JANUARY 12 — It was undeniably swift and decisive, the response from Deputy Prime Minister Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and the Cabinet to what happened at a secondary school in Puchong.
The school had been accused by a Malay political party of “religious propagation” because it had put up some Chinese New Year decoration.
Dr Wan Azizah as well as six other ministers and Deputy (but not acting) Education Minister Teo Nie Ching visited the school and even helped put up the decoration again, making it perhaps the most impressive fire-fighting on the ethno-religious front that the Pakatan Harapan (PH) administration has undertaken ever since taking power.
A New Year’s resolution, perhaps.
To add weight to the action, the Prime Minister’s Office — the PM is also acting education minister — released a statement condemning the deliberate racial provocation by Malay supremacist party Putra.
Yet, you won’t find any congratulatory messages coming from some Malay circles.
Instead, those circles saw the Cabinet action as a slap in the face, whining that no such gesture was undertaken by the ministers against the protest of teaching the jawi script in vernacular schools.
Never mind that it was the Cabinet that had approved the jawi lessons.
Never mind that the jawi lessons are still being continued.
Never mind that the Chinese educationist group Dong Zong has been labelled “racist” by no less that the prime minister himself, and an attempt at a closed-door congress on the issue was stymied by a court order after a threat by others to disrupt it.
Never mind that nobody, not even Dong Zong, is calling for jawi lessons to be denied to everyone — the way Putra was doing with the CNY decoration.
In a brief conversation with minister Saifuddin Abdullah online, he used “Malay anxiety and fragility” to describe such sentiments, while discussing an opinion piece which warned of (disproportionate, to be honest) Malay fury towards the Cabinet’s olive branch.
While he was not directly addressing the backlash of the gesture (the foreign minister was among those present at the visit), one feels that the descriptor is an apt characterisation for the panic that is gripping the psyche of the Malay community.
It is even more worrying and vexing that this anxiety is still present — or even inflamed — as we go into 2020, what more into a failed Vision of it.
This anxiety is hardly unique to the Malays. It is a prevalent global mood in response to globalisation, and the deconstruction of the “blood and soil” ethno-nationalist ideology that has so long coloured our perception of what “nationhood” is.
We see it in Trump’s America, in Brexit’s England, in Modi’s Hindutva India, in Uighur-interning China.
When writing about the “white fragility” in Australia for Aboriginal paper Koori Mail in 2016, indigenous lecturer Marcus Woolombi Waters wrote that this fear arises when you spend most of your life having your racial identity and supremacy reinforced, rather than having them deconstructed.
“Because the foundations of [the identity] were based on denial and non-truths rather than acceptance, you fear this ‘truth’ will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, and because you have no understanding of a world beyond [your identity], you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis,” Waters wrote.
Much like how whites see “whiteness” as the “default premise” of their world, so Malays see “Malayness” as the “default premise” of the country — as manifested in oft-quoted archaic concepts such as “Bumiputera” and the “social contract.”
But going into 2020, I contend that the current underpinning anxiety lies in the latent “war of culture”, where more and more Malaysians feel that their ethnic identity is equally important, and has a role to play in the national narrative.
On the other side, more and more Malays feel that not only should the Malay culture remain as the dominant culture — but in more extreme cases as an unfortunate pushback towards this egalitarianism, it should be the exclusive culture of the nation, leading to the increasing erasure of other equally valid and valuable cultures.
Which is why there is a rising zealotry to defend jawi; partly due to an increasing awareness of the need to assert or revert to their Malayness in lieu of a national identity, but also as a way to stress the dominance of Malay-Muslim over other identities, over other scripts from Chinese to Tamil, even to pre-Islam Malay scripts such as kawi, rencong, and pallava.
Which is why jawi is being turned into a yardstick of one’s Malayness, even as previously the script was mere embellishment and was let to die by the powers that be themselves.
Which is why there is a sentiment that the Queen should stand up for jawi by tweeting using the script at the risk of alienating others, even as the constitutional monarch is an upholder for all Malaysians regardless of ethnicity.
Which is why there is a threat to erase a display of Chineseness by those who insist that the default setting should be Malay, or none at all.
Which is why there is an insistence that vernacular schools be closed, UEC be rejected, derogatory tribal slurs be accepted when the Malays use it, Muslim evangelist clubs allowed in schools, literal lionisation of Nazis, and calls for minorities to be stripped of citizenship.
Really, we could go on about the many divisive and polarising hot button topics in the last quarter of the year, and they can all boil down to the same anxiety and pushback against those who challenge the cultural status quo.
“How do we address this Malay anxiety?” is therefore the undeniable question. We do not yet have the answer, and perhaps neither does Putrajaya too by the looks of it.
But maybe we can start somewhere. When there is a fire, let us not blame those trying to put it out — for fear that the culprit who purposely started the fire will light another match.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
