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2005-03-02 - 2:01 a.m. Finally finished my series of lectures at RJC. Three sessions in all: Terrorism, Censorship and Propaganda. I think the school wanted mostly terrorism discussions (my brief was : Politics and Violence) but managed to slip in the rest of the naughty bits with excuse that I'm discussing ideological violence. So was able to talk about abuses of the ISA, the Newspaper and Printing Press Act, language manipulation in propaganda. In today's session, talked about the newspapers we used to have: The Singapore Monitor, The Singapore Herald, The Eastern Sun, Nanyang Siang Pau, Sin Chew Jit Poh, Utusan Melayu. By 1984 Singapore News and Publishing Limited (which ran Lianhe Wanbao, Lianhe Zaobao and the Singapore Monitor) had merged with Straits Times Press and Times Publishing Berhad to form that megamonolith we know as Singapore Press Holdings. Whose CEO, Tjong Yik Min, an Indonesian-born Chinese, was an ex-ISD officer. I was just looking at the students and was struck at how they were all born in 1987...born into a time of complete Press monopoly by their own government. I know I'm sounding dreadfully idealistic, but I always find that there's something magic about addressing students. The mystery of what is actually imbibed, absorbed, made part of the fabric of their knowledge and value systems. It's the silent ones that always intrigue me. I'm reminded of Adrienne Rich's poem, about teaching poetry in a classroom.
Talking of poetry, hauling the books I love that last line, by the way. Because there's that sense that surrounded by an atmosphere where they're all analysing, picking at the famous words penned by famous people, the student is quietly asserting his presence (by the way, 'Jude'--from the Hebrew meaning 'praise'). A sense of 'I might not be able to leave the trace of who I am through words, but here I am anyway. Resisting annihilation. The materiality of my body. To remind my teacher that this language we are learning: abstract, intangible, sprung from a writer as real as I am.' I've also been very intrigued of late by a painting by Chua Mia Tee, who was a member of the Equator Art Society, an artists' collective that got into trouble with the Singapore authorities because of its supposed leftist leanings (members were mostly proponents of Social Realism). The death-knell for them was in 1960, when the government forcibly closed down the second group exhibition by the Equator Art Society at the Victoria Memorial Hall.
The original title of this painting, completed in 1959, was 'Bahasa Melayu Class' (Malay Language Class). The Singapore Art Museum has discreetly retitled it as 'National Language Class' in its catalogue. It's a very fascinating painting for me, because here you have a classroom of Chinese students being taught Malay by a Malay teacher. I've always assumed that it was Chua's critique of the imposition of a 'National Language' onto an unwilling ethnic group. The second boy from the teacher's left, for example, is directing his gaze at the viewer: his expression is enigmatic--but one could read perhaps resentment, a certain simmering protest... But art historian Kevin Chua offers a different reading. He insists that instead of a picture depicting some amount of racial tension, the painting 'is an attempt to transcend the particularties of race. Importantly the central exchange in the picture is between the seated girl and the standing reading boy, and not any face-off between student and teacher. What was threatening was this was a vision not of education but self-education. This is where the painting recollects a deeper colonial history: in the 19th Century, British education of Malays ironically posed a challenge to their own authority, giving the Malays tools of self-analysis as a race. In Chua's painting, the girl is not responding to what the words mean, but what they feel like--she's being awakened by language.' It was a bit of a shock to read Kevin Chua's analysis, because to some extent it revealed the kinds of racialised lenses that I was using to view the painting. Of course I'm not too familiar with the social milieu in post-war, pre-self-governance Singapore, but it was humbling to learn that the painting was not so much about ethnic identity but national identity. The students were learning Malay because it was a language that suggested sovereignity, freedom from British rule. Kevin Chua also states: 'As early as 1952, the decision was made to teach Malay as a lingua franca, in the face of mounting rural demand. Although the MCA was strengthening its alliance with Chinese educational and cultural associations in the mid-50's, to mount a powerful challenge to national education policy, the Chinese language never had any true claim to any original sovereignity of the land.' From my point of view, this wasn't about what language should be dominant, but about harnessing a certain anti-colonial rhetoric. The British put their flags and boots on Malay soil, and the birth of the nation had to be conducted through the motherland answering back, in its mother tongue--which happens to be Malay. To build a nationalism based on Mandarin would be weak, because there was popular perception that the arrival of the British predated the arrival of the Chinese--as indentured labour, for example. And Mandarin is also not the mother tongue of many of the Chinese, who were primarily speaking the other Chinese languages (I always have a problem referring to them as subordinate 'dialects'--Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, Hainanese, etc). And the words on the chalkboard are revealing too: it reads 'siapa nama k... [kamu]/ di mana awak tinggal?' Which means 'What is your name? Where do you live?' I read this as a kind of assertion that learning another language does not necessarily efface your own cultural identity: your subjectivity is preserved and respected: the simple facts of who you are and where you live (or your origins: where you come from). Wo de min zi shi Alfian Sa'at. Wo zhu zai xin jia po. I look at the painting again, at the simple grace of the girl's smile, the undisguised mirth at her classmate's perhaps faltering attempts at the language--tasting, weighing each unfamiliar syllable--he whose face is turned away from us so that the only clue to his performance comes to us from the girl. This morning, on the cab ride to RJC, the Chinese taxi driver insisted on speaking to me in Malay, claiming that he wasn't very proficient in English. He talked about his Malay neighbours; I told him about my Grandmother being adopted from a Hakka family (oh, same gang as Lee Kuan Yew, he joked!); then he told me that the Malays used to say during his time, 'Cina beranak tahu, pelihara tak tahu'--which means, 'know how to give birth, but don't know how to raise'. We talked about how the Chinese loved their sons and the Malays their daughters. Chua Mia Tee was known to make sketches on the spot, which he would later work on in his studio. What this means is that there is the possibility that the girl in the painting existed, and is 46 years older now. Like the taxi driver, she is part of a generation which in its small uncredited ways, attempted 'to transcend the particularties of race'.
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