A precipitation of identity

Malaysia’s strength of diversity is being challenged by a narrower and myopic view of society that will weaken the country’s blessings.

VIEWING the cultural output of an earlier age gives valuable insights about how people at the time thought: what was considered conservative or radical can also be deduced by how authors, artists and musicians conveyed their message.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see how certain productions or performances were in tune with changing public opinion.

Alongside season two of Star Trek: Discovery, I’ve also been watching episodes of the previous incarnations, especially The Original Series.

One consistent feature of Star Trek is the challenging of social norms and provoking of the mind using the imagined future as a device to raise issues that would otherwise cause controversy.

One basic example which recurs is race, where we see the multi-ethnic good guys face collective discrimination from alien species: the prejudice of the aliens is meant to provoke the viewers’ own prejudices.

Because Discovery is set before the time of The Original Series, the writers can reposition the ethnic composition of the future by taking advantage of how much American audiences have matured.

While in the 1960s it was ground-breaking to feature a black woman as anything other than a maid, in 2019 there is nothing unusual about “Langkawi-born” Philippa Georgiou and Michael Burnham – women of ethnic Chinese and African appearance – being in senior command positions “before” James T Kirk captains the USS Enterprise.

Certainly, there are many continuity flaws which upset a lot of Trekkies – for example the portrayal of super advanced technology that the original Kirk never had – but the issues of identity, acceptance and discrimination are constant.

Such issues have long featured in the Malaysian galaxy of cultural output too.

Many of Tan Sri P Ramlee’s movies asked what it means to be Malay, while the music of Datuk Zainal Alam famously promoted a multiracial Malayan identity, beginning a tradition of unity-themed songs that spikes every Merdeka and Malaysia Day.

Many in my generation will have a favourite Yasmin Ahmad production, while those of a newer generation might first contemplate an interracial relationship through the song Amalina by Santesh Kumar.

A more recent popular art form – the standup comedy – has seen the use of humour to make people think about their own preconceptions of identity.

Recently I experienced a real treat on this theme, with the restaging of Jit Murad’s Gold Rain and Hailstones at the Damansara Performing Arts Centre.

Originally performed in 1993 – in the words of Artistic Director Jo Kukathas in the programme notes – “it continues to speak to us about our society with humour and compassion. It speaks to a middle class troubled by ideas of belonging ... Our relationship to our country, our questions about identity, the palaver over pendatang is still the conversation in every coffee shop. Post May 9th with talk of Malaysia Baru it is still the conversation in every artisanal cafe.”

In 1993 my mind did not care to recognise race in the friendships I made.

As with other Malaysians growing up in a multi-racial environment, it was only later that we realised how viscerally important it was to many of our compatriots, and how it affected personal and professional relationships, politics, public policy and the many reactions thereto.

Watching this play – whose title is taken from the famous proverb – 26 years after it was written made me realise how, in many ways, the challenges of nurturing a shared sense of citizenship in our country have become tougher.

In my discussion paper for the eighth World Summit on Arts and Culture in Kuala Lumpur this week, I wrote: “Malaysian society’ encompasses multiple and overlapping identities: ethnic, cultural, religious, ideological, or based on age, gender, income, class and geography. Every citizen will have their own weightage of which of these are more important than others, and within these identities there are shifting definitions ... this in turn determines their expectations of their country and its government.

“The biggest challenge comes from those who actively wish to close down various avenues for debate and national soul-searching in favour of a particular definition of ‘culture’.”

A further danger is that such exclusivists would wish to centralise control of all institutions that would enable the propagation or enforcement of only that definition.

Not only would such a strategy run counter to the principles of freedom and justice, but it would endanger Malaysia’s diversity and risk national instability.

Political dynamics will, as usual, contribute a great deal to these developments. If those pushing exclusionary rhetoric really believe that it will help them gain and sustain political power, it is up to civil society and the arts fraternity to remind compatriots of a more inclusive vision of citizenship: one of galactic proportions, even.

Tunku Zain Al-’Abidin is the founding president of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas). The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.