Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock

Waterfront, Cape Town; Jan ’09

My bedtime reading last week was Haruki Murakami’s A wild sheep chase. And it was brilliant excursion — I’ll never really know what it’s like in the original, but in Alfred Birmbaum’s translation the nameless protagonist narrates this “crime-occult double feature” of a novel with stunning normalcy. And although he describes the films in the double feature (watched in Sapporo with his girlfriend following a semiphilosophical conversation about what one can do with the time one saves by flying rather than taking the bus en route to finding sheep) as “exemplars of the dreadful”, A wild sheep chase is anything but. Subtle if obsessively layered imagery and nonchalant lyricism and all.

That said, it made for a couple weird dreams. Not that any of the novels I’ve read this year have made for mundane dreams — for some reason I keep picking stuff that deals with post/modern restlessness by veering into the bizarre. Although the Murakami was the first departure from the emotionally or socially or politically bizarre into the full-out fantastical.

And then yesterday I capped an evening of a couple articles about democracy with a couple W.H. Auden poems, but I still dreamed briefly about making notes for exam revision. So about half an hour ago, after spending most of today on lots of articles about democratization and autocratization,* I decided to look for free Kindle children’s literature on Amazon. And tonight — after a few more articles about authoritarianism — I will be reading Susan Coolidge’s Clover, which somehow I’ve never read even though we grew up with What Katy did.

On another note, I’ve written on my left palm twice in the last few days. Back when I was in secondary school, my left hand/wrist/forearm was my de facto to-do list. Now I pretend to be civilized, but last Wednesday the 11-year-old whom I tutor in English was drawing faces on his fingers, so I drew one on my hand to talk to his.

And then when I was helping at Sunday School one of the 5-year-olds asked for help because he didn’t know “how to do a lower-case ‘e’”, and there wasn’t any paper handy. (Haha sorry.) When I was his age, I’m pretty sure I was calling letters “big” and “small”. Not that either his present “e”s or my former ones would merit the description “small”, but linguistic imprecision is adorable when you’re five. Not nearly as adorable when you’re five times that age, which is why I can has emo blog, where I don’t have to make sense. Although I do still have to make revision notes.

*With deviations into grocery shopping, annoyance at myself for getting annoyed at rigorous scholars who don’t talk about postcolonialism (because their research questions don’t really relate to postcolonialism), and conversations (mostly) free from academic jargon.

Its movements cannot be anticipated because it has no reasons

Marrakech, Jan ’12

Right now I should be either (a) sleeping, not least because I’m mildly sick, or (b) looking at the other 70 pages of material for tomorrow’s 9am reading group, which I won’t be attending partly because I have 70 pages to go and partly because I’m mildly sick. But I saw a spectacular play this evening, and I might as well get the blogging bug out of the way.

Today’s show was Theatre Wallay & Kashf’s production of The taming of the shrew in Urdu. It’s part of the Globe to Globe festival, from which I’ve also seen Richard III in Mandarin and Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad in Arabic — but oddly enough, it reminded me more of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Henry V. Or maybe not so oddly, since I just saw Henry V two weeks ago and have yet to blog about it. Haha. Sigh.

Four pseudo-similarities between these stagings of The taming of the shrew and Henry V:

1. I haven’t read Henry V. But we’d spent a lot of time on Henry IV Part I during my O Levels so I was expecting a lot from both the language and the presentation of the former Prince Hal,  and I wasn’t disappointed. I also haven’t read The taming of the shrew, but it seems I remembered a number of the twists from reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare ages ago.

2. Both were really traditional, only not. Henry V was the first traditional staging of a traditional play that I’ve seen in Oxford, with a fabulous cast that spoke Shakespeare wonderfully. But a lot of the flourishes and rhythms felt entirely modern. And I don’t know anything at all about Urdu theatre and couldn’t identify any of the instruments on stage apart from the guitar and the sitar, but my friend (who was visiting from SOAS and whom I first met when I was visiting Gothenburg from SOAS two years ago) said that the music in The taming of the shrew included her favourite ghazal and one of the most popular Sufi melodies. Other cool crossovers included the fact that Hortensio’s widow is played by an actor who had been a manservant in earlier scenes, which of course had all kinds of South Asian/Shakespearean connotations.

