COMMENT The DAP has hit paydirt. It has long looked in vain for prominent Malays to join the party, to dispel the perception that it is adverse to Malay interests and Muslim religion.

Today, deep in the Malay heartland - in Gua Musang, Kelantan, no less - it will unveil a pearl of a new member in National Literary Laureate A Samad Said.

A bewhiskered, brooding, perambulating presence in the streets of Kuala Lumpur that are noted for artistic predilections, Samad was a literati who was known to the ordinary people long before he morphed into a civil rights activist with polls reform advocacy group, Bersih.

Only those familiar with his literary work would have inferred that the man with the flowing white hair, beard and steady gait was making some kind of statement all those years he walked those artistic corridors, one that was the more striking for being unsaid.

Even when he took a prominent position in Bersih, he did not say much, relying on his presence to do the talking.

A lot of talking it did.

Once, in the course of a Bersih-organised protest march, he got on to a LRT coach in Bangsar to spontaneous applause from the passengers already inside: it was confirmation that the quiet pensive presence of yore had accrued to formidably recognisable stature.

He is unlikely to say much in Gua Musang today when DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng and party adviser Lim Kit Siang announce his enlistment with the DAP.

The spoken word is a difficult thing for a literary person: his thoughts become feeble in the utterance. But on a page, they are like a pebble dropped into a pond, the expanding, concentric circle of consciousness it makes ramify and merge.

If these thoughts begin in delight and end in wisdom, you have a work of art.

Even if Samad Said does not say much today, observers will recognise in his joining the DAP an apotheosis of sorts.

The Asas 50 literary movement, launched in Singapore in 1950s, of which he was a member, believed in using art to change the consciousness of the people.

Its doyen was Singapore-born A Samad Ismail ( photo ), pan-Malaya’s greatest journalist in both Malay and English in the 1950s and 60s.

We are indebted to the journalist and blogger A Kadir Jasin for pointing out that we err when we call Samad Said ‘Pak Samad’.

Kadir noted that that appellation is reserved to Samad Ismail (924-2008) who for some reason did not like Samad Said but did not do anything to obstruct the promotion of his younger confrere to the post of Berita Harian editor in the early 1970s when ‘Pak Samad’ became managing editor of the New Straits Times Press which owned BH .

Grand tradition

The gesture was in the grand tradition of the Malay newspaper arts. Ishak Haji Muhammad (Pak Sako) had stepped aside for Abdul Rahim Kajai in the early 1940s as editor of Berita Malai , owned by the Japanese who had wanted that paper to be the leading one for Malays during the war.

The actual Pak Samad had early in his career learned the necessity of putting aside personal dislikes for the interests of the group.

Samad Said, or Abang Said as Kadir has pointed out, was lower in the literary pecking order to Pak Samad despite having at least one novel ‘Salina’ that is considered to be better than anything that Pak Samad, another literary laureate, had produced.

But today, in joining the DAP, he would have taken a step more momentous to the future of the country than any taken by Pak Samad for reason of what the move represents - a breaking of the logjam of race and religion around which Malaysia's politics so obsessively revolves.

For someone as prominent in the world of Malay letters as Samad Said to join the DAP is a slap in the face of PAS, which he could have joined like that other award-winning Malay literati Shahnon Ahmad, and it also represents a kick in the shins of PKR where he has more friends.

The Islamic party is suffused with myopia and hallucination and the Malay-dominated PKR is stuck in a race-groove.

The DAP ought to be congratulated on having pulled off a coup in enlisting Samad Said.

What it should do now is to borrow a leaf from his book: emulate his deportment - go easy on the swagger and assertion and try subtlety and indirection. These are the arts of the Malay world.

The DAP is fortunate now to have in its ranks someone to tutor them in those skills.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.