Introduction

I would like to do two things. First, I want to show how some new Malaysian film and literature challenge the discourse that idealises the notion of Malay community and highlight the negative aspects of kampung life. In the texts I examine, the kampung is portrayed as a locus of homophobia, misogyny and intolerance of outsiders. My second aim is to look at the representations in these texts of other forms of community outside or beyond the discursive, imaginary kampung. These alternative communities emerge in a variety of social contexts, and are not necessarily ethnically homogeneous, such as is the case with representations of the stereotypical kampung community. The documentary-like nature of texts like Bukak Api and Face-Off: A Malaysian Reformasi Diary leads me to move from the study of discursive representations themselves to a discussion of the social context in which the texts are embedded and which they are mediating in their depictions. Such representations of alternative multiethnic communities disrupt the assumption that the small Malay kampung community is a metonym for Benedict Anderson’s larger concept of imagined community or multiethnic nation. In social practice, the concept of ‘the nation’ and national identity is fraught with contradictory meanings that Malays and non-Malays of various political and class positions are constantly contesting. I find that these texts reflect this tension. I suggest also that the city, where villagers flee in order to escape from the social control and conformity of the kampung, may have its own forms of social control and surveillance, exerted by the state and religious authorities. In the second section of my essay, I employ Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatialised subjectivity because it provides a refreshing way of thinking about, challenging and subverting these forms of surveillance and control, ultimately making the city the more liberatory idealised space that modern urban living promises.

My discussion takes as its starting point Joel S. Kahn’s essay ‘Subalternity and the Construction of Malay Identity’ (Kahn 1994). Here Kahn argues that the discursive formation of Malay cultural identity was constructed for the consumption and identification of the Malay middle classes by the political elite and the Malay intelligentsia.  This discursive construct was very much motivated by the consequences of the National Economic Policy (1971-1990), together with urban and industrial development. According to Kahn, the Malay-language rural novels of literary laureate Shahnon Ahmad, the tourist industry, domestic leisure and entertainment industries, as well as architecture and urban planning reconstituted and reified the idea of Malay cultural identity as embedded in the kampung. Such an investment of Malay cultural identity in images of the traditional kampung might have seemed contradictory to the modernist vision and modernising imperatives of Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. Nevertheless, it was actually a politically prudent position to support such a national cultural project in order not to alienate the traditional (rural) Malay voters of UMNO (United Malay Nationalist Organisation).

Kahn sufficiently problematises any simplistic understandings of who the new Malay middle class might be: ‘The new Malay middle class cannot in general be defined by a capitalist logic’ (Kahn 1994, 38). He adds that most of them are government employees, yet are neither a uniform nor homogeneous group. Kahn and anthropologist Maila Stivens elsewhere have posited that the plural term ‘middle classes’ better suits a description of the new Malay bourgeoisie. For the purposes of this essay, I posit too that one of the factors that merit the use of this plural term is the language distinction. The new Malay middle classes consist of the Malay-language elite and the English-language elite (not to mention those who are bilingual). However, given the affirmative action policies of the NEP towards Malays and its encouragement of migration from kampung to urban areas, this new wave of Malay middle classes ‘appears to be firmly urban-based and urban-oriented’ (Kahn 1994, 39).

Kahn’s paper was published in the early 1990s.  From the perspective of the mid- to late 1990s, Kahn’s point that ‘the new Malay middle-classes constitut[ed] a breeding ground for new forms of anti-Chinese sentiment’ is disputable (Kahn 1994, 39). Instead, the Reformasi movement and, subsequently, the formation of an opposition political party, Keadilan, demonstrated that the emerging urban culture of the Malaysian middle classes might, if only momentarily, be multiethnic. This is because Keadilan purported to unite all ethnicities under the rubric of social justice and democracy for all Malaysians. While some elements of the new Malay middle-classes may have ‘constitute[d] a breeding ground for new forms of anti-Chinese sentiment’ during the research and writing of Kahn’s essay, the subsequent intercommunal solidarity rallies sparked off by Reformasi are important reminders of cross-racial alliances in Malaysia’s history of race and communal politics. Like the effervescent Sabri Zain, I believe that the mass street demonstrations and the largely urban-based Reformasi movement that emerged from 1998 are significant markers in Malaysian history and politics. These events collectively raised Malaysian social consciousness and debate about national identity and its constant nexus with race and class to a level that no one political event has ever succeeded in doing in the past. However the political scientist Maznah Mohammad predicts that despite Reformasi, the spectre of racial conflict still looms, as long as the tension between moderate Muslims and fundamentalist Islamicists is not solved. This situation is exacerbated by the economic recession, the tensions that arose out of the 1999 elections, the internal factionalism facing Barisan Alternatif (the Opposition coalition) and UMNO’s attempts to cater to its Chinese voters (Maznah Mohammad 2001).

