This week marks the annual celebration of World Aids day, a somewhat poignant 'celebration', if the word is still applicable in this context, for we really have little to celebrate in the first place.

Indeed, one wonders what there is to celebrate about in Malaysia, for the statistics (the official ones at least) are appalling: 17 years after the first case of HIV was reported in Malaysia, the country now has 57,000 known HIV/Aids cases.(1) Unofficial estimates take the figure even higher, close to double the amount at around 100,000 cases and growing.

The nature of the disease and how it spreads made all the more difficult to detect thanks to Malaysian society's inability to deal with the matter openly means that the increase of the number of cases will most likely go up along a hyperbolic curve, rising increasingly fast as those unaware of being infected themselves pass the virus to unwitting partners.

As was pointed out by the president of the Malaysian Aids Council, Marina Mahathir, recently, one factor that stands in the way of containing the disease is Malaysian society's reluctance to deal with the problem at hand and discuss it frankly and openly.

In her words: "We cannot close our eyes to the fact that there's an epidemic here. What is alarming is the level of denial in Malaysia".

Alien phenomenon

Compounding this is the attitude that HIV/Aids is a problem that affects other communities and is somehow an alien phenomenon in this country: "Malaysians think we will never become like Africa. That is simply not true".

That Malaysians can still believe that HIV/Aids is a 'foreign' problem affecting outsiders is typical of the myopic culture that has come to develop and become normalised in this country of ours. Thinking of HIV/Aids as an 'African problem' or blaming it on the 'West' or 'Westernisation' is just another convenient way of sweeping it under the carpet, a roundabout way of engaging in a collective mode of self-denial so that the tattered narrative of Asian identity and Asian values can be propped up.

Indeed, the denial of HIV/Aids is symptomatic of a wider exercise of collective self-denial and negation of alterity and difference. It is nothing less than an attempt to say that this Malaysia we know is monolithic, flat, static and its boundaries are fixed and its frontiers secure.

Having to admit to the problem of HIV/Aids in Malaysia as a Malaysian problem would mean localising the global, bringing into the margins of the same something which many Malaysians would prefer to render alien and unfamiliar. It would mean, in short, having to admit that there is another Malaysia behind the faade of that static, monolithic image we have become used to thanks to the tourist brochures.

But HIV/AIDS will not go away, no matter how hard we wish it to. Nor will it remain quiet in the little corner in which we wish to confine it. It is there, growing, spreading and it will rear its head in the most unlikely of places and spaces whether we like it or not. Denying the existence of HIV/Aids is like denying the existence of racism and class discrimination in Malaysia, this Asian country that is 'truly Asia' and where such things are said not to exist.

Malaysian politicians, like Asian politicians elsewhere, are wont to disguise these problems by recourse to that tired and worn-out discourse known as 'Asian values'. This is the discourse that was most keenly used by politicians in Malaysia and Singapore in the 1980s, to explain the so-called 'economic miracle' of the region and to deny the relevance of 'Western concepts' like democracy, human rights, pluralism and multiculturalism that were deemed 'alien' to the Asian gene. (At one point Singaporean leaders even went as far as claiming that democracy could not be applied to Asian societies because it was incompatible with Asian genetic history.)

These are the same politicians who have been busy with the Sisyphean labour of reproducing the Asian 'ideal type' of citizen: conservative, middle class, and ultimately heterosexual and boringly conventional in every respect.

But Asians, as we all know by now, are not a homogenous lot. Asian history is replete with manifold examples of subaltern and marginalised discourses and sub-discourses, all working with or at odds with each other like invisible crosscurrents rippling under the surface.

One is tempted to think of an 'ideal past' where Asians were more open and willing to discuss such matters up front, but this notion of a more pluralist history is not exactly an ideological utopia or myth: there are many cases that can be referred to that point to the willingness and ability of Asians to discuss such matters openly, and indeed in many parts of Asia today what is seen as marginal, underground or subaltern in Malaysia is practically normal and integrated into the mainstream.

In parts of Bali, Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi, for instance, there exist many societies where those of transgender groupings live like everyone else, having ordinary lives as ordinary members of the community and who are not shunned or treated with contempt. History also provides us with copious examples of transgendered individuals (depicted in heroic terms, no less) as well as gay and lesbian characters in the epic poems and narratives ( hikayat ) of lore.

If Asian and specifically Malaysian society today seems so homogenous and heterosexist it is not due to historical necessity or the natural progress of time. There are clearly identifiable factors and agents at work that account for the flattening of Malaysian identity and the creation of such ideal types. Along the way, the internal diversity and heterogeneity of Malaysian society has been compromised.

Modernity and modernisation was one of the main factors that account for the homogenisation of Malaysian identity, for it was the arrival of modernity and its rigid order of knowledge and power that also brought along the colonial census, the identity card, the national roster and other tools of governmentality that were used to arrest the flow of signifiers and to fix the meaning of Malaysian identity.

Public religiosity

Another factor that accounts for the streamlining of Malaysian society has been the shift towards a more conservative, shallow, cosmetic form of public religiosity made all the more rigid thanks to the politicisation of religion and its use as a marker for communal politics that has also promoted the 'ideal type' of subject-citizen for all to emulate.

While religio-political movements in many parts of the world have served as the vehicle for social change and reconstruction (most notably in the case of South Africa, Latin America and some other parts of Asia), we have to admit sadly that the religious leaders we have here in Southeast Asia have by and large been of the conservative camp and have thus far served mainly as the custodians and gatekeepers to orthodoxy.

