong and Natthawut Sing-Thong,

In this show, Eko—who hails from Yogyakarta and is a major comic artist back in Indonesia—birthed a grotesque icon for our postmodern age: the Minotaur of industrialization and cheap labour. Like the monstrosity from ancient Greek mythology, Eko’s is a hybrid creature—in this case, half human, half machine.

His minotaurs are a fusion of body parts (torsos, arms, legs, miscellaneous limbs) and machinery (wheels, smoke stacks, pulleys, motors); these are bodies without faces, without identities apart from their value as a mobile workforce. We like to believe that we have ascended into a high tech digital age but Eko reminds us, with his crude machine-man, that we are still ever reliant on the basic foundation of capitalism: human labour.

A central motif that links his vibrantly disturbing paintings (all of which were created in Malaysia during a short residency at Rimbun Dahan earlier this year) is that of industrial spires, or, factory chimneys (‘cerobong’) spewing smoke. These funnels of pollutants are usually positioned atop heads, suggesting human complicity in environmental degradation as well as rampant development. Another all too-familiar image is that of our Petronas Twin Towers, which sneak their way into paintings, contextualizing Eko’s preoccupations. His treatment of the relationship between Indonesia and Malaysia is difficult to dismiss.

Inspired by logos and appliqués on uniforms and clothing, his embroidered works are especially intricate and unusual; they most closely reference his comic illustrations, and are filled with bizarre symbols and metaphors of wide topical interest—terrorism, nationalism, anarchy.

Eko’s video art is more cryptic—titles like Dark Disco (2005) and The Breeders (2004) only hint at meaning—but their raw and rough around the edges quality simulates his DIY sensibility. Unsurprisingly, Eko is the founder-president of Daging Tumbuh, a collective initiated in 2000 that self-publishes bi-annual comics compilations, with a following in Indonesia and as far abroad as Belgium and the Netherlands.

What is most arresting about Eko’s work is their surreal familiarity. These are images of a time and place we know all too well—our excessively turmoil-ridden world—but taken apart into signs, symbols, metaphors of meaning and then reformulated into unsettling narratives that tickle, titillate and trouble.

The only Malaysian artist in the show, Vincent Leong, takes on issues of a global spectrum, ranging from the ongoing war in Iraq to the iconography of martial arts hero, Bruce Lee. His work underscores an underlying concern of young artists working within our contemporaneous milieu: how to engage with the serious/topical without being sucked into a sense of futility about it.

Vincent’s series of lightboxes (Car Boom!!!, Operation Iraqi Love [OIL], and Suicide Lovers) manages to solicit the unthinkable from their audience: a smile (and even an exclamation of “so cute!”) when looking at images referencing the current atrocities in Iraq.

This writer views the lightboxes as a homage to Takashi Murakami, Japan’s most successful pop artist, who has taken the concept of ‘cute’ (or kawaii in Japanese) to a whole new dimension. Capitalizing on the Japanese obsession with cute, Murakami creates works that look adorable but nevertheless tackle issues as dark as the atomic bomb and nuclear fallout.

Though Murakami’s work is veiled more symbolically, Vincent’s work is more transparent. The hidden images are only evident to us when his lightboxes are switched on; without light, we only see decorative pastel paper (gift wrapping, in actuality) with innocuous and cheerful bubble designs. The message could not be clearer: truth will only come to light when there exists greater transparency.

In his video piece, How to be Bruce, Vincent explores something wholly different: martial arts icon Bruce Lee. Taking a scene from The Way of the Dragon where Lee battles Chuck Norris in an East versus West kungfu showdown, Vincent boils it down to a precise distillation of symbols: arrows and dots. Lee is represented by a blue dot and his nemesis a red one. Arrows of similar colours zip and zap onscreen, indicating the speed and range of the two fighters’ hand and leg movements.

This is an instruction video worthy of adulation because it denies us the very essence of a Bruce Lee fight sequence: Bruce Lee himself. The man, the myth, the icon is reduced to a blue dot and his infamous kicks and punches distilled into blue arrows. We only have a soundscape to remember him by and to reference his movements; the high-pitched Bruce Lee kungfu cry is the only vestige of his superhuman lethal flying fist. The rest are codified and reproduced as a system of simple signs.

From photo-image outlines (a two-dimensional take on British artist Rachel Whitread’s negative space) and a video pastiche of handshakes, to nifty, too-clever for words Transformer-like sculptures made from light bulbs, switches and adaptors (co-joined with Rubik-cube ingenuity), Vincent Leong’s works defy easy categorization. What is certain is the artist’s willingness to engage with popular culture and contemporary concerns with wit, whimsy and a wacky sense of humour.

Of the three, Nattawut Sing-Thong, who hails from Chiangmai, is the most introspective and somber. His mostly gray and black-hued canvasses are too self-referential to be easily appreciated. The Gray Thought series purports to be philosophical—with the colour gray representing integrated thought (artist notes)—but the black objects atop human heads are too simplistic, relying on images that are more functional than they are meaningful (hammer, rock, fire).

Natthawut’s two largest paneled work—Untitled [Blue Rose] and Jungle Devil—are beautiful to look at (pastel on black ink-soaked paper), with realistically rendered images (rose, flower, heart), but these common objects are stripped from their everyday contexts and repositioned against a dark, amorphous backdrop. They become abstractions, fragmented from their usual semiotic structures.

It is as if the artist challenges us to remove ourselves from the usual structures of seeing and meaning-making to contemplate new ways of understanding the things around us—a tough task indeed.

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This review appeared in Off The Edge, June 2005 issue

John Perkins : Interview

2005-05-10T16:39:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

[Please scroll down for the rather lengthy interview with John Perkins, which immediately follows a short summary about his book]

It reads like a Graham Greene novel—thick with political intrigue; rife with moral questioning; packed with sex, murder and assassinations. But Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has been enjoying an extended reign on a variety of American bestseller lists because it does not claim to be fiction. John Perkins' memoir is a testimony to truth, an expose of greed and corporate evil at the highest levels of political power.

Due to the sensitive and controversial nature of the book’s content, major publishing houses in the United States refused to publish it. Perkins himself says, “There’s a tremendous amount of press censorship in the United States. I don’t think most of the world realizes this and it’s because our press is so strongly controlled by big corporations. And our publishing houses are all controlled by huge international corporations.” Berrett-Koehler—an independent publisher of books centered on work, business and organizations—stepped in. Confessions is currently enjoying a ninth printing and is going international.

Today, John Perkins is famous in the American alternative press circle for being so bold as to denounce his former position as the youngest partner and one of the top ranking officers at Chas. T. Main Inc., an international consulting firm fronting for U.S. intelligence agencies and the U.S. government. He is infamous for giving credence to what conspiracy theorists have argued all along: that the world is run by an all-powerful, all-knowing force called the United States of America.

His detractors are calling the book ‘too crazy to be true’ but ordinary Americans are embracing the main message of the book: that the world is predicated on an ideology of materialism and greed, and things are falling apart.

Perkins’ book reads like a novel because it has a strong chronological narrative arc. It begins in New Hampshire and Vermont, where he grew up and went to school, and then to Boston, where he began his training as an economic hit man. The book then follows Perkins on the EHM trail from Indonesia in the early 70s to Panama, Iran, Colombia and Ecuador.

During these extended business visits, Perkins tells us how he sold hyper-inflated infrastructure and energy projects to developing nations and brokered loan agreements between the latter and international organizations like the Asian Development Bank, USAID, the World Bank. The loans would then be used to fund projects executed by American corporations—Halliburton or Bechtel are some of the larger ones. As taxpayers’ money funneled into American corporate pockets, developing nations such as Indonesia and Panama found themselves entrenched in debt that they could never repay. Caught in a financially compromising position, they oftentimes acquiesced to American and capitalist interests. This, according to Perkins, is how the American Empire was built.

But, as we know all too well here in South East Asia, America’s desire to extend its imperial reach has not run out of steam. Recent statements made by a US naval commander about post-tsunami relief efforts in Asia indicate that humanitarian aid is never what it seems. Rear Admiral Christopher Ames’ comment is certainly cause for worry: “We’ve talked about this idea of sea-basing for several years, of being able to project power anywhere in the world without asking permission. What we’re doing here validates the beauty of it.”

What does the future portend for us if Perkins’ book holds water?

In an effort to find out, we spoke with John Perkins from his home in Florida on the morning of March 14, 2005.

[CN -- Carmen Nge; JP -- John Perkins; JT -- Jason Tan, editor of Off The Edge]

CN: Since you published your book, you’ve been traveling quite a bit and talking to large numbers of people—earlier this year at the World Social Forum (in Porto Alleger, Brazil)—and I’m just wondering what is the message you would like to share with the world. What do you think we need to know, particularly here in Asia?

JP: Well, I think the message—the most important message—is the world cannot keep on like this. There’s no question about it. 5% of the world population, that is to say people living in the United States, consume over 25% of the world’s resources and create over 25% of the world’s major pollution and that’s not sustainable and it’s not replicable.

We know that the dream of other countries following in our footsteps—Asian countries, other countries—can’t possibly be realized because those statistics I just gave you are very clear proof that nobody can follow in our footsteps. And even we can’t continue this way. In addition to that, the United States, which is the wealthiest country in the history of the world has dreadful statistics—social statistics—indicating that we’re also one of the least happy countries in the world because we have the highest rates of incarceration, murder, family abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, divorce, on and on.

So, the answer for the world is not to try in any way to replicate what’s happening in the United States. The answer for the world—for Asia and for the rest of the world—is to learn an important lesson from us and that is that the materialism and empire building does not bring satisfaction or happiness. In fact, it brings tremendous problems. What we know is that in the next 30 to 50 years, the world is going to change radically.

In the next 30 to 50 years, we’re gonna have dramatic changes. There has to be dramatic changes. And it can either come to chaos and violence and be extremely difficult, or we can change our attitude, our way of living, and our way of relating to each other and to the environment. So, my message to anybody reading this—Asian or otherwise, people of all ages—is that we must work very hard in the next few years to change the way we look at the world and the way we relate to each other, and the way we relate to the environment. I have great hope that we will learn from the lessons of history, we will learn from this failed experiment of the United States, not to repeat the tremendous errors that we’ve made since World War 2.

I think that’s the main thrust of the message I’d like to give.

I believe that people in the United States are very unaware of what their own country has done over these past 4 decades. People in the United States believe that foreign aid is given out altruistically and in most cases, it’s not. Foreign aid is used to make the rich of the United States richer and also a few rich families throughout the world richer. I believe when people in the United States understand what’s truly happening, they will demand change. We will demand change and we will get it and that’s why I wrote this book, to help people in the United States understand that.

I also wrote it so that people in Asia and other places in the world will understand clearly what it is we’ve been doing and will not permit this to happen anymore. People in countries around the world who’ve been exploited by the United States should call their leaders to task and they need to insist that organizations like the World Bank and the US government forgive a lot of the debt that has been piled upon these countries because this debt was given in a way that should be illegal and unfortunately it’s not. And countries like Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia should insist that they don’t have to pay back a great deal of the debt because people of those countries really don’t owe anybody that money.

JT: You mentioned earlier that most Americans are very unaware of what their own country has done so this whole unawareness, I imagine it would be mainly perpetuated by the mainstream press then?