3. One cool innovation the plays shared was their presentation of the chorus/muse character. In both cases, the role was filled by a gifted actress who also played sundry minor characters. (I don’t think this character exists in The taming of the shrew, but she seemed to be a fourth-wall-shattering substitute for the framing play in the text.)

4. Monty Python. By which I mean that the Welsh Captain Fluellen in the RSC’s Henry V really really reminded me of the French knights in Monty Python and the holy grail. (Note: all the French people and the sole Welshman whom I know in person are lovely human beings). Also, the blocking and gestures and timing of the physical comedy in The taming of the shrew rivaled and possibly surpassed than those I saw in Spamalot in January. And right now my sentences are about as coherent as a Trojan Rabbit.

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After The taming of the shrew ended I was thinking that it was a really really good thing that I don’t have tickets to any more plays till a full two weeks after my qualifying exam — at which point, incidentally, I’ll be seeing Tom Stoppard’s The real thing.

Then when I was walking from the theatre to my bicycle, I ran into my supervisor, whom I’d last seen a few hours earlier when we were talking through my thesis proposal. And when I ran into her on the street she said she’d just been talking about me one block ago.

Among the many things that are clearer than my late-night syntax: it’s not the season to be blogging. Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh.

Human creativity enters into all our construals of truth

section of Victor Tan’s “In the air”, Esplanade, Singapore; summer ’11

Stuff that shouldn’t happen in real life:

1. Sentences like this one, in otherwise good books:

“As a final preliminary word, it should be emphasized that the degree to which these four premises have accurately described the American experience as far as political and economic development is concerned, and the extent to which liberal ideology has been good or bad for America per se (as distinguished from America’s involvement with Third World countries) are not questions treated in this book.”

2. Attending talks by people whose books you’re reading:

This one isn’t quite a “shouldn’t happen”, but it’s definitely a “I can’t believe it happened”. Last Wednesday I attended a lecture by Theda Skocpol, the only woman among the fifteen political science visionaries interviewed in the book I mentioned in my last post. Her lecture, about her new book on the Tea Party, was a masterpiece of delivery as well as substance.

Then on Friday I went for a discussion with Christian Smith, the author of the book that we’re discussing in our reading group. The back-and-forth was a lot of fun to listen to; I’m always amazed that heads can hold so much stuff.

3. This:

He: I feel so cool right now. [walking through a privileged door and down some stairs in a room is typically forbidden to students]

Me: Yeah, me too. [slips on stairs; falls on rear end; loses high heel to the opposite end of the room]

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One theme in many of my recent thoughts and conversations has been the fundamental uncertainty in human life, the margin of error in all knowledge, the persistent misunderstandings — and our attempts to tame this indeterminacy.

In friendships, we try to trust and listen, to ourselves and others. In my academic work, I think it will manifest in a form of critical realism, whether or not I’m aware of it when I’m under deadlines. In faith, it means contentment in the interstices between immediate blurriness and perpetual clarity. In art, it can yield glorious romps like Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, in which images of espionage, selves, double-slit experiments, love, and cultural quirks converge.

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Or other convergences too — in between Hapgood and Roth’s American pastoral, I read J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a bad year. It was my first full Coetzee, and I’d only picked it because it happened to be at the public library when I went there to borrow another Where’s Wally? for the boys I tutor. But it turned out to be a fabulous counterpoint to American pastoral. Both are novels about relationships and care and politics and unease and doubt and intractable compulsions. Both include the first-person voice of an aging author; both use literary form figuratively. And, of course, both are very different.

