COMMENT The controversy about national laureate Abdullah Hussein’s novel Interlok has taken a strange and twisted route. It demonstrates clearly how everything that comes into contact with the poison of racial politics is ultimately destroyed.

                    

In this case, the Education Ministry’s suggestion that the novel be retained as a Form Five textbook so long as the “offending” passages be edited out is a decision motivated by political expediency. More seriously, it is robbing us of literary freedom.

In most other countries, repressive regimes being the exception, people often debate and discuss difficult and controversial literary works. If we were to censor and edit out offending passages then we have to remove literature all together for some community somewhere is bound to be “offended”.

Imagine Shakespeare without Merchant of Venice because the Jews find Shylock “offensive”. Similarly, Jane Austen’s novels should not be part of any literature syllabi because it is offensive to Third World readers.

As Edward Said has eloquently argued, Austen's novels provide a false picture of Western society. In fact, before arriving in the colonies as educational texts, Jane Austen’s novels were first used as “literary texts” in the industrial towns of England to help provide the “masses” with the idea and “benefits” of an ordered English society.

If there are some passages in Interlok that some segments of Malaysian society finds offensive, the answer is not the wholesale rejection of the novel or the censoring of the so-called “offensive” passages but an intelligent conversation or critical appraisal of the novel. There is  nothing wrong for teachers or students to disagree with the writer.

Racial politics

Ironically, racial politics have made any form of meaningful dialogue impossible. This controversy reveals three main problems with Malaysian  society today and if left unresolved will definitely impede the country’s progress in the long term.

Firstly, the lack of positive reaction by prominent educationists demonstrates an acute problem with the education system as a whole: an inability to think independently. So “top-down” is the system that any contrarian opinion is impossible.

NONE It is shocking that literary figures in the country have not stood up to defend literary freedom. If there are any teachers who have come out of the closet to help define what a literary work is and why governmental censorship should be resisted, I apologise for not having seen their names in print.

What is more alarming is that if there is “defence” of the novel, it is not on the grounds that it is a literary work but that “Malay rights” have been challenged. This is purely reactionary, a knee-jerk response to one community’s complaints about the novel.

To my mind, Interlok is a Malaysian novel describing a particular view of the country from one writer’s perspective. It happens to be written in Bahasa Malaysia or Bahasa Melayu but it is certainly not only a Malay novel. In short, any defence of Interlok should be on the basis that this is a literary work.

Today, we have become a risk-averse society. In this case, we must do away with this novel from the schools because it uses some hurtful words or negative representations of particular communities in wonderful multicultural Malaysia.

What is not said is that students might misunderstand these passages because there are racist teachers or incompetent ones. If that is the underlying fear, the answer is not to banish the novel from schools but to banish incompetent teachers from schools. The situation today is really missing the wood for the trees.

Secondly, a government that tries to please everybody ends up pleasing nobody. Once Dr Mahathir Mohamad said on national television that if any one community feels too contented then another must be feeling left out. It is the role of the government to keep the balance. I am sure he did not mean that to keep Malaysia going, the government’s role is to make sure nobody is happy.

However, it is precisely this type of thinking that concessions to one community means another is being hurt or left out that has led us to where we are: a society obsessed with race. Instead of rising above racial politics, both the government and opposition parties have tried to gain political mileage from the issue.

The battle lines, which are also ethnic lines, are drawn so clearly that the responses are painfully predictable. Groups purportedly representing Malaysian Indians are forced into a corner whilst Malay NGOs are lined up opposite them. Racial politics is a zero-sum game and in this case there are no winners.

Integrity compromised

The “offending” novel remains in the class-rooms with its integrity as a literary work compromised. It is truly sad that whilst the novel is about the creation of a platform for different ethnic groups to talk and get to know each other; it is being censored because decision-makers are all ethnically blinkered.

Third and lastly, we have all managed to ignore the elephant in the room. Why are some Malaysian Indians so sensitive? Since I started writing letters and occasional articles in Malaysiakini , I have tried to highlight the pitiable conditions of a segment of the Indian community in Malaysia.

However, we must not tar all Malaysian Indians with the same brush as there are very successful individuals in the community including professionals, businessmen and literary figures. Nonetheless, there is also a visible underclass who have fallen through the cracks in the race-based system that the government is now frantically trying to remedy.

indian poverty samy vellu 191006 The government should admit that it will take time to correct the imbalances or weaknesses in the implementation of poverty eradication policies. Now that S Samy Velu has retired from politics, government should not be too worried about admitting past mistakes. In short, avoid sloganeering or simplistic gestures like erasing offending passages or words from novels. Instead, demonstrate concrete steps taken to address this community's grievances.

At the same time, Interlok provides a perfect platform to explain the complexity of managing a country with diverse communities at different levels of economic and social development. The government should not be shy to insist hat it is not systematically marginalising any one community.

But it must come clean that it is less than perfect and that the poor implementation of some governmental policies have resulted in a sizeable number of Malaysians who are poor, under-educated with no opportunities in sight. If some of them are sensitive to how they are represented in a literary work that is being taught in school, most Malaysians can empathise and understand the strong feelings involved.

This should not be viewed as a “challenge” to the Malays. Instead, the problem is a lack of trust many Malaysians have in the education system.

Solution is less race-based policies

The solution is not more race-based policies but less of it. Ethnic identity in the age of globalisation and great technological improvement is hardening and softening at the same time. Whilst we are more aware of our inherited cultural identity, we are also more aware of our shared and evolving Malaysian heritage.

Therefore, I suspect that all Malaysians would have been more reassured if the government had announced that steps are being taken to up-skill all Malaysians in the lower income bracket rather than hoping the insecurities felt today would go away just by censoring a novel written forty years ago.

If we cannot come together as a nation and if the government cannot rise above petty politics, our prospects are dim indeed. Similarly, if one large segment of the citizenry of this country feels so insecure socially and economically as to react in such strong outbursts of emotions then something must be wrong.

Ultimately, our single biggest mistake is not heeding the message our national laureate is telling us in this novel written some forty years ago: if Malaysia is to work as a nation, we have to talk to each other and not at one another. We need to “inter-logue”.

 

 

NEIL KHOR completed his PhD at Cambridge University and now writes occasionally on matters that he thinks requires better historical treatment. He is quietly optimistic about Malaysia's future.