JP: Well it’s perpetuated by the press and I think also by the fact that a great many Americans live pretty comfortable lives and they don’t really wanna know what’s going on, they don’t wanna know about the awful things that our corporations are doing, the sweatshops for example that some of our big corporations have in parts of Asia. I presume there’s some of those in Malaysia too though I am not sure of that, right?

JT: Yes. We have a large garment manufacturing industry in the country.

JP: Do those workers get well treated or…

JT: They’re mostly immigrants, John.

JP: From where?

JT: From Bangladesh, from Indonesia, from Burma.

JP: Well, anyway, you’re supposed to be asking me the questions and I sent this right back to you and I apologize for that but it’s very helpful to me because I hate to admit how little I know about Malaysia. But I like to talk about actual experiences that I’ve had rather than to speculate and I haven’t had any experience in Malaysia itself, unfortunately. I’ve always had a desire to go there, heard wonderful things about the country and its beauty and so forth but never made it and I apologize for that. Maybe you’ll get me there now. (laughs)

CN: We’ll certainly try! Well, to jump on what you said about your experience in Indonesia in particular, one thing that I do notice in your book is that a lot of the countries you talk about have oil and are strategic for US interests. Recently there is talk of off-shore oil drilling possibilities in the waters off Indonesia and Malaysia. Do you foresee that this region will now become an area of strategic American intervention and interest as well? Is that almost like a given—if you have oil we’re going to come in there and we’re going to do what we can to get it from you?

JT: Basically can I just frame it in this way: if you could let us know a little bit about where South East Asia, or Malaysia and Indonesia, lie on the hit list.

JP: I think South East Asia and Asia in general has always been pretty high on the hit list but as you pointed out, we’ve focused very much on those countries that have the resources that we covet, primarily oil. And those have been the ones that have been hit the most and the hardest certainly. There’s no question about that. And that will continue to be the situation as we move forward.

There’s a new factor here now, and that of course is China, and India, North Korea, which are emerging as big competitors to the United States. Well, North Korea not as a competitor so much as a threat. But China is certainly emerging as a major potential competitor to the United States on the empire building scene and China seems to be making many overtures towards the other Asian countries to join forces to them, to represent itself as a friend, to reach out, and the United States government and what I call the corporatocracy in the United States is very fearful of this. It’s one of the reasons that we attacked Iraq. It’s one of the reasons we put so much emphasis on the Middle East, on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait because China and Japan and Korea get most of their oil from the Middle East and the United States doesn’t get so much from those areas. So that’s one of the reasons that we’ve put so much emphasis on the Middle East, it’s because of China and Japan and Korea.

Now, if it becomes more apparent that there’s a lot more oil resources in the rest of Asia, in South East Asia, for example, then undoubtedly China and Japan will also try to exploit those areas, which will mean that they will become almost like war zones between the countries of China, India, Japan, Korea and the United States. So I think Asian people need to be very, very aware of what’s going on and be very careful and recognize that although oil has always seem to people to be a great benefit when it’s discovered in their country, in fact it’s always turned out to be a huge burden. Oil has done tremendous damage to those countries that have discovered it. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, incidentally.

CN: Part of what’s interesting in your book is that you talk about how imperialism is largely non-militaristic because it based on economic expansion. The corporatocracy, as you say, largely do not need to resort to violent or brutal measures. But interestingly enough, with Iraq and earlier on Afghanistan and perhaps even Iran, there seems to be a sign that America is flexing largely its military muscle. Do you see that as portentous in some way? Could this be indication that the empire is cracking and there needs to be a strong show of military might for China or for India, so that they know who they are dealing with in essence?

JP: Yeah. Yes, you’ve asked a very important question. Whenever the economic hit men fail, the second line of attack is the jackals—you know, the assassins, who overthrow governments. And in the past 3 or 4 decades, the economic hit men and the jackals have been pretty successful, ever since Vietnam. But today, we’re finding increasing amounts of resistance.

Iraq is a really good example where both the economic hit men and the jackals failed in the 1980s. They took out Saddam Hussein’s military in 1991, January of 1991. We did not want to take out Saddam Hussein. We could have. We did not want to because he was a strong man who had good control over his country and he was also a shield against Iran. So that was a real threat to Iran. So we would have liked to keep him in power but as our puppet. So when we took out his military in 1991, we thought that after that he would succumb, that the economic hit men would be able to win him over in the 90s. They tried but were unsuccessful again. And again the jackals weren’t successful. So, as a last resort we sent in the military and you could see the same sort of thing as being a real possibility of happening in Iran and Syria—that the economic hit men and the jackals are not succeeding. So, when that happens, there’s always the possibility of us sending in the military. It also happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban was not converted by the economic hit men and the jackals couldn’t get rid of the Taliban so we sent the military in there.

The other part of that is—and you were quite right—that at various times, the United States’ presidents—and this is true of both Republicans and Democrats—feel that it’s important to flex their muscle and show that we still have this capability. And I think particularly with what’s going in Korea and China, the Bush administration is feeling a very strong urge to flex its muscles. In fact, recently just saying that it will militarily defend Taiwan if it has to, once again repeating that old threat. So, periodically in history, Reagan did it with Grenada, the first Bush president did it with Panama and then again with Iraq, Clinton did it, he also bombed Iraq and the Sudan and many other places and now we’re seeing it on a very large scale.

So there’s two things at play here: one is that there’s a number of countries where the economic hit men and the jackals have failed, and second is the desire on the part of the Bush administration to prove to the world that we are truly a military power and we are not afraid to use our military might if called upon to do so.

CN: Just curious what you think about what Chavez recently came out to say—that he thinks America is going to assassinate him. When he said that it made me think of your book and what you said about the jackals because it’s clear that in so many important ways now Latin America is consolidating as a region to fight American economic and capitalist interest.

JP: Yes, it’s significant that in the last 6 major elections in Latin America, the presidential candidates who stood up to the United States were elected. This happened in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela. All of those countries voted for the candidate who opposed US interests and corporate interests. And it’s very interesting to watch now what’s going to happen.

I think Chavez has ever reason to be extremely cautious and there’s no question that the United States tried to overthrow him in April of 2002. That the United States was behind the coup I have no question about that. But the other thing that seems to be happening among many of these presidents, particularly Gutierrez of Ecuador and Lula of Brazil and to some extent Chavez of Venezuela is that they seem to be giving in.

Chavez has been signing some very sweet deals with American oil companies, despite his rhetoric. And Gutierrez who was voted in to a large degree by the indigenous people on an anti-oil company vote has now succumbed to the oil companies and the indigenous people of Ecuador are extremely upset with him. And Lula seems to be backing off a lot of his campaign promises and many people in Brazil feel that he’s sold out also. The one exception to this, the strongest exception to this seems to be Kirchner of Argentina who still seems to be standing up and refusing to pay the debt.

My fear is that already economic hit men and the jackals have been getting through these elected officials who ran on anti-American platforms who now may continue to talk a good line but they appear to be bending to the will of the corporatocracy, to the will of the economic hit men. I can’t say that I blame them. They’ve got to look at history, they’ve got to look at Allende, and Arbenz, Roldós and Torrijos and a whole line of people, of presidents who stood up to the United States and were taken out of office and often assassinated. I’m sure that Gutierrez and Chavez and Lula are very aware of what happened to previous Latin American leaders who opposed US interests.

CN: In some ways, when I hear you speak, it almost feels like if you don’t get assassinated, it must mean you have sold out in some way.

JP: That’s a very interesting observation. You’ve got to look at it… if you were running for President and you really wanted to reign in the corporatocracy and you ran on a platform that was very nationalistic and said, “we’re not going to let the Americans, the empire, the corporatocracy exploit us” and you won, and you started implementing those policies. You can only imagine the kind of pressure that would be exerted on you by the economic hit men and always with the threat of the jackals in the background. And all you have to do is look at history around the world—look at presidents who did resist the corporatocracy and see what happened to them—to know that you would be in a very, very difficult position. And there’s not only the threat of you being assassinated but there’s also the threat of many of your countrymen being assassinated.

So, it was significant that in 1981 the jackals assassinated Omar Torrijos of Panama but when Noriega followed his footsteps to a certain degree, they didn’t assassinate Noriega, instead they attacked his country, killed 2 to 3 thousand Panamanians—innocent Panamanians—and sent Noriega out and put him in prison and he’s still in prison in the United States. Now, in a way I think what happened to Noriega is much worse than what happened to Torrijos. Torrijos was killed in an airplane crash, died a martyr, a very quick death. Noriega watched 2 to 3 thousand of his countrymen being killed, a large section of Panama City destroyed and then he was dragged off and is spending the rest of his life essentially in solitary confinement in the United States. It’s a pretty scary thing. If you’re the president of Venezuela today or Ecuador or Brazil or Malaysia, it certainly reminds you of this. You’re gonna think twice about what you’re going to do.

CN: It sounds like political parties and political leaders are not necessarily the way out. If so, is capitalism and American imperialist interest so strong that there is no way to get out of it except to acquiesce in some form?

JP: We must not acquiesce, and Malaysia must not acquiesce, and Ecuador must not acquiesce, and Brazil and Venezuela must not acquiesce because this is a failed system. The United States experiment, the United States empire has failed, as I pointed out earlier with some of the statistics. And in my own country, in the United States, we have 45 million people without any health insurance at all. We have 12 million families—not people but families—who worry about where their next meal is coming from. And we have terrible statistics that I mentioned earlier. All of our social statistics that indicate we are a very unhappy people. We overeat, we over drink, we kill each other at astonishing rates; we beat up on our families, our children and our wives. It’s a terrible situation. Nobody should want to repeat this experiment. The world just can’t support it. The resources of the world and the ability of our environment to handle the pollution just can’t support this type of thing. So we must not acquiesce, the Malaysians must not acquiesce, the Venezuelans, the Ecuadorians, the Brazilians and the citizens of the United States must not acquiesce either.

I think the system is very vulnerable. I think we’re seeing huge cracks in it all over the place. We saw the 1997 Asian economic crisis, which then spread around the world, and that was really a fault of the system. A very large degree of that grew out of capitalism and then it grew out of the policies of the IMF and the World Bank. Big mistakes. We’re seeing really a rebellion in Europe right now. It’s kind of led by Germany and France but Europe is not happy with the United States and it’s posing some real opposition to them.

We’re seeing this rebellion in South America that we talked about earlier. Regardless of whether these presidents acquiesce or not, the fact of the matter is the people of South America have spoken very loudly and clearly. Three quarters of the population of Latin America, has, in the last few years, voted anti-America. It’s very significant. Regardless of what the leaders end up doing the system is cracking. And it has to crack cause it’s not working.

But we mustn’t expect that our leaders are going to be able to solve this problem. We can vote in the very best leaders in the world who have the best intentions and once they get into office the pressures are so extensive that it must come from the people. It must be us speaking out. It must be us speaking out with our money, with where we shop, with what we buy. We need to protest. We need to picket and boycott corporations that are doing dastardly things in our countries. That works. We’ve seen it time and time again. When we change consciousness and when we have social or civil movements, they have tremendous impact.

