1Malaysia, Dua Muka

Sharyn Lisa Shufiyan’s blogpost ‘What Malaysia’s Independence Means To Me’ has been circulating the net and I’ve just come across it today (sorry I haven’t been able to find the original link). Sharyn is also the great granddaughter of our first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman. It’s a pretty simple piece considering it’s actually attached to a much larger issue. As a Sabahan, this is my addition to what 1Malaysia means to me also what Malaysia’s already done to me:

Ati and Odu

My cousin sent these photos to me via email the other day and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen pictures of my great grandparents on my mum’s side. They’re not the average face of Malaysian heritage, are they? They don’t look Chinese, Malay or Indian because they’re not. The background history is that both my great grandparents are Sino-Dusun; my grandmother on my dad’s side is Dusun mixed Tagalog and Spanish and the only remote Malay lineage I have is through my grandfather whose parents might actually be Javanese.
Yet from the day I was born, I have been submitted to the government as ‘Malay’. My heritage, what should have been a celebration of a personal cultural diversity was claimed by the government for demographic purposes.

It is mandatory in Malaysia to have a religion so that: the government has an idea of how to sway votes according to their demographic; so that other Malaysians know how to measure your morality and how to tiptoe around other races’ automated cultural beliefs. How do I know that our racial labels are merely demographic? Because if you’re not Malay, Chinese or Indian, you’re ‘bumiputera’ or ‘lain-lain’ – indigenous others. This works perfectly for Barisan Nasional, the people who first built this nation: the Malays have UMNO, the Chinese have MCA and the Indians have MIC, there’s no room for Parti DLL (dan lain-lain). Our first UMNO Sabah leader was Suluk-Bajau. East Malaysia has so many different races: Dayaks, Ibans, Kadazans, Dusuns and the list goes up to countless other indigenous races that your average Malaysian may not have even heard of. Throughout the years Malaysian politics has generally been so embroiled in its triad of racial politics that it has not had enough room for the North Borneo indigenous peoples and therefore we were neglected.

I know it sounds negative but growing up under Malaysia’s race politics, it’s bright as daylight that it has been traumatic on all Malaysians. In the first place, my dad was hardly educated in Malaysia and my mum is not Malay at all. Malays are not indigenous to Sabah at all but somehow I inherited being labeled Malay because my father is half Malay? Actually to make things simpler, the national constitution states that if it walks like a Malay, talks like a Malay and prays like a Muslim, regardless of your DNA, you are Malay.

I grew up in the Sabah state capital city of Kota Kinabalu. I did 7 years of Chinese school and up till I was 13, I must have only had two Malay friends. I don’t know the first thing of what it means to be Malay. Being singled-out by a mess of other races even triggered a reverse racism complex although to my other classmates, I was the lucky one.
So as a child I learned that that I could be envied for being Malay and Muslim because it means that I was eligible for Islamic banking, monetary benefits, land distribution et al. Contrarily, they never really seemed like benefits to me. What was relevant to me was that it can be scary for being labeled a Malay-Muslim in Malaysia. I’m afraid of Syariah law, raids, khalwat and all the conservative laws that have been perverted and enforced onto every existing Muslim in the land (See: http://www.thenutgraph.com/whipping-kartika). As a more liberal individual, I’ve often felt like someone somewhere has made me feel very unwelcome in my own country. As a teenager, getting death threats for being vocal about my religious beliefs had become normal. Turkey is 99.9% Muslim and even they are embarrassed of how we conduct ourselves as a Muslim nation.

If you want to talk about racism or how awesome it is to be Malay, try having a ‘Siti’ in your name throughout primary school and a Chinese school, at that. I was 7 and my Chinese teachers automatically thought it normal that I was stupid or slow in class. I was never a good student because I didn’t come from a Mandarin speaking household. It took me ages to figure out for myself that I wasn’t at all stupid. In fact, after all the years of getting smacked and screamed at for being a bad student, I grew up to be what some people actually consider to be – intelligent.
I have always resented being called ‘Siti’ because it was embarrassing, feeling ostracised for the sake of a race that I did not even identify with. I sat through a Pendidikan Moral class once and the teacher told the class that Malay people wash themselves with their hands after they go to the toilet and every person in the class looked at me straight away and laughed long… and loud… and hard. I had 59 other kids and one adult in that room picturing me touch my own shit. Woe. If I wasn’t in Pendidikan Moral, I was in Pendidikan Islam where they told me that the rest of my non-Muslim classmates whom I spent 7 hours a day, 5 days a week playing and studying with, were going to hell. In addition to this, among my cousins of the same generation, they are all Muslim but I’m the only Malay among them. Their certificates state that they are ‘bumiputera’. Even they had, on occasion when we were kids, made me feel like the black sheep for being Malay. Talk about your mindfucks.