Finally, I should point out that the texts I discuss below are largely the expressions and perceptions formed by the Malay middle-classes who are English-educated, and most often, bilingual. In fact, with the exception of S. Othman Kelantan’s novel, Juara, all the written sources I discuss appeared originally in English. The films are in Malay, although the filmmakers themselves have been trained in the West. These cultural producers are no strangers to modernity themselves, and their own critical self-consciousness and positionalities outside tradition and inside modernity, must be taken into consideration even in films such as Jogho that make no overt commentary on modernity.

Perhaps no other contemporary Malaysian cultural producer captures the theme of Malay rural alienation more vividly than auteur filmmaker U-Wei Haji Saari. In his controversial first film, Perempuan, Isteri Dan ...? (Woman, Wife and Whore 1993), the blatant sexuality and daring of the female protagonist, Zaleha, a newcomer married to Amir, is perceived by the villagers to be transgressive of the patriarchal boundaries of the kampung. She is finally dealt a violent death at the hands of her jealous, cruel and violent husband.[2] U-Wei’s next auteur film,[3] Kaki Bakar (The Arsonist 1994) centres around an immigrant Javanese family constantly on the move from kampung to kampung in rural Malaysia, never fitting in because of the recalcitrant pride of the head of the family, the father, whose sole manifestation of wilful resistance and (class) revenge is arson. The same actor, Khalid Salleh, plays a similar role in U-Wei’s subsequent film in the alienation trilogy, Jogho (1998), which revolves around the minority Muslim community in southern Thailand. As the third film on this theme, Jogho most successfully develops the multiple forms of alienation with regard to Malay identity.

 This is not to refute the possible contemporary political readings viewers may bring to bear on the film. For example, when viewed against the more recent battle between Dr Mahathir and his former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, Jogho becomes a new political allegory. The unfair murder of Mamat’s brother by the sore loser in the bull arena may be intepreted to reflect Dr Mahathir’s unfair treatment of Anwar. Just as Calet’s victory over Pak Isa’s bull meant that people like Dolah and Pak Isa lost a great deal of money in the betting, Anwar’s rise to power also constituted a threat of financial loss to Mahathir’s business cronies. The Mahathir/Anwar conflict marked a split in the ranks of UMNO, the traditional political and cultural champion (‘jogho’) of Malay rights, severing the national imaginary in a way impossible to conceive in the past when Malay communal identity appeared homogeneous, seamless and whole.

U-Wei’s representations of the kampung are thus less than idealistic. Always strongly patriarchal or dominated by narrow-minded, egocentric, self-righteous and brutal men, this kind of community does not allow strong women’s voices to prevail, though such women certainly exist to create a reluctant, resisting presence in all his films. In Jogho, Mamat’s wife and daughters whom he ignores most of the time in favour of his prized bull and his young son, are alienated by his chauvinistic attitude (in both senses of the word). They are forced to support him and wordlessly care for him while he gambles their savings away on bullfights, his ego totally invested in his expertise as a champion or ‘jogho’. They cook and clean, wash his clothes, nurse him when he gets injured by the bull, feed his bull, work on the land, manage the finances and raise money for his bail and for betting. As his wife rightly mutters, ‘Men, they never grow up.’

