mamakk!!!

Warren wrote:

As a reader of the daily paper, it has become increasingly obvious to me that the government has been building up a fondness towards a particular word. Frequent as keris-wavings and as highlighted as natural disasters, are articles urging and reminding us once again to “be sensitive”.

The government’s intentions are not hard to comprehend: they believe sensitivity will bring unity, understanding and peace. However, it is a well-known fact to the Malaysian walking on the street that although the government’s intentioned situations manifest themselves on the surface, beneath the sun-touched exterior there are hushed murmurs of race, religion and rights in the dark.

Is it not obvious why Malaysia remains racially segregated after more than a century of inter-racial mixing? It is because the government does not really solve the people’s problems, but instead they hush it.

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via theStar:

MANY MPs must have found last week’s Parliament sitting to be a little duller than usual as all the excitement was centred in Machap. Some MPs, however, decided to brighten up the mood by cracking jokes and passing witty remarks. To some backbenchers, nothing could be better than picking on the opposition MPs, who also played along.

Nazri tried to tell Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang that there were no vicious intentions when Umno Youth chief Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein raised the Malay keris at the Umno general assembly last year. He said Kit Siang should not feel threatened by the keris if his conscience was clear.

“Just like when I went to Chinese events in my constituency, I was greeted with Chinese kung fu demonstrations and the kun tao.

Nazri, too, was laughing but little did he know that kun tao means “canned food” in the Cantonese dialect.

Almost always never fails to crack me up…sighz…these guys always manage to find some crap to talk about while wasting precious parliamentary time to discuss other more urgent issues.

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[pic source]

Farish A. Noor wrote:

The keris, she remarked, was a beautiful object: Graceful, elegant and curiously feminine. Yet I was not surprised. This was not the first time I heard the keris described as a feminine object; indeed many of my European friends had uttered similar remarks. Their observations were not unwarranted: Even to the seasoned eye of the keris lover, the keris is an object of beauty � and its discreet, unstated charm lay precisely in the fact that it was slender, willowy, almost vulnerable and rendered all the more dignified with the patina of time-worn antiquity.

The feminine Keris: Not a macho symbol.

To unsheath the keris was an affront to society, the keris and the keris-owner. It was an expression of crude, brutish masculinity that bordered on the uncivilised and bestial. Yet tell that today to those demagogues who brandish the keris in public as soon as a camera is pointed at them. By taking the keris out of the sheath and separating it from its feminine counterpart, the sarong, they have rendered the feminine secondary. Here lies the symbolic machismo of the act, and in this singular gesture a feminine object of reverence and beauty has been transformed into a masculine symbol of power, aggression and violence. This marks the first epistemic violation of the keris, though sadly there are many more�

The universal keris: Not a racial symbol.

Interesting post about the “keris”, a distinctive, asymmetrical dagger endemic to Malaysia and Indonesia.

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Farish A. Noor wrote:

The recent UMNO General Assembly proved to be the predictable let-down that many had expected it to be. Despite the appeals of the leader of the party, and his reminder that Malaysia�s struggle for independence was a collective effort on the part of all communities, the baying echoes of the Malay heartland resonated time and again. The keris was unsheathed and stabbed heavenwards; and all talk was of insidious �threats� and �conspiracies� against the Malay race.

Yet how many of these great �defenders� of the race, who are willing to spill blood (whose blood, one wonders?) in defence of their race, are aware of the long-term implications of their words and deeds? How many of these great communitarians are aware of the simple fact that with every reiteration of the threat of amok, the stereotype of the irrational Malay is being sedimented and hegemonised? During cheerless times such as these it would pay to take a trip back down memory lane and to look at how the ideology of racialised politics and racial stereotypes were first introduced to the Malaysian imaginary.

good article.

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