IN my teenage years, I attended a local boarding school that had a penchant for fostering competition among its students. We had inter-class, inter-form, inter-dorm, and inter-house competitions in everything, including singing and performing plays. One memory stands out in particular: In one of our many competitions, my class (or was it my house?) staged Raja Bersiong, the story of the Fanged King in 10th century Kedah who, after tasting blood in his food, became a cruel and authoritarian vampire.
This was in 1972, and despite such a suggestive scene, nobody protested, least of all our teachers. It was meant to show what a terrible king the raja was, thus providing the context. It was not there for any gratuitous reason but to emphasise a point about an evil and violent man. I don’t remember if we won the play competition or not, but the scene remained etched in my memory to this day.
What triggered my recollection of this schoolgirl play was the recent “controversy” about a scene in a play staged by some university students at their university’s theatre carnival. Apparently, there was an outcry by some members of the public because the scene, viewed as a video clip, was deemed too suggestive. I assume these are the same people who never watch anything on TV or the Internet except for religious shows. There was no context for the scene in the play which, according to some reports, had been repeatedly staged in public without any noise at all.
This incident makes me sad, really. Why have a theatre carnival when you’re going to be so restrictive of students’ creativity? In the first place, scripts were already vetted and this scene was allegedly not in the original script. Which is already an odd statement because how do actors act without a script? Or had whoever tasked with approving the script in the first place just done a cursory reading of it, along with all the other submitted scripts?
What is even sadder was the university’s immediate response, which was to apologise for offending some unknown people online and basically throwing the students under the bus. Should it not be the university’s role to defend its students and the freedom of expression? A so-called suggestive scene in a play is just that: it is a fictional representation of something, not a real-life act. Are our people so literal that they can’t tell the difference between acting and real-life?
It’s not the first time this type of reaction to acting has taken place. I remember once a Muslim actor was criticised for playing a Buddhist monk in a foreign film. Did people seriously think that he converted to Buddhism to play the part? Why then does no one complain when actors play crooks, gangsters, and the like? By the same logic, they would all have to become criminals just to play the parts.
If people in the creative fields are not allowed to be creative, what sort of art are they supposed to produce? If everything is to be controlled by strict rules to protect the sensitivities of unknown audiences, how would anyone paint paintings or write books, plays, films, or music at all? Perhaps this is why Malay-sians with any talent go overseas to do their creative work. And win awards for them.
Censorship is an insidious thing. We get so used to it that it becomes normalised. The fact that student plays need to be vetted is part of that normalisation. Books that have been published many years ago suddenly get banned as if someone had just woken up thinking that we’re still in the 1960s. Even more sinisterly, the same books are selectively banned based on what language they’re published in. They can be banned in one language, usually Malay, but allowed in others. That says a lot about how our government views which segments of our people are most likely to be gullible. Is it about protecting them or is it about not letting them get ideas in their heads that the government might find uncomfortable?
If we’ve been educating our people never to face anything different from what they are used to, or different views of the world, or even to face up to the diversity of human beings, then censorship, and its companion, self-censorship, becomes inevitable. We want to live in a world where nothing disturbs our fragile nerves. This then necessitates everyone being, thinking, and acting in the same uniform way. There’s a word for people like this: robots.
Marina Mahathir is waiting for a Malaysian to win a Booker or a Pulitzer Prize awarded to truthful not fantasy writing. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