U-Wei’s film succeeds in reflecting several points about rural Malay community: the complex gendered roles of women that are marginalised by the men in the kampung, the alienation of the Patani Malays from Thai majority rule as well as from Malaysian nationalism, and perhaps lastly, the alienation of the individual Kelantanese (anak Kelantan) whose authenticity (jati), leadership and maleness come under question by their social peers when, in contradistinction to a tradition of blood feud, he fails to carry through the violent vendetta. When the Thai police arrive, Mamat’s purposeful but wooden statement, ‘Blood has to be repaid with blood’, has a hollow ring about it. U-Wei’s Mamat is a tragic flawed figure who, when finally blessed with the self-realisation and individual (and perhaps spiritual) growth which merit going against the beliefs of his fellow villagers, is unable to stop the inevitable bloodshed from occurring.

Aside from U-Wei’s films which broach kampung attitudes about gender, other films also reflect the kampung’s non-acceptance of transgendered identity in its attempts to preserve a homogeneous collective identity and solidarity. In the film Bukak Api (1999),[8] the intolerant nature of the kampung is mentioned by a male transexual prostitute who has found her way to Chow Kit Road in Kuala Lumpur, a renowned haunt of transexuals and prostitutes in the city.  She tells a friend how she was treated as an outsider in her own kampung, hence her decision to leave for the anonymity of the big city.

The case of Bukak Api is one extreme example of gender and sexual transgression not being tolerated in the kampung Yet, more moderate moral and sexual transgressions in the kampung are not accepted either. Mulaika Hijjas’ short story ‘Confinement’ shows a kampung community’s failure to be supportive and inclusive of those who transgress moral boundaries: ‘The people at the mosque gave us some money, until the story got out that the father of the baby was not my father’ (Hijjas 1999, 86). Apart from Mak Teh, who babysits the young girl Ria’s two younger brothers in exchange for doing her laundry, and Pak Abas, who periodically drops by with some spare cash, ‘twenty ringgit a month, to sooth his guilt’, Ria’s family has no other friends in the kampung (Hijjas 1999, 86). Ria’s widowed mother is pregnant with Pak Abas’ child after Ria’s father died of dengue fever. Her mother has become mentally unstable since her pregnancy and I surmise that she was raped by Pak Abas, Ria’s father’s ‘friend’.[9]  The pregnant woman is confined indoors away from prying eyes and village gossip. ‘Pak Soud said such-and-such a thing to me the other day about your mother, Ria, and I was so shocked I hardly knew what to say!’ being one such example of gossiping (Hijjas 1999, 84). It then becomes the joint responsibility of the grandmother and the young girl to sell off the baby to a Malay woman and her white husband from the city to ensure their economic survival and to preserve the reputation of their family in Kampung Air Keruh.

Similarly the 1998 film Panas (Heat) portrays the kampung as a place of alienation, perversity and despair as well as complex and morally difficult sexual relations. In this narrative of near incest, a licentious middle-aged man marries his beautiful stepdaughter almost immediately after his wife’s demise. His sexual perversity is not tolerated in the kampung and he and his young reluctant bride are forced to leave. This film too deconstructs the myth of the traditional kampung as an ideal place of community and mutual support, subverting the ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Polite Malay kampung society does not deal with incest and rape by fathers, stepfathers and uncles, so these works clearly identify and address sensitive, real sociological problems encountered by women in the village.[10] These cultural works expose the underpinnings of kampung society as a dominant structural means of regulating social behaviour and values, finally re-establishing hegemonic mores over those who challenge them.

Why are contemporary writers and filmmakers re-focusing on the idea of community and kampung? Some, like kampung-bred U-Wei, may want to capture the essence of village society while others are perhaps reacting to the nostalgic, whitewashed renditions of the kampung in official discourses. Through critical lenses, U-Wei’s un-nostalgic films encapsulate the feel, look and senses of kampung society. But more generally, perhaps the re-focus on the kampung is as much an exploration of Malayness at a time when the semiotics and meanings of tradition and modernity are still unstable: sometimes clashing, sometimes melding—the modern questioning and breaking down the traditional, the two transforming each other in significant ways to form new, even hybrid notions of Malay identity.[11] While the P.Ramlee films of the 1950s and 1960s may arguably be ‘modernist’ and have explored what it meant for Malays to be caught between tradition and modernity, the 1990s NEP generation remains more unique and serious in their exploration of Malay identity because of the major role the state, the NEP, and Mahathirism have played in altering Malay consciousness and society (Hilley 2001). A conscious engagement with that discourse of what the kampung signifies exists because the new urban Malay middle classes still retain strong ties to the kampung, as evidenced by the emptiness and quiet of Kuala Lumpur during the Hari Raya holiday upon completion of Ramadan, when the majority balik kampung (return to the kampung).

Even within the span of one generation, in the last thirty years, Malaysia has undergone tremendous rapid urban development, technological and economic improvement and modernity. Thus, Malaysian modernity may perhaps be categorized best as uneven. This is apparent in the expanded layout of the city, Kuala Lumpur, and its changing skyline of eclectic architecture, which narrates a multi-layered history of multiple cultural influences. Like any other city, Kuala Lumpur has become ‘the primary source of estrangement’ (Bookchin 1986), more visibly so in the post-NEP period than ever before, as signs of development and technological progress fill the landscape: smartcard tollbooths at the end of highways, mega-projects like the Petronas Twin Towers, The Mines Resort City, KL Tower, light rail transport, KLIA (the Kuala Lumpur International Airport).[12]  Yet, the belatedness of modernity, (or postmodernity, according to others like Ziauddin Sardar), what Homi Bhabha calls ‘the coeval, often incommensurable tension between the influence of traditional “ethnicist” identifications that coexist with contemporary secular, modernising aspirations’, (Bhabha 1994, 250) suggests the persistance of communal identification among new migrants to the city, or at least an attempt to recreate communally-shared identities in an alien urban environment.

It should come as no surprise that more positive values associated with the kampung have been transferred to the city and suburbs by the post-NEP generation, not only appearing in some urban-located films and literature, but also being channelled through government television commercials into many suburban households. In contrast to U-Wei’s kampung-based films, Malaysian woman filmmaker Shuhaimi Baba’s urban-centred films serve to reassure viewers that modernity, individualism and urbanisation can coexist with kampung communal values. They validate both rural and urban sites and sometimes even demonstrate how the kampung is fashioning or renovating itself as modern.[13]  I will discuss her films, as well as Sabri Zain’s Reformasi diary, in order to illustrate that communities can be found in urban spaces, protest zones and cyberspace.

Thus, Shuhaimi’s outlook on community is one that is receptive of strangers and celebrates the diversity they bring to the community. Similarly, community, in the sense of support, solidarity and strong friendships, can also emerge in the most unlikely places. This is especially true for the transexuals and prostitutes who find community with each other down in Chow Kit Road in the educational melodrama Bukak Api, co-sponsored by Pink Triangle and the Malaysian AIDS Council. The characters were played by real-life sex workers who worked closely with these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the director and his crew to come up with the plot, dialogue and situations. Grassroots NGOs like Pink Triangle function to foster a sense of community among their ‘clientele’ by providing a safe space and support and advocacy for them.

Yet, instead of leaving it up to individuals to be good Muslims, the Islamic Affairs Department regulates Malay Muslim behaviour and identity through policy-making and enforcement. One provision under the Malaysian syariah laws is the rule against khalwat (‘close proximity’) in which any Muslim found with an unrelated member of the opposite sex ‘in any secluded place or in a house or room under circumstances which may give rise to suspicion that they were engaged in immoral acts shall be guilty of an offence’ punishable by a fine up to a maximum of RM$ 790 (Paddock 2000). Famous local pop stars and politicians have been arrested for khalwat in places like hotel rooms and parked cars, sometimes based on ‘tip-offs’, suggesting again that a network of surveillance prevails. The issue of privacy in the city has also since been problematised by the widely-publicised charges of sodomy levelled at Anwar in the local press in 1998, blurring the lines between public and private, and local and global, as Malaysians talked about Anwar in the same breath as the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

Perhaps the foremost example of alternative communities in the post-NEP climate is the Reformasi movement. Sabri Zain has published in book format his Internet postings of the street demonstrations, the pro-Anwar rallies and his coverage of the support for other outspoken opposition leaders and activists like Lim Guan Eng and Tian Chua around the time of Anwar’s arrest. In his book Face Off: A Malaysian Reformasi Diary (1998-99), we get a notion of how alternative sites for shared communal values are created. Media censorship and blatant government propaganda during the Anwar affair led Malaysians to turn to alternative sources of information. The internet was the first and sometimes primary source for many Reformists, with numerous internet discussion lists such as Gerak-Net Adil-Net, Anwarxtpm, and Sedarlah appearing during and immediately after the affair.

