It was late evening when I walked through the corridor, which doubles as an exhibition space for creative arts students, to the university car park. Strewn on the floor were a hammer, a jar of nails and a discarded picture frame. Hmm, what if I set the hammer upright on the open jar of nails, and place my framed composition on a stained wooden chair beside a post-modern sculpture?

The next morning, walking through the corridor to my office, I saw some curious visitors musing at my random installation and pondering over its implicit connection – none intended - with the sculpture. Ahh, the perplexed pretentious gaze one sees at post-modern art exhibitions. My objet d’art would be as good as junk in my dingy garage. Indeed, context does matter. A nude photo on a toilet wall spells obscenity. The same photo hung on a gallery wall spells ‘art’.

In the high context world of modern art, what’s treasure to some is trash to many. Each objet d’art is interpreted from the viewers’ minimal experience or feigned knowledge of the genre. In the empirical black-and-white world of journalism, however, readers are less forgiving with ambiguous stories, which they see as communicating a veiled political message that incites racial animosity and plausible assassination. Thus, the condemnation of Chamil Wariya’s cerpen Politik Baru YB J published in Mingguan Malaysia on Oct 12.

Literary representation of the sensitive politics of race and religion often risks excluding, exaggerating or misdefining the salient features of particular communities and caricatured politicians. What the author sincerely intended for the greater good can backfire when the contents and context are read through coloured cultural lenses as deceit and treachery.

Serious undertone

Different political interpretations of fact and fiction, contents and context were obviously a problem in Chamil’s cerpen. Which prompted the DAP Youth to file a police report for its perceived seditious undertone, and readers to condemn the story for its explicit incitement of assassination of a Chinese female politician.

If we were to file reports with the police on each disagreeable cerpen, racist politicking and propaganda published in our mainstream media, we’d be pretty tied up at the police station. Reading the public reactions, I’m reminded of goose-stepping book-burning reactionaries hauling down writers and dragging them to the dumps simply because the writers’ ideologies don’t fit in with what’s politically and culturally correct. I thought Malaysians by now are sufficiently exposed to the studies of literature and culture to be able to read a disagreeable story without slandering and ‘killing’ off the writer.

If Chamil’s cerpen does explicitly incite racial animosity, it should rightly be condemned just as the many keris-brandishing hick politicians and racist demagogues should be denounced – but which then should be followed by direct engagement in a productive dialogue in the public space. The latter is utterly absent from the reactions I’ve read so far. The running score: political opportunism – 1; critical discourse – 0.

The fact is that very often knee-jerk angry reactions to a controversial text tend to selectively overlook some partial truths, which may or may not be latent in Chamil’s take on racial politics in the country. A cool reflective reading of the text will find this out.

Underlying the reactions, I suppose, is the primordial fear that Chamil pegged his cerpen, which indirectly has fanned the anxiety that Malaysians feel at this time of political uncertainties. This has essentially amplified the perceived threats to a Chinese politician recently out from an ISA detention, and by extension, the Chinese community’s sense of security. The consequence as we can see is a spate of [ir]rational reactions to the imagined realities as constructed in the cerpen.

Recall that the reformasi movements have all these years petitioned for greater freedom of the press and a repeal of the ISA and sedition laws. The irony is that the DAP Youth’s police report and condemnation of Chamil’s character rather than the story’s form and structure, is akin to the government’s penchant for using the same laws to clamp down on journalists and bloggers who dare to write beyond what the authorities deemed to be acceptable.

Literary exchange

Even as we continue to clamour for greater freedom to write and speak without fear of persecution, some have obviously taken the low road of shooting the messenger – often below the belt. All this, based on a collective perception that the story published in an Umno-affiliated newspaper is politically motivated and anti-Chinese. Would the reactions be different if a similar story was written at a different time under different circumstances and published in a different media outlet?

Perhaps, a parallel ‘cerpen’ and a sequel with an alternate protagonist YB J[eyaratnam] or “YB J[ohari] could be published in S in Chew, Tamil Nesan, Star - or even Malaysiakini. Herein lies the untested space for a dynamic literary exchange among Malaysian writers. Would the literary exchange incite mass protests? Certainly – in the forum pages and on the internet. Race riots on the streets? I don’t think so. I believe we’re smarter and more politically astute than we give ourselves credit for.

Incidentally, I first met Chamil at the Commonwealth Journalists Association conference on Oct. 17 in Kuching. That morning, our acquaintance in the conference hall was interrupted when a Malaysian journalist handed him a photocopied story from Malaysiakini, which reported that DAP Youth had filed a police report against his “cerpen”. Chamil was quietly taken aback.

“Serious ke?” I asked. He nodded a muted reply that his “cerpen”, a fiction, had been taken out of context. His explanation, as reported in The Nut Graph , shows how textual narratives with its many shades of symbolical representations, inter-textuality and play on literary devices can be misread beyond what the author intends.

Reading the attacks on Chamil’s cerpen reminds me of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen for their criticisms of Islam in their novels. Chamil is yet to come near to Rushdie’s league, but certainly he has copped the flak in his attempt at ‘faction’ writing, which according to him, was basically aimed at symbolically killing the ghost of racist politics in the country. I suppose to the many critics, the cerpen was just too real for comfort.