There are elements of Coetzee’s style that remind me of Chaim Potok’s — not similarities of plot nor outlook, but their voices share a mastery of tension, of loaded sparseness. In Diary of a bad year, much of the tension and weight comes from the interaction between its three concurrent streams of narration. I usually enjoy books with competing storytellers, sometimes revisionist and sometimes confirmatory, and Diary of a bad year is no exception.

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I just paused to count, and my qualifying exam is in twenty days, during which I’ll also have to complete my thesis design essay. This probably means that these twenty days shouldn’t include much blogging. Experience has shown that my self-imposed blogging moratoriums have a high risk of failure, so I’m not going to put this blog into hiatus. But if you don’t hear from me in a while, don’t worry — I’ll be alive and probably very content, just nerding it up.

Political theories are often a function of temperament

ironic columns on Lawrence Hall, Williamstown; fall ’10

As a work interlude, I just read two interviews from a book we discussed in this morning’s very meta seminar about the achievements of comparative politics. Of the fifteen interviews in the book, I gravitated to the two featuring alumni from my undergraduate college.

The first interview was with Barrington Moore, Jr., author of the monumental Social origins of dictatorship and democracy (1967), which gave social science the equivocal mantra “No bourgeoisie, no democracy.” There’s a lot in Moore’s style and biases that chafes me — one of my friends called his interview responses those of “a grumpy old man” — but the clarity and scale of his vision are staggering. And I’m not just saying that because the theoretical framework of my thesis centres on a rearticulation of his middle-class theory. Emphasis on the “re”, but that doesn’t make me any less indebted and implicated and judgemental. Umm. Haha.

I also read an interview was with James C. Scott, author of Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance (1985). While Social origins sought generalizations from secondary historical studies, Weapons of the weak resulted from two years of living in a village in Kedah, mosquitoes and all. Besides that, Weapons of the weak probably rivals Benedict Anderson’s Imagined communities as the most widely read book that builds political theories from Southeast Asia. Plus, Scott’s interview is really fun to read, and he’s known as a good writer.

But I can’t verify his literary prowess, because for some embarrassing reason I have yet to read Weapons of the weak, despite the fact that it’s been strongly recommended by an English friend at SOAS two years ago, a (U.S.ian or other American?) professor during a lecture last term, and a South African friend in my programme. And despite the fact that my thesis is also about resistance to hegemonic authority in Malaysia. Umm. Haha. Another one for the summer/thesis reading list.

In the meantime, I shall shamelessly lift block quotes from Scott’s interview:

Q: You got your undergraduate degree at Williams College in 1958. What did you learn at Williams?
A: I was very badly prepared for Williams, both socially and intellectually. In fact, I was convinced I did not belong there and that I was going to flunk out. The first day I arrived at Williams there were freshmen talking about authors and poets whom I’d never even heard of, let alone formed an opinion about. I thought, ‘‘I don’t know anything,’’ and I called my mother and said, ‘‘You know I’ll do my best, Mom, but I’ll probably be home before Christmas because I don’t think I’m going to make it here.’’ Because of my self-doubt, I worked really hard at Williams.

Q: You majored in economics. What was the training like?
A: … The one thing Williams did for me, something my subsequent graduate training at Yale did not undo, is give me a kind of intellectual ambition. It’s not as if Williams educated me all that well, but it did give me a map of what it would take to be a real intellectual. At Williams, I also picked up a lifelong habit of spending an hour or two each day reading novels and poetry — something completely outside of political science (353). …

Q: Graduate school … can beat the passion out of people.
A: That’s right. You have to arrive with enough passion to sustain yourself. You’re going to live with a dissertation for four or five years. And if it’s not something you love, then it’s not going to sustain you. You need to find something that will motivate you for four or five years.
The other thing I would say is that politics is everywhere. … So, if you’re doing political science right, you’re not just doing it when you’re administering a questionnaire or reading a political science book. The world of politics is around you all the time, even in novels, and if you’re doing political science right, you’re doing it all the time, constantly asking why does this happen and why does that happen (391).

