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The traditional Malay keris -- like Malaysia's proposal of the East Asia Economic Caucus (EAEC) -- , is a weapon of mass confrontation and has evolved in this postmodern era into a symbol of mass deception. Dr. Azly Rahman
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http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com
"Never give a sword to a man who can't dance." - Kung Fu Tze We live in a world in which the signs and symbols of violence colonise our consciousness, From the French cave-wall-inscribed violent images of the Neanderthals clobbering a baby dinosaur, to narratives of "super race" passed down via Oral Literacy, to "doctrines of imperialism" disseminated as a consequence of the invention of Gutenberg's printing press and the primacy of Print Literacy, to the advancement of the production of violent images disseminated worldwide via FoxNews or even Malaysia's own TV stations controlled by Prime Media signifying the primacy of Electronic media literacy, and next the violence in the world of Digital Literacy especially on the World Wide web -- we are confronted with the issue of the violent use of language as a system of signs and symbols. We are creatures of signs and symbols manipulated by those who own the means of producing static and moving images. A violent logo? Objects of violence -- of deaths and megadeaths, and of decimations and of demolitions, and of the demonstration of defiance and destruction -- all these, throughout history, have become symbols of choice to those in power. Consider objects like crude-looking objects like sharpened stones and rocks used by the cavemen to club each other, spears use in Alexandra of Macedonia's phalanx, the spears and swords used in the Taiping Rebellion in China, canons used in Gettysburg in Lincoln's America, and the rifle used by the Iraqi Saddam Hussein in celebrating victory, the 21-gun salute in a modern military-inspired ceremony in Kuala Lumpur, the range of Inter-continent ballistic missiles (ICBM) buried in the silos of Nevada, USA, --- and finally the Malay keris. Consider all these sharp and pointed objects. These object involves the image of trajectoring something -- of the release of inner tension, of perhaps the libido and repressed energy, of anger, frustration, and of the lack of language to communicate peace. The Malay traditional Malay keris -- like Malaysia's proposal of the East Asia Economic Caucus (EAEC) -- , is a weapon of mass confrontation and has evolved in this postmodern era into a symbol of mass deception. It is a symbol. It is a sign. It is a signifier. It represents something. The keris is a semiotic subject of study and must be looked at from different perspectives of meaning. What is the "repression, the untamed libido, the repressed energy, the anger, the frustration, and the bottled up fears" encapsulated and buried in the psycho-archeology of the keris? I hope the original creator of the UMNO logo can help us answer this question. I want to propose something. I want to invite UMNO to consider changing its logo. If Apple Computer can do that with its unfriendly logo of an "apple falling on Newtons' head" and have it evolved into something friendlier like "take the byte off an Apple", then UMNO can do similarly. When I was a child sitting under a rambutan tree in a Malay kampong in Johor, I had this question: what if Parameswara the assassin-prince-- who was watching with thrill a mousedeer/kancil kick a Rottweiler -- had sat under a durian tree and the fruit fell? What if, like Newtons' apple, the fruit fell onto him, hit his head, and he and was brought back to Palembang to be hospitalized for concussion and coma? Would Melaka had been "founded" at all and would "ketuanan Melayu" be an issue, and would the keris be wielded in many an UMNO General Assembly? I do not know. This is a matter of counter-factual history the McFlys in the Hollywood blockbuster movie Back to the Future may be able to answer. That was my childhood and child-like question on Parameswara, who was hunted down by the Siamese, for murdering Temagi in a kingdom called Temasek.. History can be the greatest colonizer. Memories lie. There is no such thing as "historical facts" when selective, authored, and doctored accounts based on power/ideology/genealogy of truth and falsehood are used to report "historical events" and next to turn these into "facts" to be disseminated by our "nationalistic and patriotic" Sejarah/Tawarikh/History teachers and curriculum developers of the Biro Tatenegara. UMNO must improve its logo. It must have a logo competition. The criteria must be this: only symbols of peace are allowed. And one must submit an essay of 500-word on why the symbol of the party is chosen. But let us peacefully resolve the intellectual controversy surrounding the keris (traditional Maly dagger) and inquire into the problematique of the Malay neo-feudalistic-cybernetic construction of social reality, as essentially, we exist through language. Words become flesh. Inscriptions become ideology and what is inscribed into our consciousness is dependent upon the history of our material beingness. Language is reality, some might say. Transform the language we are in, and we will see psychological and social transformations unfolding. Neourolinguistic programmers, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists and biosemioticians will tell us how perceptions can be reconfigured. The main problem with the Malays is that they have become silent reproductions of the feudal ideology. They have been "Othered", "alienated", "objectified as subjects" and "classically-conditioned" by each other through the long process of historical alienation both in body, mind and spirit by the language of feudalism – language that has structured the reality of what is not called "culture of the Malays"/budaya orang Melayu. The product of the genealogy of the transformation of the silent Malays or the "hamba sahaya" (indentured serfs) is a people that has become institutionalised and silenced not only by the neo-feudalistic construct derived from the excesses of vulgar materialism-based ideology, but by yet another form of colonisation: the deeply structured hyper-modernised subliminal ideology derived from the structurally and historically violent image and symbolism of the keris. From the feudalism of the Malay kings to the totalitarianism of the psycholinguistic and philosophical-psychological strategies of mental conditioning, control, and containment of Biro Tata Negara we see the transformation of the Malay mind. In relation to the (George) Orwellian-isation of