AZLY RAHMAN

Epihany of a mediated self

2012-01-12T23:13:00.004-05:00

i am beginning to realize
that my entire life has been one
mediated by the forces of media
owned by those who owns the means of inscribing
onto and into me
... ideologies that are derived from institutions of power/knowledge
and control,
having its roots in the history of the interplay
between materialism and class,
and i have long realized that the feudal lords
in cahoot with the priest class
in control of water for irrigation and scriptures to numb the mind
-- these two culprit-classes of people
have reproduced me
in a clever matrix of production and reproduction,
such that i am no longer my true self,
that my true self actually do not exist,
except what is being told
by those who taught me the scriptures
of which the scriptures themselves have evolved,
written and rewritten,
revealed and re-revealed
in a complex system of evolution you and i are not aware of
except what is being told through
education,
indoctrination,
propaganda,
and a systematic colonization of the mind
by the neo-feudalistic rulers ...
this is what i am beginning to realize
and i am not happy with the revelation
and neither i am happy for all of you
and i now ask this question:
who is accountable for my definition,
false definition,
of a human being and what then must you and i do ... ?
in the meantime
i am ceasing to be myself as i know it and i now
will be known as
"the-one-who- used-to be-known-as-azly"

Amerika and I

2012-01-10T07:14:00.004-05:00

AMERIKA
This may sound corny
funny
a blasphemy
an irony
... likened to a comedy
but i have missed you terribly
AMERIKA
how have you been?
Like McD ... thank you for supersizing me
Like a Dunkin Donut ... you run on it
Like Coke, you teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony
Like Nike .. you tell me to just do it!
AMERIKA you are funny
I missed your comedy
your tragedy
your hegemony
your superiority
You make feel like an army of one
A Rambo
A Peace Corps volunteer in The Bronx Zoo
AMERIKA ..
You and I
we chill ...
we're good to go
we're right when we have the might
We're like Starsky and Hutch
Ben and Jerry
Bonnie and Clyde
Tom and Jerry
Obama and Hillary
We're good we're good we're bad we're bad
AMERIKA ... I have missed you
Raise your torch Lady Liberty
When I land in New Jersey
AMERIKA .. you are funny

Ode to folks of kuala lumpur city

2012-01-06T02:10:00.001-05:00

ode to folks of kuala lumpur city
by azly rahman

even if in your lifetime you will taste poverty aplenty
live a life corrupt-free and with highest dignity
... ... there is beauty in deep reverie when others are living a life obsessed with money
i have seen friends and family fall flat on their face for a life of greed and gluttony
never take a single cent you do not deserve out of your hard work
and reward you wait patiently
that was the constant advice given by our ancestors remembered so lovingly
how much must one accumulate in life to prepare for one's life in the uncertainties of eternity
the daily papers tell me how corrupt this malaysian society has chosen to be
millions and billions changing hands with people refusing to work hard like the coolie with the deepest sense of honesty
dig not your million dollar grave, friends and family
people these days are getting crazy over money money money
offer me not not a million a billion a trillion maybe
these have no meaning for me who prefer a life of simplicity
where i could ride the, bus, meditate on the train, or watch ships sail the seven seas
i could do these without any worry, where my next million going to crawl to me
how many souls i will need to destroy -- him as utility and his entire family
in my path towards achieving the highest glory in life based on money aplenty
no, i shall not sacrifice my cave, my poetry, my love for philosophy, the arts and humanities, my love for humanity, my freedom to
take my midnight walks along highways taking me to the the sea and its serenity
a free spirit i am
bless i hope all --- whose live in this kuala lumpur city
is about destroying each other as taught by machiavelli

From a dream

2011-12-25T10:18:00.004-05:00

From a dream

woke up from a dream
in which i am asked to create
a new genre in fiction writing
and to push this movement to its final conclusion ...
i have written in my sleep ...
... countless times ...
the hands writes and writes ...
only the quill and the parchment i could see ...
words and words become dissertations
and exhausted i stopped at times and wakes up
to see a world of illusion ...
and continue the thoughts i left off in my dreams
and into the cybernetic world i transpose
the ideas in the parchment
into the pastures of digital spirituality
i have become
merely words
my entire beingness has become the will
of the Author of Things
to write anything
even if i tremble at what i have written
for they come from my dreams
they become flesh
becomes thoughts
becomes ideas
break walls
storm bastilles
destroy
create
destroy
like shiva vishnu brahma
like the sword with those two verses
of a rubaiyat of the self
so powerful
that cuts across the seven heavens
as they collapses in the seven hells
i write and write
until night comes
another dream another revelation
illusion of whirling and whirling like a derwish
of the dance of shiva
another new thought
for a new genre
i have become
the quill and the parchment
in one
only that

On Malaysian education: poverty and margnalization

2011-12-22T22:42:00.002-05:00

Public

Azly Rahman

Some vital statistics on educational spending in Malaysia vis-a viz marginalization, poverty, and education. Equality for schools? Look at how much is spent on MARA Junior Science Colleges, the elitist Malay schools? How might this relate to the process of social reproduction? Are we creating classes of people with different access and hence a class of the political economic haves and have nots? ......What paradigm of education necessitates the need to see schooling as separate and unequal? How do we reverse this trend of unequal distribution of resources and make intelligence and the nurturing of it be the right of each child, especially those who are disadvantaged economically, regardless of race? Please share this.

meditations: south china sea

2011-12-22T19:14:00.000-05:00

"meditations: south china sea"
-azly rahman

At times in
my moments of deep reverie
... I know that I am that gibraltar of a rock in the south china sea
sitting there with eyes closed with awakedness
since the beginning of time I have been as such
watching the waves pound mercilessly onto my feet
still with my eyes closed i look down below
waves that rage at times gently
at times like a tsunami of our soul's vulnerability
I am that rock of ages
uncarved
but gently caressed by the tides of yesteryears
by the temper of the day
by the silence of the midnight breeze of a future yet to be serenading
the souls of men
I am that gibraltar of a rock
occasionally opening my eyes
guiding ships
lost souls wandering in the middle of the sea
the sea of chinese complexities
sea waves like velvet and gold blankets of the eternal spring
i am those eyes opening closing opening
yet never gazing at the moon and the stars
always lowering my gaze like a gentle gibraltar softened by the madness
of the moonlight
always lowering my gaze looking into the eyes
of men and beast down below
as they struggle to slay
the whispers in their souls
like wildfire raging in each cell of their body
like warriors of yesteryears they fight
in a roman arena of their own creation
I am that rock
that gibraltar of a soul
in the south china sea
where waves explode
winds rage
wandering souls weep
whispers scream
for love hidden
from the mirror of the soul

Whirling and whirling

2011-12-18T19:49:00.002-05:00

Whirling and whirling
by Azly Rahman

whirling and whirling and whirling
i sometimes do not know what Time looks like any longer
like a bird of paradise that cuts across the raging clouds high above yonder
a simurgh on a long journey
across souls of the the universe that blunder and weep
across i passed spirits that have left the world down below
i have become the wind in the darkest night only
maddening raging parading clouds know
i have closed my eyes and let the souls in me argue furiously
which way to go
which way the wind should blow
whence my whirls of ecstasy should end
when i too know that there is no beginning
there is no end
i continue to whirl
till rumi and saadi and hafiz and hallaj silence me
till siddhartha and kabir and the sages accompanying isa pleaded for my sanity
till the minarets of istanbul pierce into my soul and let my spirit bleed
and soar
and awaken the universe entire
of my cries of neither joy nor sorrow
cries merely they must look like
as silent as a smiling derwish
never a perfection i wish to become
though perfect are the circles of my dances i have performed
the master and the slave i have become
you and i -- only breath
of a syllable of wide awaken drunkedness

whirling and whirling and whirling still
i have learned to smile a cynical smile
amazed at the world build as playground of hypocrites to triumph
amazed at the hatred amongst men that has permeated in even those who knows what love looks like
in my smile of a thousand despair for a world beyond repair
as if emotions in total chaos
my senses chant the song of hope to build these cages inside of me
to keep barbaric souls at he gate from crashing in
whirls and smiles i must become
my eyes weary from this journey of light and sound
of a dream and reality and these in contradiction so profound
i have smiled a thousand smiles
and loved a thousand times
and been loved a million more
in hope that this world will one day be safe and sound
and be back in the arms of those who only have love
as a way to triumph
i shall let my weary spirit soar
ascending the heights of illuminations and dark clouds marching in ferocious might
again i closed my eyes
only love will awaken me
with a gentle smile
and wash away the cynicism my lips hath learned to live by
whirling and whirling i am now
in the stillness of looking at only breath -- you and

by the sea, midnight

2011-12-13T10:24:00.002-05:00

"by the sea, midnight"

by azly rahman

sometimes
many times
i long for the sea to be rolled out like a beautiful persian carpet
... right before my eyes everytime
i feel weary and the stillness of the night whispers
and as nightfall the waves become like an approaching congregation
of men in robe with hair beautifully unkempt, glows on their face
from the horizon, waves accompanying their feet like a procession of the
grandiose of those honored in a beggar's banquet feasting on tedious
arguments on what we are doing on the face of the earth
roll out the ocean
the horizon
the waves that pound on my heart every second
every second
every second
every breath
of my eyes shut
every wave rages
like a chant of a gregorian soul
or the mantra of a thousand lotus unfolding
each wave cleanses the darkening spots of the million of years
of the soul's undying love of this world ephemeral
i am one with the sea
with the waves that crush mercilessly onto the rocks of many gibraltars
of the eons of existence of each soul as it moves from one form to another
i am one with the breeze that whispers the haunting memory of separation
as each huge roots of the mangrove bind me never to release me
to be overjoyed with madness
from the voices of the sirens of homer's odyssey
i am the fire that burns eternally in the darkest night yonder
on the horizon of the ocean rolled out for me to feast on
as i watch with my eyes wide shut the invinsible steps of the men in white robe approaching without a sound
approaching the awaiting me on the moonlit shore of the place i still long for
i am the sands on the beach
a million me bathed by each particle of the rays that become moonlight
i am the earth
the sky
the moonlight
the breeze
the waves raging
and with not a single sound i could hear me
sitting with my eyes closed
as the sea like a persian carpet again unrolled
ending yet another story of a creation untold
at times
many times
I have become Time itself
as night falls

Ode to Darkness

2011-12-07T15:11:00.001-05:00

"ode to darkness" by azly rahman

sometimes it is better to read the world when it is dark
and when night opens up the senses
like music of the spheres
... in darkness lie the cave of the illuminated self in which
spirit dance in circles before wandering like men in begging bowls
like the awaited sign unto which love is taught to humanity that hates
when night come greeting like a sea of congregation of the wise men of the east from across the desert, canopied by the moon
when night is like a silent thunder roaring the words of love that knows neither beginning nor end
when night will become a blanket of spirits for the freezing and shivering soul awaiting yet another revelation
you are beautiful, darkness -- my friend that never a wink stray from the shivering soul i am in this mundane world of tedious arguments
of right and wrong
of the sacred and profane
of resurrection and resuscitation
night -- like the poetry of a flowing river bathed by the spirit of the morning sun
you are the one i yearn for as i begin to open the chapter of yet another epic
of silence

155] A Malay view of "Ketuanan Melayu"

2011-12-06T11:52:00.000-05:00

A Malay view of 'Ketuanan Melayu'

Azly Rahman | Feb 4, 08 2:51pm

‘O people! Your God is one and your forefather (Adam) is one. An Arab is not better than a non-Arab and a non-Arab is not better than an Arab, and a red (i.e. white tinged with red) person is not better than a black person and a black person is not better than a red person, except in piety. Indeed the noblest among you is the one who is deeply conscious of God.’

- a saying of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon Him)

‘Malaysia - to whom does it belong? To Malaysians. But who are Malaysians? I hope I am, Mr Speaker, Sir. But sometimes, sitting in this chamber, I doubt whether I am allowed to be a Malaysian. This is the doubt that hangs over many minds, and ... [once] emotions are set in motion, and men pitted against men along these unspoken lines, you will have the kind of warfare that will split the nation from top to bottom and undo Malaysia.’

- Lee Kuan Yew, now Senior Minister, Republic of Singapore

Instead of defining Ketuanan Melayu as ‘Malay superiority’ which is quite meaningless, philologically inaccurate, and philosophically arrogant, I think the word ‘dictatorship’ is closer in meaning. As you read this piece, please refrain from value judgment and from bring trapped in the prison-house of language pertaining to the word ‘dictatorship’.

To dictate connotes to tell, which connotes to narrate. To narrate means to weave a story based on an ideology. To ideologise means to encapsulate. To encapsulate means to be trap. Dictatorship, here might also mean an entrapment. Instead of acknowledging one's freedom to rule, one is acknowledging being in an entrapment - and to rule out of that condition. This is a form of false consciousness.

Words, as a literary theorist Raymond Williams might say, must also be contextualised/situated within the economic condition they emerge in. Marx's famous dictum that human beings' existence is defined by the economic condition they are in and that this condition is already predetermined. This is a deterministic view of human history.

I first read heard the phrase Ketuanan Melayu in the mid-1980s from a book by one Malik Munip. I was reading his work, at the same time reading Lim Kit Siang's ‘Malaysia in the dangerous 80s’, to get a sense of the argument. I was an undergraduate reading Literature, Education and International Politics.
I also heard that Malay students were discouraged from reading Kit Siang's work and encouraged to read ‘Ketuanan Melayu’. I love banned books and books that others tell me not to read. There is a sense of intellectual challenge to be able to read banned books.

I read Mahathir Mohamad's ‘The Malay Dilemma’ and Syed Husin Ali's ‘Malays: Their Problems and their Future’ and Syed Hussein Alatas’ ‘The Myth of the Lazy Native’ at the same time. Again, to get a sense of balance.

I read Malaysian official publications on economic outlook, juxtaposing them with a close reading of analyses on the political-economy of the Malaysian capitalist state.

I read the work of Freud and Marx to see where some of the major authors of the Frankfurt School of Social Research are going with their arguments on totalitarianism. I read the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata to see where the arguments on race superiority lie and what the fate of humankind will be.

The idea of social dominance and racial superiority might all be primarily about economics, if we are to read the history of the development of ideologies of superiority. But my question is - who has the right to claim that this or that land belongs to this or that group of people. At what point does culture and citizenship meet and negotiate the issue of egalitarianism? When does ‘the truth of one's culture’ reach its limit and the question of ‘the truth of citizenship’ dominate?

This is a very complex question Malaysians must answer after 50 years of Independence. We must open up the dialogue on this issue.

Lyrical propaganda

Let us look at how the idea of ketuanan Melayu is disseminated to the young. One way is through indoctrination camps in which songs are used.
Over the decades, perhaps millions of Malay students like me were taught the dangerous propaganda song, ‘Anak Kecil Main Api’(A Child Plays with Fire). One verse concerns the power of the Malays::

… kini kita cuma tinggal kuasa
yang akan menentukan bangsa
hasil mengalir, ke tangan yang lain
pribumi merintih sendiri…

My loose translation of this 1980s propaganda song by the Biro Tata Negara reads:

… political power is what we are only left with
one that will determine the fate of our nation
wealth of this nation flows into the hands of others
sons and daughters of the soil suffer in solace...

I do not think we have a clear understanding of what the lyrics mean. I doubt if the songwriter even understand what a 'people's history of Malaya' means. It is a song based on racist intents; its lyrics penned by one who does not have a good grasp of the political-economy of Malaysian history, let alone the latest advances in the field of psychology of consciousness.

The training programes that encapsulate the theme of this song are meant to instill fear of the Malays, not of others but of themselves, and to project hatred onto other ethnic groups without realising who the enemy of the Malays really are.

Using relaxation techniques to bring the brain waves in the alpha and state (conducive for suggestive and subliminal messages), trainees were put under ‘half-asleep’ conditions to get the ketuanan Melayu message to colonise the consciousness. The technique pioneered by Russian brain scientists Barzakov and Lozanov in the1970s, called ‘suggestopedia’, is used to instill the deep sense of fear for oneself and hatred of others.

History is a complex syntagmatic pattern of interplay between technology, ideology, culture, inscription and institutionalisation not easily reduced to simplistic lyrics as such sung to the tune of pre-war German-nationalistic-sounding compositions.

History is about the complex evolution of the ruling class which owns the technologies of control. As Marx would say, at every epoch it is the history of those who own the means of production that will be written and rewritten. The winners write history, the losers write poetry or study anthropology, some would lament.

Back to the lyrics. After 50 years of independence, who is suffering in Malaysia? Who has become wealthy? Who has evolved into robber barons? What has become of our judiciary system, our universities, our city streets, our sense of public safety and security, our schools, our youth, and our entire socio-economic arrangements at the eve of the 12th general election. How has the idea of ketuanan Melayu contributed to this state of affairs?

Language of power and ideology is at play in those lyrics. The definition of ‘bumiputera' is at play. It has become a problematic word in this age of deconstructionism; an age wherein as the poet WB Yeats said, "the centre cannot hold".

Rock musicians will recall the Scorpions' famous song 'Winds of Change' to serenade the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the breakdown of the Soviet Empire. We have to face the 'wrath' of the word.

Put an end to Ketuanan Melayu

For Muslims in Malaysia, this saying by Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is familiar: ‘Your descent is nothing to be proud of. Nor does it bring you superiority. O people! All of you are the children of Adam. You are like equal wheat grains in a bowl ... No one has any superiority over anyone else, except in religion and heedfulness. In order to consider someone a wicked person, it suffices that he humiliates other people, is mean with money, bad-tempered and exceeds the limits…’

I would say that ketuanan Melayu is a dangerous concept that is threatening race relations. It is an arrogant interpretation of selective history; of a history that is largely benefiting those who profits from the ideology.

Those promoting this concept are not well-versed in the matters of philosophy of history. I do not think thinking Malays these days subscribe to the idea of ‘Malay dominance and dictatorship’. If there is a ketuanan of one race, then the rest are ‘slaves’ and ‘serfs’ and ‘sub-citizens’, if we are to analyse it from the point of view of ‘Master-Slave’ narrative?

As a Malay wishing to see the withering of and an end to the concept of ketuanan Melayu and the birth of a new consciousness that will respect the dignity of all races and the humility of all ethnic groups, I call upon Malaysians to continue to be critical of any attempt by any race to project their own sense of false superiority that would only breed dangerous ethnocentrism bordering on xenophobia.

We should work together to deconstruct all forms of race-based political arrangement and work towards establishing a new order based on a more egalitarian economic design that takes into consideration the basic needs and dignity of all races.

We should teach our schoolchildren how to deconstruct such sense of racial superiority, through the teaching of not only tolerance but social egalitarianism - via peace education strategies. We will have a lot to gain for generations to come.

Re-reading WS Rendra's "Perjuangan Suku Naga" (The Struggle of the Naga Tribe)

2011-12-05T12:15:00.000-05:00

RE-READING W.S. RENDRA’S PERJUANGAN SUKU NAGA
(THE STRUGGLE OF THE NAGA TRIBE)

Azly Rahman

(essay written during my undergraduate days)

“You got to have patience. Why Tom, us people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone ..... Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a-comin,”

-JOHN STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow everything in its way.”

-EMILE ZOLA, J’accuse

Introduction

In 1975, Willybrordus Surendro Rendro (Rendra) wrote and performed Perjuangan Suku Naga (The Struggle of the Naga Tribe; henceforth The Struggle,) a play about the Naga tribe which triumphantly opposes the forces of industrialization and modernization in order to maintain their cultural autonomy and to protect their copper-rich territorial chastity from being raped by the “ogress from tanah sabrang,” foreign based transnational corporations.1

As Max Lane wrote, the enormous success of the play, drawing crowds of several thousand during its first performances, is “besides being due to the excellent acting and script, must also be attributed to its power as a genuine meeting between indigenous cultural experiences and social reality.”2 The Struggle’s dramatic framework adaptatively parellels the epic Bharata Yuddha lakon3 and its theme is that of a critique of Indonesia’s socio-economic reality although in the prologue, the Dalang assure us:

This story does not - I stress once again, does not - take place in Indonesia, so don’t get uptight and censor the story.4

Analyses of the play have been few. Nonetheless, in general most of them center around the affirmation of the playwright’s ingenuity in blending the framework of the wayang with the theme of Indonesia’s socio-economic decadence.5

But if wayang is the dramatic framework Rendra based his play upon, what then appears to be the ideological framework the playwright adheres to in the process of creating The Struggle? One could contend with the Indonesian literary critic, Profesor Teeuw when he wrote about Rendra:

Rendra has remained faithful to his own calling: he is no politician, he has no ideology and no practical solutions to offer, but he is a poet, whose sole duty is to have a ready ear for the cry of the wounded animal falling from its nest as a man is aiming his desecrating arrows at the moon. (underline-mine)6

Rendra is not a politician but is he apolitical? Non-ideological? Without practical solutions to offer to the problems of underdevelopment? Besides asserting that Rendra remains without ideology. Teeuw also believes: “[o]f all contemporary poets perhaps Ajip [Rosidi] and Rendra are the least influenced by foreign trends.”7 And, in talking about Indonesian poetry and poets after 1965, Teeuw however believes that the rich variety in themes and motives of Rendra’s work (his poems particularly), can be attributed to his syncretic elements and manifested in his literary products.

The syncretist elements which contribute to the playwright’s creative power are drawn from traditional Javanese, Christian, Hindu-Buddhist, animistic, as well as Islamic thoughts.8 However, Teeuw is talking about Rendra’s overall philosophical orientation especially with respect to the latter’s early collection of poems. Specifically, however, in much of Teeuw’s as well as Lane’s analyses of The Struggle there seem to be a major denial, consciously or otherwise, of the distinct ideological basis the play is grounded within: political economy. Such a discourse, of social analysis, Marxian in tradition, is distinctincly foreign in tradition and serve as the analytical case of Rendra’s satirical piece.

The intent of this essay is to shed light upon the features such as ideological delineation in Rendra’s criticism’s on issues such as modernization, mass consumption, false consciousness, technological inappropriateness, and authoritarian rule which are not viably analyzable within the political economic framework. I propose that Marxist analysis - especially from the dependency prospective - is employed throughout the author’s work. Through the character Abivara - a “critical theorist” within the Naga tribe - Rendra’s voice of conscience is heard loud and clear in his powerful ideologiekritik of both the international bourgeoise and their collaborators, the underdeveloped native elite; the two groups as purveyors of the modern capitalist system.

A POLITICAL ECONOMIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF RENDRA’S PLAY: MARXIST THEMES, JAVANESE WORDS

Precisely because the theme of The Struggle is that of an indigenous culture’s attempt to preserve its existence and cultural autonomy and to perpetuate its cherished pastoral and communal values in the face of super-exploitative desires of modern capitalism, Rendra’s play must be seen within the political economic context. Respectively, the “great communicator”, of Rendra’s ideological orientation is Abivara. Remarkable and sound are the latter’s philosophical, political, and economic argumentative bases that one would be compelled to analyze the roots of Rendra’s rhetoric. Abivara speaks for Rendra, Abivara’s words are Rendra’s thoughts. Especially at the time of Rendra’s authoring up The Struggle, those thoughts were the products of a phase in Rendra’s creative process: his Marxist interlude.

Through Rendra’s essay on his creative process, his poems lamenting the theme of human disposession in an industrialized society, and plays he translated and authored prior to the writing of The Struggle, one can find the prevalence of Marxist themes in the playwright’s work. Most remarkable is the universality of Rendra’s analysis for the study of underdeveloped societies; poverty is a structural problem when viewed within a larger historical and dialectical materialistic context. Thus, before further analysis of The Struggle is made, a brief discussion on the structurality of poverty, i.e. political as well as an analytical framework to the study of Rendra’s masterpiece. Political economy is a discipline for studying how a particular society organizes the distribution of its economic surplus for the benefit of its members.

