Transmenu powered by JoomlArt.com - Mambo Joomla Professional Templates Club

©The Sun (Used by permission)
by Llew-Ann Phang

Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage Datuk Seri Rais Yatim shares his vision for Malaysian culture going forward:

“Fifty years from now is too far away for me to say [what Malaysian culture will be like]. But, I think our 50th Merdeka anniversary will make Malaysians realise that culture must be jealously guarded, developed, preserved and promoted.

It must be done equally amongst other disciplines, and cannot take a backseat, as it has done in the past decades.

You can talk until the cows come home through politics, but culture is the best language that naturally binds the communities.

The crux is that through culture, you can create a cultural industry like music, and we should be able to nurture it through the movies too.

The Culture, Arts and Heritage Ministry will give full-throttle attention and promotion to all fields for the various communities’ culture to fit in with the national build-up, for cultural preservation and promotion.

In the future, the Malaysian culture must be understood within a multiracial context.

It cannot be seen or practised purely through one channel of cultural expression and it has to be multi-racial of course, giving due weightage to what the Federal Constitution says. We would like Malaysia to boom and become a showcase of cultural richness in Asia and the world.

We must understand that culture is actually a composite workshop amongst all races. We can still focus and practise cultural performances according to communities, but they must interpose and intermix.

The joget should be danced by all communities, Malays should be able to play the erhu just as good as the Chinese can – all these are cultural activities we must develop. This is easier said than done because culture has been compartmentalised too much in the past along racial lines.

In the past, we were not taught to appreciate clean rivers, the quality of life amongst the local plants, or clean beaches, unlike today, and simultaneously, we’re trying to slot music and theatre – the arts – in their proper places.

We created two Parliamentary Acts for this: the National Heritage Act and the National Arts, Culture and Heritage Academy (Aswara) Act.

The National Heritage Act serves to understand, evaluate and promote heritage but to Malaysians, heritage means buildings, which is a sad story.

Heritage is not buildings only but language, what we paint, draw, or sell in terms of food, and the remnants of the past. While it is to be safeguarded by the museums, it is also to be safeguarded by law.

Aswara is relevant to train our employees from theatre to drama, music, stage management, language, etc.

With these infrastructure, we hope the future is clear for this ministry to plod on and achieve what we have to.

The room for achievement is larger than what we have achieved but I’m quite happy to see that some of the major projects have been translated into [action].

We will be very serious in our training through schools and through Aswara, and we will continue to expose our cultural richness to the world and speak the language of cultural harmony and achievements.

The country has galloped a long distance since 1957. Culture has also developed in consonance with other areas, but I dare not say it is as rapidly as the buildings in Kuala Lumpur or Putrajaya.

Comparing it to a train journey, I’d say culture has plodded on rather slowly. This is due to the fact that being a developing nation, there was no premium put on culture before.

Of course, we had the Culture, Youth and Sports Ministry in 1974 when I was with the present [Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi] in the same ministry, but culture was hinged on too many other areas like sports, information and a part of it was even under the PM’s Department.

We had no real steering and planning until Abdullah rode on the saddle of being the number one in the country. This is the first time a full ministry was created and it is expected to gallop faster than the slow train, although it is not easy. I think we will gallop into the second phase of its evolution.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed