How We Perpetuate The Myths Of Empire

‘Amok’ Season Again: How We Perpetuate The Myths Of Empire

Farish A. Noor

Ho hum... Another day, another amok.

Perhaps it is no longer possible for us to wish for an UMNO General
Assembly where the delegates would refrain from uttering the same
lamentable slogan of ‘Malays in danger’. Perhaps it is too late for us
to imagine of an UMNO assembly where the keris would not be unsheathed
in public, accompanied by the familiar rhetoric of blood and belonging.
Perhaps it is too late for us to hope that one day the leaders of UMNO
would grow up and leave behind the colonial construction of the Malays
of the past.

The recent UMNO General Assembly proved to be the predictable letdown
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.

Forgotten was the simple fact that the category of Malayness itself was
a colonial construct in the first place. And likewise forgotten was
the fact that the racialised politics of exclusive communitarianism
dates back to the bad old days of Empire. ‘Melayu mudah lupa’ was the
old adage, though how true the saying is, is questionable considering
how some Malays have never forgotten how to play to the gallery
whenever it suits them.

In the midst of this, the reproduction of the Malay archetype goes on
in earnest. As the UMNO delegates bemoaned the fate of the Malays,
every conceivable stereotype and cliché was brought out of the closet
and put to work. Our former colonial masters would have been proud:
After a century of colonial indoctrination, the Malays (of UMNO at
least) have finally internalised the myth of the irrational, backward
and lazy Malay as never before. One is reminded of the words of Frank
Swettenham who described this as the land of the amok. In his words:

“Malaya, land of the pirate and the amok, your secrets have been well
guarded, but the enemy has at last passed your gate, and soon the
irresistible juggernaut of Progress will have penetrated to your
remotest fastness, ‘civilised’ your people, and stamped them with the
seal of a higher morality.”(1)

Former UMNO leader Mohamad Rahmat was among the first off the starting
post when he uttered the dreaded A-word: “Don’t test the Malays, they
know ‘amok’”. Melaka delegate Hasnoor Sidang Hussein added more blood
to the feast when he bluntly stated, “UMNO is willing to risk lives and
bathe in blood in defence of race and religion.” UMNO Youth Exco
member Azimi Daim added, “When tension rises, the blood of Malay
warriors will run in our veins,” (Prompting the obvious question:
What happens when there is no tension? Whose blood is running in their
veins then?) But the first prize for grandstanding has to go to Perlis
delegate Hashim Suboh who directed his question to UMNO leader
Hishamuddin Onn: “Datuk Hisham has unsheathed his keris, waved his
keris, kissed his keris. We want to ask Datuk Hisham: when is he going
to use it?”

The threat of going keris-waving bloody amok has become so commonplace
by now that we have grown accustomed to it. Ranked alongside other
familiar threats like the recurrence of ‘May 13’ or yet another
‘Operasi Lalang’, the ever-present threat of the Malays going amok is
now seen as part and parcel of the political vocabulary of Malaysia and
Malaysian politicians in particular. Blood and violence have become
part of our political language.

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 look at how the ideology of racialised politics and racial
stereotypes were first introduced to the Malaysian imagery.

The phenomenon of amok is and has been seen as something particular and
specific to the peoples of the Malay Archipelago. Indeed, writings on
the phenomenon date back to the 16th century, beginning with the first
European encounters with the peoples of the region. From the start, it
was argued by many an Orientalist scholar, the Malay people were
essentially an irrational, emotional and highly-strung race. The
introduction of the pseudo-scientific concept of ‘Race’ (a crucial tool
in the ideological construction of the colonised “Other” which
justified the divisive and hierarchical politics of Empire) was made
possible with the attribution of certain essentialist traits to the
colonised subjects themselves. In the case of the Malays, the
phenomenon of amok was seized upon as that all-important debilitating
factor that subsequently justified paternalistic colonisation of this
weaker, irrational and emotional ‘race’ of human beings…

During the British colonial era, colonial functionaries and
administrators in Malaya conducted their affairs with the Malays
according to their own decidedly jaundiced understanding of Malay
culture, politics and history.(2) To further reinforce the general
observations made about the Malays, the colonial authorities also
relied upon pseudo-scientific instruments like ethnographic studies and
the population census which were employed to help locate and identify
the different native groupings and rank them according to the violent
hierarchy of colonial discourse. Alongside the claims of the governors
and architects of Empire, the Eurocentric theories of racial scientists
and social Darwinists added scientific credibility and justification to
the policies of divide et impera that were being implemented in the
colonies and were translated into political realities through the
creation of a racially segregated and stratified plural society.

As Alatas (1977) and Winzeler (1990) have shown, colonial studies of
Malay characteristics and cultural practices were often used to justify
paternalistic attitude towards the colonised Malay subjects. Malay
cultural traits such as amok, latah and others were superficially
studied and documented, with undue emphasis on the more sensational
aspects of the phenomenon.(3) Such studies were also used to further
consolidate the belief that the Malays as a people were culturally and
genetically inferior to their Western rulers due to their (Malays) weak
character. The stereotype of the child-like, unstable and unreliable
Malay was thus developed on all possible levels and in all possible
spheres: from orientalist literature to ‘serious’ academic studies,
from the field of health and welfare to public housing and town
planning. So pervasive and influential were the beliefs regarding the
culturally and environmentally-determined defects of the Malays that
they would endure even up to the postcolonial era in the perceptions of
Europeans and Asians alike.(4)

So when UMNO leaders of today reach for their kerises and mouth their
slogans of blood and defiance, are they aware of the fact that their
very rhetoric bears the stains of a colonial anthropology and ethnology
which were part and parcel of the colonial construction of the Malays?

Having accepted the simplified colonial construction of the Malays as a
fixed, static, essentialised ‘race’, are these leaders prepared to
perpetuate these colonial fictions just a while longer? It is ironic,
to say the least, that the very party that claims the right to wear the
mantle of anti-colonialism in Malaysia should be the one that protects
and preserves the colonial heritage the longest. Every time a Malay
leader utters the threat of yet another bloody amok in the streets, one
cannot help but hear the scornful laughter of the colonial
administrators of the past, trailing away in the distance, harping back
to the days when the Malays were cast as that irrational race, going
amok at the drop of a hat….


Dr Farish A Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights
activist. Visit his website at www.othermalaysia.org

Endnotes:

(1) See: Frank A Swettenham: ‘Malay Sketches’. The Bodley Head,
London. 1895.
(2) See: : S. H. Alatas, ‘The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the
Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th
century and Its Function in Colonial Capitalism’, Frank Cass
Publishers, London, 1977.
(3) See: Alatas (1977) and Robert Winzeler, ‘Malayan Amok and Latah
as ‘History Bound’ syndromes’, in ‘The Underside of Malaysian History :
Pullers, Prostitutes, Plantation Workers’, Edited by Peter J. Rimmer &
Lisa M. Allen 1990.
(4) As late as the year 1960, European social scientists and
academics would still be lamenting the fate of the ‘disabled’ Malays.
In his survey for the Fabian Society, the socialist leader John Lowe
described the Malays as ‘an unsophisticated, technically underdeveloped
rural people’ (pg. 1) As far as the Malay race was concerned, Lowe’s
condemnation of them was a blanket one: ‘The mass of the Malay
peasantry are traditionalist, suspicious and often superstitious,
offering formidable resistance to change’ (pg. 22). [See: John Lowe,
‘The Malayan Experiment’. Fabian International and Commonwealth Bureau.
Research Series no. 213. The Fabian Society, London. 1960.]