the Malay world, physically and psychologically - the keris is a symbol of violence. Contrary to how many a Malay historian would romanticise the keris, it is a symbol of historical violence akin to the modern day symbol of the rifle wielded by Charlton Heston for the National Rifle Association, or by the tyrant Godfather-movies-loving Saddam Hussein during his glorious days of cigar-smoking Tikrit/tribalistic celebrations. The hyper-modern Malay continued to be shackled by feudalistic-inspired institutions of thought-control – institutions that are successful in its total quality management (TQM) of fear through specialised and stylised language. Language and power Language shapes thought and defines consciousness and from this, the material landscape of human control takes shape. Language can never be neutral. In it contains, ala (Noam) Chomskyian analysis, the deep structure of dominance. Human languages have built-in cybernetic codes, signs, symbolism, and signification to transform human beings into powerful beings, and into gods, and demi-gods. The more archaic and most jealously protected the language is, the faster it will become extinct. Sanskrit, Akkadian, Sumerian, Andamanese, and Aramaeic suffered through this process. Language that glorifies demi-gods and the high and mighty amongst human beings become extinct through the process of self-destruction of the inner contradiction. With Fate and the Divine conspiring, the subaltern narrative overthrows the Grand narrative. Language contains gate-keeping mechanism to include or exclude others. Language sustains, entertains, appropriates and propagates power relations. The language of law, medicine, engineering, computer science, economics, bio-technology, finance, religion, ethnicity, and any of the manifold variations of modern human activities, excludes the ordinary human beings of less economically-privileged class. Thus, a farmer, a padi planter, a shopkeeper, a factory worker, a beggar, a rubber tapper, a taxi driver and those who labour in institutions created by the more linguistically powerful and articulate in society become the "silent majority"; one who will become losers in this complex game of language called "life". Language, parallel to the development of capitalism and consciousness, creates the modern caste system with the newly-conditioned pariahs becoming the urban poor enslaving themselves for the benefit of the postmodern state; one that employs "feel good language of economic progress" deployed to maintain social control so that the lowest of the caste will not see the reality they are in. Unable to perceive the reality they are in, they fail to cognitively liberate themselves. As French sociologist Michel deCerteu would say, language and power is embedded in the "practice of daily lives". Language creates spaces of knowledge and power between the oppressor and the oppressed – through a complex matrix of dominance. There is language of oppression in the daily signs and symbols and in the institutions that govern humanity. Language, as a system of signs and symbols, permeates consciousness in all spheres of human activity - from how one addresses the King to the language of borrowing Michel Foucault "panopticon and synopticon" of international corporate domination embalmed in the highway billboards along the road to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Photos of the traditional rulers, prime ministers, and state leaders that adorn offices, classrooms, or any public places are meant to colonise our consciousness into accepting power relations, in this linguistic game designed to have those with "official, standard, and neo-archaic" language wins. The losers will kowtow to those who are more articulate in this game. One must imagine the Malay Sisyphus happy, as the Algerian Nobel Laureate Albert Camus would say. Liberate from language The Malays have suffered through the blindness of their own language; one that contains the seeds of destruction that numbs the human mind into subservience. The various forms of addresses of the Malay signify the class and caste divisions within the Malay society. What is termed as "respect" in the utterances, addresses, and salutations is anti-egalitarian and preserved to maintain the hegemony of the neo-feudalistic ruling class. However corrupt a leader is, one still uses the language of "respect" to honour even the most dishonourable leader who has plundered the wealth of the nation for his/her family to enjoy more respect and honour maintained through specialised and stylised language. All the titles given to the rakyat are a form of language power play that ensures the maintenance of hegemony, masking the structure of dominance. 'For whom does respect serve?' – is the essential question for us all. Such is the predicament of the mind of the Malay. Unless we learn how to deconstruct language of dominance and create newer frontiers of understanding power, ideology and totalitarianism and next deconstruct language so that it may gracefully evolve into one that reflects a class-less and caste-less society – the predicament will remain. The Algerian revolutionary thinker and psychiatrist, Albert Memmi would advocate the study of the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised through the use of language. But how is the restructuring of social language possible? What will happen to our class and neo-feudalistic system if the "silently reproduced" Malays revolt against the language that oppresses them and release themselves from what American literary critic Frederic Jameson would call "the prison-house of language" built out of the spirit of the keris? – a symbol of semiotic-feudalistic violence propagated as a symbol of "amanah" or trust? Must we have faith in such a symbol as the keris? Or is it all about economic dominance from time immemorial? From the use of the name "Iskandar (Dzulkarnain)"/Alexander the Great in the names of traditional rulers to the embalmation and enhancement of feudal glory to the name "Iskandar Development Region" in mystifying/masking local and international corporate domination through mega-real estate projects that do not benefit the poor, we see the game of semiotics taking shape in the history of consciousness. In-between this periodisation contains the waves of structural violence masked by language. For whom does the keris serve? This is the question the Malay linguist and historian and anthropologist of the keris must help us answer. Let us discuss this image of power/ideology/geneology: the keris. As a child were all told not to play with sharp objects.
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