Look at Russia. You know, who would’ve believed, 15 years ago, that the Soviet Union would’ve collapsed? And it wasn’t because of American military might or CIA. It was because of a change of consciousness. It was because of a handful of union leaders, poets and playwrights. It was a change of consciousness that occurred in the Soviet Union. What about South Africa? Mandela was in prison for almost 30 years and then became president of his country. Change occurs. It occurs tremendously. Look at China. It wasn’t too long ago that the Cultural Revolution was going on in there. And China’s changed tremendously. Look at India. There’ve been tremendous changes in the world. We can create these changes and we must. I think a country like Malaysia can really be a leader in this. A country like Malaysia that stayed sort of outside some the major political struggles of the past decade can really take a lead in changing consciousness.

JT: But John, countries like India and China… China is basically where there’s a whole new market for the corporatocracy. And lots of car manufacturers, for example, are invested very heavily in China. It is reported that they now have the highest accident rate in the world. It appears to me that places like China and India—and I think Malaysia as well—because we’re very much seduced by the consumer lifestyle here, at least in the urban centers, that we’re acquiescing.

JP: Yes, when I talked about China and India it wasn’t trying to hold them up as models that we should follow in terms of materialism or consumerism. I was simply saying that tremendous changes have occurred in those countries over the last 30 years, which shows the opportunity for change.

You know, I also write books about shamanism and indigenous people. One of the tenets of shamanism is that the world is as we dream it. When we have a vision of how we want our lives or the world to be, if we make a commitment to that vision and we give it energy, it will happen. The history of the 20th century has been a history of envisioning material wealth and prosperity. And we’ve had this dream as a species—the human race basically—and we’ve given it a lot of energy. And it’s worked to a very large degree for quite a few people. It’s also created tremendous problems for other people because of the way we did it. But nonetheless there’s been tremendous economic growth and that’s what’s happened in countries like India and China and Malaysia also. The focus has all been on economic growth in the 20th century. But we’ve proven that the world is as we dream it because that was the dream we had and we gave it energy.

Now, we’ve entered a new period, it’s the new millennium, and all the indigenous people around the world prophesy that something very significant could happen in the next few years. We need now to create a new dream which is not based on materialism, which is based on justice, on compassion, on taking care of our environment, on taking care of each other as human beings. This is a new dream. It’s an entirely new dream. And it’s hard even for us to imagine what that looks like out in the future.

We go back to any time in history, let’s say the Middle Ages or the time before we knew that the world was round. It was impossible in those times to envision what would happen when we came up with a new concept, when we understood that the world really was round and that it revolved around the sun rather than the sun revolving around the world. This created a whole new paradigm. But before that happened, nobody could’ve possibly imagined what the new paradigm would look like. We’re a little bit in that position now.

We’ve been living for the past century and more in this dream of materialism and now that dream needs to change because we’ve found that it works to a certain degree but only to a certain degree and what we need now is a truly new dream. A truly new way of visioning ourselves which I think is actually really reflective in the United States Declaration of Independence, which says that every human being has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit happiness—doesn’t say anything about material wealth. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; I think that’s a very good vision for the next phase here. Let’s forget about the materialism part of it and let’s focus on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

CN: On a more personal note, I think it’s quite remarkable to know that you have, in effect, come from being an EHM—economic hit man—to being, as you’ve once said in an interview, a shaman of sorts. How did this happen and do you see that process viably happening for other people in the corporatocracy or in higher levels of corporate power?

JP: I think that process is happening around the world now. I see people all around in corporations and everywhere else taking a much greater interest in what we call new age, you know, indigenous ideas and environmental ideas. They don’t always act on these things because our actions always follow our desires and our dreams quite a bit.

The Alcoholics Anonymous program talks about 12 steps and the first one is recognizing you’ve got a problem. It’s making the confession, like I did in the book. And that’s a very important step and I think around the world we’ve reached that—the fact that you and I are talking about this, the fact that you’re interviewing me about a book that probably isn’t even available in Malaysia at this point. And I had a major German television station here at my house two days ago and the book isn’t even out in German yet. It comes out next week in German. But this book suddenly is taking off. It’s fascinating. It’s interested people around the world and the fact that that’s happening is very significant. That people really are looking for change. And that’s the first step. So, yes, I think this process is happening to many people but each of those comes from a different background and there’s a different reason.

I think people are beginning to recognize around the world that the true weapons of mass destruction are poverty and environmental destruction…environmental catastrophe. Those are the true weapons of mass destruction and they truly are destroying human society and the planet right now, those two things. It’s not nuclear weapons, it’s not biological weapons, it’s poverty and environmental catastrophe. They’re wiping whole species out, something like 200 species every single day. And killing a lot of people. I think a lot of us are realizing that and we’re realizing that part of that, that the problem behind both of those things—the poverty and environmental catastrophe—is our economic dream of tremendous materialism: of huge buildings, and lots of cars and big industries. Those are creating those weapons of mass destruction which are poverty and environmental catastrophe.

A lot of people are realizing that and as we realize that, we know that we need to move into something new. A new dream. A dream that is defined essentially by the American Declaration of Independence of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people. And incidentally, the writers of the American Declaration of Independence drew on philosophers from Asia, from Africa, from Europe and from Latin America. And the system that they developed in this country reflected the governmental systems of many of the indigenous nations in the United States. So that concept that’s reflected in the Declaration of Independence is basically a global concept, it was expressed in the American Declaration of Independence but it came from philosophers and ideas of all around the world and it’s really time now for that philosophy to reach back out to the whole world, for us to realize that what we’re not looking for is material exploitation of resources on a grander scale. What we’re looking for is the right life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everybody.

Now, you want me to answer the question of how I got into this? That was a long answer, sorry.

It really started for me as a very young boy, growing up in rural New Hampshire, and my ancestors go back to the revolutionary war. Tom Paine, who wrote Common Sense, is a distant ancestor of mine, as is Ethan Allen, who won the first battle, the first victory for the Americans in the Revolution. And I was brought up steeped in that history but I was also always very fascinated by the Algonquin people, the Iroquois people, the indigenous people who came from New Hampshire, Vermont, the areas that I lived in. I was very fascinated by them and I knew I had some of their blood in my veins too. So, my interest in indigenous people started very young.

Then, when I went into the Peace Corps, I started living with, or close to, many indigenous people both in the Amazon and the Andes. And I found that their philosophy and their way of living was extremely appealing. And their shamanism, their healing saved my life. I was healed by a shaman. That made a huge impression on me. So, that was with me for a long time.

Then, when I was an economic hit man, when I went to places like Indonesia, for example, I would take time off the end of my assignment and spend time with indigenous people as much as I could. For example, I spent a lot of time with the Bugi people of the island of Sulawesi and I spent a lot of time with the Bedouin people in the deserts of Iran and I spent a lot of time with the Mayan people in central America and the Quichua in the Andes. So even while I was an economic hit man I took time off and continued to study and work with these indigenous people. I did it very secretly cause if I told people at the World Bank I was doing this they would’ve thought that I was crazy.

So, these people had a major influence on me and then, in 1990, I basically retired from being an economic hit man and running an energy company and I went back to the Amazon and reconnected in a very strong way and formed a non-profit organization, Dream Change, which you can find on dreamchange.org on the web, and reestablished this connection and began writing about indigenous ways and teaching about them. They’ve been a very, very strong factor in my life and given me a great deal of hope.

CN: Since so much of indigenous culture is also oral history and because so many of them are being wiped out due to capitalism and globalization, is there a way to get at some of these wisdoms for the future generations? I know that you conduct trips and you have people conduct trips to visit indigenous people. Am I correct?

JP: Yes, we’ve been doing that for a number of years now and it still goes on. And it’s about learning from them, not trying to change them or teach them anything. We’ve brought many of them to the United States and to Europe and to other places where we’ve had gatherings of shamans. So, yes, I’ve tried very hard in the last decade or so to have this exchange of information, this exchange of wisdom where we could learn from the indigenous people. And it’s very, very disturbing to me to see how the indigenous peoples around the world are being destroyed and are, in a way, destroying themselves.

One of the problems with materialism is that it’s extremely seductive. So, when an indigenous person in the Amazon rainforest, for example, meet someone with a flashlight, that is a pretty marvelous thing to have inside in the Amazon and so they want flashlights. And then they see someone with a machete and they certainly want a machete because that makes life a lot easier for them. The watch is a very seductive thing even if they don’t really care about time. It’s a very interesting and seductive thing. Now cell phones and televisions and radios are becoming very seductive.

So, one of the things that we try to do at Dream Change is honour the old ways, honour the shamans, honour the old ceremonies and the old music and the old musical instruments. And we find that when we, from the United States, go down into the Amazon, into other indigenous communities and honour their old ways and listen to their old people and listen to their traditional music and really enjoy it, that’s sort of an awakening for many of their young people because suddenly they’re saying, “oh, well maybe this stuff is good too.” But I’m afraid that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for indigenous people to maintain their old traditions.

CN: To a certain extent I would also say that the kind of trappings of materialism that you talk about is difficult to shrug off for us largely because it’s so much a part of our lives that we can’t imagine not having those things. In a way, what you’re asking for people to do is to give up the very things that make them who they are in fundamental ways. This is particularly true in urban Kuala Lumpur, our Malaysian capital. So, is the answer a balance between a kind of spiritualism and materialism? Is there no place for technological advancement? What would be your answer to that?

JP: I think the answer is something totally new that we haven’t really looked at—that is going to draw upon the old ways, the indigenous ways, the traditional ways and technology. But I go back again to saying that whenever huge paradigm shifts occur, before they occur you can’t really see what’s going to come, anymore than people in the Middle Ages could, or anymore than people who believed that the sun revolved around the earth and the earth was flat. They couldn’t possibly conceive of what the world would look like once that concept changed. We can’t either.

It’s not either or. It’s not either technology or indigenous ways, it’s some new paradigm that unfortunately none of us, including me, can foresee what it’s going to look like. I think we have to have faith though. And I think we have to fall back on the knowledge that things cannot continue the way they’re going now. It just is not possible. We’re putting far too much stress on the planet. We go back to the greatest weapon of mass destruction, which is poverty and environmental catastrophe and that’s grown out of the current system.

And that’s one of the things that’s put tremendous pressure on indigenous people, incidentally, is increased population. The impoverishment and the loss of their resources. How can indigenous people live in the jungles or forests of Malaysia when the forests are cut down? They can’t. They can’t continue that way of life. You can’t even do it in the Amazon anymore. There’s not enough land for people to continue to live as hunters and gatherers. Things are changing and in the future there’s going to be a major change that’s very difficult for us to envision at this point. The most important thing for us to do right now is to admit that the current system is not working and is not sustainable and cannot continue and that we need to commit ourselves and pour our energy into changing it. And into emphasizing values that appeal to people rather than emphasizing values that honour things: materialism.

JT: John, would you be able to name some of the people who front as economic hit men and would you also be able to name some of the main players or main companies in the corporatocracy?

JP: Well, you know, I’m not into it anymore so it’s very difficult (sighs) for me to do that. But I think any one of us can look around and see which companies are out there exploiting the world and what people are behind this. I mean, I don’t have any insights into this that everybody else doesn’t have today because I’m not part of that system anymore. But we look around and we see the people that kind of run things, we see people jumping back and forth.

