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©The Sun (Used by permission)
by Beth Yahp

IN MIDDLE-AGE, AS HUMAN LIFETIMES GO, TIME SPEEDS UP. AT 50, or even 40, you find you have dallied or sweated your youth away, you’ve used up a certain store of your allotted energies. The time ahead seems short and your list of fulfilled wishes incomplete. You have a sense of urgency.

So, the things I wish to see happening in Malaysian arts practice, I’d wish for now. Fifty years from now may well see me wishing, presuming I still can, for what is now the status quo as some of us do today, looking back fifty years. Things were better then, things will pick up tomorrow. It’s easier looking backwards, or forwards, or elsewhere, removing ourselves from the present, giving ourselves time-out from the messiness and struggle of day-to-day living. The little compromises that make life tolerable.

This seems to me the accepted notion of art in Malaysia, 50 years from Merdeka: art as entertainment, as distraction from the discomforts or banalities of the everyday. In addition, permissible art in this country is also instructive, it teaches morals and lessons, pats us on the back as a nation, and shows us our magnified successes and minimised failures. It leads us gently down pathways both familiar and safe. Shows us ourselves on our best behaviour, muhibbah when we’re together in public, otherwise safely compartmentalised.

That’s ok. Everyone needs a little familiarity and safety, a little soft focus in the comfort of our own homes, where we can take off our glasses and drift about in a tranquil haze. I do this often. Knowing where everything is, not bumping into anything, or anyone, and unable to see the grime in need of elbow grease, or the temperamental fish tank, catfish tearing strips from each other, or the malfunctioning fridge.

What I long for, though, as I eventually and desperately search for my glasses, is a little clarity. A little insight to and acceptance of the necessity of art’s other function, which has always been to show us familiarity’s more hidden sides. To discomfort and destabilise us, in order to rip through the hazy cotton wool of everything we take for granted as right and natural and unchanging in our world. To enable us to ask: Why is this right and natural? Has it always been so? Says who?

A work of art may entertain and teach, it may even preach or propagandise, but its most essential role is to imagine, and by extension, as Salman Rushdie puts it, to push at the limits of what it is possible to imagine. This is my wish, for myself as a writer, my mantra. Let me uncage my own imagination because the ability to imagine is another way of describing hope. Because, as argues a student who is defending a book on trial for “immorality” in Azar Nafizi’s Reading Lolita in Teheran: “A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”

If our absolutes are truly absolute, they can stand up to such questioning, whether now, or in 50 years time. Just as our religions and cultures, our social, political and artistic practices, each of them many lifetimes in the making, can stand up to scrutiny and examination, and even a potshot or two. Just as our leaders, who have shaped our world according to their own imaginings, should also be able, and unafraid, to.

In 50 years time, but also today, I’d like to see the end of our carefully nurtured Malaysian culture of fear, which we excuse as politeness and “giving face”. I’d like to see more daring: Malaysians no longer so serenely and steadfastly erring on the side of caution. More importantly, I’d like to see us no longer trained to believe that giving in to a seemingly natural fearfulness is what keeps us safe. Better to be safe than sorry.

Better to self-censor than await official censure. Better to keep our heads down. I’d like to be reminded that “safe” is a sealed steel box, shut away in darkness, that doesn’t need to breathe. And that sorry can be a path to absolution.

As an arts practitioner, someone who “practises art” as others practise law or accountancy, I’d like to be less timid, less worried about offending the people who have fashioned themselves guardians of my raw material – that is, my history, my experiences and memories, individual or collective, that are intrinsically a part of this country’s larger story. Whether sanctioned or suppressed. Whether I was born here, or not, and no matter the language I speak, or my skin colour. Because wherever my roots originated, and whether I’m still here in 50 years time, I am here now. That makes me a part of this place, just as this place is an undeniable part of me. We are all equally inheritors and guardians of Malaysia’s stories, this country’s complex perspectives and histories, which are precious resources. It’s our grave loss if these parts of our selves are forgotten, or buried, or snipped beyond recognition to suit a dominant point of view.

I would like to lose the feeling of having to pussyfoot around what I am allowed to explore, dig deeper into, cultivate. Bring up into the light.

And not feel fraudish, when thanked by strangers for my so-called courage.

Or so three-headed when people innocently declare: “You will never publish this in Malaysia”. “But why?” “Because these kinds of things don’t happen here.”

As a writer, but more importantly a person, a soft-shelled crab in a large ocean, I’d like to feel more protected, less threatened by a comprehensive host of laws with big names and long shadows, that are trotted out regularly, flexing muscles like a team of bodybuilders. I’m skinny and weak by comparison, it’d be nice to have one or two of them on my side.

I’d also like to feel less scared of potential hardship, for me and by extension my family, because of what I’ve written. Because someone’s sensitivities can be hurt.

Most of all, in 50 years’ time, or tomorrow, I’d like not to feel so sensitive myself, or so supposedly incitable. I’d like to be able to be trusted to think things through, to realise and honour life’s complexities, including my own. I’d like to be able to separate my feelings and beliefs from my self, so that when these feelings and beliefs are discomforted and destabilised, I can defend them without feeling flayed in my body and soul. I’d like the confidence to allow these feelings and beliefs to grow and evolve, as living things do, and not be designated monuments, entombed in stone.

I’d like to be able to laugh, and poke fun, and beKeeping it reel poked fun at, and maybe feel my eyes prickle, and my ire rise, but that’s all. I’d like the right to rebuttal without the threat of resorting to knives. Without my internal censor, my safety mechanism, standing by with her scalpel to slice my imagination back to something palatable, inoffensive, bland. I’d like to have grown a thicker skin by then.

In other words, at 50 years of age, let alone 100, as an artist and a Malaysian, I’d like to see myself allowed to grow up.

Beth Yahp is a Malaysian writer and the author of the award-winning novel, The Crocodile Fury.

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