Hidup purple cows.

Why must you see everything second-hand? Why must this be a play?

silat showcase in Kota Bharu, summer ’10

Since my last post, I have: hosted visits from a wonderful secondary school friend and a wonderful college friend; written a 2,000-word tutorial essay; drafted a 5,000-word thesis proposal; presented on my thesis proposal at workshop; worked on a fair-wage campaign at my college; introduced one of the Sudanese primary school boys I tutor to Where’s Wally; cooked; gone for a fancy dinner in another college; attended the first session of my first reading group; conversed over meals and coffee and ice-cream; skyped with a dear friend; and done the usual class and church stuff, among other things. I’m thankful.

Last Thursday, I also got to see Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad in Statford-upon-Avon. A friend and I had bought our tickets way before I had any sense of how ridiculous my schedule would get — but I was so glad we did, because the production was magnificent.

I don’t know when I last cried at the theatre, but the Shiite Mercutio death from the Sunni Tybalt’s bullet drew tears. The company — including drama students, one of Iraq’s most distinguished actors, and a superb tragedian-turned-comedienne — also elicited laughs, jumps, and endless applause from the audience, whose eyes were on the surtitle screens half the time. Director Monadhil Daood’s bold choices, such as cutting the balcony scene and inserting a rollicking folk-tale sequence about Lady Beetle and her lover Rat, made for an irresistible play-polemic.

There were plenty of other elements that I’d love to detail — the minimal, mobile set; the use of scarves to unify and control; the fabulous range of movement and physicality; the integration of pop culture; the touches of complicit voyeurism; the genre blending — but I also want to remember how I reacted to the post-show Q&A.

The majority of the questions were really happy comments by amateur cultural emissaries; while I thoroughly agreed with their affirmations, repeated compliments interpreted back-and-forth didn’t yield the most incisive session. But two interlocutors stood out.

The first was a tall Englishman sitting in the front row. I have lived and worked in Iraq but would never be able to ask this question there, he said. How many of you in the company are Sunni and how many Shiite?

Monadhil refused to answer. We are artists. We will not rebuild the walls we are breaking down.

The Englishman tried to go on. My point is that it’s very easy to talk about difference in Italy centuries ago, but it’s not so easy when we’re dealing with present divisions. Et cetera.

A few questions later, a young man spoke in rapid Arabic. He used the phrase “وجهة نظر” — point of view — frequently. The interpreter translated: Whose perspective are you trying to show? Why didn’t you present the Iraqi perspective on the American occupation and its destructiveness? Why didn’t you do more?

Monadhil was gentle but unshakable. We did. In the first scene, when the teacher speaks of the essence of Iraq, the silent American soldier in the background vanishes. At the beginning of the scene where Montague comes on stage to spar with his lady who yearns for the unthinkable reconciliation, he takes his intravenous drip away from the American solider, and Lady Montague is dressed as a nurse. Our symbols were clear; any Iraqi would have understood them. This is a play for the Iraqi people.

The young man persisted: but this play is now in England. You have a greater reach. You have power. How can you not represent the Iraqi point of view?

I thank you for your opinions, Monadhil said. I look forward to seeing them in a play of your own.

And I thank you, the young man said. And he walked out of the theatre.

And I was shaken, because I knew most of the people sitting around me were appalled at the young man’s presumption. But I was infuriated by the presumption of the moralising Englishman who had thought he was elevating the company to civilised England when Monahdhil was trying to elevate him to truthful art. And although I have yet to walk out on a discussion or lecture or play or movie, I felt for the young man — as Asian American literary criticism feels for the ambivalence between individual artistic liberty and necessarily visible representation, and as I was pretty sure some members of the Iraqi Theatre Company felt, sitting there on the gorgeous little thrust stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre.