In my reading of Sabri Zain’s book, I have found Michel De Certeau’s imaginative and utopian essay ‘Walking In The City’ in The Practice of Everyday Life extremely useful as a way of theorizing community practices and subjectivity on the streets of urban Kuala Lumpur. Its relevance to the Malaysian context hinges on Certeau’s idea that the formation of subjectivity or selfhood includes both a sense of space and place. In other words, space is deeply implicated in the formation of subjectivity. Just as the kampung is considered the locus of Malay identity, the KL streets during Reformasi shaped the identity of the ‘Malaysian protester’. At the same time, the stories, personal histories and one’s memories of certain places, even spirits that haunt certain locations, all subject-ify, communitize and give special meaning to those spaces. They are forms of spatial practice that invert the panopticon by providing an alternative and perhaps subversive meaning to that which is intended. Certeau’s observation of the functioning panopticon in New York City, which I will discuss below, is also important because it injects irony into the idea that the planned modern city (whether set in the First or Third World) is a liberating anonymous space for those escaping the traditional kinship web and claustrophobic surveillance of the village/kampung. After all, as mentioned earlier, privacy in the city may be more elusive than anticipated. Simultaneously and paradoxically, Certeau’s theory of spatialised subjectivity offers an optimistic way of considering agency in the process of ‘walking’ (acting/enunciating), or ‘shopping’ and thus gives form and appearance to alternative communities in urban spaces.

Certeau suggests that memory, stories and daily practices can construct meanings that are very different from that of institutional structures with regard to geographical spaces and constructed order. I would like to extend his idea of the potential subversion in daily practices to include extraordinary practices such as the Reformasi movement in Malaysia. ‘Walking in the city’ implicitly focuses only on the ways individual daily practices rupture the panoptic order. The mass Reformasi street demonstrations, however, reveal a communal practice that signifies an open challenge to the existing political order. Thus, my primary focus is still subjectivity as it intersects uncannily with space in the concept of kampung and community. Deploying Certeau in this case sheds light on the operations of electronic and non-electronic discourse around Reformasi and notions of subject(ive) resistance at a level that evades state and spatial structures.

The analogy between Certeau and the Malaysian Reformist street demonstrations in KL is apparent in Sabri Zain’s accounts of the people regaining some sense of agency by reclaiming the streets while being keenly conscious of that panopticon surveillance mechanism that is not only manifested in the strong presence of police and the Federal Reserve Unit (FRU) on the street level, but also situated (or geographically ‘placed’, to use Certeau’s precise meaning) up in Bukit Aman overlooking Dataran Merdeka, where these events took place:

Thus, the ‘omnipotent sentinel’ or, coincidentally, as recorded by Sabri Zain, the police headquarters becomes that ‘“proper” place in which to exercise their [Foucault’s panoptic procedures] authority’ (Reynolds and Fitzpatrick 1999, 67).

 This communal, shared act of subversion occurs at multiple levels. For example, the names of shopping complexes like Sogo, Pertama Shopping Complex, Campbell Shopping Complex become landmarks to Sabri’s readers who may have been out there on the streets that very day. However, the names in this situation ‘detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recognized or not by passers-by’ (Certeau 1984, 104). In other words, the names of places Sabri Zain’s readers would ordinarily associate with the consumerist act of shopping start to accumulate a significantly different meaning as sites of political struggle, possibly, for those ‘in the know’, who become part of the community. In Sabri Zain’s eyewitness accounts, these shopping malls serve as the markers of conflict and targets of refuge between ordinary citizens and the police. For example, the journalist ‘heard shouts from the Pertama Shopping Complex across the road’ where some policemen had surrounded a boy and ‘were kicking him mercilessly’. When asked to move after having witnessed this, Sabri and his partner ‘complied and walked away towards Campbell Shopping Complex’ (Sabri Zain 2000, 25-26). Here, Campbell mall acts, presumably, as a refuge.