There’s Robert McNamara who was president of Ford Motor Company and then became Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and then President of the World Bank. Today we’ve got a guy like Dick Cheney who’s president of Halliburton, before that he was Secretary of Defense and President of Halliburton, and now he’s Vice President. There’s any number of people out there that is pretty obvious. But I don’t have any inside information these days. I’m not in that system anymore. So all I can do is state the obvious basically.

JT: Well these people seem to come and go then but they serve the interests of capital?

JP: Well, they serve the interests of empire. What we’ve done is create this first truly global empire in the history of the world. It’s an empire that’s been created primarily without the military, with the military just in the background. And it’s an empire without an emperor or a king. The United States has no emperor or king and every 8 years we get a new leader, or less than 8 years. 8 years is the maximum. The President’s not really the leader of this country for it’s a very short period. The equivalent to an emperor or king for this empire is what I call the corporatocracy, which is these men and a few women who run our major corporations or big banks and our government. And they’re around regardless of whether the president’s Democrat or Republican. And not just from the United States, there’re people from other countries too. But the United States is really like the CEO. If you look at the largest economies in the world today, out of the hundred largest economies, 51 are corporations. Not countries, they’re corporations. And 47 of those corporations are US corporations. So, this corporatocracy actually lasts for a long time and it reaches across all administrations.

CN: So it will be a lot difficult to dismantle them than electing a new president, that’s for sure.

JP: You know in the last US elections there was no discussion of foreign policy. Kerry didn’t bring up foreign policy. Talked about Afghanistan, Iraq and terrorism—that’s not foreign policy and those are just the symptoms of the disease. The real disease is much greater than that—it’s the system, it’s the empire building, it’s what economic hit men do, it’s exploiting and ripping off people around the world and creating a great deal of anger and hatred and suffering around the world. That’s the disease and nobody talked about that in the last elections.

CN: Do you see the resurgence, or perhaps even the perpetuation, of a certain kind of faith-based consciousness in America as a kind of return to spiritualism? There’s a strong revival of Christian evangelicalism in America. Short of going back to indigenous culture, do you see organized religion as a possible solution in the minds of people today?

JP: Gee, I never thought about that. That’s a good question. I suspect that a lot of religious fervour in the United States and elsewhere is a reflection of people’s basic unhappiness with materialism and with the system that we’ve created. I think people are more and more looking outside of materialism and so I suspect that a lot of this religious fervour is symptomatic of that deeper displeasure. I also think that a lot of what’s going on, at least in the United States, is exploitation. The corporatocracy has been using what it calls religion as a way to control people, to appease people. And I think that’s certainly been done recently in regards to the clash between Christianity and Islam. I think the United States has used this conservative religious right movement as a way to support its expansionist policies in countries that have oil resources and also are largely Islamic.

In my book I talk quite a lot about the experience I had with the Indonesian young people and how back in 1971 they referred me to Al Toynbee’s book and also pointed out that even in 1971 they were saying that the big clash will be between Muslims and Christianity mainly because that’s the way the empire was going and it certainly seems that way to me. So I think some of this religious fervour is the result of the tremendous cynical exploitation of religion by the corporatocracy.

CN: In your book you mentioned an Indonesian young woman who said that the real target of America is actually the Muslim world. It almost seems incidental that most Muslim countries happen to have oil. Do you see this as a problem because the corporatocracy is so much linked to organized religion in America today? Do you see this as a troubling trend because faith is now walking hand in hand with economic interest?

JP: Well I think it’s very disturbing. I’m a great believer in faith and I’m a very spiritual person. I believe in prayer. I find it extremely disturbing when religion is used as a justification for war, for exploiting other people. I mean that’s totally inconsistent with every religious concept that I know and believe in, whether it’s Christian or Muslim or Hindu or animist, you know. It’s totally out of line with any form of spirituality. So, when religion is called upon to support war or exploitation of resources, it’s a terrible thing. And I do think that that is happening amongst certain parts of the population in the United States and undoubtedly elsewhere.

Don’t you think it’s significant that we haven’t attacked Venezuela? And Venezuela is a Catholic and Christian country and comes from a very similar tradition to ours. We haven’t attacked Cuba even though every president of the United States since Kennedy— since Eisenhower in fact—has railed against Castro and Cuba. There was the Bay of Pigs but other than that… Yet we’re very quick to go into places like Iraq or African countries, places where people have a different view of religion than we do and come from a very different heritage and I think that’s very sad. I think that’s very, very disturbing.

CN: Do you see the possibility that if the American president were not Christian that things might change?

(long pause)

JP: Ooh. You just shocked me. I… you know… I guess the answer I would have to that is that at this point in time I can’t possibly see the corporatocracy allowing anyone to become president of the United States who isn’t Christian. I think it’s extremely unlikely, unfortunately. I would love to see a President of the United States be non-white, non-male, non-Christian but I don’t see that as happening, at least not within the next 2 years.

CN: You say that you don’ think the corporatocracy would “allow” that. How much influence or direct intervention does the corporatocracy have in electoral procedures in the US?

JP: I think the corporatocracy has tremendous influence in electoral procedures in the United States. US elections are financed—high finance, tremendous amounts of money. And that all comes through the corporatocracy and they don’t allow anyone to make it to the nominee of either party—Democrat or Republican—who doesn’t meet with their approval.

There’s tremendous indication that Carter, for example, was hand-picked by the corporatocracy because they knew that after what happened to Nixon that Ford was not going to be elected. They knew that no Republican was going be elected. When Nixon resigned the corporatocracy knew that a Republican was not going to be elected after that. And they felt that Carter was the least damaging Democrat they could have in office and then they could quickly replace him with another Republican. They certainly had tremendous control over Clinton. And I have no doubt that—there’s no question—both Gore and Kerry met the standards of the corporatocracy. They were both approved by the corporatocracy. The corporatocracy has tremendous control over the electoral system in our country and a lot of that simply comes from the fact that it costs a fortune, a huge fortune to even run for president or to run for any major office in the United States.

CN: It makes sense to me now why you say the electoral process is not necessarily the answer because it’s clear that elections cannot, in any way, change the way the system is run. I am baffled as to how we are going to move beyond this if the whole world is built on one man, one vote? In parts of Asia where people are saying things are corrupt, it is always lauded that if we have fair elections things will change. But if that’s not the case then politically we’re screwed, not just economically.

JP: Well, we can change this. You’ve asked, does the corporatocracy control the elections. Yes. Does it have to, ultimately? No. We can change that. It’s been changed before in the history of the United States, for example, in the 1890s when William Jennings Bryant got the Democratic nomination. He lost the election but he ran on a very strong anti-corporate platform and he got the nomination for the Democrats and when Teddy Roosevelt became President, he implemented a lot of the things that’d been proposed by Bryant, like the Sherman Anti-trust Act. It also happened in the 1930s, a tremendous revolt when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President—it was a major change there.

This can happen. We can change things. But what has to happen first is a redefinition of this dream of ours in this country where Americans and other people around the world, Malaysians and others, will decide we don’t want to continue with the system as it is, we need to move into a new realm, we need to move forward into a new system. There were candidates available in the last elections of the United States that offered some real alternatives. Kucinich was one of them. I think Dean offered some real alternatives and he’s back in the system now. I think these are individuals that could be pushed by the people, if the people of this country really spoke out and said this is what we want, it can happen. I mean everybody has skeletons in their closets and the corporatocracy knows those skeletons. For sure George Bush has many skeletons in his closet but they don’t choose to expose those.

Let’s for example say that I decided to run for President (laughs). Well I don’t intend to, believe me, but let’s say I did. Then they would start pulling out skeletons out of my closet you know.
They could, for example, pull out things I’d done with indigenous people and say I’m crazy. I’m a shaman and I’ve done all this crazy stuff with indigenous people and they could make it look very weird, easily. Couple of major articles in newspapers. And they could do the same thing with anybody who’s running. But at that point the candidate has to step forward and say, “Yes I did these things.” Including maybe stepping forward and say, “Oh yeah, I took drugs or I had extra-marital affairs with other women but that doesn’t mean anything as far as me being president. What I’m going to do for you as president is I’m going to save the world. I’m going to paint a new vision. Together we’re going to march into this world and we’re gonna create a world where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness becomes a reality for everybody. And rather than… who was it?… Franklin Roosevelt, I guess, who said a chicken in every pot—well, I think that was very materialistic. We’d gone through the Depression; people needed that. But now what we say is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in every heart, basically. That’s what it’s going to take.

What I’m talking about here is we must have a change of consciousness from the grassroots. It’s not going to be from the top that the change is going to come. It’s not going to be a president or corporate leader or anybody else in any country. It’s gonna be from the bottom.

Gorbachev did not create the change in Russia. The change of consciousness that went on in Russia brought Gorbachev to power. And that’s going to be true everywhere. Franklin Roosevelt did not create change in this country. It was the desire for change that brought Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency.

CN: How would you imagine that some of that grassroots work would actually occur, short of going from door to door?

JP: I have a book that’s only been out since November, in its ninth printing. It’s on every bestseller list in the United States. You’re hearing about it in Malaysia. I was on the BBC the other day and it’s not even available in England yet. I’ve been on major Brazilian television shows and German shows. It’s getting out there even though the mainstream media won’t touch it. I haven’t been on the Today show or Good Morning America or 60 Minutes or Oprah. (laughs) I haven’t been on any of those shows. Yet the book is going around. I’ve been told that everybody in the United Nations and the World Bank is reading the book right now. So, I have great faith. I think we have a communication system through the internet now that’s open to everybody. There’s some people who don’t have the internet yet but pretty soon they’ll all have the internet. And this is part of where the hope comes from, I think.

The mass media has become irrelevant. It’s a form of entertainment. In the United States, the nightly news and the morning programs on the major networks are pure entertainment. They’re not news at all. They say they’re news but they’re not news. You’re writing news. Amy Goodman on Democracy Now—she’s reaching around the world. She’s news. She does in-depth reporting. Yesterday she had an amazing panel discussion on the internet about Syria and Iraq and all the Middle East with 3 men who represented very diverse views. That’s news. It’s available around the world now.

Who cares what CBS or NBC or ABC are doing? They’ve become irrelevant except as a form of entertainment. And they’re even becoming less and less relevant as a form of entertainment as cable networks get out there. So things are changing rapidly. I do believe that the message gets out. It’s why I wrote my book. It’s why you’re writing an article about the book, why you do what you do. Every single day I average about 7 radio programs. I do it right here from my telephone. But none of them are on the major networks but they’re still reaching millions of people. In the United States right now—I don’t know about Malaysia—there’s a tremendous alternative media: radio, press, internet, that reaches a lot of people. So that makes me optimistic.

CN: I’ve heard stories about threats to your life. Is that still happening? Has there been any official response from the American government about your book?

JP: No. You know, Gandhi said, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, and then you win. Well, I just hope I live long enough to make it to the last part. (laughs)

At this stage they’re ignoring me and I’m very aware that there’s going to be possibility that they will attack me at some point, either physically or verbally or both. I think that’s very likely to come but you know, I’m 60 years ago. I have a 22 year old daughter. I don’t know whether I’m going to live another day or another 30 years. But I do know that when I’m on my deathbed I wanna look back and say, “During my last moments I did everything I possibly could to make this a better world for my daughter and her brothers and sisters all around the world.”