It goes beyond orthodox economics in that not only the means of economic distribution is analyzed, rather, it also recognizes that power relations are embedded within these practices. In addition to that, political economy also looks at how human values are altered or stagnated in the process of development. Charles K.Wilber and Kenneth Jameson, in an essay which analyzes the various paradigms of economic development which have dominated the theoretical writings of scholars on development, stated that the political economist is concerned with the enhancement of human values in the “active”, - i.e. human beings as subjects of development - rather than the “passive” sense - i.e. as objects of development - within the overall process of economic growth.9

Political economists differ with orthodox economists in their view of what constitutes the means and end in development, in that,

traditional economists look on people’s values as means. Since the goal is growth, if people’s values have to change in order to get growth, then society must effect that change. But for political economist, one goal is to enhance people’s core values. Development become the means, not the end, for the end is to enhance what people value. Development or growth is desirable only if it is consistent with people’s deepest values.10

Political economy sees the inextricable link between politics and economics; whichever group controls the economic resources and surplus controls the development process. External and internal loci of control over the surplus are crucial topics explored by this form of Marxist analysis.11 With regard to the external control, for example if the economy of a particular developing country is controlled by outside forces - international agencies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, transnational business or banking corporations, etc ..) political economists would argue that the development policies pursued by that country would be influenced by policies made by those international agencies. In addition, the external forces would collaborate with the internal forces. As such, an alliance is forged; there would be a First World-Third World dependency based upon collaborations between the foreign political-economic elites with those with political and economic powers in the developing country. Within this context, development means the unequal relationship between the developed and the developing country.

Technology, investments, capital, technical skills, and services from the former to the latter in effect not only create a dependency relationship based upon unequal exchanges but also ensure that the primary beneficiaries from such a structural arrangement would ultimately be the political and economic elites for both camps, international capitalists and their “friends”, the native comprador-bourgeoise. Marxist writers such as Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, and Bill Warren have dwelled on the dependency notion of development in their analyses of the under development of Latin America in particular and the Third World in general.12 The Struggle, albeit dramatically framed after the wayang, is primarily based upon the Marxist analytical framework: political economy.

Perhaps Rendra fell short of employing class analysis (in the tradition of vulgar Marxism) for the contenting “battle” between classes are reduced to that of the capitalist class and a tribal group, the Naga, rather than between capitalists and workers (industrial and agricultural). Nonetheless, such a lack is perhaps intentional, for the intent of the play is to satirize in non-complex caricaturized manner. The Struggle, in addition, is perhaps meant to be performed for an unsophisticated audience which would immediately grasp the message social criticism. In short, Rendra wrote the play for the rural masses. In fact, The Struggle was created with the “involvement’ of the rural peasantry. As Marx Lane wrote:

The actual writing and rehearseing of the play was preceeded by a number of visits to villages where the group spoke to the villagers about their lives. These visits were prominently reported in the Indonesian press. Moreover, the rehearsing of the play in an open yard in the kampong involved local villagers as an audience and as commentators right from the beginning of the production. This latter aspect elicited an enthusiastic reaction from the villagers who would often wait to watch a rehearsal. Some parents even began naming their children after the characters in the play just as they do with wayang.13

At this juncture, the question is : what is Rendra’s perception of the role of art in society? Is art, as in the case of art for art’s sake, merely an aesthetic expression in support of the dominant class in power, or should art expose the contradictions in a society, a mirror of life in the Marxist sense, i.e. constantly in question of the mismanagements of those in power and raising the critical consciousness of the dispossessed masses? In other words, is the artist merely an embodiment of the bourgeoise class or does the artist have a more committed role within the overall picture of contending and continuing struggle between the oppress and the oppressed? Part of the question has been answered.

In Rendra’s The Struggle, the simplicity of the plot, the message intended, and the creative involvement of the peasantry in the notion of “committed” art in the Marxist sense art, to be truly meaningful, must ally itself with those marginalized in the face of oppressive forces. Whilst such an answer can be sought via one’s analysis of The Struggle, the other part can be sought through Rendra’s writings which describe his ideological delineation - from his viewing of art for its own sake to art as purposeful. In an essay centering around that question, for example, Rendra wrote about the event which prompted him to use art as a tool for social criticism.14

The event was his stay in the United States from 1964-1967; the years which introduced him to disciplines such as sociology, politics, and economics, that give him the basic tools to analyze the innerworkings of the capitalist system. Prior to 1964, he was in fact already aware of his tendency to shift to committed art which was then the practice of Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakjat) artists who championed the idea of art for the masses. Nonetheless, Rendra did not yet acquire the artistic tools to commit himself in Lekra. He wrote in “Proses Kreatif Saya”:

[S]ukar dibayangkan bahawa saya akan studi untuk terlibat di dalam masalah sosial-politik-ekonomik sebagaimana para seniman Lekra yang didikte oleh keputusan sentral partai. Meskipun begitu saya tidak pernah anti kepada seni yang “terlibat”. Bahkan mungkin sebenarnya sudah terdorong untuk terlibat tetapi belum menguasai sarana-saranan penghayatannya. Baru setelah tahun 1964 saya pergi ke Amerika Serikat dan tinggal di sana selama 3, 5 tahun saya sempat berkenalan secara bersungguh-sungguh dengan sarana-sarana penghayatan itu. Ialah: ilmu sosial, ilmu politik dan ilmu ekonomi. Bukan artinya saya lalu menjadi ahli di dalam bidang-bidang itu, tetapi saya mulai memahami dasar dari ilmu-ilmu tersebut.15

Prior to the writing of The Struggle, Rendra and Bengkel Teater performed several plays, both original and adaptations, with themes of revolt against established rules. Two which warrant discussion for their Marxist treatment are the Greek classic Lysistrata and Rendra’s original, Mastadon dan Burung Kondor (Mastadon and Eagle). Lysistrata, was adopted at the time of Rendra’s interlude with political economy, the theme of the Greek classic is revolt, “[t]he women of Athens and Sparta were accusing the male oligarchies, who rule these cities, of waging war against their neighbors while the national economy deteriorated and the people suffered.”17

Whilst Lysistrata can be said to be a political economic treatment of a play set in ancient times. Rendra’s Mastadon dan Burung Kondor is without doubt a play based upon the realities of contemporary socio-economic problems, which find their expression in Marxist terms - a critique of the modern capitalist system. The theme in the latter is “development” (and underdevelopment in a Latin American country and how mass marginalization of the rural poor - via the country’s obsession with the Gross National Product (GNP) is a yardstick of development.18

Mastadon and Burung Kondor is remarkable in its exploration of the theme of dependency. The 1970s was a period when dependency theory of development was at its primacy. The ripening of social turmoil, mass marginalization of the poor, and the increasing domination of predominantly United States-based transnational corporations upon the economies in Latin America gave birth to dependency theory and the study of under development. Wilber write about the theorists as well as the dominance of the theory within the context of Third World development:

Starting with the historical studies of underdevelopment pioneered by Celso Furtado, Andre Gunder Frank, Keith Griffin, Osvaldo Sunkel, and others, a dependency perspective on the process of development and underdevelopment has been in the making, particularly in regard to Latin America. This structural approach builds on the history of capitalist development ..... The development of capitalism and the world market is seen as a twofold process. A highly dualistic process of underdevelopment of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is the consequence of the process of development of Europe and North America. This twofold process created a situation of dependence in which the underdeveloped countries become appendages of the developed countries.19

Mastadon dan Burung Kondor is Rendra’ analysis of the Latin American experience, employing dependency theory as its ideological base. Perhaps it can be correctly said that sciences of sociology, politics, and economics (“ilmu social, ilmu politik dan ilmu ekonomi”)20 the playwright studied during his stay in the United States are those in the Marxist tradition of dependency perspective. The Struggle Rendra employed such an analysis in relation to the socio-economic realities of Indonesia. But before further analysis is made on Rendra’s interlude with Marxism, in the context of The Struggle a brief note on a similar ideological shift in Rendra’s poetry-making needs to be mentioned. In his collection of poems Blues for Bonnie, the fruits of Rendra’s years in the United States, he acknowledged that many of the issues dealt with are about morality and commonsense. Such was the period of Rendra’s search for an art form which would suit him best. He wrote:

Dari alam stoned saya harus menyeberangi ke alam common sense. Seperti orang bertapa yang turun gunung, lalu tergagap dan termanggu di dalam pasar. Banyak pengalaman rohani dan pikiran saya didalam persentuhan dengan persoalan sosio-politik dan ekonomi itu. Tetapi saya belum bisa merumuskan pengalaman itu dengan baik di dalam alam kesedaran yang baru itu. Demikian pula saya belum bisa menemukan “bentuk kesenian”-nya yang cocok. Di dalam ketegangan kreatif serupa itu, persoalan itu menyentuh rasa moral saya. Sebagai hasilnya lahirlah Blues Untuk Bonnie yang tidak merumuskan persoalan sosiopolitik, tetapi persoalan moran dan common sense.21 (emphasis original)

Nonetheless, although as Rendra himself admits of his non socio-political and not committed nature of Blues for Bonnie, much of what he poetizes about are people dehumanized in a world of progress. In “Negro Tua” Rendra writes about an old Negro from Georgia, despite his deteriorating health, still plucks his guitar for a living. In “Maria Zaitun”, “Bersatulah Pelacur-Pelacur Jakarta”, and “Rick dari Corona”, the poet championed the prostitutes whom he sees as the by-products of a world dehumanized by modernization. And in “Pemandangan Senjakala” the theme is mass destruction of human lives in the face of war created by human beings themselves.22 Blues for Bonnie is thus about human disposession especially in a nation as rich as America. As Dani N.Toba wrote:

“Blues untuk Bonnie”, merupakan nota universal tentang kemelaratan manusia terlantar di Amerika Serikat, di mana ada diskriminasi dan hak sosial lebih tinggi dari ras putih. Negro tua yang menjadi tokoh Rendra masih lebih lumayan dari “Maria Zaitun” Indonesia, karena masih bisa menyanyi, biarpun tubuh sudah “bagai guci retak”.23

It was after 1971 that Rendra began writing poems centering around socio-economic and political themes. Written between 1971-1978 and compiled in Potret Pembangunan Dalam Puisi,24 the poems, as Rendra claimed, are meant for his audience rather than for the critics. The strength in a particular art form is judged by the degree the audience understands what the message is, the poet believed.25 The public response to the poems in Potret Pembangunan Dalam Puisi was good at the time Rendra read them in public. That success, Rendra believes is due to the strength of the art form, one which commits itself to the issues of socio-economic and politics. Rendra attacked those in the literary circle who believed that art needs its critics who would help the audience judge its aesthetic value. He wrote:

Kritikus adalah jambatan antara penonton dan pembaca dengan seniman? Omong kosong! Kritikus adalah jambatan antara seniman dengan kemungkinan-kemungkinan spekulatif dalam dunia seni. Jambatan yang benar-benar bisa diandalkan antara seniman dengan penonton atau pembacanya adalah kekuatan “bentuk seni”nya. Seniman yang mengiba-iba dan memohon agar kritikus suka menjadikan jambatan lagi karyanya, sebenarnya kalau diteliti ternyata karyanya itu memang punya “bentuk seni” yang lemah, atau yang tidak otentik timbul dari penghayatan terhadap kehidupan tetapi timbul dari prasangka-prasangka yang eksentrik dan dari tingkah genit yang dibikin-bikin. Jadi memang serba artifisial.26

Themes of oppression, alienation and protest against those in power who dehumanizes others, embodied particularly in Rendra’s poems written in the 70s reflects the poet’s use of art as a tool to champion the plight of the masses. Rendra’s engagement with the plight of the wretched of the earth, placed him among writers in the Marxist humanist tradition. The poet’s use of his intellectuality in making aware the unknown i.e. raising the critical consciousness of the dispossessed in seeing the structure of their dehumanizing condition parallels what Jean-Paul Sartre - humanist, philosopher, and literary genius - believed about the role of art and the artist in society. Sartre, who believed that literature is always committed said in 1959.

If literature is not everything, it is worth nothing. This is what I mean by ‘commitment’. It wilts if it is reduced to innocence, or to songs. If a written sentence does not reverberate at every level of man and society, then it makes no sense. What is the literature of an epoch appropriated by its literature?27

Rendra’s art explains to the public the process of ideological manipulation of the ruling class upon the masses. Especially in The Struggle, he analyzes the ruling class’s mystifying of the term “development”. What makes Rendra an intellectual who “has the right” to his art is the fact that he communicates to the masses what is otherwise known: the ideology of the ruling elite. In other words Rendra’s “commited art” attempt to release the masses from the shackles of such ideological domination. In the Sartrean sense, Rendra is not an intellectual “accidently” (i.e. propagator of bourgeoise ideology), but an intellectual “essentially” (communicator of the miscommunicated).28 As Sartre summarize the role of the written (intellectual) within the contending demands of “universality” (real knowledge) and “particularism” (ideology of those in power):

The commitment of the writer is to communicate the incommunicable (being-in the-world as lived experience) by exploiting the misinformation contained in ordinary language, and maintaining the tension between the whole and the part, totality and totalization, the world and being-in-the-world, as the significance of his work. In his professional capacity itself, the writer is necessarily always at grips with the contradiction between the particular and the universal. Whereas other intellectuals see their function arise from a contradiction between the universalist demands of their professions and the particularist demands of the dominant class, the inner task of the writer is to remain on the plane of lived experience while suggesting universalization as the affirmation of life on its horizon. In this sense, the writer is not an intellectual accidently, like others, but essentially.29 (emphasis original)

And in The Struggle, Rendra attempts to universalize what is particular, communicate what is miscommunicated and though remaining on his plane of existence, reaches out to the masses to feed them with thoughts essential to the understanding of ideological dominate and the structurality of their socio-economic condition. Albeit simple in message and its framework. The Struggle is rich in its Marxist analysis of economic dependency and bourgeoise ideology. More than just an analysis, Rendra does suggest an alternative development program based upon the idea of a participatory development. And more than any other character in the Naga tribe, perhaps Abivara can accurately be tamed as the dramatis personae; the great communicator of Rendra’s thoughts.

THE STRUGGLE AS IDEOLOGIEKRITIK

Though the play is set in Indonesia, the message is universal; one can relate it to the critique of modernization in the capitalist portion of the Third World. As such this essay, does not attempt to ground Rendra’s analysis specifically as it pertain to the Indonesian society. As mentioned in the introductory section, Max Lane’s analysis already serves as a major reference to the study of The Struggle as it relates to Indonesia’s socio-economic reality. Enough have been said by lane for that matter. Because of the universality of Rendra’s message, perhaps a more general and conceptual connection can be made of the play with a Marxist discourse rooted in German philosophical tradition: Ideologiekritik. As the term suggest, such a discourse, or more accurately a cognitive science, deals with the critique of ideology. Particularly, ideologiekritik serves as a tool for the critique of the modern capitalist system. The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (commonly referred to as the Frankfurt School), established in the 1920s, serve as an institution which gave prominence to critical theory; social research movement anti-thema logical positivism. The heart of critical theory lies in ideologiekritik. The latter attempt to analyze the role of ideology in a capitalist society; a role which prevents the working class from seeing the structurality of their situation as well as one which prevents them from carrying out the revolution Marx predicted would tear down the capitalist state.30

Three features of Ideologiekritik explain why it could aptly be related to the suggestion that Rendra’s play theorectically is based upon ideologiekritik:

(1) Radical criticism of its dominant ideology (Ideologiekritik) are inseparable, the ultimate goal of all social research should be the elaboration of a critical theory of society which Ideologiekritik would be an integral part. (2) Ideologiekritik is not just a form of ‘moralizing criticism,’ i.e. an ideological form of consciousness is not criticized for being nasty, immoral, unpleasant, etc. but for being false, for being a form of delusion. Ideologiekritik itself is a cognitive enterprise, a form of knowledge. (3) Ideologiekritik (and hence also the social theory of which it is a part) differs significantly in cognitive structure from natural science, and require for its proper analysis basic changes in the epistemological views we have inherited from traditional empiricism (modelled as it is on the study of natural science.31

The theory’s aim is to liberate individuals from the manipulations of ideology, especially that which serve the interests of those in power. In the same vein as Paulo Freire’s idea of conscientization,32 critical theory attempt to subjectivize the objectified, communicate the miscommunicated, and unlearn what has hitherto been learned. In other words, critical theory is in character reflective and in its potential, emancipatory. As Brendo and Feinberg summarizes:

[C]ritical theory attempt to explain communicative distortion in terms of a history of events in which people’s interest were involved: it recognizes that this historical context gives meaning to present communicative distortions can be used to reveal the partial interest behind current ideologies made sense in their earlier lively days when they fitted their practical social contexts and the ways in which those social contexts changed, the critical theorist can better understand current distortions and the limited interest that they serve.33

How is Rendra’s The Struggle related to Critical Theory/ Ideologiekritik? Exactly how and when Rendra studied critical theory is not the issue here, rather the dialogues in The Struggle do suggest an abundance of instances where critical theory is the underlying theorectical framework. The whole play is in fact a critique of positivist ideology permeating in Western modeled developmentalism, value neutrality of technology, cultural manifestation of modernization, etc. In other words, communication from the dominant class (international capitalist and its collaborator, the native bourgeoise) is analyzed as a miscommunication; the latter distorts real communication. Through the voice of the Naga, Rendra offers the anti-theme to such distortions in communication, and hence, in the tradition of critical theory, attempts to anticipate his audience from such ideological mould. Remarkable is the manner Rendra exposes the innerworkings of the modern capitalist system; both in its mode of production (economic base) and the ideology to sustain it (superstructure).

In The Struggle, a careful analysis would reveal that not only the Astinamese use their critical tools to oppose the rhetoric of capitalism but also most interestingly, Rendra even equate capitalism with similar tools to degrade itself and thus, in the process, exposing its own inner contradictions. In the very first scene “The Machine’s Chorus”, Rendra, in the Marxist sense, relates the development of capitalism with its tool of exploitation: technology. Dudley Dillard, in his essay on capitalism, wrote about the parallel but dependent development of capitalism and technology. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution with the shift of commercial activities to industry, technology became the major force aiding capitalism in promoting such a shift:

Two of three centuries of steady capital accumulation began to pay off handsomely in the 18th. century. Now it became feasible to make practical use of technical knowledge which has been accumulating over the centuries. Capitalism became a powerful promoter of technological change because the accumulation of capital made possible the use of inventions which poorer societies could not have afforded. 34

The machines - i.e. the promoter of capitalism -, speaking in chorus, described their capability of producing goods for mass consumption; the latter are to be sold cheaply via huge markets. Largely developed in the industrialized countries, “land of the ogres” as Rendra calls them - “rich in capital and in machines that produced commodities”,35 - technology, personified, talked about the link between production and the inability of capitalism to withstand its own weight thus, have to search for markets abroad:

The warehouses overflow/ We’ve got nowhere to store our goods./ ...... We sell our products cheaply/ We must have a huge market./ ..... Working fast requires a big market/ cheap goods can be sent far and wide.36

The machines also talked about “economics” in the neo-classical Milton Friedman sense; time saved by the advancement of technology for mass production will generate profit and if the workings of free market enterprise is disturbed, the economy will collapse. The machines reveal the logic of such a system:

Profit increases capital./ Capital increases profit. More money means more schemes./ We can’t be help up, we can’t be interrupted ... Money must circulate./ Money must circulate/ Time is money./ Goods are money/ we call this economics..... If you disturb us/ Unemployed workers will bite their nails.37 And, besides their search for huge markets, the international capitalists also demand raw materials. Such is a scheme the machines termed in unison as “Progress”. They chant: Give us raw materials/ So that we can run. ....Progress This is the age of progress / The age of agriculture we leave behind./ The age of industry we make a reality. 38

Thus, in the very beginning of The Struggle, Rendra lay deconstructed and presented the innerworkings of the international capitalist system as such Dillard described - capitalism help develop sophistication in technology and in turn, the latter make efficient the production of goods for mass consumption, to be sold in as huge a market as possible. Marx, writing as early as in the Communist Manifesto39 observed the alliance of capitalism and technology, and in the years after World War II writes such as Immanuel Wallerstein,40 Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller,41 and Paul Baron42 - those writing in the Marxist tradition, observed such a tendency of capitalism - technological development alliance to surbanked upon the globalization of world economics. If the machines provide an expose, of such capitalist logic - i.e. Rendra providing technology the tools for self explanations, - the playwright, through the Dalang’s narration provide anti-thetical arguments to counter the already self degrading rhetories of capitalism. The Dalang, albeit answering in a somewhat confused manner when explained about economics, nevertheless debunks the “trickle down” myth of development advanced by free-marketeers and modernization theorists.

Dialectical to the argument on profit, the Dalang relates development as such with poverty:

Money goes round and round/ Money circulates/ Round and round in the sky/ Up towards heaven./ Ah, but from there/ It never comes down to earth. The god of money gets richer/ The poor remain coolies/ For all eternity./ The people are cultivated, schooled and molded/ To be nothing but consumers.43

Whilst the “Machine’s Chorus” scene provide The Struggle’s audience with the knowledge of international capitalism’s logic for penetration into an “undeveloped” society, the “Astinampuram” scene described the mentality of the native comprador-bourgeoise - the Indonesian elite set - who make possible the development of underdevelopment. Equipped with the paraphanelia of Western affluence and modernity, - dark sunglasses, heavy make-up, girdle to slim the body “before it’s too late”,44 - Rendra’s “Sri Ratu’ is given the honor to lead the role of an Imelda Marcos - type wife of a leader obsessed with the rhetoric of Western-modeled developmentalists.

Nothing should obstruct the collaborative effort between the foreign investors and the elites of Astinampuram - for, there are benefits to be accrued in the latter’s approving of such a development scheme. For example, when the Prime Minister proposes that Sri Ratu approve the building of Wijaya Kasuma hospital, the latter see it as a viable project for a developing country whilst the Prime Minister assured that the queen will personally profit from such a deal. Rendra wrote its brilliant dialogue:

SRI RATU: .... Our nation must not be left behind in developing modern science. PRIME MINISTER: No need to worry, Your majesty. Happily there are many foreign companies who want to invest here and build pharmaceutical factories. SRI RATU: Their requests must be given priority - providing, of course, they show sufficient “understanding”. PRIME MINISTER: Their “understanding” is quite large. They are going to keep aside ten percent of the capital for unforeseen matters, the use of which will be entirely up to your Majesty, and will be entirely deposited in Your Majesty’s bank account in Hong Kong. SRI RATU: Excellent! 45

Clearly, as in the earlier scene with machines, the native bourgeoise are also given the tools to expose their inner contradictions; the Prime Minister himself suggests the corruptness of the system with wealth from the country channeled into foreign banks. Rendra does not even limited his criticism of the capitalist ideology (permeated into the thinking of the native elites), by making the elites contradict themselves, he uses the Dalang to further conscientize his audience on the issue. The latter anti-thematically argued the building of Wijaya Kusuma: What’s the use of all this for the ordinary people? Most people in this country still live in poverty. What they need it not the most modern hospital in all Southeast Asia, but more small hospitals in each district. One luxury hospital could mean fifty simple hospitals available to all.46 Thus, the preceeding discussions on the two scenes show that Rendra criticizes the capitalist ideology which mystify the term development.

For the international capitalists, development means larger markets for goods, which are mass produced, and no longer consumable in the industrialized societies, they are marketed in the underdeveloped societies. For the native elites, it means believing that those goods are inherently necessary for progress and the notion of modernization (albeit such is a false notion development). The free enterprise model - allowing markets to regulate uninterruptedly, - is transplanted by international capitalists, “the ogress from tanah sabrang”,47 into the economy of the developing society with collaboration from the native elite who equates progress with development along such a line. Rendra sees it as mystification and via Ideologiekritik unlocks the distorted communication.

