reduced and recycled

I saw pictures of flooded areas, and marveled at how large swaths of land were transformed into flat pans of dirty orange. I’ve seen pictures like those before, but they never had any more significance than the massive human suffering inflicted on bewildered people. Sometimes, in those pictures, the roofs of houses and the highest branches of trees reach out above the waters. They look like little holdouts defying the flood waters, sometimes. In other times, they look like carcasses giving mute witness to their surrender to rising waters.

This time, I couldn’t help but think of the correlation between the floods, like a blanket covering the particularities of settlements, and the demolition of sites of historical significance. Is it so different from the banning of books? I think the banning books prevents readers from engaging the melange of experiences books open up. The destruction of historical sites, similarly, removes the opportunity for future generations to engage with the past.

It’s like cutting little pieces out of a quilt.

If you cut certain pieces out, you deprive the quilt of its original character; it becomes truncated, piecemeal and gaps will exist. And these gaps are like dead carcasses lying above flood waters, bearing mute testament to removals and revisions. These flood waters remind me of death, the final ‘leveler’. The waters flow over the little things that make living spaces less stark, and more human; the rubbish, detritus, cars, racks, buckets, wind chimes and such. It turns everything into a uniformity, hiding everything else.

I learned some time back how countries manufacture their own foundational myths, and I’ve talked about it before. Sometimes constructions of such myths present themselves naturally to people, and the collective memory is codified for future reference.

I don’t know if the same thing is happening in Malaysia.

Temples - sacred, public social spaces - when removed leave a large gap; memories don’t correspond to reality anymore. The mother who, for many years, walked her child past Bok house will now only have absence to remind her of Bok house. Other people who remember Bok house in one way or another will also suffer the same absence.

But more than just absence, I think losing these temples and other sites leaves holes, gaps in our collective memories. These places have meaning and significance not merely for the special qualities in construction and such. These places, to me, have meaning and significance because they stand like landmarks in our collective cultural past.

In one day, the government was able to discredit, disown and dismiss the contributions of Chua Cheng Bok to Malaysia, let alone Chinese Malaysians.

In my mind, sometimes, I see in these efforts to tear down our collective past a specific, meditated attempt to rewrite Malaysia’s own foundational myths. I get paranoid, sometimes, but watching the loss of Hindu culture which so informed pre-colonial Malaysia; watching the active attempts to cull historical facts from history textbooks; watching a communal-centred approach to defining race relations; and watching the loss – and indeed the questioning – of cultural landmarks makes me draw such conclusions.

It’s like standing on one’s roof and watching flood waters rise.