A failed Malaysia?

Are we seeing a failed M'sia?
Azly Rahman

I was born in a British military hospital in Singapore and grew up in a Malay kampong in Johor Bahru. I’ve moved from one realm of cultural experience to another, living in one enclave to the next in the process of being schooled and becoming an educator.

I’ve finally ended up in a truly multi-cultural town a half-an-hour’s drive from New York City where I have lived for several years, waiting for opportunities to come home to Malaysia and be directly involved in Malaysian education, social, and cultural development. No place like home.

Sometimes I wonder if all this make me a cultural construction of multi-ethnicity or a if I am still a Malay. Is the question of being Malay merely academic by now?

I think I am still that. I still speak Malay fluently and write in Jawi quite beautifully, although my almost half of my life has been ‘schooled’ by American education, constantly exploring the ideas of America the pastoral – the hard core Jeffersonian ideal drawn from Humanism and the Enlightenment Period.

At times too I would still plow through representative texts of ancient Malay philosophy and to situate the core ideas within newer perspectives I constantly acquire, so that as the poet WS Rendra would say, we will always “reconsider traditions”.

Here in the US, I teach a course called ‘Cross-Cultural Perspectives’, trying to engage my students in the works of Edward Said, Clifford Geertz, Renato Rosaldo, and the like.

I find myself again having to interrogate my subjectivity and objectivity as a culturally-constructed being in my attempt to play the role of Socrates in dialectical conversations with students in our exploration of the multiple meaning of culture. Each semester is a learning experience, teaching me newer ideas of what culture, race, and ethnicity mean.

Yearning to come home to the kampong where I grew up, I am still waiting for a time to share new ideas that will help Malaysian students transform realities by turning them into radical thinkers and social reconstructionists with deep interest in transcultural philosophies. We need such a revolution in thinking.

In August, we will engage in yet another ritual of a nation perpetually in narration: the Merdeka celebrations. Consider the proclamation from the Rukunegara:

Our Nation, Malaysia is dedicated to: Achieving a greater unity for all her people; maintaining a democratic way of life; creating a just society in which the wealth of the nation shall be equitably distributed; ensuring a liberal approach to her rich and diverse cultural tradition, and building a progressive society which shall be oriented to modern science and technology.

We, the people of Malaysia, pledge our united efforts to attain these ends, guided by these principles:

* Belief in God
* Loyalty to King and country
* Upholding the constitution
* Sovereignty of the law, and
* Good behaviour and morality

These words, constructed and proclaimed in 1970, after the bloody riots of May 13, 1969, contain internal contradictions if we analyse it today.

Country in deep distress

If the proclamation is our benchmark of Merdeka, we must ask these questions:

* How have we fostered unity when our government promotes racism thorough racialised policies and by virtue of the fact that our politics survive on the institutionalisation of racism?

* How have we maintained a democratic way of life, when our educational, political, and economic institutions do not promote democracy in fear that democratic and multi-cultural voices of conscience are going to dismantle race-based ideologies?

* How are we to create a just society in which the wealth of the nation is equitably distributed, when the New Economic Policy itself was designed based on the premise that only one race need to be helped and forever helped, whereas at the onset of Independence poverty existed among Malaysians of all races?

* How are we to promote a liberal approach to diverse culture and tradition when our education system is run by politicians who are championing Ketuanan Melayu alone and ensure that Malay hegemony rules in all levels and all spheres of education, from pre-school to graduate levels?

* How are we to build a progressive society based on science and technology when our understanding of the role of science and society do not clearly reflect our fullest understanding of the issues of scientific knowledge, industrialisation and dependency?

Are we seeing a failed Malaysia?

Across the board, the country is in distress: education is in shambles, polarised, and politicised; the economy is in a constant dangerous flux; the judiciary is in deep crisis of confidence; public safety is a major concern due the declining confidence in the police; and politics remain ever divided along racial and religious lines.

The ‘transition to power’ that we are seeing is an unwelcome testament to a country inching towards a quagmire.

This is the Malaysian version of Dorian Gray, one that shows the image of a vibrant nation of progress and harmony, and racial tolerance and a robust economy, but is a deformed Malaysia that is merely a continuation of a feudal and colonial entity.

The colonised have become the coloniser. The state has become a totalitarian entity using the ideological state apparatuses to silence the voices of progressive change. The nationalists have nationalised the wealth of the nation for themselves and perhaps siphoned off the nation’s wealth internationally.

This is the picture of a broken promise made by those who fought for Independence; the voices of the early radical and truly nationalistic Malays, Chinese, Indians, Ibans, Kadazans, Sikhs, etc. of the Merdeka movement.

It is this promise that, 50 year hence, has been broken by those who capitalise on the extreme ends of the politics of identity.

How then must Malaysians celebrate the next Merdeka Day? By flying the Jalur Gemilang upside down? Or put justice in its place by engineering a multi-cultural jihad against all forms of excesses in the abuse of power? To de-toxify the nation and begin with Year Zero of our cultural revolution through the gentle enterprise called peace and multi-cultural education?

Herein lies education as a solution. I believe we need a radical overhaul of everything, philosophically speaking. We have the structures in place but need to replace the human beings running the system.

We have deeply racialised human beings running neutral machines. We have ethnocentric leaders running humane systems. We have allowed imperfection and evolving fascism to run our system. We have placed capitalists of culture behind our wheels of industrial progress; people who have the dinosaur brain of ketuanan this or that.

We have created these monsters and unleashed them to run our educational, political, economic, and cultural systems. We have Frankenstein-ised our Merdeka.

We need to re-educate ourselves by reinventing the human beings we will entrust to run our machines. We must abolish the system and create a new one.

We must be aware that class in the broadest and most comprehensive sense of the word is what we are dealing with and through class and cultural analyses we can arrive at a different path to a newer Merdeka.

In this coming Merdeka, 40 years after May 13 1969, the rakyat armed with wisdom of a new era must speak softly but carry a big stick.

Our struggle for a renewed Merdeka has only just begun. Malaysians have no choice. We are multi-culturalists now. We must abandon race-based politics.