Throughout the play, especially in the scenes of Astinampuram, and the Parliament, such a Marxist discourse the critique of capitalist ideology is employed. In the overall context of The Struggle, the Naga represent, as a group, a critique of those in power. Specifically though the voice of Abivara, Rendra offers his notion of how the younger generation, especially those equipped with Western-education (in the Marxist tradition) should think. One can almost see a biographical element of Rendra in Abirara; the critical theorist amongst the Naga. With the tools to analyze the capitalist system and its ideology, Abivara, back from his studies abroad (i.e. Rendra back from the United States?) offers his view on among other issues, technology, development, false consciousness, and the maintenance of one’s cultural autonomy in the face of foreign cultural imposition.

Abivara see the value of technology more in its potential for liberation and to be used for social purposes rather than as display of one’s power and prestige. For example in the same where he comes home to the Nagas, when asked by Sapaka why he did not bring a car come, he answered:

Indeed, as I lived modestly, I could have easily saved enough to buy two cars. But we don’t need cars here. What we need are trucks. Cars aren’t progress - they’re just a luxury. On the other hand, trucks can fulfill our basic needs. They can carry both more goods and more people. But first, the roads between the villages must be improved. To bring in trucks before the roads are improved is to show that you don’t understand technology.48

The relevance of appropriate technology is equated with the desire to meet basic needs and not basic greed. And with proper technology and infrastructure, society can produce goods for the market with absence of the middle-man; those who have the tendency to buy cheap goods from the produces whilst in turn reap profit of the urban market:

ABISAVAM: So it’s important that our village also build roads? ABIVARA: Yes father. Our village will then be able to run its own transport which can take our produce straight to the market.49

Abivara’s, thus Rendra’s view of development is one which would let the society control technology and use it as a tool to produce their basic necessities. Perhaps the most important scene laden with Rendra’s thoughts on the mystification of progress - one which saw the primacy Ideologiekritik - is Abivara’s expose on: false consciousness generated by the powers of the Western media to dominate society’s thinking. In “Abivara and Setyawati”, responding to Setyawati’s equating of urbanization and progress, Abivara asked: “What do you mean by ‘progress’”.50 Such is perhaps the question par excellence asked by those attempting to attack the rest of Western - developmentalist ideology. It is a radical question, demanding one’s analysis of the underlying assumptions, values, motives, etc. that has hitherto gave primacy to capitalist economic base and its superstructure (ideology of the state apparatuses). Abivara argues for the social value in village life rather than for the impersonalized feature of urban life:

Is it really true that there is more social life in the towns? Good God! Townspeople hardly ever know the names of their own neighbors. Social intercourse between friends has become expensive in the town. All social intercourse must be related to some practical interest. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business or sexual interest, or some other material concern. It’s only one-sided social intercourse, not total. So in fact it’s really the townspeople who lack social life.51

Further along, Abivara demystify the notion that to progress means to adopt Western defined “fashion” which is “nothing more than new habits and new customs ... and ... only binds people.”52 Abivara linked such definitions of progress and development with how false - consciously townspeople view those in the village:

Their ( the townspeople’s) view that they are superior than the villagers is an uneducated view. They should know that village people are more productive than townspeople. Villagers produced things from the earth. But what do townspeople produce? All thay can do is import. Their economy is a hawker’s economy. Or the most they’re capable of producing is bureaucracy. And bureaucracy is an obstacle to progress.53

Bureaucracy, in Rendra’s mode of analysis, is a means to maintain the status quo which benefits those in power. And bureaucracy in the Astinamese circle means the abuse of the rule of law - a corruption of power. As the character “Mr. Joe” said in response to the “Big Boss” on the possibility of branding Abivara a subversive:

What law? There is no law here, only power. And the powerful here are very clever. There’re not concerned with the law. They’re concerned with tidiness.54

Rendra perhaps acquired sufficient tools to understand international capitalism’s profit-motif and exploitative shceme while his stay in the United States and hence, through Abivara, makes a plea to those with Western education to see serve in rural development efforts rather than work with foreign firms of the state bureaucracy. Abivara’s first speech, after returning from his studies aborad, clearly reiterate Rendra’s thoughts:

My father, uncles and all friends. I, Abivara, son of Abisavam, have now returned from studying across the sea to work in may village.55

The playwright debunks the myth that to get ahead in life means to be an important person working in the capital; a successful person is one who perpetuate the bureaucracy - one who maintains the status quo. In Abivara’s dialogue with Supaka, he defined leadership:

SUPAKA: Abivara, don’t you want to become an “important person” in the capital? ABIVARA: No, I’m not the “important person” type. SUPAKA: Don’t you want to get ahead in life? ABIVARA: Oh yes, I want to be a person who is useful. But to be an “Important person” is on the contrary, not to get ahead, not to progress. I want to be a leader. The “important persons always defend the status quo; leaders are willing to go forward”. 56

Such is Rendra’s plea to the educated in that, they should see the immediate needs of the larger messes and not the perpetual greed of the elite for, society has invested a great deal in educating them. And, that leadership feature is present in Abivara who “has rather grown closer to his environment ..... doesn’t need electric guitars, air conditioning and porcelain toilets.”57 Within this context, Rendra is indeed critical of those dominated by Western developmentalist ideology in that, they fail to see that they are indeed mentally captive - unable to break away from such ideological imprisonment - thus, potential failures in understanding the plight of the poor. These leaders cannot possibly become leaders in the sense Rendra categorized for, the false conscience pervading them - i.e. modernization values, - only ensure that the international capitalist ideology is maintained. They, like the international capitalists, will in turn be oppressors of their own people. Paulo Freire, in analyzing such a psychological state of mind, wrote:

How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be “hosts” of the oppressors can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.58 (emphasis original)

To that effect, Abivara can be said to have discovered himself to be a “host” of the oppressor - the international capitalists and the Astinamese elites, - and with his knowledge of such an oppressive system, analyzes its contradiction and in turn “contribute to the midwifery of ... the ... liberating pedagogy”.59 The preceding discussions on Abivara attest to the idea that there is, among the Nagas, a critical theorist who provides an Ideologiekritik to the capitalist ideology. Issues such as the ownership and control of technology, the mystified view on development, false consciousness of the elite in power as well as future leaders who would be perpetuators of such consciousness, bureaucracy as a mechanism of oppression in alliance with international capitalism, and foreign economic penetration, are among those Abivara spoke of in order to entangle their logic.

And if Abivara represents the promising dialectical thinker among the Naga, his creator Rendra not only is one amongst the Indonesian society but most remarkably, represents that voice of conscience among the oppressed masses all over the world at large. Such claim may not be exaggerated one, for eventhough the capitalist portion of Third World societies may represent an almost irreconciliable melange of different features - ethnic, religious, physiogomy, etc. - an underlying similarity amongst them is perhaps evident: the capitalist development path they travel on has paved way to authoritarianism, military rule, underdeveloped elitism, and abysmal gap between the haves and the have nots - in correlation to the development of international capitalism.

The Struggle’s dealing with those issues thus made it an aesthetic document of ideologiekritik. In each and every scene, and in the multitude of dialogues and philosophical reflections of its characters, - especially those in the Naga tribe - Rendra’s thoughts are like prescriptions to correct the ills in a society torn apart by political, economic and social decadence. Such a pathological condition prevails, ten years after Rendra wrote The Struggle.

The reigns of many Astinamese-type regimes in the post-war era have been overthrown by dialectical forces in alliance with the poor; those of Marcos in the Philippines, Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, the Shah in Iran, and Somoza in Nicaragua. Nonetheless, Suharto still reigns perhaps due to his power of mystifying the masses via his (albeit contradictory), Yudhistira charm. Until the masses can see their wretched poverty better than the glitters of the charm, Suharto’s Astinamese Kingdom will continue to reign. Perhaps Rendra does not have, if one agrees with Prof. Teeuw’s statement, any practical solutions to offer in correcting the political, social and economic ills in his society. But he does have a practical solution by making his audience start thinking about the ills as an initial step towards searching for alternate forms of social organization.

Perhaps Rendra learned from the liberations movements in Nicaragua, Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union by analyzing the teachings of Sandino, Che Guevara and Castro, Mao Zedong, and Trotsky, Lenin and Bukharin - that such a step not only is necessary but within a dialectical and historical context, inevitable. Such a step, in other words, will emerge by itself - perhaps the dialectical thinking generated as a historical inevitability and borne into individuals “chosen” by history as revolutionary thinkers - given the ripening of the socio-economic turmoil.

The playwright invites his audience to adopt such a mode of thinking. By caricaturizing the societies into good and evil, Rendra does want his political statement to be understood to the maximum. He could have presented the dual nature of the Astinamese, i.e. a combination of good and evil, and likewise present the Naga with their inherent contradictions. Nonetheless, he does not want his audience to be confused with such an apologetic - especially towards the Astinamese - approach to his art. Such is the manner Rendra uses his drama to suggest the possibility of envisioning an alternate reality embodied in the cultural values of the Naga. These are the values which see the inherently humane approach of how a particular society should govern itself given its ability to make choices in deciding its path to progress and development. And such a path require one’s examining and reexamining - in the Marxist idea of thesis and anti-thesis - of these goals of development in relation to human beings relationship with Nature and their relationship to other beings. As Lane wrote about such a “humanist radicalism”, in the Naga thought:

The goal of the Naga society is the productive relationship between man and man, and between man and nature. The farmer “who greet mother earth” and “take the benefits given”, but then, in accordance with the way of nature (jalan alam), protect the earth in turn, symbolize this productive relationship.60

And in The Struggle, that thought represents Rendra’s anti-thesis to the prevailing thesis - of capitalist borgeoise ideology which dominates both the Indonesian elite and the masses. With this dialectical thinking then a synthesis could emerge which consequently would lead one to envision a better reality, rejecting one which is invented by those in power. Perhaps this dictum is best summarized by Abivara’s friend Carlos:

People must awakened/ Witness must be given/ So that Life can guarded.61

CONCLUSION

Viewing Rendra’s The Struggle within a Marxist framework is not an exercise in intellectual speculation; it is a viable and accurate way to approach the playwright’s masterpiece. The remarkable similarity of Rendra’s mode of analysis, to such variation, in essentially Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production and its mode of ideological manipulation - variations such as dependency theory as well as Frankfurt School-inspired ideologiekritik - must be attributed to particular phase in the poets’ life: the years of his interlude with Marxism.

Such a claim is not far-fetched nor one based on the desire to encapsulate Rendra within an ideological mould. It is a claim to in fact ground the playwright within one of the ‘notches’ which has hitherto contributed to his rich and diverse intellectual base. Such a base too contributed to the wisdom of Rendra as a poet of the people who refuses to bow to elitist and static modes of thinking, especially that which is purveyed by international and native capitalist bourgeoise.

He is an artist who is not willing to let artistic conventions dictate his art; he thus deplores the role of literary critics in judging how his art should be. Rather, he lets the suffering of the masses and the easy livings of the elites dictate in what form his art would expose such contradictions. That commitment thus justifies his role as an artist - in the Sartrean sense - who has the right to use his art to mirror life. And, as long as Rendra is alive to hold such a mirror, the hopes of those dreaming for an alternate reality would not be extinguished for, as Rendra believed, People must be awakened Witness must be given So that Life can be guarded62

NOTES

1. W.S. Rendra, The Struggle of the Naga Tribe, trans. and intr. Max Lane (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979), p. 5.

2. Ibid. p. xxv.

3. Ibid. p. xvii.

4. Ibid. p. 3.

5. Perhaps Max Lane’s introduction and commentary of the play represent a single major analysis of Rendra’s work.

6. A. Teeuw, Modern Indonesian Literature II, 2 vols., (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979) p. 113.

7. Ibid., p. 97.

8. Ibid., p. 111.

9. C.K. Wilber and Kenneth P. Jameson, “Paradigms of Economic Development and Beyond”, in C.K. Wilber ed. Political Economy of Development and Under Development 3d. ed (New York: Random House, 1984) p. 13.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., p. 14.

12. See for example: Paul Baron, “On the Political Economy of Backwardness”. Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment”, Bill Warren, “The postwar Economic Experiences of the Third World”, in Ibid.

13. Rendra, The Struggle, p. xxv.

14. See Rendra, “Proses Kreatif Saya”, in Dewan Kesenian Jakarta. Dua Puluh Sastrawan Bicara. (Jakarta: Sinar Harapan, 1984), p. 34.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Rendra, The Struggle, p. xxxiii.

18. Ibid.

19. Wilber and Jameson, “Paradigms of Economic Development and Beyond”, in C.K. Wilber ed. The Political Economy. p.17.

20. Dewan Kesenian Jakarta, Sastrawan, p.34.

21. Ibid.

22. See Dani N. Toba, Hamba-Hamba Kebudayaan, (Jakarta: Sinar Harapan, 1984), pp. 110-119.

23. Ibid., p. 34.

24. Ibid., p. 36.

25. Ibid., p. 37.

26. Ibid.

27. Jean Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, (New York: Panthean Books), p. 14.

28. Ibid., p. 284.

29. Ibid.

30. Eric Bredo and Walter Feinberg, Knowledge and Values in Social and Educational Research (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), p. 271.

31. Raymond Guess, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermans and the Frankfurt School. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981). p. 26.

32. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: Continuum, 1986).

33. Bredo and Feinberg, Knowledge and Values, p. 279.

34. Dudley Dillard, “Capitalism”, in Wilber ed. The Political Economy, p. 83.

35. Rendra, The Struggle, p. 5.

36. Ibid., p. 6.

37. Ibid., pp. 6-7.

38. Ibid. p. 7.

39. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, The Communist Manifesto, Samuel H. Beer (North Brook, Illinois: Att ed. M Publishing Corporation, 1955) pp. 88-89.

40. See for example Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

41. Richard Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

42. See Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (Harmondsworth: , 1973) p. 133.

43. Rendra, The Struggle, p. 25.

44. Ibid, p. 7.

45. Ibid., pp. 2-2.

46. Ibid., pp. 27-28.

47. Ibid., p. 5.

48. Ibid., p. 22 For discussion on inappropriate technology, see for example, Dennis Goulet, The Cruel Choice, (New York: Anteneum, 1971).

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., p. 42.

51. Ibid., pp. 42-43.

52. Ibid., p. 43.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., p. 67.

55. Ibid., p. 21.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., p. 66.

58. Freire, Pedagogy, p. 33.

59. Ibid.

60. Rendra, The Struggle, p. xxvii.

61. Ibid., p. 69.

62. Ibid.

eternal flame

2011-12-03T21:48:00.001-05:00

eternal flame
by azly rahman

on this night
of a thousand stars
play me that ancient sound of beauty
like that lyre of mesopotamia
as i close my eyes and walk slowly
down the path of the unseen
your voice
as beautiful as the sound of the mystery of yesteryear
unsolved
unresolved
under the burning sky
flame eternal like a dance of the mystical
you are calling my name
like the sirens of homer's odyssey
i shall meet you there
we shall become
that beautiful melody
that eternal flame

Malaysia: A collapsing grand narrative

2011-12-02T11:24:00.000-05:00

A collapsing grand narrative
by Azly Rahman
in ILLUMINATIONS, Malaysiakini

What is ailing our society? Are we moving into the final stages of social, political, and moral annihilation, judging from the levels and forms of violence we are seeing emerging?

We see no respect for the rule of law, an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, conspicuous consumption at the highest level of vulgarity, a continuing massacre of the voice of critical sensibility, a direction-less educational progress, production of public statements championing racial and religious bigotry, prostitutionalisation of the electoral process, drunkenness of politicians in attacking pluralists and multiculturalists, fear and trembling upon hearing the words “socialism” and “communism” - all these are indicators of the chaos Malaysians are experiencing in their attempt to understand where their leaders are taking them and why this nation is being torn apart.

Has Malaysia made a wrong turn in conceptualising its economic, social, and political policies, merely transplanting a system left by the colonials?

Have we nurtured a culture that ensures the continuation of a system of exploitation adorned with a façade of nationalism and patriotism derived from the much contested ideology of ketuanan Melayu that is fast losing its force of populism and gaining an image of neo-colonialist Sartrean nausea offering a “no-exit” route to a collapsing grand narrative of an Asian despotic form of deformed developmentalism?

Why are we experiencing this phenomenon? Why are our elected officials becoming corrupted to the core - both in the way they use power and the way they display the image of being in power?

What has crept cancerously into the cognitive faculties/thinking process of our leaders in these five decade of unilinear developmentalist agenda that necessitates such a brutal image of arrogance in the way the leaders react to the voices of discontent as in the Bersih rally and in investigations on corrupt practices?

Have Malaysians failed to examine their lives, borrowing the Socratic maxim “the unexamined life is not worth living”? Are we summoning our greatest enemy - ignorance - to lead us to the path of developmentalism and putting knowledge in front of the firing squad circa Merdeka/Independence, borrowing again another Socratic maxim “the greatest enemy of knowledge is ignorance”?

I suppose we have installed rulers who are not philosophers. We continue to install exploiters and abusers of power that use the ideological state apparatuses to allow a certain paradigm of human and material development to reign supreme. We have installed robber barons who speak with a two-pronged tongue of national development; skilled users of Orwellian doublespeak.

What we have is now, after over 50 years of independence, are a broken education system; a population that does not read books that help in the improvement of the soul, mind, and spirit; a ruling regime that is holding its last dying breath by chanting the mantra of racial and religious bigotry in the hope that it can continue to live in luxury for the next decade or so.

A philosophically dead society

We have a philosophically dead society by those who could not even see the need to look at society through the lens of political economy but rather see the bastardised version of specialised functions of governance as the only way to run society as a political entity.

We need to groom philosopher-rulers - not as an elitist Platonic or Confucian type of ruling elitism, but to create the everyday philosopher-ruler in our project of grooming future leaders in virtually all sectors of our lives.

We need to reconceptualise the way we run our universities and public institutions in the training of the mind to lead organisations. We need to help members of society understand what knowledge is, its origin, its transformative power, and how it should be applied for the good of those that are potentially marginalised, alienated, or even mentally enslaved in newer and more subtle ways.

Through education conceived differently to meet the needs of a degenerating society, members of society need to be taught how to analyse complex social, ethical, technological, and social issues in this post-industrial and informational age and offer scientific ideas to effect humanistic and social change in virtually all sectors of human intellectual-macro level activities.

To save this nation from total destruction, we must go back to philosophy and through a rigorous curriculum adaptable to varying contexts of learning, teach our future leaders the following:

To understand the nature of knowledge and the history of its conceptualisation.

To understand the differences between knowledge, information, understanding, application, and able to articulate how these conceptions differ from one another.

To utilise the understanding of the philosophical, cultural, and political-economic aspects of knowledge as a basis to create newer and synthesised understanding of these and craft frameworks to offer perspectives to social and moral problems.

To develop logical, creative, moral, and futuristic ideas for social and organisational change; ideas informed by the deep rooted and broad-based understanding of knowledge in the most inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural sense of the word.

To develop a set of cognitive skills to be recognised as effective, respectable, well-informed, philosophically-trained members of a think-tank group of social organisations and social frontier thinkers able to generate innovative solutions to complex problems.

To explore varying cultural philosophies and draw universal themes of ethics and social reconstructionism to affect changes that will benefit the poor, marginalised, and alienated of all ethnic groups.

Such is the newer design we ought to explore to renew our intellectual prosperity. We must begin to become a nation of philosophers more than a nation of plunderers.

VIDEO: How Malaysian mainstream media works too

2011-12-01T11:58:00.001-05:00

ESSAY: Hijrah in reverse

2011-11-29T10:52:00.001-05:00

Thoughts on hijrah in reverse

by Azly Rahman

I took time today to reflect upon the story of Prophet Muhammad's (Peace be upon Him) exodus/migration from Mekkah to Madinah in 622 AD, signifying the beginning /Year One of the Islamic calendar.

I posted notes on my Facebook page; a forum I utilise primarily as a tool for intellectual engagement, somewhat like a digital/electronic platonic cave or as a virtual salon of the French Revolutionary period, to discuss anything under the sun with view of deconstructing dominant ideas of the day.

Yes, "hijrah" is the beginning of the new year of the people of the Islamic faith but my questions were these: has the Islamic intellectual paradigm evolve since the 1900s? Has religion courted philosophy? What is still ailing the "Muslim mind" and what fundamental shifts need to be engineered?

These are questions that came to me spontaneously that asked to be posted for members of my Facebook forum I now call the Trishakti salon.

I posted a thought: perhaps the Quran is too personal and personalising of a text to be transformed into a hegemonising and universalising text for an "Islamic state"; perhaps an Islamic state exists in its impossibility, still an "imagined community" ruled by perfect people over perfect people they govern.

Perhaps the Quran is too vague of a grand narrative for political philosophy and that any interpretation of it as one, will run into the unresolvable problem of getting entangled into the complexity of praxis (ideology to practice) of the various "mazhabs/schools of thought", each competing with each other on what truth is.

And we have not yet talked about the nagging problems of the use and abuse of the sayings of the prophet (the hadiths)

Sense and meaning

I thought perhaps the Quran is meant only for personal reading, best done hermeneutically, in that as many as there are souls in this world, therein lies the number of possible ways to make sense and meaning of how one ought to live his/her life as a "Muslim" or a "person at peace" or have submitted to a life of peace and peace-making.

I don't know ... as Socrates would say ... the world of Islam is at best, politically messy, grounded in the triumph of the disabling influences of culture.

I thought, ala the Jeffersonian (American philosopher-statesman) ideal, had the Malaysian constitution clearly separated religion and the state, Malaysians would probably have a less complicated scenario of race-religious relations and class. Rather, race issues would predominate, making resolutions easier.

Countries claiming to be Islamic states are either ruled by dictators or despots, prone to perpetual revolutions due to its internal contradictions.

Like an evolving self and an evolving soul, liberal democracy may still be a useful political philosophy better than theocracy, as Man essentially are not born-sinners to be cleansed by the pepper spray of the state nor born to suffer to be robbed of his rights and be happy suffering,

Rather, I thought, man is neither - the sacred and the profane in him requires a gentle, evolving government that respects his natural rights as man; rights he has surrendered to the state, in place of his happiness perhaps living nobly in the forest or in the paradise he had refused to be banished from.

It is the lethal combination of state and religion that, in the course of history, made killing each other in the name of this or that god legitimate, in holy wars to ascertain who was "holier than thou" and masking the real interest of kings and warriors be they Charlemagne, Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka, or even Saladdin Ayyubi.

Still, the decade-old question circa 9/11 remains: which god would allow such atrocity as well as the bombing of millions of innocents in Iraq?

Unfamiliar practices

I had another thought as well: in my lifetime i have seen and read about all too often "atrocities" committed in the name of Islam; a child beaten with a hard long cane for failing to memorise a chapter from the Quran, an Islamic religious teacher taking advantage of girls in a marhaban group, Islamic teachers telling students how dangerous the ideas of Socrates are, a band of Islamic teachers sabotaging the teaching of English language, syariah lawyers lying through their teeth and taking advantage of women, imams involved in get-rich-quick schemes, honor killings, female genital mutilation, the religious-criminalisation of rape victims,

Taliban with concubines, Tabligh wandering preachers spewing incomprehensibles where a little learning is dangerous, fatwa-making as frenzy and fiesta, the 5,000-strong Million Malay-Muslim rally, and of course men saluting the formation of the cult group Al Arqam's Obedient Wives Clubs.

Those I have mentioned above are practices of Islam not familiar to me and in fact more of these happenings are making the religion strange to what I know it ought to be.

Maybe it is a postmodern phenomena of the coming of age of a religion. Or maybe, this is a consequence of a failed marriage between religion and philosophy.