__________________________________________________
This interview appeared for the first time in Off The Edge, April 2005 issue.

www.sangsuria.blogspot.com

2005-02-24T21:40:00.000+08:00

I am breaking precedent for the first time in my blog by actually writing a note to all my readers--and not merely posting my customary published writings.

I would like to invite you to visit a new blog created by a very close and dear friend of mine, Ong Ju Lin. I first met Ju Lin when I was an undergraduate in America; even then I was blown away by her energy, her kinetic and pure charisma, and her capability for deep and empathetic introspection. Most of all, I was awed by her generous spirit, her limitless courage and her willingness to engage with every aspect of humanity with love and sensitivity.

I have always respected her work as a photojournalist and investigative reporter extraordinaire and for the first time, I (and all her fans worldwide) will be able to access her writings and photos whenever we please. This is indeed a cause for celebration and it is my hope that those of you who visit Ju Lin's site will be inspired to think, to create, to take action, and to believe that there is still a lot of unbelievably good people in the world.

Ju Lin, welcome (as my pal Bonn would say) kablogista!

Noor Mahnun Mohamed: Interview

2005-02-23T13:28:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

In the bygone era before snapshots and professional studio portraits, famous figureheads and dolled-up dignitaries, pompous politicians and coiffed capitalists purchased posterity through the laborious process of portraiture. Artists sketched and painted while these men and women sat for them for hours. In our very own Central Market artists’ bazaar, portraits are painted on a daily basis but no-one sits for the artist—they give him their photos as reference instead. There is no denying that the human preoccupation with self-likeness has not diminished though artists’ desire to paint them may have dwindled. Noor Mahnun Mohamed, a Malaysian artist of Kelantanese descent, has resuscitated an old tradition of painting people but with an invigorating psychological depth and a visual style that has been praised for its simplicity and meticulousness.

The human figure has a prominent place in your work. What is your attraction to the human form?

I really like the Renaissance artists. Before I studied art, I was also a student of architecture and I developed a deep interest in the humanist tradition.

You say you like the Renaissance artists but you have a tendency to use flat perspective in your paintings. Don’t you see this as a form of rebellion against the more classical Western art tradition?

I sometimes adopt a more conventional sense of perspective in my work but I do like seeing things from strange angles; this for me is what leads to a sense of pictorial depth. I find it easier to manipulate the composition with flat perspective because the objects can be asymmetric and this is much more interesting than just having them point towards one perspective. For me composition takes place from a more realist point of view, meaning, I copy nature but I don’t imitate it.

I’ve noticed that colour and composition are paramount in your work. Do you often begin the painting process with these 2 considerations in mind? Can you give us some idea of how you work--the process of your painting?

I usually begin with an image that I think might be interesting to put in another situation or a room. After I bring these two different points together, I sketch it out on small grid and I play around with the size for a bit before enlarging it onto a larger grid. It’s just line drawing at this point. I always focus on the composition first. Colour comes later because the colour that you mix on the palette is usually not what appears on canvas because so much depends on what colour is beside it. I then decide if I want cool or warm tones but I tend to work with a blue and green palette.

Why the prominence of portraiture in your recent work?

It is an exercise. For my subjects, it is exciting, a novelty. Nowadays people take more photos. But they are still curious about how people see them. When you take photos of yourself, you do it not because you do not know how you look like but because you are curious about how you look like to yourself. Some people actually don’t like how they look in their paintings but that is because it is not how they see themselves but how I see them. Not everyone realizes this.

In an interview you once said that it is important to create distance between the painted figures and the viewer, and that buffer zones are necessary. Do you still feel this way?

Well, I don’t just feel this way about art but also about real life. A lot of it depends on the viewer because the eye does not impose buffer zones of course, but I want figures to inhabit their own worlds and thereby have a sense of estrangement from us. But this is a subconscious development. I don’t consciously create figures that reside in their own worlds; only later do I see it when I look retrospectively. My new works are more people friendly. Before the figures used to be more mysterious, now they are just paintings of people I know, my friends, my parents when they were young. This is because I meet so many people and I keep moving around and my past is in boxes. I think my past is also very much the present. At the moment, the way I see my parents, for instance, is I also how I see my past and the memories I hold.

In what way do you feel you have evolved as an artist/painter since returning from Germany in late 1997?

When I painted in Germany I was a student and I had the luxury of huge studios. It’s not the same here but I do feel at home in Malaysia. The buffer zones seem to be losing themselves here.

Why this increasing sense of familiarity rather than estrangement with your painting subjects?

I think I am getting old therefore I’m more people friendly. (Laughs)

_______________________________________________________________
Noor Mahnun Mohamed’s solo exhibition will be on at Valentine Willie until 3 March, 2005

Manit Sriwanichpoom: Interview

2005-02-08T19:32:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

We live in a world where photography has become the tool of advertising and capitalist propaganda and we acquiesce. Indeed, we even genuflect at the altar of shopping and slick promotion gimmicks. As a professional photographer who lives off the fat of lucrative advertising orders, Thai artist Manit Sriwanichpoom knows this world of insidious global capital all too well. His response: the creation of his iconic and vibrantly-hued Pink Man, the fruit of capitalism’s excesses but also the most apathetic observer of its ironies and failures.

Why the Pink Man? Isn't it mostly women who love to shop? Isn’t pink usually a colour associated with femininity?

First of all, I'm a man and I know man's world well enough. Since the World is still being controlled and led by men, who else should I criticize? The particular 'fluorescent pink' that I've used is considered by Thai people to be culturally the color of bad taste, and vulgar. I wanted to portray a middle-aged man looking funny, pathetic, and contemptible. I can't think about getting a woman to act in this role since I see that she is also another victim of men's ideas.

Are there particular issues in Thailand that you want to highlight using the Pink Man? Are these issues applicable to the rest of Asia as well?

The issues that I’ve highlighted are consumerism, tourism, socio-political issues, image-making and the latest one that I've been working on is 'Neo-nationalism'. Asian countries have been developing in the same sort of direction in terms of economic practice—Globalization and Free Trade, despite political differences.

The Pink Man is also someone who is constantly window shopping but he doesn’t buy anything because his cart is always empty. Are you trying to say that shopping is an act without meaning? That consumerism can never fulfill us?

Yes, that is what I wanted to say. Consumerism is a form of Greed. How could you fulfill it?

What is your opinion about the effects of consumerism and globalization in Asia and Thailand?

I am not against globalization if it's for good and not for greed, for better understanding not for manipulation, for freedom and not for slavery. So far, from what I see, we have the wrong perception about globalization. People think that through the mechanism of consumerism and technology we will achieve globalization faster and get richer faster. Instead it's creating more problems globally such as terrorism, neo-nationalism, global warming and so on.

What will come next for you in your work? In light of the recent events in Southern Thailand, do you think you may be creating works commenting on the problems in that area?

Yes, in my next show the Pink Man will deal with 'Neo-nationalism' that has come back again, from the economic crisis of 1997 with the rise of Thailand's current ruling party 'Thai Rak Thai' (Thai loves Thai or Thai Patriot) up to the unrest in the south.

___________________________________________________________
This interview appears in Off The Edge, February 2005 issue.

2005-01-31T17:45:00.000+08:00

Botero: The Interview

2005-01-31T17:41:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge
Pictures by Angelia Poon

Some call him the Maestro. Some consider him a living legend because he commands millions for his artwork and his exhibitions worldwide draw crowds in their tens and hundreds of thousands. Some have dubbed him “one of the most original contemporary artists alive today.”

Fernando Botero in person, however, is extraordinarily unassuming and, at 72, is disarmingly youthful.

This is a man who wakes up every morning (when he is not traveling) and spends 7-8 hours a day in his studio, making art. How does he feel working so hard and being alone for so many hours? Botero beams when he says this, his eyes lighting up: “Happy”

For Botero, art, passion and life are intertwined, locked in a relationship that sustains and inspires him, that gives him reason to keep doing what he clearly loves.

“All my life I have been doing painting and sculptures. I keep going because in art you never retire. I don’t know any artist who has retired. It’s the curiosity of what you can do. It is the desire to learn something everyday because in art you have the philosophy that even when you take a small step, you understand that will make you better. Art gives you such a pleasure, there is such excitement to work in art that you do it everyday because it gives you more pleasure than any other activity.”

The luxury of being able to do what one loves without having to worry about eking out a living from it is something Botero has earned. Born to a middle class family in Medellín, Colombia in 1932, Botero started out like the typical misunderstood, struggling artist.

As a young man, he spent countless hours drawing and later, painting out of boredom. He was later thrown out of his Jesuit-run secondary school for drawing naked women for the newspaper El Colombiano’s literary supplement and for writing a subversive article on Picasso, which irked the school’s religious authorities.

Botero was undaunted. He continued with his artistic endeavours—painting bullfights he attended, copying images of the French revolution taken from his father’s bookshelves but injecting them with the flavour of Medellín, and sketching prostitutes and their patrons in the brothels of Lovaina, a working-class quarter in Colombia.

At the tender age of 18, Botero held his first solo exhibition of watercolours at a photographer’s studio in Bogotá; by all accounts it was a resounding success. Critics were favourable and he sold several works. A subsequent solo in Bogotá, which showcased work during a ten-month stint in the northern Colombian fishing village of Tolu, proved to be even more successful, winning Botero a healthy grant in the process.

Colombia could not contain Botero forever. Barely 20 years old, the artist found himself bound for Europe, hungry to feast his eyes on the works of the great masters. Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Florence, Tuscany—Botero soaked in the artistic ambience of each city. Apart from attending art school, he also copied the artworks of the masters: Titian, Velasquez and the frescoes in Italy.

“When you copy a painting you see it more. You understand a painting more than if you just look at it,” Botero explains. “When you copy, you are able to learn the technique. It is very important to connect the mind with the hand.”

The visible presence of art within the European cities he visited evidently had an impact on Botero beyond the canvas. It would later shape and hone his interest in public art, particularly his monumental sculptures, and influence his thinking about the relationship between art, urban spaces and the public.

“A city without art is dry. When there is more art in a city, the more gentle, the more beautiful the city is,” Botero muses. “Paris is a city full of art. Or Rome or Florence or Venice. Even if you don’t look very carefully, it still gives a gentle feeling to a town to have art around.”

He thinks that it is important to place art not only in public spaces but also in the most visited parts of the city or town. In the past, Botero has had his monumental sculptures exhibited along Park Avenue and Central Park in New York, in the Champs-Elysees in Paris, along the Paseo de Recoletos in Madrid and throughout Venice. For his Singapore show, his huge bronze sculptures greet visitors to the Esplanade, Fullerton Hotel and Changi Airport. For Botero, art should not confine itself to the art gallery or museum.

“Very few people go to museums actually,” explains Botero. “My monumental sculptures is art that comes to meet the people. When you confront people with art, I think that is a good thing because it creates some intellectual interest in a spectator that would otherwise never go to the museum.”

