A non-Malay PM and "Senario Lagi"
Dr. Mahathir Mohamad recently said that a non-Malay can someday sit in the very chair where he now cosily parks his own personage.
Experts in the Malaysian Constitution say there's nothing revelatory about this observation. The world continues to turn and the Klang River remains as damp as ever in the wake of his statement. But there have been sparks and reactions separated along the usual lines.
The English-language press played up this seemingly liberal stance as yet further proof that we've come a long way, baby, and that those Oppositionist crybabies won't be able to withstand, let alone match, this sweeping surge of egalitarian goodwill. "Put THAT in your ketayap and smoke it, Nik Aziz" pretty much sums up the editorial line.
The Malay press explained it rather differently. The always unfunny "Senyum Kambing" cartoon panel in Utusan Malaysia says it all: one guy passes on what the PM just said and his companion sagely replies, " Fahamlah maksud yang tersirat ." (Read between the lines).
What does this mean? As a faithfully masochistic follower of the cartoon, let me translate: It's a message to the Malays that if they don't buck up, their less halal counterparts will someday take over. This is meant to be a very bad thing. So the statement is presented as an implicit threat and a form of emotional blackmail rather than a hopeful sign that We Shall Overcome.
The Senyum Kambing way of thinking is pretty evident in the words of personalities such as Muhammad Muhammad Taib, who warned that the Malays must keep up with the times before anything horrible happens (the worst-case scenario is kept vague). Someone should tell him that "keeping up with the times" would necessarily include the basic comprehension that you don't need to pay for foreign houses in cash. But that's a different story.
It's always interesting to see how a particular statement can be spun to serve two different but complementary purposes. Interesting, but standard operating procedure in a country such as ours, with a divide-and-rule legacy that's too tempting to give up.
Dr. Mahathir Mohamad recently said that a non-Malay can someday sit in the very chair where he now cosily parks his own personage.
Experts in the Malaysian Constitution say there's nothing revelatory about this observation. The world continues to turn and the Klang River remains as damp as ever in the wake of his statement. But there have been sparks and reactions separated along the usual lines.
The English-language press played up this seemingly liberal stance as yet further proof that we've come a long way, baby, and that those Oppositionist crybabies won't be able to withstand, let alone match, this sweeping surge of egalitarian goodwill. "Put THAT in your ketayap and smoke it, Nik Aziz" pretty much sums up the editorial line.
The Malay press explained it rather differently. The always unfunny "Senyum Kambing" cartoon panel in Utusan Malaysia says it all: one guy passes on what the PM just said and his companion sagely replies, " Fahamlah maksud yang tersirat ." (Read between the lines).
What does this mean? As a faithfully masochistic follower of the cartoon, let me translate: It's a message to the Malays that if they don't buck up, their less halal counterparts will someday take over. This is meant to be a very bad thing. So the statement is presented as an implicit threat and a form of emotional blackmail rather than a hopeful sign that We Shall Overcome.
The Senyum Kambing way of thinking is pretty evident in the words of personalities such as Muhammad Muhammad Taib, who warned that the Malays must keep up with the times before anything horrible happens (the worst-case scenario is kept vague). Someone should tell him that "keeping up with the times" would necessarily include the basic comprehension that you don't need to pay for foreign houses in cash. But that's a different story.
It's always interesting to see how a particular statement can be spun to serve two different but complementary purposes. Interesting, but standard operating procedure in a country such as ours, with a divide-and-rule legacy that's too tempting to give up.
By sheer coincidence, I caught the local movie blockbuster Senario Lagi on the day that the PM's thoughts assumed its customary place in our headlines. EM Forster once said: "Only connect." Although Forster never caught a single episode of Senario in his lifetime, his maxim served me true on that day.
Senario Lagi is a slapstick comedy that is on its way to becoming the highest-grossing local movie of all time. It's a surprisingly coherent, patchily enjoyable romp that counts as an improvement over its predecessor Senario: The Movie (1999). My favourite bit of course was the spoof of the TV soap Idaman (here renamed Butik Mengidam , which can very roughly translate to Gagging For It Boutique), which I helped unleash onto the unsuspecting Malaysian public a few years ago.
I am a sucker for fat-women jokes, and there are plenty here courtesy of the redoubtable Syanie. And I must give credit to the movie for sneaking in probably the only depiction of Malaysian police brutality you are ever likely to see outside of those " Laungan Reformasi " VCDs.
Another interest of Senario Lagi lies in its depiction of ethnicity. Sociologists could do worse than to watch the thing to find out about race relations in Malaysia at the moment. The movie has been praised by The Star for providing a multi-racial portrait of our fair land. To some extent this is true enough - most local movies don't even bother to do that much - but we should look a bit beyond the casting statistics. What do we find?
When a Malay man's car is surrounded by a group of Indian men, the atmosphere is meant to conjure up some of the panic that the white urban protagonist feels in the black slums of Bonfire of the Vanities . The fact is, the encounter ends with a benign twist (the Indians just wanted a lift to a wedding) but a sense of a menacing Otherness is crucial to the context. Notice too how the only Chinese man with a speaking part is rebuffed by a hitchhiker because there's a dog in the guy's backseat.
It IS possible to read too much into this sort of thing, but I aim to offer just a few humble observations. Senario Lagi is not a racist movie, and I will put what's left of my reputation on the line by saying it's better than Mimpi Moon , but it shows what can go on in the collective and creative imagination of the Malay population in dealing with the muhibbah make-up of our society. Remember too that the PM's actual prediction/promise/threat (delete where appropriate) hinged on whether the majority Malays can ever be READY for a big change.
Mimpi Moon ignored racial boundaries by adopting a nobody-here-but-us-bourgeoisie sense of camaraderie. Senario Lagi is less PC but more colourful - in all senses of the word. The ideal is still expressed in Mekanik , one of the best local movies of the 1980s: " Orang putih ka, orang coklat ka, orang biru ka ... kita semua orang Malaysia, bukan? " Tell that to Senyum Kambing .
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