In all these, my heart still pays tribute to only the Islam brought by Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon Him). May Muslims in this age of high speed hyper-modernity and Arab Spring ideology, engineer their exodus wisely.

DR AZLY RAHMAN, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York city) doctorate in International Education Development and Master’s degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 300 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience spans Malaysia and the United States, over a wide range of subjects from elementary to graduate education. He currently resides in the United States.

Dawn

2011-11-23T18:05:00.001-05:00

Dawn
by Azly Rahman

Dawn
break of day they say
of a new age
where i emerge
from a world without boundaries
formless
wandering
at times aimless
at times seeing apparations
of those long gone
those i love and those i have never even met
I woke up to the sound of reality i could touch
of the familiar
yet strange
Dawn
you are here
as i recomposed myself
into a creation of body and soul
again
and again
till i will no longer be ultimately
Dawn to Dusk you promised me
that I will meet you
I have not met you
but only once perhaps
in that dark corner of out illuminated selves
when we were still
in the memory of Love
that will never die
and when i woke from the wide awakeness
of our illuminated selves
you left me standing all alone
in my alonesness of this Maya
     of a reality you and I constructed
out of the ruins of the yesteryears of what hath failed you
you have seen destruction
          in the gift you have tenderly build for me
out of your longingness for me you have once said
you and i have promised
and i stand here alone
still watching
the tedious arguments
of the destructions of the ages of Man
          you have concealed from me
yet you professed a love undivided
from dawn tiil dusk i seek thee
you are no longer there
hidden
inbetween the changing light of dusk
as it leaves me standing alone
as it walks away into the night
and inbetween the tears
of the crossroads you banished me at
tears that hath become rain
that soothes and washes the pains
of yesteryears
of a once lush forest
of my subconscious
of a mind that never was alive yet
i cried for thee
as silent as the stillness of the night of rage
you and i too have created
in the screams of my unconsciousness
             i asked thee :
                        what have you given me in the name of love?

LYNAS ISSUE AGAIN: Malaysians learn from this video! Protes against the Kuantan Lynas Plant.

2011-11-17T13:43:00.001-05:00

Occupy Dataran, too?

2011-11-14T11:10:00.001-05:00

Occupy Dataran, too?

by Azly Rahman

"No bulls. No bears. Only pigs" - an Occupy Wall Street poster message.

My weekend was spent thinking about the whole idea of "occupying". I was preoccupied with it after spending a good three hours visiting the Wall Street protesters. I have been reading about this "global phenomena", and I read too about "Occupy Dataran", which I suppose is the idea of occupying Dataran Merdeka in Malaysia. Below are my brief thoughts that preoccupied me after my brief ethnographic trip down Wall Street in New York.

It was fun studying the language of modern day protests. I consider myself an ethnographer of post-modernism and a student of social revolutions, for my early papers during my undergraduate days were essentially about revolution, such as studying the anatomy of the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions of 1979.

I wrote about the Computer Revolution in the 1980s and my later work has been on cybernetics and existentialism (as in the title of my blog). My students in Cultural Perspectives were given an assignment to compare and contrast the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, so I wanted to make sure I know what they will be talking about, hence my three-hour visit to the "Occupy Wall Street" move.

I wanted to understand this global phenomena of a protest movement as well and to discern the purpose and the language of it and to analyse the "culture of it" as it becomes popularised. I found some interesting themes that brought me back to my undergraduate days, with my student day movements and my occasional involvement with Amnesty International, especially in the protest against apartheid.

There is an interesting observation I made there. Crude as it may seem, but with an element of "intellectual culture" being displayed, as if there is an "artistic and social" installation being displayed, consisting of the elements of the seeds of a revolution ideologically based on anarchism.

In there are tents with human beings that are 'nomadic', a makeshift library of anarchist literature, a food pantry, a kitchenette, a "mini stage" for speeches and street theatre and presentations for radical thinkers to drop by and lend support, anarchistic literature, a "think-tank tent", an outreach tent, bicycles, and crudely made protest posters .

All these I found to be interesting elements of the reaffirmation and perhaps rebirth of radical consciousness loosely orchestrated by youth wide awake enough to see their society being dominated and hegemonised by corporate culture.

The fact that it was a camp as such, right there on Wall Street, is a radical statement that is appealing enough to the youth of any city in the world and attractive enough a movement to be broadcasted by both the corporate-controlled as well as social and personalising media.

As I was feeling a sense of 'camaraderie' with the protesters, who will still be there in the freezing weather, I ask myself: "what do they wish to achieve" in a world in which everything is already structured by the ideology of the "magic of the marketplace" and the Berlin Wall has fallen"?

And when each and every part of our body, our consciousness, or cognitive excursions into the spaces of knowledge and power" and our very existence has been a location and a habitue of the exploitation of corporations and governments alike that have enslaved the mind and the body, and in which spirituality has also been hijacked by laissez faire to be turned into profitable human venture into understanding the divine?

I don't know. As a lifelong student of both philosophy and cultural anthropology I do not have the answer to the meaning of what we are seeing in Occupy Wall Street or even "Occupy Dataran", when essentially I still believe that radical changes can happen best through total change, cultural re-engineering, the dismantling of the corporate capitalist system and perhaps "re-villagisation" of human beings and to reorganise ourselves into "communes". I don't know.

America is America. And especially New Yorkers are a people of a strange planet. To us, this is just a protest, like any other - on gay rights, Palestinian rights, Israel's rights to exist, rights of animals, of the Tibetans, to eat super-sized McDonalds everyday, rights of the New York City's naked cowboy to sue his business rival , the naked cowgirl, etc. Life still goes on because arguments or discourse has been so relativised and post-modernised and debated of its pros and cons and its subjectivity that anything goes.

But back to the Malaysian scene. If Occupy Wall Street is about a statement made on corporate greed in America, what then is the message in Occupy Dataran? Which Malaysian corporations are the message for? Who is the one percent and which one is the 99 percent?

How have the corporations in Malaysia been instrumental in the project of alienating, marginalising, and plundering the "people" or the "rakyat"? How will the structure of control be exposed? What is the nature of political economic control? Who owns what, through what means?

These are the questions that interest me as we see Malaysia too undergoing what Chairman Mao would call "interesting times".

DR AZLY RAHMAN, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York) doctorate in International Education Development and Master's degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 300 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience spans Malaysia and the United States, over a wide range of subjects from elementary to graduate education. He currently resides in the United States.

eleven-eleven-eleven-eleven

2011-11-11T11:59:00.001-05:00

eleven-eleven-eleven-eleven
by Azly Rahman

11-11-11-11
It was 11 in the morning,
on the 11th. day
on the 11th. month
on the eleventh year
... of 2000
numerologist we have become as human beings
fascinated by the seemingly mystical nature of
numbers
when we are now, in this age of numeral-literacy
where computational philosophy governs our everyday reality
we are numbers
numbers
binary
of zeros and ones
getting excited
when there are anomalies
as in today's much awaited little joy of cognitive excitability
11-11-11-11
today we are an anomaly
for a minute
we are not numbers
souls who believe in numerology
cogito ergo sum
i think therefore i exist
i doubt if i am existing
on this day
11-11-11-11
-- azly rahman, 11-11-11-11

far and near

2011-11-10T23:55:00.001-05:00

far and near

by Azly Rahman

from up above
looking down below
i could see
so far yet so near
and at times
.so near yet so far
yet a deep blue sea we are
watching the waves
come back to the shore
till eternity the waves
come back to the shores
in tears wiped dry
by the blue ocean

in her eyes

2011-11-10T22:21:00.001-05:00

in her eyes
by azly rahman

her eyes
dark like the beautiful silent night
piercing like a whisper of love across the blue horizon
deep like the deepest secrets of the boundlessness of love
in her eyes
i could see
the sutras and the puranas of yesteryears
of the battles rage within
that hath washed the eros in her
in her still beautiful eyes
i could see
the glow of a million stars
each chanting
the name of the one her eyes
never a second blink
in her eyes
i enter
a window
into her
soul
where two chants
become one
two heartbeats
becomes a
sonnet
we once knew by heart

STATEMENT: On culture

2011-11-10T11:19:00.000-05:00

culture is a complex construction of personal reality; we must be ready to make ours more meaningful by deconstructing its internal dynamic and make it more organic by destroying the elements and foundations that are disabling, leaving behind rites and rituals that have become meaningless, question core beliefs that have become anti-philosophical, destroy tools and toys that are found to be libidinal, challenge the meaning of respect for elders that have corrupted themselves in order to corrupt and bankrupt the young ... maybe by this we can become "culture-less" and lead a happier life always in sync with our existentialist and evolving self without being trapped in the historicism of the Master-Slave Narrative of some imagined community -- azly rahman (in a lecture to students of cultural studies)

Love-- not yet known

2011-11-08T17:25:00.000-05:00

Love -- not yet known

by Azly Rahman

Come twilight when poetry no longer visits
No longer sent to knock at your door when night falls and the eerie silence of the wind that rustles with rage
When in the deepest dungeon of the wasteland of your soul sings the joys of living only you yourself will join in the serenade
When the image of you becomes what I have yearned to be in the night in which only mute souls mutter
When all is no longer poetry but a prose of a thousand parchments of sound bites of your emotions in hypocrisy yearning to become a michaelangelo of your madness
Come twilight when you and I are like molten steel inseparable yet in harmony with the spheres of eternal sound of joys of the clanking iron grids of our hearts telling each other stories we are yet to create
Come twilight when poetry will be as cold as a room of a gaddafi transitionary cemetery
Poetry-- you and I will conspire with Fate.

Come nightfall when I no longer will call your name etched in the meadows of my yet formless beingness
When you and I await Time to scream its first cry of infancy
When you looked at me a thousand years repeatedly and like a never-ending chants of serenity you professed a love that has neither name no sensibility
When the waves have not yet rush to the shores in their madness of a lover's delight..., persistent like a man beating his chest bloody in the ancient city of Karbala
Like drops of rain yearning to fall in the misty morning ocean of mercy you and I could see engulfing the souls of Man
You called my name
Across a sea of molten steel
Bubbles of love's labour lost
Come nightfall
Still-- meadows of my unborn soul etched with your name
The mantra and mourning of your silent cries of yearning for the self in you -- through me you will swim across the sea of molten steel
Come nightfall
Fate and I will conspire

Come nightfall
As I close my eyes wide open to the reality of the unreal
When eros becomes thanatos
When the catharsis of the infancy of my primodial soul becomes an ever growing mutating metamorphosis of memories of the beautiful things I shall not cherish but command poetry to be the scribe
When all these become the objects of desire of my dreams
... When you and I have become creators of this playground of a child's hope
A child neither born nor dies when age sinks her into the world not yet created
Come nightfall when you and I in dreamworlds parting in anger as a Nile river of yesteryear
Come nightfall when we shall whisper the koans of catharsis into our ears that no longer have a form -- only sounds like a Newtonian sphere exists
Only then
when night falls
we will
with Fate conspire
become one -- like eros and thanatos

I have looked at you with eyes closed
You sat on a throne of gold I crafted; all that glitters gathered from the finite world
For a thousand years
I called your name
Words not yet formed I whispered into you
Time not yet created I await you
I looked into your eyes

And when twilight comes
And when poetry no longer knocks at your door
I whispered your name
Flesh and blood you shall not become
But Love --- not yet known

We have become hyper-real

2011-11-07T12:41:00.002-05:00

We have become hyper-real
by Azly Rahman

in this cybernetic world
we have become hyper-real
hypertextualized
hypercognitive
hypersensual
... hypnotized
hypertensed
heterogenous
harmonizing with the chakras of the digits that never stop computing
aliens we are
at the fringes of a new form of psychedelia we have arrived at
the crossroads
of thoughts so intense
to be or not to be digital
that is no longer the question
to be or not to be real
as real as reality is said to be
in a Descartian world of digital devotion
we are devotees in an ashram
built by pandits and popes and prophets
of Quantum quagmire
quacks we might one day become
what is real we ask?
how real is real we yearn to feel ...
hyper-real our karma is
we have swallowed the apple of mcintosh
and drank the snake oil of cybernetic sensuality
we are no longer us
because we never were
in this cybernetic world
Om ... said the sound of our despair
Amen ... said this world beyond repair
together-- we meditate on this happiness we create
silent i shall now be.

Malay is a fruitless language

2011-11-04T20:38:00.003-04:00

Malay a fruitless language
by Azly Rahman

Lovely is the English language
More fruitful than that of the Malays
I could see the fruitfulness of it
And learn to appreciate juiciness when you bite into it
Unlike the dryness of that of the Malays

You can call someone an apple of your eye
And when you fall in love with that person you can go bananas
In Malay you can't call your date a rambutan
and be mistaken as an orangutan
you can be crazy in love but you can't say that I am going to be a pisang
no no no -- Malay is a fruitless language

Fruity is the English language
Better than that of the fruitless Malays

You can fall out of love and become a sour grape
When the apple of your eye left you for the Big Apple
You can see politicians become sour grapes
When they are no longer favoured in their Banana Republic
In the fruitless Malay language, when you become a sour grape
You can't call yourself a kedondong and sit under a tree like ikan temenong
You can't even call your ex-girlfriend a pulasan
          as you were the first to 'perasan' and became a sour grape

Ahh Tutti Frutti English Language
Ahhh no such things as ... buah muah ... in Malay langugae
    simply won't go as Malay is a fruitless language

English is in demand
as a fruity language Malaysians should have command
Americans can drive a 'lemon'
Can Malaysians drive a 'longan'?

Ahhh ... there there is an English fruit called 'squash'
One can even play the fruit and be good at squash
Can Malaysian be good at durians
And roll it down the bowling lane?
How fruitless is the Malay language

I have often wondered why traditional English parents love the fruit cantelope
They feed their girls that thing at an early age
Now that I am in love with the English language I know it means
     ... "can't elope" ... hah ... how fruity is the beauty of the language
But can you Malays come up with a fruit that "can't elope"
I bet you can't ... you fruitless language
   The best you can tell a girl is that she is a "jambu" but she will still elope.

When you are in love and with the apple of your eye
When you go bananas and saved from being a sour grape
When you go on a date in Strawberry Fields
Your heart will always be on Orange Alert
You will be cheery like wild cherry
No-- can the Malay language be as fruitful and fruity as this
No it can't
How could you call your girlfriend a lychee
And not expect her the smack you with her tai chi
And you go crazy over her like a Siamese mango without biji
And your heart beat fast like a magoesteen on 100-meter dash to eternity

Fruity is the English language
Darling are the clementines
Like in the song "Oh my darling ... clementine"
Try using that line via the fruitless Malay language
Trying saying "sayang ku .... limau kasturi"
And you'll see Hang Lekir and Hang Lekiu
     running after you crying like a Portuguese fruit under a Melakka tree

English even have "pomegranade"
Of which the word grenade emanate
Fruitless language Malay don't have this
The closest is the sound of the popping of buah getah
As a child visiting grandma and grandpa in Penang I would wonder
   what the heck is that little C4s of a fruit's doing

Okay maybe there is one fruity word the Malays can be proud of
is when they call their love one "buah hati"
or "fruit of the heart"
now logically, do hearts have fruits?
or fruits have heart?
unless you talk about love that is coming to fruition
and the heart is cheery like a shaved rambutan
or a repented durian that finally bathe in perfume water
                made from a concoction of limau kasturi and fermented lychee

So-- what then must we worry
Fruitless it will be
Of which language is more fruity
When we all now know
which one is
the good .. the bad ... and the fruity ... !

OPINION: Are the Malay linguistic nationalists betraying our children?

2011-11-03T23:45:00.000-04:00

Are the Malay linguistic nationalists betraying our children?
by Azly Rahman

Nationalists are nationalists. Some remain rooted in the language which shaped their personal reality, in a world of shifting views and multiple interpretations in which one become sub-texts of both Grand and Subaltern narrative.

Nationalist are nationalists. In a postmodern world, we sometimes do not know who the enemy of these nationalists are. Perhaps the enemy lies within. Fear of one’s own shadow?

Nationalists are nationalists. They can remain so. They need to evolve into globalists grounded in the love of many cultures, still.

Perhaps like many, I am a strong advocate of the critical importance of the English Language as, at this point in history, a language not only of commerce, the arts and humanities, but also an inspiration for revolutionary movements that challenges colonialism and imperialism as well. In order to understand the enemy, one must speak its language. Stamford Raffles knew this well when he was sent to the Singapura to be its “founder”.

The enemy is corruption and social cancer wrought by casino capitalism, spoken in English globalized by high speed Internet, mutating the mind, body, and soul of natives and savages transforming them into neo-colonials. The enemy is the dimension of language that installs regimes and systems of oppression that leeches off blood sweat and tears of the natives transformed into indentured post-modern slaves. The English language of the modern imperialism system and the Gog and Magog of the maddening capitalist world is the enemy.

Many a revolutionary writer opposed to colonialism wrote in the English Language – from Jonathan Swift to Joseph Conrad, from Eric Blair (George Orwell) to V. S. Naipaul, from Karl Marx to Raymond Williams.

Of course for Malaysian children we do not expect them to be passionate of the Greek mythology, the philosophy behind Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, The Chronicles of Narnia, or translation of Ramayana and Mahabharata, or even the Adventures of Asterix – we hope this will one day be a reality when we throw away our TV sets and ASTRO channels or our iPods or Blackberry.

Of course this is a long road for Malaysian children to be engaged in world literature in (English) translation and be a little be more learned and refined and to expunge any sense of racial superiority such as “ketuanan this or that”.

Long road to freedom. There is a reality at hand. When a Malay poet laureate and a chief of a language preservation bureau (I hope this is a close enough translation of ‘dewan bahasa dan pustaka’) and a hundred other Malay Language jihadists were pepper-sprayed for protesting against the English as a language of instruction, we have got a national problem.

What is the message? What is being symbolized? What is the signification? What is the issue? What is the non-issue? Where is the sensibility? Where is pride? Where is prejudice? Where are we taking this argument?

These are difficult questions.

Essentially, in my opinion, the value of teaching the applications aspects of Science and Maths in English is that hopefully the teachers will work harder with the students to master the lingua franca. Perhaps later, when there is mastery, teachers and learners themselves can explore the humanities and social scientific aspects of Maths and Science, and ultimately in their later years understand the philosophical and political--economic aspects of the two "subjects". One may then, in one's old age, read the biographies of Sir Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Henri Poincare, Paul Erdosh, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawkings, etc. Or even read translations of Hamzah Fansuri or Ibnu Arabi.
English Language is one important vehicle for such exploration.

My question is: what is the fate of linguistic nationalists in the age of globalization and deconstructionism? For whom will such nationalists continue to serve? But ultimately, why are the adults arguing for the next generation when the former should be allowing the latter to chart their own intellectual future?

Or-- could the answer be in the passion for teaching and the need for an entirely new pedagogy?
We are only beginning to peel the layers of complexity of the issue of teaching of Science and Maths in English. We need to go beyond the data and conclusion presented mundanely passed as the ultimate truth why we need to teaching Science and Maths in the Malay Language.

We need to rise above the simplicity of concluding, the reductionism of our arguments, and the shallowness of our claim of the need to be ultra-nationalistic about the language to be used.

We need to look at how best can the children of Malaysia be served through multiple languages and through the importance of the English Language. We need to step back – many steps – and look at our philosophy of education, our paradigm of teaching and learning, our training of teachers, our caste and class system in our ‘information-overloaded’ educational system, our politician’s constant interference in schools and in controlling the minds of our children and our teachers, our destiny as a multicultural nation demanding us to master multilinguistic possibilities, and finally how we have built in successes and failures in ours school system

Daunting task for us. Requiring supra-nationalist thinking. But if, in Malaysia, linguistic nationalists are merely players in a world’s-a-stage of build by ‘tuans of this and that culture’ under the ideological direction of ‘ketuanan this and that,’ we must rewrite the script.

Language shapes reality. Or maybe language is reality. Or maybe, in the case of the nationalist, language confines reality.

In multicultural Malaysia, in a world past post- and hypermodernity, our language policy ought to make possible multiple realities, multiple worlds or knowing. So that our children may become world-wise Malaysians.

PLEASE SHARE THIS OPINION WITH THOSE WHO WISH TO SEE THEIR CHILDREN EXCEL IN A WORLD IN WHICH ENGLISH IS STILL THE LINGUA FRANCA..

Only Love is the Absolute

2011-11-03T12:53:00.001-04:00

Only Love is the Absolute
by Azly Rahman

The philosophy of the self
is the constant –
the Absolute –
from which
the Changing Concepts emanate.

From the Absolute
springs
existence,
eternity,
harmony,
oneness,
power,
destiny,
knowledge,
life, ....
and so on and so forth.

From the Absolute
springs
Creationism
within the Inner Self
that one must govern,

From the Absolute
emanates
Good and Evil,
Heaven and Hell
the opposites and the contradictions
that one needs to mediate
in one's lifetime,

From the Absolute
emanates
the knowledge of one's
Life,
Death,
and Resurrection
one experiences daily,

From the Absolute
one sees
the history of the creation of the Universe within,
the Universe Outside, and
the parallel universes that are being created
outside of oneself,

From the Absolute
one finds The Love that Reigns Supreme,
that conquers all,
that evolves from Hate to Love
from the being trapped
in the love of oneself to
the love of humanity,
without boundaries

From the Absolute,
one commands the Guardian Angles
to bow down to oneself
and not to Kings, Sultans,
Despots, Tuns, Datuk Seris,
or the State,

From the Absolutism
of One's Rulership in one's kingdom,
one governs the armies of senses –
Sight, Hearing, Speech, Thoughts...

From the Absolute
one sees with the Inner Eye
the daily battles within and decide
who will be the winners and
who will be the losers,

From the Throne of Absolutism,
one speaks
with the ancient prophets and sages
and instruct them
to strengthen the authority and legitimation
of this Inner Kingdom one constructed
out of the realization
of an end of a journey
one is rewarded with,

The Absolute is Love,
never changing,
always travelling with this self
of flesh and bones
and consciousness
that one gets the chance to encounter
in one's lifetime...
if one searches for love.