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Another interesting thing about R&J in Baghdad: I understood somewhere between a third and a half of the Arabic, while I’d only understood a smattering of the Mandarin at the National Theatre of China’s excellent production of Richard III at the Globe on Sunday. Still, I felt unjustifiably smug when I recognised the stellar Chinese rendition of “A horse, a horse.” In a couple weeks I’ll get to see one other play in the World Shakespeare Festival series: The taming of the shrew in Urdu. Last month I saw Hamlet with an unrehearsed cast configuration and improvised props. Next week I’m going for the Globe Theatre’s Henry V on tour here. Some forms of confusion make me happy.

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Another indulgence this past week: staying up to finish Philip Roth’s American pastoral, even though that meant messing with my jealously guarded sleep schedule. For some reason I hadn’t read any Roth before, and had been working away at American pastoral for a few weeks, constantly interrupted by more urgent reading.

Roth is one of those writers whose style I love but don’t anticipate reading very much. It’s funny — I’d recently told a friend that her collection of short stories was stunning, even though I generally preferred the indeterminacy of complicated overlaps in novels and plays over the irresolution of truncated storylines in short stories — and then along comes Roth, voluptuous in mundanities and compulsively detailed in the vital trivialities that dominate our brainspace, and I find him exhausting. Virtuosic, but exhausting nonetheless. He writes entrancingly flawed characters, and every other page has vivid reflections that could easily end up as one of the Pithy Title Quotes on this blog, but part of his genius is in bringing meticulous lyric to the endless inconsistent churning of our minds. I was reminded of Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an artist, as an old man, but I read that a long time ago and may be misremembering. So before I do any more violence to either Heller or Roth, here’s a bit of American pastoral.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turh with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody about the same meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. … That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you (35).

In an unintended self-referential caricature of Roth’s beautifully ponderous vitality, here’s some of what this passage made me think of: the abovementioned friend’s short stories — I’d pretentiously told her that “I really like how your characters get messed up because they hope a lot but fear too much, not because they stop hoping, as in a lot of the depressing modern stuff I like”; which in turn brought to mind a European friend who’d visited Boston for the first time and said that “downtown feels really American, a country constantly living between hope and fear”; an emo poem I wrote during senior year; and the hopefully-not-too-depressing prospects for social science epistemology, which I wrote about in a philosophy essay over the Easter holidays, and which we’ll be discussing in this week’s reading group.

And before I get any more tired and tiresome, it’s time for real work. Lucky you.

The peace we should seek, the peace we must forego

Stone Hill from the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; summer '08

This week is overflowing with virtually every category of activity that ever enters my schedule. Overflowing to the point where I don’t regret missing the Magdalen choir’s May Morning serenade to the onset of spring a few hours ago. And I’m posting this to remind myself that gratitude and stillness and humour are essential categories in any week’s agenda. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Mendukung cita-cita hendak memelihara satu cara hidup demokratik

Bersih 2.0, Kuala Lumpur; July 9, 2011

Last night I was again outside the Malaysian Police headquarters. I keep wondering why I went. It’s as if I’ve been possessed. I know I will not enjoy anything else I attempt to do between 8pm and 9pm nightly. I’m struggling to understand myself. Things came to a head last night. I was asked to speak on why I was at the vigil. I declined. I was embarrassed to say I didn’t really know (39). …

I am attending the vigils because I have been radicalised by the Messiah. My attendance is my verdict on the abuse of power. My standing there is my running away from the cowardice which permits evil to reign. My presence there is power for others (45).

That’s Rama Ramanathan writing in The Bible and the ballot: reflections on Christian political engagement in Malaysia today. Published by Graceworks and Friends in Conversation, The Bible and the ballot is a slim volume of thoughtful essays by Malaysian Christians on why they care and what they hope for.

