By: Azly Rahman

Growing up in a Malay kampong in Johor Bahru, having been born in a British Military hospital in Singapore, schooled in Kuantan, Seremban, Shah Alam and moving from one realm of cultural experience to the next, living in from one enclave to another in the process of being schooled and in the process of being and becoming an educator, ending up in a town a half and hour’s drive from New York City where I have lived for several years, I sometimes wonder if all these makes me a “cultural construction” of “multi-ethnicity” or a “Malay” still? Or — how “Malay” am I still? Or — what is a Malay”? as I would ask what is an “American”?

Here in the United States where I teach a course called “Cross-Cultural Perspectives” in which 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 dialogue with my 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” means. I look forward to the intensive classroom discussions by the “hybrid and hyphenated human beings” in my class — those whose family background present a rich tapestry of ethnicity in a sea of creativity called the human race.

I have had pure Afghans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, Turks, Greeks, Irish, Australians, Ghanaian, Nigerian, Russian, Israeli, Cuban, Iranian, Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, Australian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Jamaican, Egyptian, Bangladeshi, Saudi Arabian, and a hybrid of all many of these. There were Indonesians too. But no Malaysians yet.

My first question on the first day of class to them is: how multicultural are we? How do we see culture as a “construct” that will enable human progress towards peace, social justice, and liberation? These are indeed big words I have set them to explore.

Is race and ethnicity an illusion and a mental construction? Or is it real as real as body and flesh we fight with using and used by the rhetoric of nationalism in honor of our country right or wrong? How might education help bring about the desired changes in the way we translate concepts to practice?

Malaysians had just celebrated her 51st. Merdeka/Independence celebration and merely a few months after the most decisive and exciting by-election in history; one in which not only many are saying “the political fate of the country lies” but also one in which race and religion has become ever more prominent as a decisive factors.

Against the background of the celebration lies a Malaysia that is engaging in yet another ritual of a “nation perpetually in narration”: the Merdeka celebrations.

Consider the proclamation below:

“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”

— From the Rukunegara, circa 1970

So… what happened?

The words above constructed and proclaimed in 1970, after the bloody riots of May 13, 1969, contained internal contradictions if we are to analyze it today.

As the country approached 31 August 2008, we read the following stories:

– ISA arrests that have confusing and the hypocritical dimensions surrounding these

– a national coalition front undergoing implosion and falling apart

– an irate Prime Minister mulling action against a blogger flying the Malaysian flag upside down, in cyberspace; an action that finally materialised through the arrest of the blogger

– a by-election campaign in Pematang Pauh in Penang, that rears the ugliness of smear campaigns focusing on race, religion, and personal issues instead of presenting solutions to national crises;

– an aborted Bar Council forum on conversion to Islam, disrupted by groups claiming to represent the survival and dignity of Malaysian Muslims;

– an angry Vice Chancellor of an all-Bumiputra university threatening to file suit Chief Minister of Selangor for the latter’s suggestion that Universiti Teknologi MARA be open to non-Bumiputras;

– a teacher in Selangor reprimanded and transferred for hurling racial slurs at her Malaysian school-children of Indian origin;

– the continuing and intensified work of the Prime Minster of Malaysia’s propaganda outfit, Biro Tata Negara in ensuring that the ideology “Ketuanan Melayu” remain funneled into the minds of Malay students, educators, and civil servants;

– the continuing refusal of the Ministry of Higher Education to grant freedom to students to gain concepts and skills of political consciousness by its refusal to radically revise the University and University Colleges Act;

– an increasingly cacaphonic and toxic relationship between the Executive, Judiciary, and Legislative; as a consequence of the 22-year rule of the previous Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad

– a hyper-modernized country trapped in the excesses of nationalism and globalization in an age wherein the global food and energy crisis is taking its toll on the economic and political lives of nations.

Those are amongst the snapshot items of Malaysia circa 51 years of Merdeka/Independence. The composite image of a system of divide and conquer left by the British colonials continue to be artistically refined into subdivisions of divide and conquer, aided by the propaganda machine of the ruling class. Malaysia is seeing the image of the little brown brothers that are becoming the new colonizers and transforming into emperors in new clothes.

If the words of the proclamation are to be our benchmarks of Merdeka, we must ask these questions:

– how have we fostered unity amongst nation, when our government promotes racism thorough racialized policies and by virtue that our politics survive on the institutionalization 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 multicultural 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 is designed based on the premise that only one race need to be helped and forever helped whereas at the onset of Independence poverty exists even amongst 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 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, industrialization, and dependency?

Are we seeing a failed Malaysia? Has racial politics brought this nation into chaos?

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

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

The colonized has become the colonizer. The once oppressed is now oppressing. The ignorant is educating the educated. In a world of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

The State has become a totalitarian entity using the ideological state apparatuses to silent the voices of progressive change. The nationalists have nationalized the wealth of the nation for themselves and perhaps siphoning the nation’s wealth internationally.

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

How then must Malaysians celebrate its 52 nd. Merdeka? By flying the Jalur Gemilang upside down? Or to do better than this – to put justice in its own place by engineering a multicultural jihad against all forms of excesses of the abuse of power and to de-toxify the nation entire, and next to begin with Year Zero of our cultural revolution through the gentle enterprise called peace and multicultural education?

Herein lies education as a solution.

I believe we need a radical overhaul of everything, philosophically speaking. We have the structures in place built in some instances to a state-of-the-art but we need to replace the human beings running the system.

We have deeply racialized human beings that are 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 have 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 present system and create a new one; just as how we created our new cities – Putrajaya and Cyberjaya – our symbols of our Oriental Despotism and Asian capitalistic decadence. 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 new Merdeka.

This Merdeka, the rakyat, armed with wisdom of a new era, must now speak softly but carry a big stick.

Our struggle for Merdeka has only just begun.

We hope that the ideas of change discussed in our little Malaysian “salons” — from the warongs to online hangout joints — will become impetus to the much needed mega change in consciousness of Malaysians. We hope that radical ideas will be debated in our universities, educational and cultural institutions and consequently affect political changes that would further compel educators to begin redesigning policies through the rejuvenation of thinking.

Malaysians have no choice. We are all class-based multiculturalists now. We must reinvent even the way to think about how we think as Malaysians.

Now — that’s a metacognitive challenge!

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I APPEAL TO THE MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT TO RELEASE RAJA PETRA KAMARUDIN IMMEDIATELY AND UNCONDITIONALLY AND RELEASE ALL THE ISA DETAINEES AS WELL AND CONSEQUENTLY REPEAL THE ISA AND ALL OTHER INTOLERABLE ACTS

REPLACE THE ISA with an INTELLECTUAL SUSTAINABILITY ACT INSTEAD.

PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION: http://www.petitiononline.com/isa1234/petition.html