Is it therefore a surprise that under such conditions living as we do in a modern surveillance society where even our most private moments are subject to scrutiny by the state and the religious thought police that we cannot deal with questions like HIV/Aids in our midst?

When HIV/Aids first made its impact in Malaysia nearly two decades ago, the political and religious leaders of Malaysia reacted in the only way they knew how: to immediately label it an external, alien problem that affected other societies and not ours.

When it became clear that it was a Malaysian problem, the gesture towards exclusion and exteriorisation remained: Even when it was obvious that Malaysians were increasingly infected by HIV/Aids the religio-political elite could only respond with yet another gesture of denial/exclusion: they labelled it a 'gay disease' or the disease of the lower classes as many of those infected were poor drug users who came from the less fortunate strata of society.

All manner of explanations were used to explain the problem away: from the 'immoral lifestyle' of those deemed 'deviant' to urban squalor and crime in the inner cities, etc. Seldom was there any attempt to look at the issue itself and present it as something that was intimately bound to the norms and values of Malaysian society itself it was always seen as something at the periphery, confined to the margins and the marginalised sections of Malaysian society.

But today the statistics seem to point the other way: Next to drug users who make up around 80 percent of those infected with HIV/Aids, the second biggest group infected happens to be heterosexuals thereby undermining the unwarranted claim that this is some 'gay disease' or 'God's punishment' against so-called 'sexual deviants'.

It can no longer be seen as 'their' problem, i.e. the problem of the 'outsiders' who reside within the Malaysian public body. If anything, the statistics now confirm that HIV/Aids is a Malaysian problem with a Malaysian face. But can Malaysian society look itself in the face and address this issue today? Don't bet on it.

Looking at the HIV/Aids issue as a Malaysian issue would mean many things: It would mean that we have to recognise that this thing we call 'Malaysia' is actually an abstract, artificial entity that brings together a multiplicity of different identities, worldviews, modes of living and value-systems that do not necessarily correspond or complement one another.

It means having to accept that the Malaysian 'norm' is an artificial construct, and that its construction has been at the cost of marginalising other communities (gays, lesbians, transgendered groupings, the social underclass, etc) whose position along the margins is determined not by nature but by violent hierarchies and strategies of exclusion; it means having to engage in an auto-critique of Malaysian identity and Malaysian-ness itself, which few are inclined or able to do.

'Corrupting' Islam

Witness the developments that we have seen so far: During the recent conference on HIV/Aids in the Muslim world held in Malaysia the organisers of the conference were accused of trying to 'dilute' and/or 'corrupt' Islamic teachings by promoting homosexuality and free sex of all things.

Despite the fact that the conference's stated aim was to raise awareness of the issue in the Muslim world and by doing so save millions of Muslim lives, one might add the conference soon turned into a fiasco where at least one participant was accused of 'insulting Islam' instead.

One wonders how the fanatical diehards in our neck of the woods would have reacted to the news that Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens) took part in the recent Aids awareness concert in South Africa? Of late Yusuf Islam like many other Islamist activists in the West including Tariq Ramadhan has come under heavy attack on the grounds that they are Muslim 'apologists' for Islamic radicalism.

Seen as the 'potential enemy within' in the West, these exemplary Islamist activists have broken new ground by taking on issues that the more conservative ulama and religio-political leaders of the Muslim world have shied away from.

For their efforts, they have been condemned by both sides: The hard-right conservatives of the US and Europe regard them as the vanguard of an 'Islamic revolution' in the West, while their fellow Muslims regard them as traitors who have sold out and become too 'Westernised' instead.

But as Yusuf Islam himself pointed out prior to singing his number at the concert in South Africa: "Wherever there is hope, there is a solution."

Do we, here in Malaysia, have a solution? Unless and until we can come to terms with the presence and spread of HIV/Aids in our midst in an open and adult manner and discuss practical solutions like sex education, the use of contraceptives and the practice of safe sex, this cannot possibly happen.

The tragedy of HIV/Aids is that it is a preventable disease whose spread thus far could have been contained had the world acted in a rational, adult manner. What is more the plight of those who have been infected could also have been significantly improved had we behaved in a more humane and charitable way instead of mouthing platitudes about the universality of religion while discriminating against those infected in the most loathsome, contemptible way.

HIV/Aids is our problem now, but it is a problem that extends deeper and further than the co-ordinates of the infection itself. It is a problem because it has unmasked the deep rooted prejudices, fears and insecurities of a nation that cannot be honest to and about itself, and cannot come to terms with the alterity that resides within it.

As long as this is not accomplished, it will remain a marginal concern though the marginal is

ironically right in the centre today: HIV/Aids is rapidly becoming a major threat to none other than Mr and Mrs ordinary Malaysian themselves, the disease that in the end proves to be the final equaliser that breaks down the internal frontier between 'us' and 'them', the inside and outside, of a Malaysian society that cannot come to terms with itself.

Endnotes:

(1) According to official statistics, around 80 percent of cases of HIV/Aids in Malaysia involves drug users who share needles. Interestingly, the second highest group making up 12% of cases happens to be heterosexuals thereby undermining the spurious and bigoted claim that HIV/Aids is a 'gay' disease that targets homosexuals primarily.