Governments, institutions and corporations are not oblivious to this truism. One of Botero’s sculptures—what a friend calls the ‘big bird’—has been sitting outside a financial institution in Singapore for the past 10 years, acting as a recognizable landmark for the bank. In New York, two of his pieces are in situated in the Time-Life building. The Spanish and Puerto Rican governments have both purchased Botero’s monumental sculptures, using them to decorate their cities.

Botero’s most famous—and controversial—public sculpture is located in his hometown of Medellín. In June 1995, his statue of a huge bronze dove was bombed by suspected urban guerrillas. Botero was particularly disturbed by the incident because the bomb was placed between the legs of the dove but camouflaged with a bunch of flowers; it went off during a street party, killing 25 people and injuring another 200.

A piece of the sculpture was broken off but strangely enough, did not fall from its pedestal. “It became a cubist sculpture from hell,” Botero said, wryly. In an act of defiance, he asked that the bombed dove remain—with its broken piece welded in place—and he donated another dove to stand next to the first one. “Now in Medellín they have the one that is bombed and the other one and it is called Violence and Peace,” he added.

The artist’s desire to respond to the problems in his home country has resulted in an astonishingly generous donation of an estimated $250 million worth of artworks to museums in Medellín and Bogotá. Works by Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Matisse, Dali, Miró and a whole host of other artist luminaries now provide ordinary Colombians the opportunity to see original works by great artists up close.

Additionally, Botero himself also began working on a series of paintings depicting a different face of Colombia: that of the violent and brutal drug-fueled war ravaging Colombia in the past 40 years. His style is unchanging but instead of placid and satisfied looking men and women, these newer works depict the dead bodies of rotund Colombians after a massacre, the knifing of innocent women and cherubic children, and countless victims of kidnappings, murder and torture. These stark portrayals of Colombia’s grim realities are a far cry from the images of serenity and sumptuousness that are currently on exhibit in Singapore.

“I have been painting the gentle face of Colombia all my life because I have Colombia in my heart but in the last 6 or 7 years I felt like almost a moral responsibility to do a series of paintings that show the violence in Colombia and the drama of my country,” he explains. “My idea is to create a small reflection on people about the terrible thing that is violence. One day people will see it in the National Museum of History of Colombia and they will remember this time as something awful that shouldn’t happen again.”

Botero, who will not be profiting from these works because they will all be donated to the National Museum in Colombia, sees himself as continuing a long tradition of depicting social issues in art. “It’s in the tradition of art to do things that sometimes become identified with a moment in history. For comparison, the obvious is Goya. Then you also have Picasso and Guernica,” Botero elaborates.

Despite his renewed sense of social consciousness, the Colombian is still steadfastly an artist first and a visual documentarian second: “In my paintings I deal first of all with the responsibility I have as a painter to do a good painting. Even though I am depicting something that is awful and not [morally] right but the composition, the colour, the technique and the drawing itself has to be first rate because it is art before everything else. My responsibility is to do art, only then comes the dramatic.”

Botero’s adherence to the essential basic components of art—to form, to line, to colour and composition—is, in many ways, a throwback to a classical tradition that eschews random experimentation for its own sake. This is an artist who takes seriously the study and execution of great paintings.

“You cannot replace paintings with theatre,” he says, when referring to recent trends in installation and performance art. “That’s why I think today many artists have lost their bearings. An artist always works towards the idea of creating art that would be there for ever, something that will give aesthetic pleasure. This is not the case anymore,” Botero laments. “The rules of the game have changed.”

For Botero, art has suffered over the years because universal aesthetic markers of appreciation have ceased to exist. Chief of these is the “idea of defying time”, which Botero considers an important characteristic of art. In his view, artists are too busy trying to keep up with current trends and as such, they do not strive to seek out their uniqueness—the mark that identifies them as artists.

What makes a Botero? His artistic landscape is replete with extremely large and rounded objects. Some audiences call Botero subjects “fat” while other, more politically correct and polite, folk identify them as “chubby” or “full-figured.” There is, however, no denying that Botero people and objects are intensely recognizable.

Art critics and Latin American luminaries have all tried to understand and decipher the enigma of Botero’s world. They pontificate and theorize about his love of “fat” people, animals and things. The artist himself calls it “the exultation of volume” and he says that it took him 10 years to rationalize his preoccupation with size, proportion, volume and “to find coherence” in his work and his style. “I was 35 years old when I painted my first Botero,” he quipped.

Some artists never discover their style, their mark, their identification stamp in the immense world of art. Botero considers himself lucky for having found it while relatively young.

“It’s a very important and difficult thing when you can give to your work an imprint that is recognizable. It is very important because when you look at all the artists in the museum, there are artists you recognize because they have a very clear colour and style that is recognizable. You can have painters that can do everything well but the masters, they are the ones who always have a very strong position. When you see a Caravaggio or Goya, it is very clear that it is a Caravaggio or Goya. Their followers are those without the courage to be extreme.”

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This interview appears in Off the Edge, January 2005 issue.

2005-01-09T17:39:00.000+08:00

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Botero in Singapore: Review

2005-01-05T17:43:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge
Pictures by Angelia Poon

Full-figured and fleshy, plump women have finally found a worthy lover of their curvaceous, sensuous volume. His name is Fernando Botero.

In Singapore, a city that celebrates model-thin females in bone-hugging clothing, the gleaming bronze Botero women sunning themselves in nude splendour all along the Esplanade harken back to a time when ample girth symbolized health, wealth and beauty. These are women who scoff at their anorexic-looking sisterly counterparts from the island city; these are women who are more confident about their naked roundedness than the waifs who stiletto down Orchard Road in their ubiquitous spaghetti-strap tops, swinging their bonded, coloured hair.

There is a certain something about these monumental bronze sculptures that invite scrutiny—perhaps it is their unabashed state of undress, perhaps it is their mammoth size, perhaps it is their aura of whimsy. Perhaps it is all of the above contextualized within a national space that is entirely opposite: small, serious, sedate Singapore.

Although signage warned the public to stay away from the sculptures, children delighted in trying to clamber up Botero’s cherubic Horse (1999) and tickling the soles of the Man on a Horse’s (1999) feet. Adults giggled as they posed next to gloriously nude Adam and Eve (2003); one man even tried to touch Adam’s bronze privates but it was a little beyond his reach! It’s not often one observes this much playful engagement with public art, beyond the usual snapshot moment.

If, as Botero says, his monumental sculptures are designed to bring art to the people, to engage them, then his largest solo exhibition in Asia has certainly achieved its purpose.

Twenty of his public sculptures are scattered throughout Singapore but the majority of them—16 to be exact—are located along the Esplanade, set against a panoramic skyline of brilliant blue sky, gently undulating waves and man-made concrete and metallic structures.

Their location befits them: graceful, well-rounded women stretch out on their bellies and backs, soaking in and beautifully reflecting the bright shafts of sunlight that dance on their ample bosoms and twinkle off of their bountiful bubble behinds. These are women who enjoy their own presence, wrapped up in their own private joys—Reclining Woman (1993) with her eyes half-closed is sluggish in the noonday heat as flies flit between her armpit and abdomen; Woman with Cigarette (1987) has a crusty air about her, and a decidedly coiffed hairdo, but she is cool and nonchalant despite the fallen leaves and twigs nestled between her thunder thighs and the stones lodged between the bend in her knees.

Reclining Woman (2003) is Mother Nature personified. Set in the middle of a grassy clearing and against a magnificent, majestic heritage tree (these are very old trees that are protected from damage and demolition by the state due to their historical status) this bronze bucolic beauty has her face turned up towards the sun and a blanket loosely draped in front of her. Although Botero insists his monumental sculptures are not site specific, the verdant green locale seems made for her plenitude. The solidly smooth sculpture reflects the dappled vista in a manner that pleases the eye, and its size—though large in a more enclosed space—is perfectly proportionate to the massive tree that provides her ample leafy shade.

Alternatively, Woman with Fruit (1996), which is placed along the waterfront, appears almost mermaid-like in her pose. Sunbathing al fresco, her gaze is out to sea and the fruit in her hand almost like an offering to Poseidon, God of the sea. Her hair is as perfectly wavy as the salty water, its undulating shape mirroring the seascape but also suggesting a serpentine creature and the fruit, its Garden of Eden-like temptation. Her legs are crossed in a whimsical pose, almost playful, although her face is curiously serious, even enigmatic.

These are Botero’s women—resplendent, redolent, rewarding their viewer with more than just their ample hips and firm breasts. These are women who invite us to forget their femaleness (for their sex is never evident, lost between their massive thighs), to forget their nudity because what engages the senses is the quality of their materiality, their capaciousness. From shiny blue black to warm glowing brown with slightly golden-veined undertones, the bronze used by the artist has a character and a life of its own. Just like his women.

Botero’s celebration of the fecund female figure does not only exist in the open air and the realm of public art but also within the more traditional gallery space. Some 70 paintings and 14 small sculptures are currently on exhibit at the Singapore Art Museum, showcasing a range of Botero’s work, from the 1970s right up to our present decade. It is here that we see what makes Botero unique, what makes a gallery viewer gush to this writer: “I love his paintings because they are like nothing I have ever seen before.”

Carlos Fuentes, one of Latin America’s most prominent men of letters, argues that “Botero’s women are not fat. They are space.” However, Botero’s paintings capture a sense of space in a way that is different from how his sculptures occupy volume. In their three dimensionality, his monumental sculptures are synonyms for depth—their skeletal insides radiate outwards to extend space while their clay mold and bronze skin covets this space into a specific shape. Alternatively, his paintings, in their two-dimensionality, are more confined by the planar form; since they cannot extend in every direction, their suggestion of space has to come from within the frame.

What is unique about Botero’s paintings is they do not adopt a Renaissance sense of perspective. His figures are flat; his still life is gargantuan but not in relation to their surroundings—his Pear (1976) is enormous not because the table it sits on is small. The fruit is large because the vividness of its golden-brown colour and its centrality on canvas make it so. It is huge because it fills the frame. Additionally, it is immense because the teeth mark on its smooth skin is so tiny. Hence, we recognize something is large not in relation to its surroundings, but in relation to itself. What is important, the artist seems to imply, is not how the objects in a painting occupy space but how they themselves embody space.

This notion of space has become universal in Botero’s work, even though he takes great pains to imbue his work with a Colombian flavour and context as well, as seen in his bullfighting series—Picador (1987) and The Death of Ramon Torres (1986)—and works like The Seamstresses (2000), which captures the multi-racial working class women in his home country.

In his earlier paintings, for example The English Ambassador (1987), The President and The First Lady (diptiques) (1989), the girth and fatness of the people do not only connote space, they also imply over-abundance and ostentatious-ness. Paintings of corpulent, over-dressed Presidents and their wives are a reflection of the state and its leaders, who, in their pomp and pretentiousness, live in a wholly different economic reality from their fellow citizens.

As his work develops, the relationship between size and corruption, largesse and excess, becomes more muted. The selected works on display at the Singapore Art Museum are more focused on Botero’s relationship to European masters like Ingres, Titian and Van Gogh. Even when he is mimicking Piero della Francesca’s Duke and Duchess of Urbinn in After Piero della Francesca (1998), or honing in on the infant from Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas and reproducing her in rotund form, in After Velasquez (2000), Botero simultaneously charts his own course even as he pays respects to a glorified tradition. For the visitors to the museum, this is a chance to see the masters up close, through the eyes of a more contemporary student of these art history giants.