It’s always encouraging to hear from people who sound like reasonable human beings while affirming things that you sometimes feel crazy for believing. For me, that category of beliefs includes both Christian truth claims and Malaysian democratic aspirations. So The Bible and the ballot puts me in the position of a chorister who enjoys the preaching.

But there’s a more symbolic reason why I found this book encouraging. A few years ago I remember hearing a politician speak in a seminar in PJ about how he gets flak for his chosen form of public service because his fellow churchgoers disdain all of politics as corrupt. He was from a ruling-coalition party that I would never support, but I did agree with his argument that Christians in Malaysia need to engage in politics more — but also more responsibly, prayerfully, and humbly.

It’s comfortable to rest in high-minded but unexamined notions of dirty politics and the separation of church and state. Politics may be somewhat dirty, but most sociopolitical things are — and everything is political. We cannot imagine (or pray) away the fact that we have to respond to how our governments wield power. Growing up with three energetic siblings has given me a knee-jerk reaction against the platitude that “silence means consent” — but silence is an action. Neutrality is a choice and, while it’s often a good choice, it’s not always the best one.

And while I fully believe in the separation of church/mosque/temple/gurdwara/shrine/meditation garden from state, that does not mean that membership in one negates constructive participation in the other. It does mean that each has sovereign rules in its own domain, and that the friction of overlaps must be negotiated with the consensus of the wider public body. And even though the wider public body comprises assorted individuals who can and should let their assorted philosophies shape their actions, their arguments in the public sphere must speak to civic interests. Just like how it would be silly and arrogant of me to speak in physics jargon (which I am no longer fluent in) or Malay in an English-medium comparative politics class. (Not that I’m necessarily lucid in seminar even when I’m speaking the right language.)

Given all of that, it’s lovely to see The Bible and the ballot make a measured, multifaceted, unflinchingly visible, and pleasantly formatted contribution to the discourse on these issues. Take that, pious squeamishness.

That said, the parts of The Bible and the ballot that I enjoyed the most were the accounts of personal experience and motivation, rather than the more general arguments or factual expositions. (This is probably because I spend most of my time reading general arguments and factual arguments for class, although I probably should be reading more of those, instead of e.g. spending the evening blogging). So here’s a bit from Tan Soo Inn:

I am under no illusions that any human government this side of heaven will be free of problems. Indeed, the fact that human governments constantly fail us reminds me that the perfect government awaits the return of the King to usher in the new heaven and the new earth. It is precisely because I know up-front that no earthly government will be perfect that I am freed from cynicism, and this allows me to do what I can. Often, this means that in choosing between two candidates, I am choosing the lesser of two evils. But this too needs to be done. We need to curtail evil as well as promote good. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is right when he reminds us that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”. We fool ourselves if we think that we are always right and the other side is always wrong. All things being equal, in a particular choice, I must try to discern  which candidate is a little bit closer to the side of the angels’ (23).

In sum, The Bible and the ballot is definitely worth the SGD7/RM15. Because both the Bible and the ballot have immeasurable worth. Haha. But really.

Click for more information at the Graceworks webstore.

Just one gripe: of the six essayists, five are Chinese and all are men. Mitigating factors: first, Sivin Kit acknowledges in the afterword that the book would have been richer had it included more gender, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. Second, although Sivin is the only one of the (mostly Chinese anglophone male) contributors whom I know personally, I’ve heard good things about all of them, and their stories bear that out. Third, the writers affirm multiple voices and multiple forms of expression, which presumably includes emo blogs.

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Here’s part of my story.

I didn’t have a particularly politicised childhood. My father did have a T-shirt that said: “ISA: I Say Abolish”, but I was far more familiar with the Pevensie children, Asterix, and Commander Keen than I was with the Malaysian cabinet. When the economy crashed and Mahathir sacked Anwar, we were far away in a suburb of Chicago because my dad was attending seminary, and I was small enough that most of the news went over my head.