To all my friend’s mums who hid the ham when I visited their homes, the guys who I met in nightclubs who said I was pretty but it was too bad they couldn’t marry me, so they wouldn’t buy me a beer; my Chinese teachers who thought being Malay meant being stupid and the I.C. people who gave me a ‘binti’ in my name when I was 12, extending my three letter name to six – thank you for messing with my childhood. All for a religion that was imposed on me and a race that the government wanted me to have, thus taking away my rightful cultural heritage. Malaysia went through so much trouble to control my identity and make me one of them but my accent’s almost American and my Bahasa Malaysia sucks. Now what was all that trouble for?

If I had a say, I wished my I.C. said I was sino-Dusun. I wish that I could marry outside of my religion without my partner having to convert into a religion that I myself don’t practise because I believe in a non-fascist God.

So what do I have to say about Najib’s 1Malaysia? Can I change my name now? Can Muslims convert into other religions? And while you can’t decide whether to have your education syllabus in Bahasa Malaysia or English, can there be more facilities for indigenous races to learn indigenous languages? Where were the Sabahan and Sarawakian filmmakers in 15 Malaysia? Do West Malaysians know what native Borneon languages sound like? And once and for all can someone explain to me how come we can’t change our religions but Yasmin Ahmad (God rest her soul) managed to change her gender and marry her husband? Cos I’ve been wondering for years.

Nenek Jantan and family

My mother’s father is the tallest one standing in the middle of the photo. I’m unsure by what means he came to convert into Islam himself as a young man, but he wasn’t born a Muslim. He was around when many other Sabahans started to converted into Islam and he was politically involved in the formation of Malaysia. Many of his political colleagues would have converted into Islam during Tun Mustapha’s time because when UMNO came to East Malaysia, Tun Mustapha sponsored mass conversions of the indigenous people into Muslims. A lot of politicians converted into Islam to gain favour and their animalist faiths predating centuries, dissolved. I don’t have a long lineage of Muslims on my mum’s side of the family at all, I don’t know what my great-grandfather practiced. My father’s side is from West Malaysia, however, and have most likely been Muslims for generations. Either way, if mum wasn’t a Muslim, she would have had to convert to marry dad. In other Muslim countries you don’t have to convert to marry but in Malaysia, we do. That’s how I became a Muslim. Some of those who became Muslim during Tun Mustapha’s time converted to benefit themselves in an un-Islamic way and their predecessors now would still be Muslim. That was the beginning of Islamic and politics in Sabah. Gone were the days of native customs and the bobohizan. Most indigenous people became ‘practical’ and embraced Islam or Christianity. Eventually, our native religious beliefs which had been around for hundreds of years or perhaps more, undocumented, dissipated into great Borneon history.

What does 1Malaysia mean to me, Najib? It means that religious freedom, free from politics for everyone and for Malaysians of every creed to benefit from our economy, including the indigenous people. Not just the Malays, Chinese or Indians. Help encourage indigenous cultures in Malaysia preserve their identities with dignity. In a lot of ways, we need much more help than just the Malays. I hope nationally, we can get to a point where the face of indigenous North Borneons can also be ones that every Malaysian can acknowledge as a Malaysian face. East Malaysia has bled for the West, destroyed its forests and polluted its oceans to be so neglected, to be ‘dan lain-lain’ and dirt poor while the Petronas twin towers stand tall above KLCC. We cannot have a government that won’t do anything when Penan women are getting sexually abused yet will threaten to cane a woman for having a beer? Religion needs to be exempt from our politics so we can prioritise the people’s real needs.

To me, 1Malaysia means bridging the oceans. It doesn’t mean Indians, Chinese and Malays or indigenous peoples can just be friends, it means they can love or have babies together if they so choose and still keep their personal heritages. To me it means more religious freedom, more education, less petty hatred and Muslims who can go see the Black Eyed Peas if they want, because it does send the message out there that it’s okay for the non-Muslims in Malaysia to have distorted moral compasses. That’s not right either.
My main hope out of this 1Malaysia crock is that Malaysians stop just talking about the Chinese, Malays and Indians and start to acknowledge the indigenous people too. Are we also in the picture of this 1Malaysia you speak of? Will the government and the God fearing people of Malaysia allow each other to be ourselves and not only who we want each other to be?

It’s not that I want to say that a lot of Malaysians can be racist or religious extremists but we do have somewhat of an international reputation for it. As much as West Malaysia needs to catch up with East Malaysia in that respect, it’s all across this country so let us not fool ourselves. The government merely represents its people, the question is: does Malaysia believe in religious freedom for all its citizens or just the right to be Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist as Malays, Chinese and Indians? Efforts to racial acceptance requires far more than just words, a mere slogan just isn’t going to cut it.

~ by starranise on September 22, 2009.