What is sorely missing from Botero in Singapore is, most assuredly, his series of work in response to the violence in his hometown of Medellin. The city that most people associate with drug cartels, state corruption and poverty has, since 1999, become the subject of Botero’s paintings and sketches but none of these work are on display in Singapore. They give us a glimpse of a different kind of Botero, a different appreciation for space in a context that is not about pleasure and plenitude but pain and death.

Botero in Singapore has been lauded as “the most comprehensive survey exhibition in Asia” of the artist’s work but without this recent series on Medellin, we are left with an impression of an artist who lives in a state of nostalgia for his native Colombia, during a time when beautiful large women languished in their own amplitude, amidst a verdant, rustic landscape of serenity.

Perhaps that is the exhibition’s intention—to cocoon us from the world’s depressing realities with art that reminds us how pleasure and the imaginative spirit need never decay.

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This review appears in Off The Edge, January 2005 issue.

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War and Peace: Four Films

2004-12-21T16:46:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge

December 15, 2004 marked the first night of film discussion at AEI, after a packed house for Samira Makhmalbaf’s latest cinematic endeavour, At Five in the Afternoon. The group that gathered in a circle was of a modest size and the dialogue that ensued was at times halting, at times steadfast and only occasionally heated; war and peace are clearly subjects that do not invite easy digestion.

From the grainy black and white palette of Gillo Pontecorvo’s landmark film, Battle of Algiers, and the spartan icy white landscape of Marooned in Iraq to the tongue-in-cheek black humour of Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land and the somber, haunting quiet of At Five in the Afternoon, this month’s screenings at AEI gave us more than enough occasion for reflection.

The Battle of Algiers, which kicked off December’s War and Peace series of films, reminded us—with a great deal of cinematic restraint—that the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib is a silent salute to European colonialism’s brutalizing military power. The fact that Pontecorvo’s 1965 film easily calls to mind our war-inscribed present is both eerie and disheartening.

Charting the rise and fall (and rise again) of the Algerian resistance movement in colonial Algeria under French rule, the film is a highly affective portrayal of anti-imperial struggles waged by ordinary native Algerians against their white settlers. The resistance, led by the FLN (Front de la Libération Nationale OR the National Liberation Front), is revolutionary for it includes men and women, adults and children, and in so doing, results in the kind of grassroots anti-colonial struggle that penetrates all sectors of society.

Frantz Fanon, perhaps the most famous non-Algerian writing about the resistance movement in his adopted homeland, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” Pontecorvo’s grippingly honest film is testimony to the truth of Fanon’s assertions. We do not only see the fist of colonial might pounding into the stone facades of the Arab quarters, killing countless innocent civilians, we also witness the tactical moves of a disenfranchised people with nothing to lose.

With disarming precision, The Battle of Algiers re-enacts the bombing of French civilian targets in public places, such as coffee shops and banks. Such guerrilla strategies are reminiscent of the Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories, as well as more recent attacks in Iraq by civilian Iraqis against American soldiers.

It would seem that colonialism and its military apparatus is still alive and well in numerous corners of the world. At the same time, however, organized resistance struggles have not dwindled. Despite his harsh and gritty portrayal of Algeria under French colonialism, Pontecorvo gives us a rare glimpse of hope en masse towards the end. The death of key players in the FLN does not equal the death of the struggle against repression and foreign occupation. The desire for self-determination needs no leader.

No Man’s Land is a lesson in contrast. If Pontecorvo tries to show us the truth of colonialism then Tanovic tries to show us the farce of war. The civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina at its height in 1993 is theatre of the absurd at its best. Two soldiers—one Bosnian, the other Serb—are awaiting their proverbial Godot: the United Nations.

Caught in the crossfire of Bosnian and Serbian frontlines, the two men are accompanied by a third: a Bosnian soldier, wounded and lying on a special kind of dirty bomb—one that bounces up when detonated, killing everyone within a few hundred feet. As the 2 soldiers bicker, point fingers and even shoot at each other, they await a UN bomb specialist from Germany to save them from their fate.

The UN becomes the object of Tanovic’s derisive black humour. Ordered not to intervene, UN peacekeeping forces come and go without any sense of purpose, bowing down to the whims of ineffectual UN high command, who are more interested in appeasing the media than they are in handling the curious dilemma before them.

The film exposes the not-so secret affair between the media and the United Nations, and mocks at how both routinely dupe the other, unaware of their own internal failings and hypocrisy. Caught in the middle are the soldiers who fight a battle that knows no solution. Locked in a paradigm of accusation and hate, the Bosnian soldier eventually kills the Serb and, ironically enough, is himself killed by a member of the UN peacekeeping force.

The final image of No Man’s Land is a stroke of cinematic genius. The remaining Bosnian soldier, lying on a bomb that will explode as soon as he moves, is left alone in the trenches—the media thinks he has been saved, the UN abandons him without remorse, and his partners in war are dead.

The absurdity of war knows no solution. Its victims are the thousands who are caught in the crossfire between peace and politics, between hope and senselessness. The future is a time bomb waiting to go off because war promises nothing but more death in store.

*******

Both Pontecorvo and Tanovic take us into the heart of war, into the thick of insurgency, counter-insurgency, brutality and senseless violence. Alternatively, Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Ghobadi takes us to the hinterlands of war’s bleak after-effects.

In Marooned in Iraq, Ghobadi leads us on a road trip that delivers Kurdish music and mayhem with a generous dose of comedy. A famous musician, Mirza, manages to convince his two sons, Barat and Audeh, to follow him on a mission to find his lady love, Hanareh—who is blessed with a beautiful voice and an even more elusive presence.

In an interview, Ghobadi confesses that Hanareh is not the focal point because the goal of the film is to take us on a tour of Iraqi Kurdistan and to expose the consequences of Saddam inflicted cruelty onto the Kurdish community. We witness the effects of bombings, thievery, smuggling and chemical warfare by Iraqis against the Kurds. Orphaned children with impish toothy smiles share screen time with round-bellied and thickly-mustachioed Kurdish musicians. And the Kurdish women—old and young—are simultaneously vocal and opinionated, cantankerous and difficult.

The face of Ghobadi’s Kurdish community demands our laughter as well as our empathy because they are irrepressibly human and undeniably humane. In the face of suppression, state-sponsored purges and great poverty, these homeless people continue to laugh in the face of their perpetrators and to joke about their own plight.

The music in the film is reminiscent of Emir Kusturica’s carnivalesque Underground (1995), to which Ghobadi acknowledges cinematic debt. Kurdish music, according to the director, is one of the liveliest in the world and in his film, he uses it to give his characters soul—it awakens and energizes them, even in the face of death.

But like all good road movies, Marooned in Iraq never leads us to a clear destination. Hanareh is never found, father and sons take divergent paths away from one another, and the future of Kurdistan is unknown.

The enigmatic future of war-torn nations seems to be a central preoccupation of the last 3 movies in the War and Peace series. Apart from The Battle of Algiers, the rest of AEI’s December offerings ask us to not only ponder a possible future for these countries—the former Yugoslavia, Kurdistan and Aghanistan—but also to question the notion of possibility itself. What does it even mean to imagine a future? Is another world possible?

Samira Makhmalbaf attempts to answer this question through the vehicle of a burqa clad and white high-heeled Afghanistan woman, Norgeh, who dreams of becoming her country’s next President.

Her 3rd film, At Five in the Afternoon is Makhmalbaf’s decidedly feminist take on contemporary post-Taliban Afghanistan. In her film, women attend school, they are free to move about beyond the confines of their homes and they can show their faces if they please. Talib men, like Nogreh’s father, must look away and beg forgiveness for their sins if they were to accidentally cast their eyes on an unveiled woman. Women are no longer responsible to cover themselves in the company of men; instead men are the ones who have to take responsibility for their gaze.

With a cast of non-actors, Makhmalbaf manages to give us penetrating insight into the psyche of a young woman and the community within which she lives. Nogreh is a woman who desires the impossible—to be the first woman President of Aghanistan—and who dares to articulate her desires in a schoolroom of peers as well as to a male poet, who is enamoured by her ambition and steadfastness.

But she spares her father the pain of knowing the truth about herself; she continues to maintain a charade of Muslim female piety and decorum because she does not want to anger him and she also realizes that he is too old and has suffered too much to be able to deal with this additional trauma.

With memorable images of graceful burqas billowing in the wind, against a desolate, arid landscape, Makhmalbaf paints us a picture of Afghanistan that is both feminine and masculine. A recurring motif in the film is the image of Nogreh, a solitary female figure emerging from dark, interior confines into lighted exteriors—symbolically representing Afghan women’s transition from the orthodox Dark Ages into post-Taliban enlightenment.

Full of symbolic significance, Makhmalbaf’s film invites us to imagine a new future that does not promise men at its helm. The final sequence of At Five in the Afternoon is a revealing one: the Taliban regime, represented by the two old men, is tired and despondent—one of them has even declared the “God is dead”; the future of patriarchy, represented by Nogreh’s nephew, is dead.

What remains are the two women—one aspiring to be President and the other, her sister, mourning her dead child and husband—who walk together in search of water, with which to sustain them for the onward journey. They head towards the promise of water but the film ends without showing us if they indeed found it. Nonetheless, their courage keeps them going, keeps them from giving up like their elders. Armed with each other and a once-unimaginable aspiration, these two women literally walk into the final frame with nothing but hope and resilience.

Perhaps, these will be enough.

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This review appears in the December 2004 issue of the Asia-Europe Institute newsletter.

2004-12-10T18:02:00.000+08:00

The Muralists - Anting Anting & Matahati

Muralists with a Conscience

2004-12-10T18:00:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge
Pictures by Ju Lynn Ong

“Artists have a social responsibility. I come from a poor family so I attribute most things to social problems and cultural dilemmas. Something has to be done. We belong to a generation that has inherited the problems of the generations before us so I am always thinking in terms of problem solving. But there’s still a long way to go.”

These are not words we often hear from our Malaysian artists, who typically shy away from defining a clear role for themselves and their contemporaries. This is perhaps why the current Malaysian art scene is characterized by a tepid engagement with its socio-political context. Artists who do not see a role for themselves often languish in the throes of their own affectation and internal angst.

This is not the case for Filipino artist Alfredo Esquillo Jr., whose quote above is as honest and as thoughtful as his work. A recipient of the Philip Morris Asian Arts Award Grand Prize in 2000, Alfredo is most famous for his richly textured social realist paintings, which touch on a wide range of issues from globalization and economic inequity to religion and politics. A recent work, Modus Operandi—inspired by a quote from a 2002 report summary entitled “Alternatives to Economic Globalization” by The International Forum on Globalization—is proof that socially conscious art is very much alive and well in the Philippines.

Alfredo, together with five Filipino artists from the artist collective Anting Anting, is in Malaysia as part of a residency exchange programme with a local artist collective, Matahati—a group comprising 5 artists—that has been active in the Kuala Lumpur art scene for more than a decade. The residency is funded by Arts Network Asia, a regional grant-giving body that emphasizes collaboration among arts practitioners in Asia.

