Emergency Festival! The darurat, through art
Reliving the tales of history’s ‘losers’
By Chan Siew Lian
The pamphlet boy. The teacher. The factory worker… farmer… rubber tapper… pastor… opposition party leader… insurance agent… student union leader… Labour Day committee chairman… pork seller…
I shuffled uncomfortably in my plastic seat. My feet were cold and damp from walking to The Annexe in the evening rain. Sitting across the room, Marion D’Cruz was reading out from a list of names, occupations and dates. Meanwhile, in the space between us, a cammo-decked Elaine Pedley performed Yang Ban Xi dance moves, accompanied by communist-themed music emanating from the cultural videos being flashed on two screens.
It was the opening day of the Emergency Festival!, a multi-arts fest organised by the Five Arts Centre and running till 26th October. Despite the downpour earlier, a small crowd of supporters had gathered for this particular session. Over tonight and tomorrow, D’Cruz was determined to go through the entire list of 10,662 people detained under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act to date (she would end up reading 1,000-plus names).
Between her sombre tone and Pedley’s sometimes comic expressions, I wasn’t quite sure how to react. Rarely do strangers’ names trigger empathy, more so those with a ‘criminal’ record. But these weren’t your regular bad guys. These were people detained without trial because they said or did something that was deemed a threat to the status quo, even if it was just distributing pamphlets. The injustice only really hit me when a member of the audience started to cry. A while later, she left the room. A shout of frustration was heard outside.
The secondary school student… vegetable seller… printing worker… nurse… blogger…
STATE OF RED ALERT
Ask any young Malaysian the extent to which national history concerns him or her, and the answer would probably lie somewhere between ‘a tiny bit’ and ‘a really tiny bit’. Ask the same young person about the Emergency, and he or she is likely to reply, “Is that a movie?” or “You mean like the one in ER?”
And yet if we were to re-examine what our “breathtaking” Sejarah textbooks say about Malaya’s first Emergency from 1948 to 1960, we would be told that it all started when the commies—skinny Chinese flers wearing bushes and the odd rifle—started killing a few privileged white lords and some civilians. In response, the British colonial government declared a state of emergency—termed as such because calling it a ‘war’ wouldn’t have been as insurance-friendly for the rubber plantation and tin mining industries—and moved to revoke civil rights and clamp down on left-wing extremists.
Okay, so gun-toting communist-terrorists sound reasonably dangerous; reason enough to call for an Emergency anyway. And yet half a century later in 2008, the word has slipped into our vocabulary again. In September, rumours of a possible darurat seeped through the political babblesphere when PKR president Anwar Ibrahim—himself an ex-ISA detainee—claimed he had enough parliamentary votes to overturn the present government. Declaring a state of emergency, some postulated, would thwart any such plans from taking place.
Darurat? In Malaysia, in the 21st century? I mean, I do still see some skinny Chinese flers around, although their ilk has largely been replaced by the potbellied variant. But no—I wouldn’t exactly label them a threat to national security.
Yet this power business, as we have all learnt, can get pretty bizarre. And it’d be naïve to think we won’t be affected. Or that we don’t have a stake in it.
THE WINNER TAKES IT ALL?
From the silencing of public opinion, to the clampdown on peaceful demonstrations, to the uncanny ability to arrest anyone under the ISA, it’s understandable why many in our generation feel frustrated with the current political situation. The glorified propaganda we’ve been fed offers no solace. No heroes in the form of the underdog. Is there a way forward?
The Emergency Festival! proves there just might be, starting with our willingness to tell, and listen to, the stories of our country’s losers. After the dance-discussion, I attended Fahmi Fadzil’s humorous play called ‘Operasi Oktober’; wandered through the 12 Years art exhibit curated by Wong Tay Sy, Norman Teh and Grey Yeoh while feeling intrigued; then stayed back a little for the free food and drinks. In the background, Jerome Kugan was mixing some darurat-era songs with the organic chatter of the mostly-art fart crowd. Meanwhile, my feet were dry. A friend I met had loaned me a pair of bright green slippers two sizes too small. Reminding me that while change might not always seem like the perfect fit, it’s still better than walking around with cold feet.
The Emergency Festival runs from 16-26 October 2008 at The Annexe, Central Market. All events are free except for theatre performances. For more info, visit www.fiveartscentre.org