Review
Beyond These Words
AU Sow Yee
Translated by LEONG Jie Yu
The three speakers of the panel entitled “Re-mapping Inter-Asian Historical Contexts of People’s Theater II: Trans-local Practice and Exchange in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia” all came from the region of the Malay Archipelago, a place where its networks remain deeply intertwined: Sim Kok Meng (Malaysia), Muhammad Febriansyah (Indonesia), and Dindon W.S., Ratu Selvi Agnesia (Indonesia). Sim focuses on the sorting of Malayan Chinese theaters’ history at the beginning of the twentieth century before 1937. The other two speakers, with much coincidence, took different angles at scrutinizing the New Order regime launched in 1966 by Suharto when he came to power, which was, at that time, a brand-new political language that linked Indonesia to the Cold War situation that was blazing through Southeast Asia.
Instead of discussing the practices or methodologies employed by the speakers, this comment was in fact directed towards addressing the thus far concealed and undeveloped network of connections that could be furthered from the speakers’ propositions, which, to me, remains the most charming part of the whole discussion.
Raised during the workshop “Where the People are…,” Kok Heng Leung’s thoughts on the concept of “the People” seemed like a heavy and serious query. This reminded me of Wiji Thukul, an Indonesian dissident poet who wrote the poem Bunga dan Tembok (Flowers and the Wall).
Like flowers
We are flowers that you did not
want growing
You would prefer to construct
houses and pillage lands
Like flowers
We are flowers that you did not
want existing
You would rather develop
highways and steel fences
Like flowers
We are flowers
made to fall on our own earth
If we are flowers
You are the wall
Yet on that wall
were seeds that we have scattered
Till the time where we will grow together
with confidence: you shall crumble in our faith
Anywhere regardless—tyranny shall fall!
Wiji Thukul used to take part in theater shows at Solo. His life was said to be inseparable from Indonesia’s New Order. Two years after he was born, a coup happened where the pro-America Suharto overthrew Sukarno’s leadership and came into power. The New Order came into force and into the limelight of history. In 1998, the regime was toppled over following Suharto’s fall from power. Wiji Thukul had disappeared mysteriously before the New Order ended, and every now and then, it was rumoured that his life had been taken away by the despot.
The statement of his beautiful poem is distinct and the image of the enemy is clear. I arrived at Hsinchu last night and attended dinner with participants of this workshop. I sat quietly in the noisy restaurant and listened to my friends whom I had not seen for ages talk about protests and revolutions. Authority is something that will surely exist throughout time: past, present, and the future. However, it is a life form that never stops evolving, like the DNA of a virus that goes on to mutate throughout the unceasing ebbs and flows of human history. The target against which the resistance intends to fight changes constantly as well, like a Chimera. The concept of a Chimera, a fire-breathing beast in Greek mythology, has a body composed of parts from different beasts, where it then gradually develops into an alien composite. Following this thought, what the revolution was protesting against was an undefinable target that constantly reassembles and changes its structure made out of the self and others.
“Let politics be politics; and let art be art” was often used to regulate the mentioning of the ugly situation in politics that the public has always been aware. The great French philosopher Jacques Rancière once discussed in an essay that the commonality between art and politics is that both could be fiction or imagined. The kind of politics that was referred to however is beyond political incidents or issues, and instead referred to what lies in the core of the structure of life. Rancière’s point of view displayed a positive facet of the relationship between politics and art. The formation of this relationship does not refer solely to art being critical of politics in its presentation, as this is not the only way that such relationships could be forged. As mentioned in the session just now, the interconnectedness of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines is more than just the interaction taking part in the people’s theater.
Wiji Thukul’s Bunga dan Tembok protested against “construction,” a theme that could be found in pop songs of popular films during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959, Motion Picture and General Investments Limited, a film company founded by the Malayan movie business magnate Loke Wan Tho, produced Air Hostess, a movie that was filmed in locations across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. Grace Chang, the female lead, played the role of a young woman who aspired to be an air hostess. Taiwan was her first flight destination upon her completion of training. During her stay at the Grand Hotel Taipei, her Taiwanese colleagues requested for her melodious singing as a gift upon meeting. She then sang The Taiwan Song. “Taiwan’s a nice place that I love, I’ll sing a little tune about it / There are long coastal lines and tall mountains, and hill forests full of gems / the roads run in all directions, and railroads connecting north and south / a pretty view on the Pacific Ocean, Taiwan is a treasured island.”
The tune of The Taiwan Song originated from Night in the City of Tainan, written by Taiwanese composer Hsu Hsih. This song, which at a glance seemed to have nothing to do with politics, had a salient number of nouns related to development and construction present in its lyrics. Roads as a reference to development was also foregrounded in Wiji Thukul’s works of poetry. In fact, the preceding version of the tune of Night in the City of Tainan came from The New Taiwan’s Song of Development (1946), which is a song that talks about the hopes of mid-1940s, post-Japanese-retrocession Taiwan for a better political and societal situation.
The early stages of the Malayan Chinese Theater movement, as mentioned by Sim Kok Meng, was related to the budding of leftist movements during the 1920s while the Malayan leftist movement during the 1930s and 1940s had much to do with the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army, an army formed out of civilians. Sim has shown us the link between Chinese theaters and the leftist movement that happened in Malaya during the first half of the twentieth century. However, the layers of connections that could have been revealed through this link is hidden from the public’s plain sight. For instance, during Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army’s active years of resistance, herds of Taiwanese youths had been recruited to join the Japanese army and enter the warfronts of Malaya and Indonesia.
That being said, the inception of Indonesia’s New Order was, in fact, in sync with the chronological developments of the Malayan Emergency period (1948- 1960). As part of the Cold War island chain, both countries were core “warfronts” that stemmed from the mainstream anti-communism ideology. During the Emergency, the British colonial government offered generous incentives to the surrendered members of Malayan Communist Party and to the people who blew the whistle on Malayan Communist Party members. The Malayan Peoples’ Anti- Japanese Army was the former version of the Malayan Communist Party, and the incentive money given out by the British colonial government actually came from the rubber production industry in Malaya. Rubber played a crucial role in the hot war breakouts during the Cold War, e.g., the Korean War, being the main raw material for the tyres of armoured cars and tanks.
We are to be fooled by the surface of direct associations, thinking that we are facing a single enemy, while overlooking the fact that this intertwined, messy web of relations is a hidden structure of power lurking under its disguise. This power structure and its “associated” networks that are being shielded by peoples, organisations, and even nation states holding “fictitious” powers, is something worth exploring beyond these words said by the three speakers of this panel.