The exchange residency, the brainchild of Matahati, is unique in that both artist collectives will spend 3 weeks to a month in each other’s home country, during which time they will collaborate in creating art work(s). In short, it is a two-way, dual-venue residency exchange rather than the typical one-location residency.

What this exchange engenders is a kind of collaborative process that equalizes the power relations between the two hosts. If in Kuala Lumpur Anting Anting has to conform to the cultural norms of their hosts, then in Manila Matahati will do the same. The fruit of their collaboration for the Malaysian leg of their residency exchange is a public mural, currently on display in front of the National Art Gallery.

When this writer spoke to Anting Anting, they had just completed about 8 hours of mural painting the day before and were embarking on the labours of day two. They were on a tight schedule—a 33 metre by 6 metre mural by 11 artists in 4 days.

Lawrence Borsoto, a member of Anting Anting, admitted that 4 days is too short. “We are just worried if we can finish the mural on time.”

Wilfredo Alicdan, a founding member of Anting Anting, acknowledges that it is more of a challenge working with Matahati members, who do not have any experience working on murals. “We don’t really feel the collaborative process because we are each doing our own section of the mural. Perhaps later we will come together, towards the end,” Wilfredo adds, hopefully.

There is no denying the project is ambitious. Not only is the mural extremely large but the artists come from very different backgrounds, each used to very different styles and aesthetic visions. Matahati as a group has been around half a decade longer than Anting Anting—which was conceived in 1997 and based in the province of Cavite, about 30km outside of metro Manila—but its members tend to create individual works and the extent of their collaboration is in the form of group exhibitions.

As an arts collective, Anting Anting is not bound by a singular aesthetic form; some of its members, like Joseph Lofranco and Jose Austria, are abstract artists whilst others, like Emmanuel Garibay, Alfredo Esquillo Jr., Wilfredo Alicdan and Lawrence Borsoto are more closely rooted to the figurative tradition. Nonetheless, they are united by a coherent sense of purpose. All the artists are deeply engaged with their locality, with the problems and lived reality of their common context.

Jose Austria, commenting on Anting Anting’s artwork, explains, “We share a lot of subjects in common, from social life and social commentary to human behaviour.” Joseph Lofranco concurs: “We share issues as a group. Every time we do a mural, we like to showcase those issues.”

One of the objectives of the group is to “foster and safeguard the democratic participation and representation of Philippine visual arts” and even with 12 members, they successfully manage to negotiate the delicate balance between friendship and work. The secret to their cohesiveness is their disavowal of domineering leadership.

Emmanuel Garibay, 42, one of the senior founding member of the collective, elaborates on Anting Anting’s work process: “We stress on the process of consultation. There is not just one individual leading the group but the entire group goes through the exchange of ideas and consultation. It is unavoidable that one or two people may dominate during discussions before the project but during the actual work that’s when the silent guys put in their share.”

Even though Anting Anting members also work on their individual art pieces, they are well known for their murals. They are particularly invested in creating art within Cavite and have created murals commissioned by their local town mayor as well a local university, De La Salle University.

Joseph Lofranco, who was born in Cavite, speaks highly of their mayor, who is extremely supportive of their work. For him and for Anting Anting, public art is paramount: “We envision art in Cavite, working with the local government, especially the Mayor of Dasmarinas. It’s mostly a working class community with people being very mobile, commuting to Manila for work. We are pushing to bring art to and to create art in Cavite.”

Anting Anting’s commitment to their local art scene is laudable because it resists the usual impulse of artists to create work primarily for personal and commercial gain. Jose, 25, the youngest member in the group, is clear about the economics of creativity: “I don’t think about money because doing art is not about making money. It’s a passion, it’s my life. As artists we are different from other people, we visualize things that others never see. We should develop our skills completely before we think about money. That should come later.”

Emmanuel, or Manny as he is affectionately called, finds it surprising that so many young artists today are so concerned about their careers and future. “It’s a global phenomena,” he believes. “I come from the tail-end of the hippie movement, a movement that had a disregard for material things and the establishment. It’s a culture that is still imbibed in me. I am more intent on the search for meaning than the search for status and comfort.”

Anting Anting’s murals are testimony to the interplay between aesthetic commitment, community service and financial survival. The group may have had their murals commissioned but they have also spontaneously created on-site murals for political rallies and demonstrations. Manny calls them “protest murals” and they are largely “guerrilla operations” made on the fly, in feverish excitement and in aid of political causes.

Alfredo fondly remembers a mobile mural from the year 2001, which they created during a rally calling for the ousting of then President Estrada. “Public art should contribute to building awareness to solve current crises and problems rooted in an ignorance of history. We should contribute something even in the smallest possible way,” he adds.

Murals excite Manny: “It challenges you to not just display your craft but to come up with images that interact and hopefully stimulate people into some kind of critical engagement—facing and confronting their own situation. I haven’t been around here long enough to grasp the Malaysian condition and situation but we start from where we come from; the issues we raise are just as valid in the Philippines as here: the environment, politics, religion, ethnicity, particular issues pertaining to greed and big business and the victimization of the poor. But these issues may be of a lesser magnitude here.”

For Jose “the situation in Malaysia is much more ordered” when compared to his home country. “It’s a harder life in the Philippines. So, the more angst comes to you, the more artwork you can produce.” Lawrence observes that Malaysian artists in general do not really engage with political issues. Wilfredo thinks that Malaysian artists “play it safe” unlike Filipino artists, who are more likely to be cynical and critical of the establishment and the authorities.

The impulse to ‘play it safe’ is plainly evident from public statements made by Bayu Utomo Radjikin of the Matahati group. “Artists should practice self-censorship,” he proclaimed very calmly during a public art talk-sharing session with Anting Anting held at the National Art Gallery earlier this month.

But how does one instill the compulsion to self-censor among a group of Filipino artists who do not work within such a constricting creative paradigm? Who has the power to enforce the cultural upper hand in this collaborative process? Perhaps most important of all, do the tides of influence move only one way or will the “anarchic tendency” (as Manny puts it) among the Filipino artists somehow infuse and inflect the form and content of the mural in the end?

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To find out, you can visit the National Art Gallery, where the Anting Anting-Matahati mural is on display on the exterior of the building until May 2005.

2004-12-10T17:42:00.000+08:00

Mural - large view

Mural Painting as Democratic Process

2004-12-10T17:36:00.000+08:00

by Carmen Nge
Pictures by Ju Lynn Ong

There are multiple ways to conceive and execute a mural painting. According to Wilfredo, in their home base, murals usually begin with one person choosing a concept or idea worthy of visual public expression. The same person would then go about finding other Anting Anting members to help him create his vision. It is not uncommon to have small groups of about 5 artists working on one mural.

Mural painting is inherently different from other kinds of artwork because, as Wilfredo maintains, “this process makes us think differently because we have to share ideas. When we do our individual work, we don’t have to share.” Lawrence considers murals to be a challenge because “most artists are very individualistic and need to have chemistry with others. The important thing is to figure out how to fit as a group first.”

In the early stages of planning their murals, Anting Anting members spend a considerable amount of time brainstorming and coming up with suggestions for content and theme. With Matahati, they replicated this process but omitted one of its components. Alfredo confesses, “In Anting Anting we are more aggressive about what we want in terms of mural content but here we are not as aggressive. There is a lot of adjustment and a need to take on different perspectives when working with Matahati.”

Ahmad Fuad Osman, one of the members of Matahati, chuckles when he reflects on their working process for the first day. “It was chaos,” he reveals with a smile. “Everyone doing their own thing can be quite chaotic because you have figurative and abstract artists working together on the same canvas.”

For their murals in the Philippines, Anting Anting usually break themselves up into 2 groups: the abstract artists and the figurative artists. After working on a mural for a while, one member from each group will cross-over and the abstract and figurative gets integrated at a later stage of the artistic process. For their Kuala Lumpur mural project, abstract and figurative artists had to work side by side, creating the mural simultaneously.

To limit the kinds of visual confusion and incoherence that could occur from this method of working, the two groups had the abstract artists paint in framed or boxed sections of the mural. This writer finds it interesting that the artists found a need to contain the abstract elements in the mural; it is as if without frames and limitations abstract art would threaten to disrupt the rest of the visual narrative.

Fuad sees it differently: “If you look at it another way, then you could also say that the abstract work is highlighted—our eyes are drawn to them because they are visibly positioned and framed.”

“In many ways this is highly intuitive work,” Fuad continues. “The process itself is constantly changing. We have to adapt what we do according to the images that are being created. Each artist has to think about supporting the image before him.”

A great deal of problem-solving becomes organically built into the process of collaboration as well. Members of both groups have daily debriefing sessions after 6-8 hours of mural painting where they discuss what they have accomplished and brainstorm how to proceed the following day.

One of the early successes of this brainstorming session had to do with the problem of time: with less than a week at their disposal, the artists were understandably worried about being able to complete their mammoth task.

The time constraint was partially solved by having the artists generate a pool of images that they then collaged together digitally according to scale. Thus the mural, which is not painted directly onto a wall surface, first began as digital art; by having the background digitally reproduced on canvas, this significantly reduced the amount of time spent in the first stage of the mural process.

When the chaos from day one ensued, artists revisited the original digital collage and focused on the specific images they generated during the brainstorming session. Rather than subsume their individual styles and personal visual touches under a homogenous group aesthetic, Anting Anting was encouraged to exploit them. In an interesting divergence from the traditional working method of mural painting, this collaboration emphasizes individuality.

This sense of individuality is reflected in how each artist understands the central message of the mural. Wilfredo, Fuad and Alfredo see the boat in the mural as emblematic of a journey undertaken by the Malays and the Filipinos.

For Alfredo this journey harkens back to a period in history before the arrival of the Spaniards to the Philippines. According to him, they have studied about how Malay traders came to the Philippines on boats called balangay and this word has since morphed into the term barangay, which in Tagalog means ‘community’. Fuad said he was surprised to find out that Malay and Tagalog languages share a lot of words in common: mata, saksi, aku, kami, etc.

Bayu sees the boat as having more personal significance: “Our programme [with Anting Anting] is like a boat, handled by many people, not just one. Within the boat is a group of people going from one place to another, doing various projects with each other.”

Manny considers the mural to be a “futuristic vision of what we hope to see. It is a post-cataclysmic event where the survivors are victims of the onslaught of globalization. They are on a boat, like Noah’s Ark. Under the water are the structures that have victimized the people. Outwardly they are like images of a fragmented scene. Form-wise this keeps to current aesthetics, with the experience of fragmentation and alienation.”

What remains to be seen is how well the various fragmented parts fit to form a whole. Can the individual mark of each artist ultimately transcend their aesthetic specificity and contribute towards visual and thematic coherence?

Ultimately, what is most fascinating to this writer is not the end result of an intense collaborative endeavour but the process of give and take necessitated by the mural painting tradition. It is a tradition that demands that artists veer from the path of egoism and self-interest to immerse themselves in a new kind of artistic labour, one that clearly engages the public beyond the domain of art for art’s sake.

2004-12-10T17:34:00.000+08:00

Working together

2004-12-10T17:32:00.000+08:00

Painting into the twilight

2004-12-10T17:22:00.000+08:00

Manny at work