Although some place or street names may have slippery meanings, the street actions of the Reformists actualize, re-activate or revive forgotten symbolic meanings attached to some of those very names. Dataran Merdeka, usually the locus of staid ritualistic pomp and official ceremony once a year during National Day celebrations, regained its historical meaning of freedom first associated with the popular hopes of a new nation in 1957. Another one of the busiest areas of social protest, Jalan TAR, was named after the first Prime Minister who read the declaration of independence in Dataran Merdeka the same year. In the 1980s, towards the end of the Tunku’s life when Mahathir’s government was fraught with business scandals, the Tunku was snubbed by Mahathir, who did not extend the customary invitation to him to attend the UMNO General Assembly. One cannot help but make the comparison between the two leaders and their different styles of leadership. Mahathir’s swift, authoritarian and harsh actions have been perceived as ‘un-Malay’ by the ordinary Malay on the street. According to an elderly Malay lady lining up to enter the courtroom where Anwar was to be tried: ‘We Malays don’t usually treat people like this. Maruah (dignity) is very important to us. Even the guilty deserve dignity. It’s in our ancient annals, the Sejarah Melayu. But our leaders don’t seem to understand this. This is not the Malay way. That is why so many of us are angry’.[16] The phrase ‘we Malays’ by implication seem to exclude Mahathir for ‘treat[ing] people like this’ (Sabri Zain 2000, 39).

  Sabri’s book is important because it captures a euphoric moment in Malaysian history of an empowered urban community manifesting ‘transversal power’, a term Reynolds and Fitzpatrick use to describe Certeau’s strategy. According to them, ‘transversal power’ is something that makes possible ‘the transgression of the boundaries of subjective territory’ as people cut across the conceptual boundaries of their prescribed subjective addresses (Reynolds and Fitzpatrick 1999, 74). The cover photograph of Sabri’s book, the map of downtown KL inside its covers, as well as the written narrative—the ‘spatial stories’—all work in conjunction to give, so to speak, the full picture of the ‘unlimited diversity of the enunciatory operations’ as well as their ‘graphic trail’ (Certeau 1984, 99). The map guides and aids the curious reader in reconstructing and remembering ‘a way of being in the world’ that was hopeful and positive  (Certeau 1984, 100). Read by a politicised reader excited by the accounts of urban popular democracy, the book evokes ‘the remembering of forgotten practices and the subsequent reconstructing or imbuing them with new meanings’ (Reynolds and Fitzpatrick 1999, 75).

 During this time, the government also tried to scare the Chinese community by drawing parallels between the Malaysian Reformasi demonstrations and the anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia of May 1998. But Sabri remarks that no Chinese-owned shops or Chinese demonstrators were killed or raped at the Malaysian Reformasi street gatherings. ‘I myself saw dozens of “Free Guan Eng” banners and posters next to the “Free Anwar” posters at these demonstrations. This did not seem anti-Chinese to me’ (Sabri Zain 2000, 65). [17] In fact, Reformasi in Malaysia, whether it took place in the streets or on the Internet, had the capability of creating and fostering community (or an imagined community as its political leaders would like to think) across ethnic communal lines. As Sabri insists, ‘[Reformasi] is about whether the Malaysian people are ready for democracy or not—whether we have grown out of the “divide-and-rule” of racial politics’ (Sabri Zain 2000, 66).

Conclusion

Just as culture and identity are constantly in flux, these alternative communities are formed by exigency. They are neither stable nor permanent. In fact, their raison d’être is contingent on the breakdown of the nation-state’s ability to provide a sense of community. Should the nation-state successfully fulfil its Enlightenment promise of emancipation and democracy for those of its subjects who are strangers within, then these alternative communities might dissolve as easily as they have been formed.

Gaik Cheng Khoo will take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Asian Research Institute in Singapore in July 2003. She is a creative writer who until recently taught at the University of Victoria, BC Canada. She can be contacted at gckhoo1@excite.com

Notes