by Justin Teoh
I am distraught by the Malaysian youth’s lack of interest in personal writing, and even more so their sheer disservice of it. A few months back, I helped transcribe an interview conducted with a youth trailblazer who was very well a part of the advocacy scene we have from #lawan and #kitajagakita. It still does not sit right with me that they disclosed that they subscribe to zine content only through a private Instagram account. It called to mind synaptic connections of underlying problems, with implications that concern the affairs of eventual reform, reform on part of both the rakyat and those in power who are to be held accountable. I am pressed to give a narrative to clean the salted wounds of what is and should be an essential practice.
I sat to ponder why I write, looking inward. I have not reached the halfway point of my college career’s progress bar, but I started to switch majors regularly before it began at 0%. I was everywhere at once, piecing together whether I was cut out for the creative control demanded of film, the burnouts of social work, or for monitoring the global proliferation of nuclear weapons to comprehend peace studies. I tried to fill in checklists of categorical criteria only to find that I could not see myself committing entirely; even with my current majors, there is a baseline anxiety that I still cannot find a sense of belonging, but at least now I can channel my focuses on the intersections of aiding public policy decisions with insights from world literature. As a wholly undecided student, I did not believe that my verbal utterances and lost trains of thought could do justice to my profile and history that while others can empathize, cannot necessarily subject themselves to the molds I tried to cookie-cut myself with. So I write to think, and to make sense of what I think. It became clear to me why individual-based counseling often seems to extensively involve journal therapy. It diminishes any attachment from opinionated presumptions that were imposed on oneself, giving them a firm stepping stone for their capacities as they really are. Just as a fitness junkie practices progressive overload to prevent injury, a writer should spare themselves from being misguided, and start by smelling the paper flowers before bothering to dissect them for insights.
Writing is patient and kind, but likewise, it asks for patience and kindness. When writing occurs in place of two-way conversations, then the fact of the private account heavily inhibits our collective growth. It is simple enough to figure that words connect, but in a situation where we ask for nationwide solidarity in issues of governance, institutionalized prejudices, socioeconomic disasters, and domestic violence, the writer should be made aware of the types of readers their work resonates with. This is especially the case when the overarching goal as it is now in Malaysia is to be proficient in the nuances of deeply-rooted problems and calibrate pundits so as to stop perpetrating them. Literary scholar C. D. Narasimhaiah puts forth that the critic “should be a Sahrdaya, responsive reader, actively collaborating with the writer and seeking corroboration from his fellows in what T. S. Eliot called ‘the common pursuit of true judgment.’” Just as Narasimhaiah contextualizes “the common pursuit” that I contextualize “pundit.” Too often do I see writers my age profess their thoughtful analyses into the void and then get verbally attacked by readers above their age once they gather attention within the status quo. The writers we have now are entitled to having readers who are equally capable of writing and showing meaningful support, and for the latter to take up that reciprocal role they cannot shroud themselves in associating from said pursuit, lest they sacrifice the former’s voice.
Since everyone that is capable of reinforcing or deconstructing the status-quo has to do so through some rhetorical capacity, it follows that everyone is capable of writing. I write this piece to assert that we, Malaysian youths, cannot not wait for writing to materialize on its own. As the rakyat continues to hold the short end of the stick in major political decisions (or indecisions), wishful thinking cannot adequately help alleviate their material consequences. A figure held accountable can choose to censor words, but they have to acknowledge the words first before doing so, hence failing to consider successful arguments later on on their part would rub them in ways they should have seen coming. Philosopher-activist Michel Foucault famously wrote that “power is exercised, rather than possessed;” other than what we have, what more can we use to bring back justice through what we do? With our bare selves, there is no better way to navigate ethical discourses than to write, and to write well.
Writing well comes with practice. In this vein of “investing in yourself” I hear as a youth, I would like to come back to the concept that writing is honest. One common issue that I see with beginning personal writers is that many are inspired to write about profound feelings and sensations but are limited in their descriptions other than the fact of, and their immediate wants and responses towards said profoundness. Especially with artistic manifestations of prose, poetry, and music; it is disheartening to see people fall short of their potential because they are averse to constructive writing criticism, and even worse–not get any constructive criticism at all. There is very little evidence of exploration and progress beyond the musings of “my darkest and deepest thoughts,” or “the words that we left unsaid,” or the attempts to replicate Frank Ocean’s shapeshifting sensibilities through acoustic art pop, just to name a few. This is why a compassionate and sustainable writing community on our shores is necessary. We can only go further in the arts and humanities through the collective examination of good writing, both at home and overseas. If we continue to reinforce the barriers that inhibit creative expression and remove the liberties of them being perceptive towards seeking the joys in life, then there is no reason for those in power to be intimidated from trading the rakyat’s well-being for their own. There will also be no reason for other Malaysians to believe, despite our professings of being a harmonious, multinational country, that our right of self-expression across our intersections is worth saving. As literary essayist Matthew Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy, “[perfection] is a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the over-development of any one power at the expense of the rest.”
I conjured up the quotations of literary theorists from other parts of the world thus far, and I will continue to do so here to make the following point: instead of looking at the past to see what we are missing and what to follow, Malaysian youths should seek to redefine themselves by writing about, borrowing from Foucault again, “the history of the present,” which in turn would always start with personal writing. The few months of my training in comparative literature at Chapel Hill has taught me this: nothing is original; everything of the present can always be traced back to an influence from the past, while simultaneously being told through the language of the present. Looking back on our relatively recent history as a trading colony, the critiques and writing of literary heroes such as Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Muhammad Haji Salleh, K.S. Maniam, and the like, all had to be about postcolonialism because Malaysia had to grapple with structuring its lived experience with being sustainable as a community, now vibrant not as a global recognizee but a recognizer. It is now with writers such as Hanna Alkaf, Tan Twan Eng, and Yangsze Choo that we should be open to outside influences as they reverberate through the fertile tanah of our respective identities and stories to write, to eventually make sense of the Malaysia we are currently trying to imagine for all of us. Zora Neale Hurston wrote in What White Publishers Won’t Print: “Literature and other arts are supposed to hold up the mirror to Nature. With only the fractional “exceptional” and the “quaint” portrayed, a true picture of [Negro] life [in America] cannot be. A great principle of national art has been violated.”
I believe that politicians and representatives who ferociously advocate for the greater good (as we youths define it) are as susceptible to the influences of those who are in it for money. If you look hard enough you would find that their rhetoric is not as revolutionary or sophisticated as the key texts that would be taught in tertiary education settings. I see that they often explain their initiatives and reforms in a language that the average Malaysian can at least understand while tiptoeing between political divisions in the process. While it may be enough for the recipients to respond and cast their votes, it is not enough that they only act when prompted and not out of their own will beyond results. In the long term, this would reinforce the status quo of inaction. If we care about embodying an inclusive future that we can be proud of, then we would have to start peering into the subjective mirror of our ideas and not just to the objective mirror of our physicality. We cannot at an early stage start to lose touch with the charms of our own writing, which will always be synonymous with that subjective self, the self in which we hope can have a say in meaning something. Joan Didion’s writing continues to live, and she warns us that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” If we are going to prepare ourselves to answer those questions, I just hope that we are not speaking into another void of private accounts.