Love is the Asolute
Only Love

Times like this

2011-11-02T12:49:00.004-04:00

Times like this

by Azly Rahman

times like this when night falls
when dawn hath long arrived
to become a canopy beneath the stars
to the soul inside of me that yearns to wander free
i see the beauty of the story of the night unfolding
... strange as the plot may seem
neither beginning nor end nor in-between
at times eros comes and offers its long-flowing robe for the wanderings
of the soul
at times thanatos cometh and spread its endless plots of battlefields
at times catharsis halts that wandering soul and speak of things to come
at times Time collapses
indeed Time persistently collapses
times like this the soul is free to wander as i would set it free to be
so that you and i could meet
in a distant time we once inhabit
when Time was neither persistent not perishing
like dawn and dusk
like day and night
we met
in the darkest and deepest night
i still know you
formless as you will forever be
Love -- you are
a soul that never wander

Recitation II: Random verses

2011-10-27T09:45:00.004-04:00

Recitation II: Random verses
by Azly Rahman

Time, with thee I conspire with Fate and Free Will
unto thee I offer my salutation
from Dawn to Dusk to Darkness daily I see
thee tells the story of who I might have been
and yet Evolution I must become
the story of Creation I have been told.
O Time, I wish all of creation know Thee

Read ... Read thyself
for thee is a book of signs, symbols, signifiers,
of the semiotics of spiritual symbiosis of the self
                   and the larger self; of truth within a truth,
                   of chakras configured from chaos connected to the cosmology of cosmic consciousness;
                   of a lamp within a mirror; of a speck of dust evolving and wishing to know;
                   of a text inscribed by the textuality of truth temporal

we come from love and unto love we shall return
in between these lies the deep understanding
                   of what love and the absence of it means
                   of suffering and liberation
                   of appearance and reality
                   of the evolution of consciousness and the destruction of it
                   of the entering of paradise and the expulsion from it
                   of the realization of beauty and ugliness
                   of the grayness of good and evil

O' capitalist societies, capitalist selves
be subjected to the ramadhanization of existence
for fasting is the act of slowing down your sense of urgency
         to accumulate and to acquire capital taken from Nature, from the Natural self
         to slow down the desire to
                             rob the poor
                             rape Nature
                                 and revolt against Love
Verily,
a life of detachment
of dharma,
and the realization of moksha
                         is a life free from dhukka

O' self, between darkness and light we met
and we mediate upon the covenant we are to made,
as we contemplate putting thee in the abode of Love,
where Paradise is never lost,
where Nature is the Ultimate Self
and as dawn breaks we set forth
to encapsulate thee into a soul, spirit, and body
as we greet the light of darkness and set thee free to roam the Earth
and to seek for thine self within a guide in thee

O' self, thou have shed tears of fear and loss
of meaningfulness at the dawn of creation
at the onset of thine journey through this matrix of complexities
and the Mandelbrott of spirituality
Did not thou agree to carry the gift of love and knowledge and remembrance of things past?
Go forth and seek for the guide within, so that thou will see Maya clearly

O' self
ask not what the nature of truth nor the form the guide taketh
these will come to thee in thine waking hours of labour
and thine conversations with Nature,
in thine deepest reverie when night falls
and when solitude is thine companion
for the righteous path will be many and will be one,
as the mind becomes science and the soul become a lotus that blooms
                                      a thousand times, piercing the eyes of reality

O' self
with sincerity, explore all possible roads that may lead to self knowledge
one may arrive first in a prison-house of language
in a tower of babel and end up feeling the pleasure of experiencing
                the universal in the particular,
                the profane in the sacred,
                the falsehood in truth,
                        and the grandiose-ness of the minutest of things

O' self
read ... read thyself ...
read ... even if it takes a lifetime to do so
for thou are a book of signs that began as a tabula rasa
constructed out of scripts whose ink drawn from the fountain of Love and Plenty
so that thine existence will become a scripture of scripts and subscripts
of narratives and meta-narratives of the Grand and the Subaltern

O' self
tame the Fire within for thou is a kingdom in itself
a master of thine's destiny with Fate decree and conspiring
command the armies
                the counsels
                the playwrights
                the scribes
                the artisans
                the musician
                the designer of battlefields within
for thine is a powerhouse of creations of many a worlds
                    to be created in thine's journey towards everlasting bliss

O' self
O' people
O' tribes
O' nations
see what destruction humanity has done when the stone is carved?
The stone was forced to become -- carved, constructed, characterized, and made to colonize
from the stone carved
        the powerful amongst you will invent, install, and institutionalize ideologies
        that seal the fate of humanity into becoming cogs in the wheels of absurdity
from stones we evolve.

O'self,
O' society
inside of thou resides beelzebub, iblis, satan, the demon mara
the darkest of the darkest human instinct, or whatever name you may call it
one that reincarnates into human systems, statesmen, tyrants, semiotics of power, casino capitalism, demonic-hegemonic cycles of civilizational force ---
know it, tame it, subdue it, bring it to de-evolution do that you may arrive at nibanna

O' deepest self
in earth, wind, fire water lies the metaphysical semiotics of thine's creation
and in the universe outside lies thine's universe inside;
rejoice
for thou is one with Nature
as that cybernetic energy imbued with an existentialist design of flesh and blood
rejoice and revolve, like Newton's universe
                             in harmony with thine's chakras within

O' self
childhood, youth, and old age are merely in thine imagination
for the mind, the spirit, and the soul
are old as the universe if thou knew that ecclesiastical history of the self
and the cosmology of creation
for thou is merely a symbolism of Time and Space constructed as an experiment
in the workability of creation;
                               do we exist hence?

O' people
guide thine youth to spend their early years in the pursuit of knowledge
and the passion of its application and the beauty of its bhakti to humankind;
teach them well in the way so of the "jen" or the gentlemen, as Kungfu Tze would say,
and turn them into deep thinkers who cares for the fate of society and
at the same immersed in the joys of growing up and finding meaning in being wise adults

O self
suffering lies in one's inability to detach oneself from materials, people, places,
and the urge to accumulate more than one could possibly share.
Liberation thus is to live a life focused on higher goals, ideals, principles and living a life
honoring what one needs and not feeding one's greed.
Live a life of mindful living, aware of the semiotics of Desire colonizing

O self
journey into the past, to battlefields of yesteryear
like those of Kurusektra, Peloponesia, Trafalgar
and slay thine dragons and demons thou have nurtured out of passion, desire and arrogance thou hath tamed not confront these as well as the skeletons in thine closet and come home to the present victorious
like Arjuna,Alexander, and Ashoka ...
                            so that peace of a thousand years shall reign thine heart

Life is not a losing battle; it is a glorious gift to the self

Become an ethnographer to thine's own life
an archaeologist of consciousness,
a philosopher of living
catalog the data of experiences
analyzing what thou have gone through
          so that thou may have conversations with thine's own inner culture
and reconstruct those patterns not longer in sync with thine's concluding chapter
                                of the Book of Thine Own Signs

O' self,
O' people
recite merely not thine holy scriptures
journey hermeneutically into it
         - recite, read, read, re-read, construct, deconstruct,
          dive into its dialectics, so that thou will find the meaning of each passage closer to thine's own desire,
          stripping off disabling cultural contexts of the world of yesteryears
          and ultimately it is you who will become the text in your own existentialist context

O' people,
Religion is merely
a logical structure of human experience
vis-a-viz the Divine
so that the mind can explore the meaning of religious rituals;
          symbolism, nature of existence, meaning of God, evolution of the self
                  as it journeys, through Love and Compassion,
                  toward the larger Self;.
Religion provides the idea of how human beings must treat each other
in this sea of Humanity and
in this Ocean of mercy

O' self:
be in this world as a stranger;
thou do not exist except as a self conditioned by systems created by others,
controls imposed on the mind,
narratives inscribed by thine elders;
exist thou shall not in this state no longer
if thou knows that this journey of life is one of becoming a postmodern flaneur
and a destroyer of perceptions,
          creator of illusions, and
          preserver of thine's complex inner government

O' self
jihad till thou see the crystal clearness of thine soul, blissful thou shall be

O' people
activism and revolution alone cannot bring instant peace to any nation
it is the deep understanding, deep structuring, and the mass disseminating
                               of love for all things great and small
that will give everlasting meaning to desired change.
it is the absence of love that creates spaces for greed, hatred, and violence
                           subtly factored into systems of control
                           and organized chaos

to understand Death, one must first contemplate what Living means

O' self,
daily thou undergoes karma

O' Fate
O' Free Will
Let me conspire with thee

...

Death

2011-10-25T15:37:00.001-04:00

Death
by azly rahman

are we memories in search of a body?
or merely flesh and blood
and bones and all these and more in search of a reason to
walk away walk on walk through this path of ephemerality
of a game of chess
of a garden to grow
where we knew the game
we have met
when flesh and blood we were not yet
when flesh and blood we no longer are
are we up there seeing sight?
listening to hearing?
living what is to be lived?
with love found, lost, found again .. when love has always
not left us; as if we are like the fish
like waves and the shore
like the warmth of the light of the flame
that whispers in the night
i see myself when
the self in me sees you
you and i
dies
daily
in the beauty of living --- eternally
wherein memories, body, flesh, bones ... can no longer be

Pronouns, Pathetically yours

2011-10-24T21:11:00.003-04:00

Pronouns, pathetically yours ...
by Azly Rahman

Sitting in my garden under a flame of the forest today
I close my eyes

Autumn breeze so refreshing
I am at the mercy of the the beauteous rays of sunlight
so warm as if love is in every speck of light
bathing me with my eyes closed, my soul scattered in the universe
Three wind chimes surrounded me
One made of steel
One made of wood
One made of bamboo
together -- music so magnificent they made
Three winds of culture blew into my slumber
as i think of pronouns in a land I once knew

why did god in scriptures speak in shifting pronouns?
ahh .. i thought ... not an important thought at this moment
i was as if like a dry autumn leave blown to a land yonder
as i asked with eyes still closed

if i meet an ancient malay king
will i use to pronoun "patik"
when i feel it sounds like "pathetically yours"
or will addressing them and their monopolized status divinely-sanctioned with a "you and I' will suffice?
i suppose i have the answer: "patik" or "pathetically yours" will not go
as i think the word "beta" as the pronoun of the monarchy conjures in my mind "of an experimental "beta-testing" version of a government ... if it works it works ..
no -- i then say, neither "patik" nor "beta" will go well with me
yes - "pathetically yours" and "beta-testing" will they sound to me
I shall settle with "you and i" as i address these human concepts of ascribed power i shall not agree ..

if there is "your high-ness" there must be "your lowliness" i must say .. in the mind of both they must agree to play this game of pronouns i should say
no-- i thought: i shall not play this game

the autumn wind blows
my eyes still close
such a beauteous day
i though the wind in its glory has brought me
like that single red leaf drying
to that land i once knew
has brought this "pathetically yours"
to where i ought to belong, the old folks would say

with a deep deep breath i took, like a buddha under a flame of a forest
i opened my eyes
i am still here ... i am ... that red leaf .. saved from being crushed perhaps
by pronouns ...

Arjuna II

2011-10-23T16:35:00.000-04:00

Arjuna II

by Azly Rahman

and under the blood red sky He shoots arrows
drawn from the darkest dungeon of his Self
and thunderous was the sky
... tempestuous was the raging sea yonder
with a million eyes of the storm staring
and He saw like precious drops of rain
arrows turned into lotuses
multicolored
falling down one by one
like fingers falling of a hand dejected
He smiled ... in his dark shining armour He smiled
as the sky grew bloodier
the Earth below burst out in Anger -- ar

Wasteland II (with apologies to TS Eliot)

2011-10-22T10:10:00.002-04:00

Wasteland II
(with apologies to TS Eliot)
by Azly Rahman

I
...
I woke up with the sound of boots
marching outside my window
British soldiers! British soldiers! They are here!
I screamed in my dream
I was a child worried my Union Jack flag on my kite is not ready yet
to be flown in the fields of dream
where my grandfather secretly brought me to
I love to sketch the grandeur of Stamford Raffles as he majestically stood
over the place I was s born

I saw the red coated ones outside my window, giving flowers
and kissing the forehead of politicians in Malay hats ...
how sweet are the saviours I screamed in my dream

In one ear Bach's Air on G-String played
In another I hear the ripping of Hendrix's Star Spangled banner
"... give me your hands, your minds, your souls ... tired masses ..."
as i hear Stamford Raffles plead ...
"give me your land, your love .. "
i shall give give your "life liberty and help you pursue
my happiness ..."
Ah ... sweet are those words I heard in between my dreams
and the reality I am yet to see.

I was child not yet born
That hears these monumentalism
of conversations of history
between army boots and Malay headgears
with the word: " a suicidal nation will be sweet"
written in jawi script, borrowed from a land far far away
... as we become postscripts of yet another Grand Narrative
of a the boy with a kite flying Union Jack

born he was not yet as he navigated and directed the wind
smiling he was as the kite yearns to be free
like the teeming masses on the shores of Lazarus

Intellectual apostasy by Azly Rahman

2011-10-20T19:41:00.001-04:00

Intellectual apostasy
by Azly Rahman
News had it that in an islamic university
they plan to kick out a professor of law and constitutional legality
... who spoke up against interference of the monarchy
they suspended him and the nation is now in jeopardy
what an un-islamic act i am beginning to see
performed by an islamic university
today i asked this question many moments aplenty
is it islam? -- or is this political idiocy?
that has crept into the corridors of what could have been plato's academies
what worth is having an islamic university
when the act itself is non-halal laced with hypocrisy
what faith would one have in islam as practiced by hypocrites aplenty
when even an islamic university is advancing intellectual decadency
ahhh ... i wonder what version of islam must one believe in
when all is now so messy
messy messy messy .. like a lid of a pandora box of hopelessness and lunacy
let me retreat to the jungle and live like lao tzu and finally be happy
care to join me?

Malaysian academicians and their pledge of loyalty

2011-10-20T18:16:00.000-04:00

Academicians and the ‘Akujanji’
by Azly Rahman
(written circa 2006)

A simple sentence/clause can clearly illustrate how these academicians are being controlled and their intelligence subdued. It takes us to deconstruct the clause and analyse what kind of ‘truth’ it embodies and how the ‘truth-force’ operates in the learning environment, to understand how thought-control operates.

The clause I am referring to is from the now infamous Surat Akujanji (Pledge of Loyalty) for ‘government servants’. Let us inquire into the genealogy of the production of the clause, how it is used to dishonour the university, and how the academicians are being silenced and stupefied by it.

The irony is that we have graduates from universities abroad who themselves were trained in the best and rigorous environment of learning that protects intellectual freedom.

We expect them to embody the ethos of a committed intellectual who will translate good expressions of freedom of practice, but instead, they have become the new colonisers of the neo-colonialist state.

Let us now compare, for example, what academic freedom means in America and in Malaysia. Let us then offer suggestions on how the Malaysian academic community can have its right to be intelligent.

Right to be intelligent

In the US, public school teachers, community college and university professors have all the guarantees of academic freedom as rights in their collective agreement with their respective institutions; rights that are also enshrined to ensure that the students they educate will become intelligent and informed citizens.

Academic Freedom clauses from the American Association of University Professors include

1) Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.

2) Teachers are entitled in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institutions should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.

3) College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

Another example comes from the reknown research university, Columbia University, in New York:

‘The University is committed to maintaining a climate of academic freedom, in which officers of instruction and research are given the widest possible latitude in their teaching and scholarship. However, the freedoms traditionally accorded those officers carry corresponding responsibilities. By accepting appointments at the University, officers of instruction and research assume varied obligations and duties.’

Clarifying that commitment, it states:

‘Academic freedom implies that all officers of instruction are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subjects; that they are entitled to freedom in research and in the publication of its results; and that they may not be penalised by the University for expressions of opinion or associations in their private or civic capacity; but they should bear in mind the special obligations arising from their position in the academic community.’

These statements of guarantee have become the cornerstone of the culture of ‘free spirit of inquiry’ enshrined in the thinking of American academicians and one that emanated from the protection of the fundamental rights of the individual.

The Surat Akujanji is doing exactly the opposite. Consider the implications of the clause (ix), in Bahasa Melayu and in English, from the document forced upon the Malaysian intellectual community:

bahawa saya antara lain:

(ix) tidak akan ingkar perintah atau berkelakuan dengan apa apa cara yang boleh ditafsirkan sebagai ingkar perintah (I shall not be insubordinate or conduct myself in such manner as is likely be construed as being insubordinate.)

Such a sweeping and generalised statement endangers faculty members in their pursuit of truth through critical inquiry. The clause entails that the academician shall have no freedom, rights, and responsibility in deciding the nature of ‘truth’ to be pursued. The idea of insubordination implies that the work of academicians will be subjected to the rigours defined by the prevailing ideology and those who are in power to impose such ideology.

In addition, the difference between the Academic Freedom clauses and that in Surat Akujanji is clear; while the one produced by American institutions encourage freedom and responsibility, the one adopted by Malaysian universities take away such freedom and assures that even academicians are inherently irresponsible.

In other words, the American academic community sees the ‘goodness and genius in the human being’ while the one adopted by Malaysian universities see the ‘evil and sub-standard intelligence of the human being’ and the need for the mind to be subdued, tamed, and domesticated. The latter is unquestionably reminiscent of colonial discourse.

Why should we perpetuate such a discourse among the people of independent Malaysia?

Power-hungry leaders

We must understand that organisations are made up of human beings who have personal biases, grudges, and motivations that can be counter-productive to the development of intellectual tradition of any university.

A leader of an organisation, even in a supposedly intellectual environment as in a university, can never claim neutrality in the way decisions are made. Our purpose as intellectuals must be to produce as best as we can, statements of guarantees that the nobility of the university environment must be preserved by all, and especially that rights of the faculty must be guarded against attempts by the leadership to subvert them.

The phrase ‘insubordinate… likely to be construed as being insubordinate’ is definitely problematic. In the hands of an autocratic leader who wishes to maintain his/her hegemony over others, or to maintain control and power over the powerless, or to maintain rule via Machiavellian tactics, the semantics of ‘insubordination’ can be a powerful instrument of oppression.

Ultimately, who defines what ‘insubordination’ means and what are its dimensions? It is too subjective of a term to be used in such a supposedly-objective manner. It will be open to abuse. Academicians do not wish to be oppressed nor abused especially in an academic environment.

Why can we not learn the virtue of intellectual freedom and the fundamental rights of the individual from nations such as the US? Must we not implement what is good from world-class practices?

Is not the purpose of education in Malaysia is to educate its students to become intelligent, creative, critical and open-minded? Do we not understand what a ‘university’ means and why we lecturers and professors have the moral obligation to help open minds and not close them shut? Do we really understand what a world-class university means?

What then must the Malaysian academician do?

Academicians need not be powerless entirely. In times like this that try their intellectual sensibility, they may discover that they can no longer seek the help of the university to address grievances - judging from the fact that there is no provision for an academician to argue for academic freedom, and that there is no mechanism to attend to such grievances fairly.

Clause (viii) of the Surat Akujanji guarantees that such a recourse cannot be taken. It states (in translation) that an officer “… shall not bring or attempt to bring any form of outside influence or pressure to support or advance (his/her) claim or that of other public officers relating to the public services …”

One must be aware how damaging the clause can be to the interest of the aggrieved party. Should there be instances of abuse of power, corruption in all forms, attempts to subvert the intellectual foundations of Malaysia universities, or any form of unethical practices, the clause would ensure that the complainant would not be able to seek the help of more credible outside agencies/organisations/bodies/persons to resolve those issues.

How do academicians criminalised by the system seek justice from the administration when they do not have faith in the organisation’s capability to be objective and to understand what the rights of an academic might be - when in fact, there is no charter or covenant/compact to guarantee such rights?

We must now be concerned how our universities will, in future be seen in the eyes of the international academic community with this clause that illustrates the intellectual problematique of this nation.

What then must we do? We must have the universities nullify, revise or discard the Surat Akujanji.

We must demand that the university administration forms academic freedom committees so that parameters of freedom of expression can be constructed. The committees must produce a statement of guarantees of academic freedom to be signed and honoured by all.

We must encourage dissenting views from as many perspectives as possible, true to the development of newer philosophies of multi-culturalism that is developing.

We must elect progressive university leaders into office; ones that will promote the rights of academicians and students to be more intelligent and more rigorous in their thinking.

Malaysian academicians, stand up for your rights!

Do not allow those who abuse power to trample on your hard-earned intellectualism. We have generations of creative young minds to educate. They are waiting for academicians to regain their right to be treated intelligently.

Is HIMPUN against apostasy necessary?

2011-10-19T14:37:00.001-04:00

instead of gathering a million people to protest against apostasy,
why not ask them to stay home and pray for peace and prosperity
and then watch cartoons on TV ...
and then facebook each other reminding how cheap a publicity this is all will be
to destroy racial and religious harmony ...
ahh malaysians malaysians malaysians ...
you watch too much TV and believe in lies and bankrupt political ideology -- azly rahman

MRSM schools a successful failure?

2011-10-18T18:22:00.000-04:00

MRSM schools a successful failure?

by Azly Rahman

As hypermodernising societies such as Malaysia progresses in syncrony with the advancement of capitalism, and as race and religion becomes the foundation for decision-making in education, especially in elitist well-funded schools, Malaysia is faced with another dilemma of education and national development.

Is this country creating sophisticated ethnocentrists that will continue to sustain race-based ideologies?

Maktab Rendah Sains Mara (Mara Junior Science College) schools, well-funded, well-staffed with advanced degree faculties, and well-taken care of by the Malay-centric government may be one example of a phenomena of a successful failure in the system's 40-year evolution.

The school system prides itself in innovative curricular experimentation drawn from best practice of schools, particularly those of the United States; as its original template was based upon.

What educationists will see in the list of innovations are merely aspects of the formal curriculum; upon further analysis lies the hidden and informal curriculum as perceived from curricular theory; hidden is the deeply racial socialisation aspect.

The overall picture lies in the impact of politics and education in the socialisaton of MRSM students. they parrot the teachers, the teachers parrot the politicians, politicians kowtow to money and power - that's an example of successful failure.

We are all economic beings, homo economicus undoubtedly but it is education and only education that is the best means to re-engineer, restructure, re-level, and redesign society.

It is the only means to sustain individual and social progress, as philosophers Dewey and Freire would argue.

Valueless ideologies

While the advanced nations are prioritising multiculturalism, honoring cosmopolitanism, and globalising education, Malaysians, through their endless fights over education are making many steps backwards. MRSM has produced a breed of sophisticated professionals to sustain ethnocentric valueless ideologies out of touch with current cultural realities.

Consider, in a similar vein, how much is spent and attention paid to on yet another high-priced elitist project such as the Pintar Permata at the expense of other schools in dire needs of even basic amenities such as those in Sabah and Sarawak or in many poor states - is that equity and equality for all races? Or is it a showcase based on ignorance of the meaning of equality and education?

With all due respect to the administrators, teachers, parents, and students, I must say about the MRSM school system.

With its insistence on being a Malay-centric, MRSM these days are not preparing children to survive in a multicultural, cosmopolitan, and ever-changing world that requires English as an important skill, and an outlook that is more open to learning about other cultures especially in the context of a rapidly changing Malaysia.

Those specialisations in each MRSM school are merely cliches filled with educational terminologies that are not fully understood but fully acceptable as a platform to appease the needs of the current regime.

Regimentation is necessary it seems to tune the mind of the monolithic mono-cultural students to accept governmental dictates making them in turn, one-dimensional beings.

Are any of those MRSMs suitable for Malaysian children? Or are they merely training and indoctrinating grounds to prop up yet another breed of leaders that will sustain the culture of blind following neo-feudalism of Ketuanan Melayu that itself is a dying specie?

Do parents know what goes on in the culture of the MRSM boarding schools and what goes on in the minds of your children?

In this context, we must look at the difference between education, schooling, indoctrination, mind-control, and liberation in thinking. I would say that the MRSM system is a successful failure.

Retrogressive ideologies

In MRSM, that predominantly Malay-elite secondary institution for the best and brightest young Malays, Malay-centric indoctrination work have been happening since the 1980s. Courses such as Kursus Kesedaran (Self Awareness Courses) are conducted to instill the questionable idea of Ketuanan Melayu, making the children afraid of "Malaysian bogeymen and bogeywomen" and their own shadows.

Open-mindedness is rarely encouraged and students take control over each others' lives transplanting retrogressive ideologies into each other's head, with the help of ultra-nationalist and anti-multiculturalist teachers.

Even if these children survive the ideological ordeal and experience 'tough love' and go on to get their degrees from top American and British universities, they will still be Malays with a shallow understanding of multiculturalism or become more sophisticated Malays with more complex arguments on Ketuanan Melayu.

They will then design policies to affect the needed sustenance of ideology in order to protect the interests of the few. Neo-feudalistic cybernetic Malays are then the new creations of the political-economic ruling class. They run the country and many are now running it down.

As an educator wishing to see Malays progress alongside in peace and prosperity with other races, I call upon us all to put a stop to all forms of indoctrination held especially by the BTN (Biro Tata Negara); an organisation that is of no value to the advancement of the Malays they claim to want to liberate.

It should be taken over by progressive Malaysians and replaced with a systematic effort to promote not only racial understanding through teaching respect and deep reflection on the cultures of the peoples of Malaysia, but also teach conflict resolution and mediation through cross-cultural perspectives. All must question the presence of BTN on campuses. All must reject BTN's programme for indoctrination.