We got back to Malaysia in 1999. I remember some of my relatives holding some strongly anti-incumbent sentiments, and a few of my classmates mirroring their parents’ political loyalties.

In 2003, I went to Singapore for the O Levels. I don’t remember when I began to get angry at The Straits Times‘s biased coverage of politics at home, but I did. I don’t remember when I started praying with some friends for Malaysia’s public space, but we did — even if we spent more time praying about family or church or academic contentment or girl tiffs or boy angst.

In 2007, after my A Levels, I interned at a national daily and saw the political process in the flesh. I covered a bit of it, too. (The excruciating puns never went into the stories).

Later that year I left for college in rural Massachusetts, knowing that I was going to major in political economy. I don’t remember the genesis of that impulse — maybe there wasn’t a distinguishable one. It certainly took till my sophomore year for me to let go of the possibility of a shiny major in English or comparative lit or math or physics or philosophy.

Halfway through my freshman year, I turned 21. I couldn’t register to vote between my birthday and the March ’08 general elections because you weren’t allowed to register at foreign missions back then. But I think I still cried when the opposition won an unprecedented vote share, and celebrated with both dizzy and doomsday speculations in a conversation that evening with the one other Malaysian on campus.

Over the next few years, I registered as a voter in Malaysia; made unfruitful phone calls to consulates and embassies asking why they didn’t have the legally mandated procedures in place for full-time overseas students to register for absentee ballots; and wrote my thesis on a contentious Malaysian education policy.

Last July, I marched in the Bersih 2.0 rally. I ran from our law enforcers. I blinked away tear gas. By the time I blogged about the rally two nights later, it felt surreal. But indelible. I still can’t quite believe that my government shot tear gas into a hospital compound in front of all of us, but I will not stop believing in fairness and kinship we stood for that day.

A few weeks after Bersih 2.0, I attended a vigil for the Emergency Ordinance Six, the same unjustly detained activists whom Rama Ramanathan was supporting in the quote at the top of this post. A few months later, I left for this master’s programme in England.

I don’t fully understand how I have become a graduate student in political science, or how I have come to be entrusted with a monthly column on a public commentary website. Or how I have spent so many years in countries where it is really hard to buy a nonchurchy/boozy wedding card for my beautiful Muslim cousin who is getting married at home the day after Bersih 3.0. I also have no idea whether or not I will get to vote in the upcoming general election: the EC finally says they are processing my absentee ballot application, but they seem to have struck me from the electoral roll in the meantime.

But it would be both futile and ungrateful to discount any of these developments, just as it would be futile and ungrateful to deny either my Malaysianness or my Christianity. Not that I’ve never had the inclination — to present myself as less foreign, less religious, less personally invested in classes, at parties, or on this blog and Facebook — but both Malaysianness and Christianity are far too exciting to confine to pews and protests.

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The Bersih 3.0 protests are symbolic. Voting itself is symbolic. But both Bersih and elections have as much practical impact as symbolic weight. And their symbolic weight is considerable.

Malaysia is not the sort of semiauthoritarian state where you do not speak up because you fear for bodily security. Which is a large part of why the political violence at the Bersih 2.0 rally felt unreal. This is not to trivialise the scores of people are abused or killed in lockups on an official’s whim — but to commemorate the many more who speak up.

Yet the incumbent government refuses to listen.

Still, as much as I-who-am-just-getting-used-to-a-smartphone-and-who-pretends-to-dislike-simplistic-observations hates to admit it, the internet has become an invaluable space for open discourse, journalism, and mobilization in Malaysia. Not least because the government retains a formidable grip on mainstream media. And just as the internet as subverted a lot of that chokehold, many of us eager to subvert our pseudodemocracy. Even if it takes hundreds of thousands of rakyat protesting in 80 cities around the world for tanah tumpahnya darah kami, and several more elections fought on highly skewed ground. Not just insha Allah, but because Malaysia boleh. And I’ll be in front of the Malaysian High Commission in London on Saturday.