I was browsing through bookforum.com when I lighted on an interesting article featuring Henri Lefebvre. No, I don’t know who he is, but Daniel Miller’s written a compelling piece describing Lefebvre’s ideas, and in particular, his involvement in the May 1968 revolt against De Gaulle’s government. Not unlike our own riots in May 1969, I was caught by the following section in Miller’s article:-
For both Lefebvre and his many followers, the political path which followed from this stance was clear: if one genuinely wanted to transform society, one needed to intervene on the level of everyday life, and reverse-engineer its governing architecture. Public space itself needed to be “diverted”, its meanings transformed by those who use it. It was this vision that Lefebvre and the soixante-huitards shared. As one of les événements’ most famous slogans would put it: “Beneath the paving stones – the beach.”
There is so much there of uncovering, of piercing the everyday with simple truths. I couldn’t help but contrast this with the May 13 riots, and the aftermath: such effort in concealing and covering over. Somewhere in KL there are people shuffling along on pavements built on silent corpses and dry bones - if not literally, then in every other way. Silence, rumour and suggestion laid over with interlocking tiles and the detritus of urban city life. It makes me wonder if we will ever get to the “truth” of the matter, because in the intervening years, the authenticity of any witness to the crime of 1969 has been tainted by the prevailing, ethnocentric nationalism of the day.
Sometimes it feels like our separate cultural identities in Malaysia, our collective communal memories of those times have now, by the passage of time, taken on a depth of meaning which, should the facts of May 13 be examined with any objectivity, naturally shirk away from. I get the feeling that people may not want to know anything about what went on back then anymore. Still, there’s forced ignorance and then there are those bones and corpses, those untold stories, still buried beneath the walls of a newly-constructed, communal biography. I suppose it will be impossible to uncover and reveal without tearing down what it means to be Malay, Chinese or Indian.
I think about this for a bit and then am confronted by molotov cocktails tossed at the DAP building in Perak. It’s all one and the same, to me.
Comments (3)
We must let the truth out. It is scary that some young ones and many peers believe that the fact that the massacre was instigated by Harun Idris. Ask many journalists, politicians, activists and just ordinary folks. It is a recorded historical fact.
UMNO used murder to implement racial supremacy. This was how the Mahathir/Razak legacies were build. But which country ain’t built on blood?
soli correction:
…the fact that the massacre was instigated by Harun Idris is a ‘conspiracy theory’.
And time has made their legacies all the more complex. If it is to be done at all, I hope it’s done carefully - this isn’t about picking at scabs, this will be more like brain surgery.