Let us no longer allow any government body of that sort to set foot on our campuses or our schools. As Malaysians we have to demand an end to the further dissemination of racist ideologies.

Open up, not only institutions such as UiTM (Universiti Teknologi Mara) and MRSM but also Umno to more students of the major cultures. We will then have a great celebration of diversity and respect for human dignity in the decades to come.

We need to turn succesful failures such as MRSM into truly successful Malaysian educational ventures; an organic system able to prepare young Malaysian citizens for a diverse, multicultural, and rapidly challenging world - minus the cliches of educational innovation and blind nationalism that will be anti-national in character.

DR AZLY RAHMAN, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Bahru, holds a Columbia University (New York) doctoral degree in International Education Development and Masters degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies, and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 300 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience spans both in Malaysia and in the United States and in a wide range of teaching context; from elementary to graduate education. He currently resides in the United States.

In my garden I asketh

2011-10-15T23:03:00.000-04:00

In my garden I asketh
by Azly Rahman

In my garden I asketh
Roses why must you have thorns?
                   what story of life are you telling us?
as I mow the lawn with this wrecking guillotine machine in my hands
Up and down and in circles
Guillotining thousands after I stormed the Bastille

But still, roses roses why are you with thorns?
As I contemplate roses I asketh again and again
though a strange a question might it be
                  can a rose be not a woman but a man?
                  And the thorns that guard are but guardian angles?
now how could that not possibly be?
                  in a world as upside down as we have created it to be?

And even in my garden I shall never fail to see
As the poet Emily would too agree
                                Life and death
                                Heaven and hell
                                And purgatory
And the role I play in these little worlds I could see
Ah .. my garden and me

goodnight poetry by azly rahman

2011-10-14T11:20:00.000-04:00

goodnight poetry
by azly rahman

poetry comes to me
from unexpected places
as i drift across continents
as my gaze scale the heights of monuments, of the towers of power
as i lay in-between my siestas and deep slumber
as i stare deep into the eyes of those speaking of the stench of wealth and power

ah poetry
you have cometh to me when i was a child,
                      in my simplistic mind, stoning those palaces of tradition

you have now cometh to me as i close my eyes
verses flowing like a river styx
verses in search of a loved one

ah poetry
a friend you have always been
you roam the streets of egypt
of tunisia
of yemen
of mao's china
of castro's cuba
you have touched me
                and drowned me in your reality
that you are merely words
                that become living monstrocities

ah poetry
you and i
have always conspired
since i know what words can mean
how verses can become lovers
                       of a vengeance we embrace
to change things
to our heart's desire

ah poetry
even in my showers
as i bathe away the ills of yesteryears daily
those of mine and others
even as i soothe my soul and make each cells in me
as new as a child conceived in divinity
even as i speak to the waters of purity
that flow into the entire of me
you poetry
and your verses
will still clothe me
             in this invisible shroud oud of mystery

poetry
let us go into the streets
you and i
and plant the seeds of anger in them all
      for anger is already in their hearts

ah poetry
let me tell you this:
this world hath lost you
this word hath gained "it"
as the "it" drifts farther away
from the Thou-ness of things entire

you and i know
this world is a playground
made of the structures of power
installed by vultures
who speaks of the glories of culture
through the stench of their mouth
as their hands strangle the ignorant
as they steal from the poor

ah poetry
        we must now strip them naked
and parade them on a street samba
          in a maoist carnival
will you and i ... poetry? ... my true lover?

you and i
we will wade through the river of blood
that flows deep into the jungles of steel and concrete
we will call upon Reason and Revolution
and the spirit of Rousseau
and break into the towers of power
and yank out those toilet bowls made of gold
of the owners whose fate were long foretold
and turn those mansions into houses of the holy and the old
and of children on the streets hungry and cold

ah poetry
you are now whispering words of love to me

as i close my eyes
to journey yet into another world
wherein the spaces of hope collapses into yet another
layers of colors like rainbow in the dark
as i close my eyes and pull the darkness of the night
that now becomes a blanket of memories like quilt
i close my eyes,
your soul meets mine,
we become one
and we lay silent
bidding goodbye
to this world

poetry: you are now inside of me
as we become
more silent that the night

Trishakthi and Malaysian Politics by Azly Rahman (with Malay translation)

2011-10-13T14:45:00.001-04:00

Trishakthi and Malaysian Politics
by Azly Rahman
(with Malay translation)

Come General Election # 13 in Malaysia, who's going to lead the cybernetic revolution of the Third Force, Third Wave, guided by the Third Eye? The Messiah we need to get us out of the Matrix ...

Third Force, Third Wave, Third Eye = Tri-Shakhti ... a force that should shape new politics away from the current ideological impasse ...Bloggers, commentators in social media must come together and ignite this new intellectual revolution in educating the masses. TRISHAKTI ... third force, third wave third eye ... A force that will color Malaysian politics blind. A force that will be a vigilante to the abusers of power. No one can stop it. The internet is anarchy -- ride its wave.

The Kuhnian Revolution in science proposed that when there are too many questions unanswered as a consequence of the end of history for the prevailing worldview, the paradigm is meeting the near-collapse of its existence. This is said in Kuhn's classic work The Structures of Scientific Revolution. (Thomas Kuhn is a Harvard historian of science)

Malaysia is facing such a crisis - the near collapse of the Barisan Nasional Paradigm. There are too many questions unanswered and too many structures crumbling - judiciary, education, law enforcement, economics, culture, etc. The third wave is here - postmodernity. The first wave, traditional societies gave way to modernization.

In Malaysia, both waves have failed; as consequence of failed policies of modernization taken over by privatization, Look East, and Malaysian Inc. as policies. Vision 2020 is a meaningless slogan created by the ideology of Mahathirism. Capitalism developed without ethics fueled by greed and convenienced by race-based politics.

The third wave is here. The March 2008 tsunami was warning of its inevitability.

But the Third wave needs a Third Force and a Third Eye; Third Force cannot be stopped, Third Eyes cannot be blinded.

TRISHAKTI is here. We need a leader -- an intellectual leader. Current leaders do not understand this force. They are in it and drowned by it, like fish in the water.

Let us push this idea to the masses and see it dance in the Malaysian cyberspace and gets translated into praxis. TRISHAKTI resides in the cave -- Plato's cave

________________________________________________________________

Trishakthi dan Politik Malaysia
oleh Azly Rahman
terjemaan: Zulqurnain Othman

Tibanya PRU13 betapa persoalannya siapakah yang akan mengetuai Revolusi Cybernatik atau Revolusi Cyber dan berlebih lagi dari kerangka Kuasa Ketiga atau Gelombang Ketiga dan berpimpinan dari Mata Ketiga yang mungkin juga boleh di ertikan selaku jurusan mata hati atau mata kalbu. Lantas kemungkinan juga perlunya kita berpaksi kepada Tokoh Penyelamat laksana Al Mahdi yang bisa membawa kita keluar dari kejumudan kewujudan kita masa kini.

Kuasa Ketiga juga gelombang ketiga dan dari itu mata ketiga=Tri Shakthi jikalau di ertikan dari bahasa sanskrit asalnya. Kuasa ketiga ini yang boleh membentuk aliran politik baru yang sewajibnya berjauhan dari ideologi-ideologi jalan buntu sekarang ini. Blogger-blogger juga tukang-tukang komen/ulas media sosial mesti bersatu mencetus dan menyalakan api revolusi intellectual baru demi menyerlahkan bahasa minda masyarakat majmuk.

TRISHAKTHI ... kuasa ketiga, gelombang ketiga mata ketiga... Satu kuasa yang keseluruhannya mewarnai poltik Malaysia hingga terus menjadi buta dari elemen-elemen rasis dan perkauman jumudnya. Kuasa yang pastinya menjadi laksana seorang vigilante atau sang skodeng yang bisa menjerit lantang sekiranya ada sang penguasa2 menyalah guna tampuk kuasa. Tiada siapa yang boleh menghalang

TRISHAKTHI. Dunia Internet sememangnya berbentuk anarki atau caca marba -- kita gunakan sepenuhnya.
Revolusi Kuhnian di dalam wadah sains melamarkan apabila dan tatkala adanya terlalu banyak persoalan yang tidak terjawab hasil dari berakhirnya ketamadunan sejarah atau "the end of history" dan di ertikan dari pandang dunia sedia ada atau prevailing worldview, paradigma ketika itu seperlunya berhadapan tanpa selindung keadaan hampir langsung roboh - near collapse pandang dunia atau world view itu. Kenyataan ini termaktub di dalam Teori Klasik Pendita Kuhn - The structures of Scientific Revolution ( Struktur-Struktur Revolusi Sains) Thomas Kuhn ialah seorang pakar sejarah sains dari Universiti Harvard.

Malaysia sememang nya berhadapan dengan krisis sebegitu rupa - keadaan hampir roboh langsung - "near collapse" Gabungan Barisan Nasional atau lebih tepatnya Paradigma BN itu. Terlalu banyak persoalan yang tidak terjawab dan terlalu banyak struktur-struktur yang telah reput - kehakiman, pelajaran, kuatkuasa undang2, ekonomi, budaya, dlll. Kuasa Ketiga telah ada sekarang ini - pasca modern atau postmodernity. Gelombang Pertama, masyarakat tradisional memberi ruang kepada modernisasi.

Di Malaysia, kedua dua gelombang - masyarakat tradisi dan modernisasi berakhir dengan kegagalan;hasil dari polisi polisi modernisasi di ambil alih oleh privitasi(privatization), Pandang Timur(Look East) dan Perbadanan Malaysia(Malaysia Inc.) sebagai polisi polisi gantian. Wawasan 2020 adalah satu slogan tanpa makna yang di bina dari ideologi Mahathirsme atau Mahathirism. Capitalism atau sistem kapitalis tanpa peradaban(ethics) di sogok lagi dengan naluri tamak tanpa had dan di permudahkan dan di selaraskan bersama 'kejituan' politik perkauman
.
Gelombang Ketiga sebenarnya sudah sampai. Tsunami 03/08 adalah amaran ketibaannya. Tidak dapat tidak.

Akan tetapi gelombang ketiga memerlukan kuasa ketiga juga mata ketiga. Justeru kuasa ketiga tak dapat di tahan dan mata ketiga tak dapat di rabunkan malah di butakan sama sekali.

TRISHAKTHI telah sedia hadir dan kita perlukan ketua --ketua berintellek. Ketua ketua yang ada tiada faham akan kuasa ketiga ini. Arakian mereka telah berada di dalam nya tetapi lemas di dalam nya, mungkin juga di ibarat ikan di dalam air bahkan tiada sedar ia sebenarnya beralamkan fitrah nya tetapi masih sesak lantas tenggelam setenggelamnya.

Mari kita ketengahkan idea gelombang ketiga ini and melihat nya menari nari ria di dalam alam cyber Malaysia tercinta. Juga meneropong ketika ia di bentuk menjadi aturcara aturcara gerak kerja ataupun praxis.

Maka Trishakti bermukim di Gua ahli filasuf Plato!

terjemahan: Zulqurnain Othman
from: Trishakthi and Malaysian Politics by Azly Rahman.

___

The Wise Man of Semabok, Part 2

2011-10-12T16:06:00.002-04:00

THE Wise Man of Semabok, Part 2

II

AAAARRRRRRRGH!” he one day screamed,
... When the pressures of schoolwork sank into him.
“Can’t studying be easier than this?” Johan kept
on asking,
“Isn’t there a secret formula for learning and memorizing?”

And that day Johan buried his face in a mountain
of books,
Like a poor little kitten drowning in a brook,
And he yelled and screamed at the thought of failing,
Until late at night he kept on wailing.

That night Johan slept amongst his books,
Indeed that night he dreamed he was standing
by a brook,
And he was staring at the rushing waters,
“Will I leave this question unanswered?” he wondered.

And Johan kept on wondering and wondering,
When the answer will be arriving.
Not to mention why he was there standing,
Looking at the water fast running.

The Wise Man of Semabok, Part 1

2011-10-11T23:18:00.001-04:00

THE WISE MAN OF SEMABOK
by Azly Rahman

rhymes for modern times,
written in seven days
... in seven different locations
in about seven thousand words

--------------------------------------------

I

There was a boy,
Johan as he was called,
Who lived in the toughest time of all,
In which there was too much to learn,
in not so much time at all.

It was the time of fast computers,
And supernovas and quasars and environmental
litters,
And of course in school, a lot to be learned,
Poor Johan, to have the mind of a genius,
was all he has always yearned.

In school there were Physics and Chemistry,
And History and Biology,
Not to mention all the languages
and all the readings and the homework
given by his teachers.
Oh, how Johan and all those very ambitious
Yearn to find the one best method which
will make them geniuses.

It was his eleventh year of schooling,
A Fourth Former like him doesn’t have much time
for doodlings,
For it was the year of high hopes,
Another year then - there would be a major exam
for Johan to grope.

Thus the journey began for his intensive studying,
Of constant memorizing and reading and calculating,
For Johan wants to do the best in every test,
So as to prove to himself, his parents and the rest,
That he indeed can be the brightest and the best.

Months passed by and the poor boy began
to feel the pinch,
As if he’s crawling every inch,
To get the facts he learned imprinted deep within,
So that he could perform the best - day out, day in.
When the going gets tough, as they say,
The tough gets going, come what may.
But life, like Johan, like that of the rest of us,
Is filled with ups and downs - a roller coaster such as,
And poor Johan, like a lark he rises early morning,
And like a nightingale he retires beyond
midnight calling,
Reading and writing, thinking and calculating.

This world is too much for me

2011-10-07T00:48:00.000-04:00

This world is too much for me
by Azly Rahman

this world is too much for me
and one man can be an island entire of itself
unto which a kingdom divided and united and divided and united again it stands
away from the marketplace and rich-quick scams
away, far far away from sultans and feudal gangs, and royal clans
away from missiles in silos which blow the world out of its DNA strands
away from the blown up face of a boy in Palestine the holy land
away from media persuasions and rape of clever brands
this world is way too much for me

this world is way too much for me
as i longed for death as it comes so easily in multiplicity
consistently in perfect harmony with profound beauty
as all the world's a stage i cannot be a mere player
nor will i be historied by narratives crafted by hypocrites in power way too many
this world is way way too much for me
i cried times too many
until a figure in white robe brought me away to this destiny
but still -- i sit peaceful and empty
though beautiful things around me i carry

this world is way way too much for me
but still i sit on my throne
with mere sound of my breathing i worship incessantly
and for many thousands of years i look into the mirror
like many a poor narcissus in many ponds of grandeur
and for many more thousands of years i waited for company
to help me construct my identity
so that i will be known and knowers will i see
but where is the beloved one who will be my company
one i waited a thousand years still, so patiently?
so that this kingdom of cybernetic philosophy
can reign more joyously?

and the prince will no longer be narcissus
but will be ready for pomp and pageantry
and produce offspring
with roots and wings
who will journey down to this world called Maya
and revolt -- from Srivijaya to Cyberjaya
and destroy missiles in silos
hang war kings, hang their strange bedfellows
and restore the blown-up face of the Palestinian child
and resurrect in every hinterland and principalities
wise men and prophets who once foretold destinies

ahh... for now
this world is still way way too much for me
as i reign alone
meditating on the Self's multiplicity
waiting for company
to speak of unity
of two worlds
breathing silently
and as the hand writes ...
this world is still too much for me

And I bathe in you

2011-10-05T09:22:00.001-04:00

And I bathe in you
by Azly Rahman

O' lovely one
Might this be the end of the journey?

to walden pond --
       as i walked back home from the marketplace
found this text written some time ago
pinned to my favorite apple tree
       a text of conversations in search of truth
and truth in each and every word?

said to myself--
       ah ... never can I think in straight lines
for, is it a square in search of a center?
a fractal coming home in search of that one-cell structure?
or is it us-- looking at the self in search of the other?

think of me come day and night
when you look at yourself with eyes wide shut
look at the beauty of things in state of sobriety
for-- on a clear day you can see eternity
and is this a logical and sensible enough journey?

in the river that runs deep
you become the mountains
the sky
the stars
the morning sun

and in the river
    i bathe in you
-- but still: is not separation a melancholic and painful beauty?

She died at heaven's gate

2011-10-04T00:32:00.000-04:00

"She died at heaven's gate .. "
by Azly Rahman

O' Messenger
I know she would return-- but not dead and still lovely like this!
And tell me-- it is not because of the poem she called "wicked and funny"?
... Not the metaphors of Life I used way too many?
Not talks of boddhistavas and deserving nirvanas?
These are not -- I hope
For these are mere words with not much hope

But she sent me sandstorms
And reconstructed love and conjure stories of more storms
The Rubaiyat of Wall Street I sent her was a gift too strange for many
But one which is a prelude to a journey
Many hath received gifts from me -- but few giveth back gracefully
Are we not the Gift -- unto IT we return night and day, every second aplenty?
But this lovely dragonfly of mine that flew close to the sun--
had not I expected her to surrender so easily
Though I know that rubaiyat a thing so phantasmagoric bound in eternity

I did not write the rubaiyat -- neither the butterfly many thought had died already
But is fantastic -- is it not?
What kind of mind created such verses
Not to be shared with others
Never reveal these to others
From the fountain of Al Kautsar it must have come
Verses and verse poets longed for

O' Messenger I have said to this soul searcher
That the hand -- as it writes --- writes
None is erased
Beauty flows from the heart
Love conquers all with all its might
And I write drunketh and intoxicated
As I sit alone in my kingdom--- of rainbow I erected

We will find out how this divine comedy will transpire
Methinks it might be beautiful if the Dead is resurrected
    and Love reconstructed entire
I will make this journey a peaceful one
Thou hath come a long way in search of the Chosen One

Stay for a while to write this story
You have journeyed times too many
Sit back, relax
perhaps a Cafe Mocha Grande' Starbuck coffee if you may?

She is a lovely child
Many hath asked me to lead them to this path so right
So right ... so right ... it is so blindingly bright
But not for this soul who is aspiring to greater heights

But O' Messenger tell me this
Which gate of heaven is she now at?
The night before I sent her a gift
Like many gifts I sent her and many others for their journey
To loves of my life and to unseen enemies aplenty

O' Messenger
I do not think this soul would be back so early
I had not finished even rewriting Dante's Divine Comedy
Lovely is she not? And she has the sword with her too
       one engraved with the words Might and Right
And she arrived early in the morning -- perhaps she took the early flight?

O' Messenger
You will stay with me
And write this chapter of metaphysical history
It can be better
     than a rumi
     or saadi
     or john donne's poetry
                        we shall see
And I have found my way
Already bored with metaphysical muses at this grand tower made of ivory
And bored of multiple voices I find fake, hollow, and empty

But now
Let me
Rewrite this divine comedy
But who is me?
Who is "I"
Who is "we"
In this kingdom of harmony?

So hush messenger
bring me the answers to this soul's beginning
                                                      and its destiny ...

Phaedrus II: The Last Judgement of Thamus

2011-09-28T09:59:00.001-04:00

Phaedrus II: The Last Judgement of Thamus

by Azly Rahman

__________________________________________

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

-- Denis Diderot, French Enlightenment thinker

There was non among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.

-- 'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley-Wollstonecraft

Sometime ago, after reading Plato's narration of a conversation between King Thamus and the inventor Theuth concerning the impact of new technologies on society, after reading media guru Neil Postman's work Technopoly, and after deep reflection on the idea of the Luddites (a movement that "raged against the machine" during the Industrial Revolution), I penned verses which I find suitable to honour Malaysian bloggers in their onward march towards creating a spectre that will haunt the state-owned print media.

Here it goes:

P H A E D R U S II
The Last Judgement of Thamus
Circa A.D. 2020
Lines composed near the banks of Hudson River, New York city
by Azly Rahman

Background notes: They say that there dwelt at Naucratis in Egypt one of the old gods of that country, to whom the bird they call Ibis was sacred, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. Among his inventions were number and calculation . . . and, above all, writing. . . . To [the king, Thamus] came Theuth and exhibited his inventions . . . when it came to writing, Theuth declared: "There is an accomplishment, my lord the kind, which will improve both the wisdom and the mentory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom." "Theuth, my paragon of inventors," replied the king, "the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it. . . . Those who acquire [writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. . . . What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory . . . ( Phaedrus, 95-96)

And it was in the year 2020
In a not-too-distant cybercity
As Socrates' narratives on cybertechnology
Laments King Thamus's concern for the fate of academies

And Theuth my inventor par excellence
What say you concerning educational excellence?
Of the methods and principles of teaching
Brought about by new technologies of communicating?

O' Thamus, Wise King of Cyberjaya
Indeed our children will undergo Karma
Of one imbued with Dharma
Which will bring us all to Moksha
Karma is Rebirth
Dharma is Devotion and Duty
And Moksha is art of being one with Creation
Of which educational practice will assume a new reality

This invention called blogging
Of which for many ages we have waited so patiently
Will transform the meaning of Reality
                                            and Democracy
as it marries Virtuality
More than what print media has guaranteed

O' wise King Thamus
We are witnessing the death of Papyrus
the demise of Gutenberg legacy
As we witness the birth of PERSONACRACY
deeply personalized form of postmodern democracy
In the brilliance of anarchy
To be cultivated with the media of blogging
By way of this ideology called PERSONACRACY,

O' King
Our children, the true song of democracy they will sing
Of which the teacher will die a slow death
Like the first teacher Socrates
whose fate was a choice he once had
Our children will be Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu
The Creator, Destroyer, and the One who Renews
Our children will make history and create Knowledge
Destroy paradigms
and like Vishnu, preserve what is old and what is new

They will be Renaissance men and women
In their mind neural connections will be made,
synapses will be woven
And the boundaries of the Real and the Imagined we can no longer ascertain
In this onward march towards Virtuality
Classrooms will cease to exist nor too the concept of teaching
The sage of Russia Illich
will be singing
In honor of this day when education means deschooling

O' Thamus wise ruler of Cyberjaya
The days wherein authorities rule capital cities
Will be gone with the advent of my invention called blogging
Pedagogy will be replaced with METAPHYSICAL TRANSITION THEORIES

And Plato's academy will be history
Buried underneath the magnificence of blogging
Gone will be the idea of faculties
In their place will emerge knowledge patterned like fractal geometries
And Chaos will be the order of the day
And Complexity will be king of pedagogies

For the sage Mandelbrott did once spoke
Of the patterns inherent in knowledge and wisdom
O' Theuth my kingdom's most honored inventor,
What say you of the blogger's impact on the teacher?
One who holds the key to any civilization's treasure
And who guards the principles of a moral character?

Wise King Thamus,
this is my conjecture:
My invention is Frankensteinish in nature
Aren't we already at the end of history?
Wherein the Knower and the Known has no longer a boundary?
This technology will destroy authorities
Including values we guard with jealousy
Slain like the dragon in Beowulf's story
Buried with Socrates and Dante Alighieri

A further elaboration concerning the death of authority:
O' King, I call this an Age of Subalternity
In which we will witness the dawn of PERSONACRACY
Of which with the help of blogging,
               the child constructs his customized version of democracy

O' Theuth Master Inventor
Yours is a song of conjectures
For, can you as a creator
Be the judge of what good and bad
               blogging will bring into our future?

My greatest apologies
Wisest of all Kings
Do you not remember that we are in the year 2020?
In which kingdoms have been crushed
                     under the weight of technologies of virtual realities?

And you dear king - are you not already ancient history?

You and your kingdom destroyed by technologies of Virtuality?

