Denying the freedom of thought

Wishing readers a Selamat Hari reduced Raya.

I hope it’s obvious to all that festivities leading to funerals is not the way to go.

Hopefully, also, for a couple of days, politicians will cease their juvenile posturing and name-calling and declaration of servitude and pretend to be friends to all.

Unfortunately for us, they will be back soon enough, mouthing the clichéd alibi of having listened to the people, having suffered watching their suffering, to justify their betrayals of trust.

What people? How many people? A few met in a hotel café, or clandestinely in a room above? How many people were invited to have dinner at Azmin Ali’s house or the Sheraton?

The people are always the last to have a say in the governance of their affairs, and only after something has been decided and done for their “good”.

Meanwhile, the auditor-general is positive with the bug. And the prime minister is in self-quarantine for a couple of weeks. Who is at the helm while we are being battered by rough seas? A collective of convenience? A coalition bound by slipknots?

It does not bear thinking about.

I see a dreary prospect of more pettifogging politicking until Parliament can sit in a stretch, far longer bum-numbing than a couple of hours, and the government can be called to account; until Bersatu has its elections to determine the fractions of each faction; ultimately till the next general elections, when the people’s voices will be tallied again… and politicians decide otherwise subsequently, and so the cycle goes on, Malaysian politics achieving the physical impossibility of a perpetual motion machine running on the spot.

To talk of things more cheery, I go further afield to the community of the town of Palmer in Alaska, who protested against their school board's decision last month to ban five books: F Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (which I am coincidentally re-reading after a gap of five decades), Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and “The Things They Carried”, short stories by Tim O’Brien.

Issues that the school board members had with the first volume of Angelou’s memoirs included its “sexually explicit material, such as the sexual abuse the author suffered as a child, and its ‘anti-white’ messaging”. Fitzgerald’s classic novel of careless society and callous love was dropped for “sexual references”. “Invisible Man” contained “rape and incest”. “Catch-22” was anathema for its violence, “a handful of racial slurs” and the fact the characters “speak with typical ‘military men’ misogyny and racist attitudes of the time”.

The community rallied against this attempt to dictate appropriate reading for young minds and promoted the books far and wide. Funds were raised to get the books to youths. Money was offered to kids who read all five books. An online book club was set up to discuss the books. A food truck gave free servings of mac & cheese to students who submitted a report on any of the books.

One of the board members admitted that he had only read “The Great Gatsby” of the five books sanctioned.

Strike one for the people. The Palmer school board retreated in the face of communal resistance, and the books are back in the curriculum.

Unwittingly, the censorious school board has increased the interest in and the readership for the five books.

I and other Malaysians involved in the arts – film, theatre, music - have had similar run-ins with authority trying to lay down the law as to what is permissible to communicate to the public.

They want anodyne, placid entertainment that doesn’t challenge mind or emotions. They will never understand why artists want to be iconoclasts, why a repetitious formula works for science but is death for the arts.

The news on Palmer reminds me of my first encounter with one of my lecturers, Mrs Price, in the English Department, University of Malaya (circa 1970).

A physically imposing woman, who always looked as if she was sitting tight with her equally imposing husband in their red MG sports car, she strode into the lecture theatre for our first lecture with her, and the first word that came out of her mouth was the most well-known, most-used four-letter Anglo-Saxon expletive.

What the f… dozens of “freshie” jaws drop, mouths agape, eyes agog. Did we hear right? Couldn’t be… we did because she didn’t whisper it, she hurled it at us.

She went on to explain that for the next few years we would be reading and explicating all kinds of writing, dealing with all kinds of expressions of emotions and passions, warped or otherwise.

She had no tolerance for juvenile immaturity, kids sniggering, blushing, nudging, winking, every time there is a reference to sex in a line or passage. So time for us to grow up, get over our inhibitions and get on with our studies.

She couldn’t have gotten us to mature overnight, but she certainly got our full attention.

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist. - Mkini