Go back to the cave

2011-09-28T01:18:00.000-04:00

Go back to the Cave
by Azly Rahman

Let us go back to the cave, this new year
Let us move forth
beyond the hypocrisy of New York Time Square’s ball-dropping
of those screaming and yelling amidst confetti falling
More than just a night of fireworks in the sky, adorning,
Of drag racing,
Of disco-dancing
Of well-wishing
Of drunk-driving

And next, another year of national forgetting
… a nation in amnesia we are made to be in
Let us not forget what must lie ahead
As we retreat to the “cave”
To think of shadows on its wall
And to reflect upon the “doctrine of reminiscence”
… the river of forgetfulness we drank from, intoxicated therein

In this cave we congregate
And begin to look at this Reality we have constructed
Inside and outside of us as we are made to become cogs
in the wheels of Industry
Inside and outside of us we build Neon Gods and bow down to these
and their creators
Inside of us we have become these Gods

In the cave we must contemplate
The nature of revolution we must initiate
One that must begin with the mind and end with the mind
And in-between these we gather all those
Not yet intoxicated by the fireworks displays nor the hypocrisy of celebrating
Against the backdrop of world’s poor suffering
And in between these-- come forth will those be in full force
to bring this corrupt system down its knees
From inside of us, into the outside of this
… a revolt that must begin with the end in mind

In this cave
We are one
We are many
We are the powerful and the powerless and we are once the power abusers
We speak the language of Nature
Of one that will bring down this world of Materials Culture
Of one that will rewrite our History
So that the past will be closer to our Primordial Nature
So that the future will be close to our Heart’s desire

This will be our cave
In it we will speak of Politics and Culture in its most Ideal form
So that we may speak of The Culture of Vultures outside this cave
this vulture culture that is corrupting Human Nature
making the rich filthier
the poor poorer, trampled upon easier

This will be our cave
Wherein we no longer speak of the national economy
Calibrated by statistical lies only, trumpeted globally
In fine imitation of the language of composite indexes and standards and poor
And how bulls and bears will roam the streets running amuck
to the tune of the velocity of money
as currencies move globally creating national tragedies

This cave will be the place
Wherein we no longer speak of how many billions and gold bullions we will need
To prop up the next emperor with a kris
Nor a place wherein we talk about curbing corruption
Whereas we ourselves are too corrupt to curb ourselves

In this cave
There shall be no fireworks to burn
There shall be no slogans to clutter the timid mind of the people we govern
There shall be no strategies of deception and intrigues of politics to renew
There shall be no plans of monopolizing the prime media to honor
the Neon Gods anew

In this cave
There shall be dialogues our politics and pedagogy once knew
There shall be conversations around the idea of
Who should rule?
Why should we be ruled?
What is a just government?
When does a government become ineffective, abusive, oppressive,
and tyrannical?
and what then must we do?
Must investment bankers become emperors?
Must future leaders ally with global corporate raiders?
Must we disobey unjust laws?
How must we learn to question authority?
How must our children be taught?
How must their intelligence be respected?
Must these young minds be developed by State-conditioned educators?
How must we stop the decay in our universities?
How must we reclaim its prosperity and recapture its dignity?
And vote out those who rule with arrogance and intellectual brutality
What is an ideal society, a perfect government, a philosopher ruler
How might we create a messiah out of wisdom and virtue?
How might we make these possible?
Through a revolution of Pure Reason
That will overthrow governments run by robber barons

This will be our cave
As what Socrates once spoke of
In which Muhammad the prophet of Islam found illuminations in
In which Lao Tzu would had also once retreated to
Let us all go back to the cave
Let us first make our way to the mountains
There is no mountain high enough

Come into our cave---
Educators, university professors, Vice Chancellor, students, activists, enlightened politicians, social workers, farmers, rubber tappers, fishermen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, entertainers, religious leaders, military officers, artists, artisans, musicians, comedians, petty traders, currency traders, multimedia producers, princes and princesses, schoolchildren, …

Come into our cave---
Revolt we must against the Gods of Materials Culture and Political Vultures
Who reign through the Divine Right of Kings
Reigned through Hidden Terror
Mandated by the Modern State it Legitimates
Through the use of The Ideological State Apparatuses it Finely Decorates
So that the Masses will be cleverly subjugated

Let us, when we are ready, come out of the cave---
To create a new social order
For—this world is too much for us.
But we are not merely a speck of dust
We have choices. And we evolve.

This new year, we should be in a cave.

Scream of Consciousness

2011-09-28T01:11:00.003-04:00

Scream of consciousness
by Azly Rahman

i want to write how my spirit tells me, where it moves my soul,
provided i can distinguish what is a spirit and what is a soul
and who writes what i have written....
i want to write as though my consciousness flows like a stream ...

i do not know where my soul lies
nor wherein my spirit reside
nor faith alone can tell me where my body and my soul meets
or when words in me conceived in antiquity
becomes flesh until eternity knocks on the door of
this temporality

i am writing as my heart tells me to
all that is existing in me are merely names embodying flesh blood bones
names that were taught to me in moments of deep serenity yonder in a distant antiquity
in a place only spirits may convene

i will stop writing
but cease will i not in composing the words, breathing life in them, worshiping words and only words
so that they may become flesh blood bones and awaiting for spirits and soul and thoughts and feelings and anger and joy
to yet take shape and form ... in the world of words only i am all too familiar with
as i have seen them in that place, serene, yonder , in a distant antiquity

i am now silent.

Wuthering Heights II

2011-09-28T01:05:00.001-04:00

Wuthering Heights II
by Azly Rahman

And his glorious eyes, like a thousand arrows from Indera's bow
pierced into mine from a pasture unseen yet aglow
into my soul a thousand blows
become seeds made of fireflies' souls glow

And sought thee not in heaven, nor earth, nor wind, nor fire
for he resides in the deepest dungeons of human Desire
of him many a life-time long a seeker longs like the ages of Man
                                           -- one Right a path through many wrongs

Never raise a coward cry in thou's search
for that with the thousand eyes
for he sees thine soul in momentous joys and silent cries
Cease not to think
Cease not to be
These are the hands of the minds
                    That plow the fields of eternity

Seek thee that spirit, seer
Through the sands of time
If thine eyes may catch yet a thousand blows
From Indera's arrow
Though in the pasture of thine soul a thousand rivers of forgetfulness flow
And never one had thou seen his glorious eyes
Neither in heaven, hell, earth, and water
Never once in this lifetime
But at least one has not ceased to think ... nor to be

Cease to think nor be
For therein lies the signs of thine's path to serenity
If thine's journey like Ulysses in Homer's story
Becomes thine’s own in thine's own glory

Seek not the one who shoots arrows
Nor one thou seeks in vain that will come to Humanity
                                     for a better tomorrow
For therein lies human folly and the burden of thine's sorrow
To wonder in disgust what ails one as one plows through those sorrows
of yesteryears till there is no tomorrow ...

The signs of times are the signs for thee
For in thee lies unbridled eternity
That which seeks the glory of the Humanity
wanting to become-- and to be
Arrows that pierce one's heart and soul and the signs inside of thee
are but reminders of the Thou in love with thee ...

Seek in thee the origin of Humanity
In the darkness of the early morn as it awaits the colors of glory
In the silence of the thundering explosion of the Universe and its story
Lies the birth of thee,
witnessed by the angels with deep jealousy

How many eyes are blinded by the brightness of pitch dark reality
Bathed in the river of forgetfulness mistaken as a Ganges of prosperity
How many eyes are pierced by those arrows of eternity
Mistaken the gift of sight to bathe in the glory
and worship the gods and goddesses of materiality

O' humanity
Did you not remember the day in which
                             on one fine darkness of neither day nor night we met?
In which thine has kept the promise to be free and to agree to walk with dignity?
That time when no forms nor substance nor appearance nor encapsulation makes thee?
Have thou forgotten that moment of deep silence that resounded gloriously like a symphony?
Did you remember what was told to thee?

Time is created for thee in this journey
So that thine heart will always be close to remembering thine self in all its glory
Time, like the goddesses Kala, wait no Man nor promises Eternity
Time, when will thou unfold thyself
                                            for these earthly things that take pride in destroying boundaries?

That Light

2011-09-28T01:02:00.001-04:00

That Light
by Azly Rahman

therein in us lies the light
that has transformed the self
and mutate the ego
into differing evolutionary stages
     of consciousness
therein lies, as Man was conceived from spirit and flesh
at Dawn and at the dawning of the historical Man,
the eternal light that alters the entire self
and elopes
and hides
and appears
and disappears
     for the self within,
therein lies at the beginning of creation,
the Man that drinketh from the fountain of Creativity
so that Man may become Creator
as he journeys
into the afternoon,
the late afternoon,
the daybreak, and next
the pitch blackness of the Day,
     only to be reborn and the cycle continues...

Only if man knows
of the light within
that brings him to greater heights
into the layers of the Universe
of the self
     -- larger than the universe outside
     -- until the universes and him becomes one.

But the light too has evolved and rebelled
      - unaware that the self it inhabits
is a well guarded self
wherein the Man
      - the Enlightened One -
sits on a throne
guiding his destiny and
charting his metaphysical history.

Ahhh how nice words like these flow
          -- those only the self knows
For is it not said that
for the known
there is a knower
For the living there is that that liveth within
For the seeing there is one that seeth
For the one that speaks there are verse spoken into .
     And so on and so forth
For -- there is no past nor future
All that ever existed is an ever-changing present ...

On listening to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata

2011-09-28T00:57:00.001-04:00

On listening to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata
by Azly Rahman

Significant
is "night" as an inner cave of the self
           in which the soul seeks solace
            as it speaks to the senses
                      five, six, seven....
            and reconnects with the enlighteningly dark forces
            within the self.

Significant
is "night" as we retreat deep into the abyssimal
           yet blissfulness
           of the soul corroded so much by the multitudinality
           of the stages of life we tried to mediate
                   in this world of form and substances,
                          of the self and the selflessness of the self

Significant
is night to the bright of day
            as dawn greets yet another cycle
            of the creation of the self,
            yet another vow being made in thunderous silence
            in screams of the unconscious
                        -yet another moment of creation to be witnessed --
                                of the Big Bang of the body and soul united yet parted

Night
     you are no longer one with Day.

Will a sonata make us one again?

Thanatos cometh, she may

2011-09-28T00:50:00.002-04:00

Thanatos cometh, she may
For the one in grief
By Azly Rahman

Like the glory of the early morn,
          as it leaves the serenity
          of the night of a thousand stars,
          of the universe bathed in the warmth of moonlight,
you will see the events folding as another new beginning.

There is the gift of the mystery that lies beneath.
          All the world’s a stage we are merely players
          and some play their part well
          some failed but forgiven,
                     next to be given a new script.

Like the fever that is engulfing you,
          yet another catharsis visits,
          leaving you like the one shrouded in a blanket
          awaiting for a revelation
          of yet another conclusion of a chapter in a book of life
                  written,
                  rewritten,
                  and as the hand writes,
                  nothing is erased
but becomes postscripts
of a grand narrative of the self.

Like the warmth of a distant Love engulfing you,
          as it cuddled the tenderness of the one innocent like a lamb,
          yet another wave of happiness awaits you,
          washing away the tears of yesteryears,
          giving you the strength to face the world that will be
                    kinder,
                    gentler,
as you conclude another chapter in your book of life
                   battling demons,
yet unscathed by the waves of advancing destruction.

You grieved for a son that has not the chance
          to taste the sweetness of a father’s love;
          you grieved for the self in you
that has not the chance to taste the blissfulness
          of a union made in heaven.

But grieve not
          till tears run dry,
          till there is no more walls of regret to tear down,
          till there is no memory of yesteryear to deconstruct,
… move forth and live in the ever-changing present,
           cherishing every moment with love and forgiveness
… move forth slowly leaving the memories that still haunt,
            believing that all that ever existed was a stage
                 wherein you played a part in a plot that was never yours,
in subplots that called for thanatos
          upon thanatos to be played
          as if eros is the game …
          of hubris
           of hamartia

you flourished
you flourished
come what may
Thanatos cometh, you may

O' child of wonder

2011-09-28T00:47:00.001-04:00

O' child of wonder
by Azly Rahman

You asked about the meaning of all life's sufferings
                     and all these;
there are none for some,
they are what you wish to create out of these,
                  for many.

You were a child of experiences
that vacillate between the sacred and the profane;
hence you seek for 'god' in "his" house
and still cried like a child abandoned by the divine

You traversed the path of self-discovery,
with beauty and wit as gifts
                  to break the heart of many;
but you gave too much,
too early,
until you find there is nothing left for you
to bathe in love's fountain of glory

You met keen souls
whose character and intentions your heart was never foretold;
only to find sadness and tears of living
you can no longer hold

You found the meaning of things
that grow like flowers in spring;
these are the signs of life you see rejuvenating.

I can go on and on with a thousand verses but to conclude I say

" Of past lives that comes a visitin'
there are those you met to guide you
                                 through the mysteries of the unseen,
there are those who want to tell you how,
                                together, life could have beautifully been."

Man in blue, part 1

2011-09-28T00:44:00.001-04:00

Man in blue, Part I
by Azly Rahman

yonder i saw a man in blue
he must have been in his late forties
he must have been there in the cold for seasons aplenty
he must have a story to tell the world anew
in between the two trees i called theos and pathos i saw him

man in blue tell me your story
though from a distance i hear your whisper
though the sands of time like a hurricane's rage awashes me afar
what burden of this world have thou been shouldering
though in deep contemplation thou sits on the throne of dignity
in between eros and thanatos thou presides
over the spirit of Man in the valley of the shadow of Death
daily it roams

though enshrined in a cold winter's day
thou giveth warmth to the heart of many
of those who seekth thee far and near
to tell the story of a thousand sorrow
to seek thine's counsel so there'll be tomorrow
thou is the beacon of hope blue man yonder
though silent as a rock carved to the shape of a spirit
mystery revealed
man in blue thou has maketh this world think asunder

thou your silence will be eternal
like the rythmns of snowflakes falling in a forest yonder
pray tell me blue man
what life is
what love is
what death means
that thou dwellest in
that thou have seen all

man in blue
how can i touch thee
when thine is a light of multicolored hues
dancing like strobes of rainbow from a distant sky
has not thine a nature?
silent as a bayou so blue
thine like a monalisa's smile chiseled
unmoving
whilst the world of them and i is a rupture
when can i ever touch thee?

man in blue
whilst the world sleeps i stand here staring at you
i really want to know you
speak to me
as i should be spoken to

even from far i can only stare at your feet
Devotion of mine to the wonders of that man in blue
like worshippers of Zeus at the feet of Olympus
like Krishna devotees dancing in Times Square
like those who scaled the heights of Machu Picchu
like fools who dived into the Dead Sea
i will stand here between eros and thanatos, theos and pathos
speak to me, man in blue

bring on

a rimbauld
a reilke.
a rendra
a neruda
a whitman
a shelley
bring on the best of sages
to spew words well-chosen, well-crafted
verses and quatrains that explode emotions
bring on the masters of the iambic pentameters
of sonnets and elegies
to describe you, man in blue
they shall never be able to define you
but speak to me like i should be spoken to

between the streets broadway and amsterdam
of this city
you sit listening to the stories of many
tales of hope and deliverance and peace and plenty
like the statue lafayette brought in honor of lady liberty
you reign supreme in that corner overlooking philosophy
you hadth cometh far, man in blue
carrying the secret you were told
as a child in a far away land
secrets upon secrets told as you reached the peak of that tree
till you were blue, dazed inbetween realities
struck unconscious no child wanted it to be

man in blue, man in blue
tell me what those secrets aplenty you hold
of this mystery of the self i too must hold
i shall be standing here still, in between these trees waiting for thee
till i turn blue like you
whilst the city snow engulfes me

man in blue what hadth silenced thee?
Will I ever be spoken to?

Snow-covered bamboo leaves

2011-09-28T00:40:00.001-04:00

"Snow-covered bamboo leaves"
by Azly Rahman

Today I looked out of my window. The world was white.
As white as the snow: falling and falling as if each snowflake must become
A postscript.
     Of the longest story ever told.

Each bit of snow fall become one amongst millions and billions.
Of snowflakes that will become a blanket of whiteness
That will be weaved like an endless design of a carpet of a story.
Again, postscripts of a life that will be concluded in white.

Today I looked out of my window. I saw not a single snowflake.
The world was not white.
     Leaves from those bamboo trees fall: falling as if each must
Become what a child’s dream is made of.
I saw a child barefoot
Playing with a blowpipe he made out of the postscript of his future.
Running, laughing.
      Away from his sorrows I suppose.
      He is a child of Nature.

He looked at me as I looked outside of my window.
We locked eyes.
I saw snowflakes.
I did not know what he saw. From amongst the bamboo trees his eyes pierced into mine..
He disappeared.
Not a smile.
Not a frown
           he offered as a gift.

In between the snowflakes and the bamboo leaves lie our story weaved.

My philosophy of teaching

2011-09-27T11:22:00.002-04:00

Azly Rahman
‎"To evolve into wiser individuals with enquiring minds, we must ask questions and reflect upon the answers suggested to us. If we are afraid to ask questions, our mind and consciousness will be owned and manipulated by those who think they have the right answers, or by those who wants to use force to tell us what the right answers shall be."
– My thoughts on the nature of learning

"I currently firmly believe that education should first be a dialectical and dialogical tool to mediate and resolve the contradictions between Existentialism and Cyberneticism, and of Cultures of Disabilities, ...and next be a Deconstructive-Reconstructivist tool and social force to engineer personal and social revolutions and progress towards the realisation of a personal republic of virtue, ethics, multiculturalism, and metaphysics; so that human beings endowed with the Natural Rights to be free may collectively become educated to rise above hegemony, domination, and oppression and in the final analysis, journey towards a Pastoral and Natural self ."
- My personal philosophy of teaching

To Pablo Neruda: by Azly Rahman

2011-09-26T11:12:00.002-04:00

TO PABLO NERUDA:
by Azly Rahman

pablo--
you reign supreme amongst comrades, poetry your sword
your heart and soul unscatched by the journey
you rose from a speck of dust
untainted by the economies of scale
you serenade us with songs of children labored in chains and
           left to rot from the politics of pain
from the politic of mouth which speaks
from heart diseased like cold molten crust

pablo--
i do not know what you found, what you saw
in your wide awakened drunkedness
whilst you still called your poetry flawed

oh pablo
i may be a laureate your comrades longed for
nor my poems memorized by those in love and by the masses silenced

but wait pablo--
let me read you like a subtext
let me bathe in your passion for folklore
as i sit solemnly on a bench outside a new york city mall of glitz but violence hidden
as i sit - come hither
    let us have tea and talk about a revolution

you are a friend of the people
of allende whose for freedom instantaneously shattered
by round of ammunition spewed from the brilliance of the lost souls
                  of The Pentagon's totem pole
                  of a clever siege of copper and cattle

and you pablo --
your spirit rose above the ashes
as the wheels of commerce trample geopolitical marshes

am i wrong pablo--
    if is say that love might not conquer all?
       in this world of guns, guts, glory?
     where poetry lives in vain and machiavellian logic build human amongst us all?

am i not right comrade neruda ---
     in saying that the world is in a hurry
     to catapult darwin and friedmann to their glory
     and leave the child alone -- disfigured by splinters of the world economy?

oh pablo ---
you have descended from the poetry of love
cane down this earth, praises be unto you
but wait!
this is not the end of the story of love
the revelation use be constructed anew

and then--- let us finish our cup of tea
and talk about REAL nationalism
          and strange strategies
          and of the self in society
          and of the self in the march of history

ah ... let us now talk about this:
   who has the gin
   and who is hungry
oh ... wait a minute is it this:
   who has the gun because the child is hungry
wait again:
    who still has the gun and the child is still hungry

or-- they have the guns, guts, and glory
     and how do we arm the child with poetry and philosophy

ahh ... this will make sense pablo--

so that we will now know
      how politics is buried under metaphysical poppies!

may you rest in peace, comrade ...

Mao of Love by Azly Rahman

2011-09-25T20:37:00.002-04:00

Mao of Love: preamble
by Azly Rahman
March 5, 2011

I had a dream
Of reading a Rilke
Whilst in a Rimbaud state of mind
Unfinished was my reading
    of the Duino Elegies
    of terrifying angels and of love
In that dream too
In-between my readings
I looked yonder
Three teens
In broad daylight slowly climbed up an apartment building
Scaling the height
To burglarize
And they took only umbrellas
Three beautifully crafted ones
And they opened the umbrellas
And together ... through the window
Smilingly, they ascend to the ground
     That image: like a freeze frame of a postmodern clip
              of The Matrix

In that dream
In a room
Full of people I saw her
    In red cardigan
    Or was it a turtleneck I was not sure
       As what dreams give me: benefit of the doubt
In her lies a childhood
A landscape of raw emotions
A tapestry of dialiectics
Amidst the world of growing materialism
Dialiectical materialism ... of love

I woke up
    Time collapses
       Persisting like a memory still, like a Salvador Dali
Flashed in front of my unseeing eyes are the words:
    Mao of Love ... Mao of Love ..
Forcing me to seek inside of me
This strange sensation of love
That constructs and deconstructs and reconstructs
That is a thesis and an anti-thesis and synthesizes and the cycle continues
That proposes and disposes and recomposes
That lives and dies and reincarnates
That loves and hates and reconciles and comes back in forms anew
That walks and marches tens of thousand of miles and sacrifices for the Mao of Love
That has no fear to abandon love of materials for higher love

Mao of Love I was writing
Beyond the Tao of Physics
          I too was contemplating
Out of the dream that came a-visitin'
These words repeatedly I was chanting

My chants of the Mao of Love
Brought me back to my dreamstate
As every cell in me chants the mantra
incessantly
Like the wise one under the bodhgaya tree

Becometh of me was something I have never seen
A body and soul there is --
yet without boundaries
There are only words inscribed unto my entire body
Like tombstones glowing in a wasteland of warm lights aplenty

Like a apparation in front of me
I saw myself like clouds moving
in a pompous ceremony
Entering the room where the one in red sat alone
In the smoke-filled room
With multicolored strobe lights dancing
till eternity

We Shall Meet again

2011-09-24T17:02:00.002-04:00

We shall meet again
By Azly Rahman

We once met when Time was immaterial,
grasped by the hands of the Beloved
When you and I was Space
          formless and void
whispers and screams of that tedious argument of creation we could hear
in the corridors where spirits roam
          in a purgatory of yet
                 another karma
                 within a karma
         to become yet another form and nothingness
you and I care not

Unforgettable Fire
I shall meet you again
With Time and that Void we have brought together
          as we unite and soar higher
as we become no longer flesh, blood, body, soul, intuition, Indra –

We have gone far my Love
This perfect union
Long has it been an imperfection
Dharma disposes

We have seen Kurusektra
Where fire rages within the hearts of men
Brothers against brothers
warrior against his guru
Krishna the charioteer
Guiding that Kshatriya of all Ksatriyas
           Arjuna
the reluctant slayer

Ahh ... we have seen
     how Fire consumes the soul
             of mice and men

Have we not also seen the wanderings of Adam
imbued with names
banished in shame
to suffer the pain
Of a well-designed game?

O’ love ... did you and I not
bear witness to that?

You and I O'love
Could not endure even the sight of pain
of siddhartha the prince of light
he was becoming
          a living meditating corpse
          fasting
          suffering
          transforming

O' Love
you are a devotee to the wishes of men
            have you not bathed them in you?
                     so that they may become flesh and blood?

but you and i will meet again O'Love
Unforgettable Fire
     we shall meet again

Totem poles of the Unseen

2011-09-22T22:27:00.004-04:00

Totem poles of the Unseen
by Azly Rahman

in thyself lies another Universe,
     of landmarks and tombstones and
     of totem poles of the Unseen,
couched merely in languages, concepts, words,
     that await meaning

– in this universe if one knows
-- ones does not exist but is created and destroyed
and recreated daily in a cycle of being and nothingness ..
and this Universe is formless but organic
and can be seen only with the non-existent eyes within
the world outside is an imperfection
that too needs to be lived in and explored
          ... as one is condemned to be free ...

the world inside is a perfect beauty
          and gloriously mathematical
          and symphonic that helps explains
          and guides the world ... outside ...
as one is condemned to know
... Platonic one could say
being intoxicated by both worlds
       would lead to an imbalance
drinketh not from the River of Forgetfulness, some might say

how could one explain creation of the outside world
     when one cannot see what is created daily
          in one's inner universe?
how could one understand destruction in the outer universe

     when one's inner universe fails to experience inner destruction?
how could one reconstruct oneself out of the ruins of such destruction
     when one cannot master the signs and symbols of the inner world
          and name the temples and totem poles of the inner self?

read oneself well entirely
    and one can read the scriptures within,
    mastering one's destiny and charting one's path of righteousness ...
read in the name of thyself ... as within thyself
          lies the world that explains what lies outside ...

within the course of one's living
within the lifetime of one's existing
lies the story of Creation
only made meaningful if one could see
          how the beginning and the ends of things reveal themselves
          ... the Alpha-Omega of things entire

the world outside of oneself has taken a wrong turn
how could the Merciful and the Compassionate allow
mercilessness and chaos to reign
     from time immemorial
there is as if an angel of Death unleashed and allow to roam
...chaining the angel of beauty and life on its own,
          watching from the cage

speak to me of Existence, said the Outer Self
     as I am lost without an explanation
speak to me of Harmony
     as I am wobbling in this world I traverse
speak to me of Eternity and the Eternal Soul
     as I am a hollow being and has become the wretched of the earth
speak to me of the nature of the Creator and the Created
      of the Reality and one that is being Realized
          the Manifest and the one being Manifested
so that I may not live merely as a speck of dust
     but as a spirit yearning to rise
     a soul yearning to Know

in the sorrow of men
     lies the evolution of suffering
           of Ignorance
of shattered window to the soul
of eyes that are not taught to see
of the ears that are not taught to hear
...the mouth not taught to utter the
          names forbidden to be spoken of

O' Wise One
Show me the path of the Unseen
     Should I become a devotee to what you are teaching
Show me where Life is
     as it nourishes the Living
Show me where Knowledge resides inside of me
     as it is guided by the One that Knows
O Wise One
where shall I find thee?
when you are now totem poles in me?

Paradise lost paradise regained

2011-09-22T22:22:00.003-04:00

Paradise lost paradise regained
by Azly Rahman

Was I ever told of a paradise that once embodied me
of flowing rivers of a thousand amazons
in which the soul was embodied not by the flesh and blood
of a womb of love
why was I not told of a place I once knew
where sin is not yet a chess game of salvation
of a tedious argument between humanity and the almighty
Why was I not told of such a paradise?

Why was I told of a paradise of a time I cannot remember
of one where pomegranates they say are the seeds of the sins of Man
And old women and snakes as temptress like a set of tedious arguments creep upon my soul and eat out of its flesh
Ready I am to be expunged out of this paradise
With a soul as bruised as a apple gnawed by the worms of eternity
Why was I not told about my conditioned in such a paradise?

They said paradise is lost
They said paradise regained
Why should I not create one
Closer to my heart’s desire?

In silence by Azly Rahman

2011-09-22T22:04:00.001-04:00

In Silence
by Azly Rahman

in silence lies
     the formless
     the unspoken
     the unsaid
     that single breath
   the way
     the tao
     moksha
     Thou
in it lies the screams
           of the silence of truth.

Nature in me

2011-09-22T21:22:00.004-04:00

Nature in me
by Azly Rahman

Speak to me of the wind
And I will speak to you of its origin

Look not into things that has no bearing
For, origin is fixed and soul ever changing

All the wind mean
Is that the souls have been
And the souls have seen
Everything and nothing

And sing to me the song of souls and spirits
And I will walk you down the path to where they inhabit

I long to sing the song of the soul
But I am mute

I long to hear you speak of the spirits
But I am deaf

Could thee ask them to sing instead
Then all the meanings will stay intact

Speak to me of thunder and lightning and of the roughness of Nature
And I will show you where in the world inside of you Nature is preserved and ruptured

Thunder
Lightning
The roughness of nature
Oh the wonders of the world
tender to the sense but frequently blurred
by the things shrouding the mind

Where in me are you --- Nature?

Mother's Day

2011-09-22T09:55:00.001-04:00

Mother's Day
by Azly Rahman

Mother
I am at a loss for words
I could just write “Words cannot describe my love for you.
     Thank you for everything …”
           Like everybody said
           In those cards, those poems, those moments of well-wishing
I could just say that
And wait for another year.
     Another celebration.

At each and every breath I take
As each and every thought of every veins in my body that makes me stay awake
Each and every cell I bathe with mantras to
Each and every corner of your womb my eyes glanced through
I want to say “thank you …”
But that would be ordinary
As others too have wished. Maybe.

I could send you a card
A prayer to your soul
And remind you of a memory of me when I was a child
And tell you where I have been as I walk on this world they called “maya”
I could tell you now what you meant by the path of righteousness
        The path I took
        The road not taken
        That may have made a difference
But mother, on this day of yours
Those would be ordinary.

I am at a loss for words
Unless my thoughts and my words are in the Jawi you know
I could write about the days when I was a child
       Fighting demons
       Strange creatures in my mind
       Out to destroy our kampong
       I fought them alone
       None will ever know
       On those trees
       In the rivers
       In the room I locked myself in
            No one knew . Not even you.
I could write all those on Mother’s Day
But those would be ordinary stories.

Mother on this day I must confess
That I was an existentialist as early as when I started to:
        Climb that tree
        Sneaked out of that wooden back door
        Jumped out of those old Javanese looking windows
        Roamed the city alone in my Japanese slippers
        Walked along the huge huge water pipes that lead to Singapore city
I was an existentialist, mother.
I cared about the Universe
But did the Universe care about me?
I wanted to tell you all these
On Mother’s Day back in the day
But my story would be ordinary.
     Plain ordinary.

You combed my hair daily
Laced it with Brylcreem
Masked me with Cuticura talcum powder
Tucked my shirt well into my neatly pressed pants
You held my hand everywhere I go
Afraid that the world would take me away
You held my hand tight as we crossed roads
Afraid that I would come to multiple crossroads
I wanted to tell you all these Mother.
          On the following Mother’s Day.
Back in the day.
Ordinary story to me.

Mother you are sweet
You said I had beautiful eyes
Those eyelashes too
Eyes that came from the depth of the night
Somewhere you and I may know
I saw you smile
When many came to look at my eyes
But what have those eyes seen now?

I don’t know how to say “Happy Mother’s Day”
That would be too ordinary to you and me.
I can only feel everyday is your day .
    Though for many years I was sent away.
        Like an anarkin.

Gently on my door she knocked

2011-09-22T09:44:00.003-04:00

Gently on my door she knocked
by Azly Rahman

Poetry has come to me again
i do not know from where
       did it knock at my door softly?
       did it rage out of my fireplace and engulf me entirely?
       did it rain on me when i was out walking?
       did it whisper like a night of thousand stars
it comes when it knows i need her
when she knows
     i am in flames
when she knows
     i am as calm as a walden pond

Poetry comes to me when I am angry
At the world that has no mercy
       for those trampled by systems
          designed by human insensitivities
when iron hands in soft velvet gloves pound mercilessly
          on those fighting for basic human dignity
when black-robed men in the court of law preside
          over the fate of fellow men
stinking voices of higher justice
          whispering judgments into their ears
when men spewing religious verses in parliament houses
          rob fellow men in broad daylight
those horrifying faces of politics still running around
          spewing venoms calling for crusades
poetry comes to me in times that try men’s soul … in times like this

She has come again

2011-09-21T11:54:00.001-04:00

poetry comes to me again
like a voice holding my hands into the woods in which the future reveals itself
like a world of wonder that unveils a curtain
to a congregation of the hearts chanting to ease pains
what must i write? will i have an audience?
must i whisper to you poetry; what i saw ... what i can see?
must i keep silent and let the loudness of the chants overwhelm me?

poetry has come again
whilst i open my arms
to catch rainbows
by the river Styx
poetry: you have come again
tell me what this is all about?

Did you not tell me
          when I was a child
That there will be so much love to share
In a world that will grow older, colder, with the cries
          of a hungry child left in a huge dumpster of Progress?
          of a young girl driven to the brink of madness by the elegance of the neon lights?
          of a grow up man crushed of his torso by the heavy blow of daily toil?
          of a woman in twilight years whose Love having flown leaving her wilting like a rose dried up
                                                                              ----like a raisin in the sun?

poetry: did you not tell me all these whispered into me those moments we we up on that tree?
did i not ask you to whisper to me what the ultimate answer is?
                               or did i not whisper that to you
                                                   before you become you --- o' poetry?

poetry: you told me that rocks would speak to me in my alone-ness
as they roll down the hill
            gathering moss
that i would catch rainbows
            with open arms as i wade through the river styx
bidding farewell to the one i love
             you told me these, poetry
                               all these
did we not agree that Life is a child of Death?

Poetry: my first love ... my last
have you not flowed into my veins
build castles in every cell of my body?
become each breath that i take
reproduce yourself in every breath i give back
                       into this Finiteness of the world outside of you and i poetry?
i shall bid the world goodnight as poetry and i dance in our dreams

Angry poetry

2011-09-19T10:00:00.002-04:00

Angry poetry
by Azly Rahman

Shouldn't have I been angry and write this cranky grumpy poetry
T's the state of the world so sorry
That has made my brain cells fried and my emotions so roller-coastery
Cool me off by writing poetry
Dip me in Loon Lake or the one where Loch Ness have its weekend party
I am cranky grumpy angry
And I am not sorry ...

Thought of taking a walk to Ben and Jerry's
OD'ed me on a gallon of Chunky Monkey
Started thinking of Malaysia's Bersih Rally
Give me that gallon of Yellow Mellow, Ben and Jerry!
I want it now or you won't like to see me cranky
You capitalist ice cream maker colonialist imperialist ice breaker!
I am cranky and sweaty
And I am not sorry for this cranky poetry

Yellow Mellow hot potato
Yo' Malaysians you are so cranky
You masses are angry I'll spray you with sambal tumis aplenty
Stupid rallies they say
Disturbing the peace of this country that is in harmony
Shut up masses
Hush and shush!
While we steal diamonds, submarines, Twin Towers, golden yachts,
and smuggle them out of the country
Don't be cranky now
Don't be grumpy
It's all a game of who's mighty!

The heat
Intensity
Relativity
Hiroshima
Nagasaki
Humans are crazy
Radioactive crazy
Terrorists aplenty
Suicide bombers spirituality gone Lucifer-crazy
Purgatory
Black Sabbath Fender Stratocaster Hell-Raising guitar-ripping crazy
Grumpy cranky sweaty I am in the heat of New York city
Country roads take me home Sin City Jay Bee

My body's sweating with indescribable beauty
Blood sweat tears of industry
Like the workers of the world uniting in harmony
March on walk on carry on
In the heat of the summer night
Bring down the corporate imperialists down to their knees
Globalization ain't apple pie and cream cheese
A billion served a billion more starved
McJihad McTerror McModern Slavery
Aaargh...hot sweet summer beauty
this heat is making me write cranky poetry
Stop me
Take away my pen
before I march alongside Old Man Samad Said in his next BERSIH Rally

Rubaiyat of Wall Street

2011-09-18T16:25:00.000-04:00

Rubaiyat of Wall Street
by Azly Rahman

T'is neither Beast nor Beauty
But thoughts herein to tame those who are angry
For anger is Fire of raw Desire
To be molded with clay -- to our Heart's Desire

The Beast is still a Beast within
The Beast speaks in quatrains
Whilst meditating in front of an Approaching A-Train!
A minute is like a thousand years
To hand the keys to Beasts who desire

Drink let us all -- from the cup of hot and cold
To reach the Heaven, from stories only we were told
Drink-- whilst I meditate upon chromosomes
Twenty plus THREE a pair -- all yearning to come home

The wind is like the Tempest's Ariel
High speed access of the Angel Gabriel
From seventh heaven the symphony cometh
Scent of the One who reigns in a place
                             filled with Love and Warmth

Sing my love sing
So that you may find what is missing
Ecstasy is a meadow in this idea-scape of cybernetic philosophy
Where the King reigns in perfect harmony

Many hath journeyed and not come back
Scattered all over are multi-colored brand-named backpacks
But i am too in the forest and ocean floor
Living amongst myth, legends, and folklore

Worship, my Love worship
But not mute walls nor idols nor structures one reached through hardships
But speak thee with the Messengers entire
From dawn to dusk and night when souls are in slumber

Every inch of me embalmed in a computer diskette?
Like bones and marrow laid to rest in a rotting cascade?
The lightness of being is a state of Heaven's gate
No -- no -- not NIKE shoes nor Californian suiciders of Heaven's Gate

Wind -- I thank thee for stopping by
Come back to me, for more questions souls will live by
See me in my office -- between nine to five
All ten of you angels -- not the eleventh I banished whose union I denied

Origin matters
Origin matters
Else in life we will have metaphysical stutters
Tell me of the curse, my precious Love
I will send you a piece of my Love which will have it run wild

O' Love
What hath been wrong with the way of the world
Forked tongue men in long flowing robe
    and women treated like hot-fudged swirls
My Love, if you cannot stand if this happens again
Sit still and meditate
   to unravel this mystery come snowstorms and rains of sand again

Love,
I am no beauty
Nor light in the dead and still of the night
But one who taught Alexandra how much to conquer
     and if Might is Right
Many eyes are sore
   diseased from too much of blinding light

O' Love
Tears of sadness flow down my cheek
Waiting for the seekers of Love --
    the young
    the old
    the oppressed
    the meek
News and views hath been sent aplenty
Yet only a few will return to serve
     in this here-and-now Reality

May the force-- my Love
May the force --- be with you
This sword I give to you is not brand new
Pass'd down from Sir Gawain
    the green knight he slained
This sword will split open the seven heavens
            with one strike so light
Engraved on this sword are so verses
                         so Right
                         so Mighty Right
this word-- from a Beloved
     I will treasure till Death invites me aside ---

Go forth in peace-- my Love.
We shall meet again-- and become One.

Epilogue by Azly Rahman

2011-09-17T19:30:00.001-04:00

Epilogue
by Azly Rahman

poetry has come to me again
so often it knocks at the door of my eternal soul, i do not understand
hardly the time i have to gather the spirits inside of me
from their wanderings whilst i am deep in slumber
to gather them
... to warn them that poetry hath come
so excuse me while i kiss the sky
and caress the muse
and serenade the darkening stars
under this angry moon
canopied by the red blood sky

T'is not my nature with poetry I meant to hurt anyone
Philosophy is so powerful it permeates
     and becomes love
     and becomes poetry
     and hence philos and sofia
     and the hands write ...
But philos must come down and dwell amongst the citizens of Maya

I am philosophy in search of boundaries
        religion in search of sensibilities
but perhaps, looking for these
            from the balcony of the glass walls of ephemereality
   --- i should not have meddled in the affairs of humans
          nor look closely at pine trees
but your poetry have of late touched me so deeply ... so deeply
                               shattering boundaries I guard jealously
and yours are words that branched out of this physical reality
    so real they are yet glazed with metaphysical reality
                                            with pure religiosity

These conversations
we hold dear to our hearts
in the presence of the Thou
    they are here to stay
    come snowstorms
    come sandstorms
    come the company of angels on fire
These conversations shall remain cherished
   and guarded from others who will never comprehend strange phrases i must utter

But not you perhaps
For I have long lit a candle
by the side of the biggest and strongest pine tree
and camp there nights so many
    whilst I preach to this magic carpet
        --- rats! how can I bring this tree for this magic ride?
             never have I meant to transform dragonflies into trees!
             tress will be trees
               specks of dust will know joys and miseries
             for these are where heaven and hell lie
             in a world of fractal beauty and weeping dragonflies

We might never meet in flesh and blood
    --- only in cybernetic reality
But this --- is the ultimate beauty.

At the "Louis XVI Collection, European Art" Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, circa 2005

Malaysia-- a scientific bolehland?

2011-08-22T01:07:00.003-04:00

M'sia - a scientific bolehland?

Azly Rahman
Aug 22, 11
12:06pm

10 friends can read this story for free

As we approach yet another year of Merdeka/Independence, we are challenged with yet critical questions on developmentalism - how progressive and scientific have we become, as the pledge embalmed in the preamble of the Rukunegara?

How has modernisation helped us develop the necessary skills to become good citizens? How have we used science to fuel the engine of growth that is not synonymous with a Lotus-engine fuelling Formula One vehicle in the Sepang circuit - engines that will bring this nation to a massive heart attack on the fast track of progress?

Arriving from abroad and approaching the baggage claim area of the KL International Airport, one must marvel at the feeling of tremendous progress Malaysia has achieved, with the first-class infrastructure installed onto the landscape. There one sees a shopper's paradise - as if yet another facility for our national retail therapy has been built serving the wives of the rich and the powerful of the Malaysian and the international global power elite.

En route to Kuala Lumpur, one sees the magnificent buildings with their architecture the “Islamic way” or Moorish-styled to remind one of Malaysia that insisted upon the Malay-Muslim ideology driven by the notion of progress and modernisation that emphasises on human, scientific, and moral values.

The architecture of Putrajaya and Cyberjaya - twin cities emblematic of high growth Asian Despotic style - attest to the country's commitment to radical change in the conception of the developmentalist agenda.

Malaysia has now turned into a Scientific Bolehland in which the can-do philosophy of high and ornamental growth embraced by the ruling regime is fashioned after the notion of science, framed religiously, dominantly Islamic (albeit framed, as a matter of convenience, ideologically.) That is the image of scientific and technological advancement.

That image of “progress-we-must-scientifically-we ought to be-morally we insist” is beautiful as a façade. The notion of scientific progress is adequate to show the world how this country has triumphed over colonialism and which has now progressed further than the land of her colonial master that recently produced a London riot.

But if one travels around the country as an anthropologist of hypermodern developmentalism, one could see the contradictions of capitalist advancement - exemplifying the half-bakedness of how science is understood in society, what has become of the meaning of technological progress, how science is demystified in the public discourse, how scientific knowledge is disseminated into the schools, and finally how much the discourse of developmentalist agenda is misunderstood to mean the race to embark upon real estate projects that have little bearing on the meaning of human progress and liberation.

How has science been “enculturalised” and deployed ideologically is of concern to those interested in Malaysia's brand of Asian capitalism.

The ability to know what progress means

Science, from the Latin “scientia” means “to know” and to be “scientific” means to be ”knowledgeable”. What this means in Malaysia as a scientific bolehland is the ability to know what progress means from a system of knowing about one path of developmentalism.

What we see installed in our landscape of progress are testaments and architectures of political and economic power that are based on a shoved-in-the-brain-of the founding-fathers'-and-mothers' notion of neo-colonialist agenda of human progress.

How much science as an enterprise of verifying and falsifying and accepting or rejecting of this or that hypothesis, in this case ideas and notions of progress in this Scientific Bolehland, is a concern - are our policymakers using analyses and findings from impact studies in order to “develop and modernise” this country?

How much are scientific findings respected and used for driving growth and environmental protection, conservation, and preservation? How much is science used in helping develop the culture of modernization in its most progressive sense?

How much is science is used to make our schools more equitable and the resources shared equitably so that the original twin-pronged idea of the New Economic Policy - eradicating poverty and restructuring society - is developed justifiably?

Most importantly, how much is political ideology dictating the developmental that ought to benefit from good findings from scientific research - those that put science at the service of society first and puts human beings at the centre of the universe of the chakra of human progress?

We seem to be progressing in a very uneven way - the class divisions in society manifesting itself not only in cities but also in the suburbs and hinterlands and principalities.

Travelling the length and breath of this country, one could see the semiotics of social change, in a land that prides itself in high growth but humiliates itself in the political will to understand alternate development paradigm that not only addresses the issue of equity, equitability, and intellectual and environmental sustainability via science and technology, but the problem of respect of human and constitutional rights.

That is what we have become - a scientific bolehland. Perhaps a pseudo-scientific land of First World infrastructure and Third World intellectual demeanour.

A collapsing grand narrative

2011-08-15T04:30:00.000-04:00

A collapsing grand narrative

Azly Rahman
Aug 15, 11
11:42am

To understand the nature of knowledge and the history of its conceptualisation.

To understand the differences between knowledge, information, understanding, application, and able to articulate how these conceptions differ from one another.

To utilise the understanding of the philosophical, cultural, and political-economic aspects of knowledge as a basis to create newer and synthesised understanding of these and craft frameworks to offer perspectives to social and moral problems.

To develop logical, creative, moral, and futuristic ideas for social and organisational change; ideas informed by the deep rooted and broad-based understanding of knowledge in the most inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural sense of the word.

To develop a set of cognitive skills to be recognised as effective, respectable, well-informed, philosophically-trained members of a think-tank group of social organisations and social frontier thinkers able to generate innovative solutions to complex problems.

To explore varying cultural philosophies and draw universal themes of ethics and social reconstructionism to affect changes that will benefit the poor, marginalised, and alienated of all ethnic groups.

Such is the newer design we ought to explore to renew our intellectual prosperity. We must begin to become a nation of philosophers more than a nation of plunderers.

Why Malaysian Muslims too must thank the Christians

2011-08-07T02:06:00.002-04:00

RESEARCH NOTES -- On Cyberspace

2011-07-21T09:59:00.000-04:00

The concept of cyberspace
If I am to choose the concept "cyberspace" as a starting point of using it in a hypothesis, I would craft it briefly as follow:

For nominal definition, "Let cyberspace mean the environment in which we interact as beings in a digital context". This would allow readers to assume that the words surrounding --- words such as "environment", "interact", "beings" and "digital" --- will be primitive terms understood by those in this postmodernist era.

For denotative definition, it could be crafted as "Cyberspace can mean either of the following; a digital space where text, audio, video and graphic intermingles, or a space wherein human interaction depends on the use of 'clickstream' technology as well as well as the creation, destruction, or recreation of data" And the list of terms which denotatively refer to cyberspace can be extended as it would allow for empirical import as well as fertility because of the availability of primitive terms in it.

For connotative definition which lives and breathes on a combination of primitive and denotative definitions and one which allows especially for the fertility of the concept and attempt to arrive at precise communication so that empirical import can be build in, I would craft the term as such:

"Cyberspace is an abstracted area in which the human self participates in the exchange of social messages in an environment characterized by the complex communicative system in which information in digital form and character is encoded, coded and decoded for a particular purpose".

The above connotative definition though quite long-winded, I think would allow for some degree of precise communication, empirical import, as well as fertility when used in a hypothesis.

The woman who burned her salmon

2011-07-17T14:55:00.000-04:00

The woman who burned her salmon
by Azly rahman

Descending from the clouds late one evening visiting souls
I chanced upon a woman too many but that one who burned her salmon got etched in my memory

She wanted the dame of the Atlantic sea to be one with Teriyaki
Grilled it on the stove fully dressed in ginger and wasabee
In her eyes I saw her spirit dancing frantically almost like a flamenco and salsa choreographed in hybridity and that her salmon was quiet and ready to face its karma for living a life of a piranha

From the clouds high above I was hanging upside down watching the woman sprinkling her Teriyaki

Like a high priest of a temple of Helena blessing the devotee with black wine

The salmon smiled awaiting paradise of the hereafter at every sprinkling of the holy source her soul feeling cleansed of the life she lived in the rivers of Sin City

She is now ready for her journey to mokhsha
I saw the woman’s eyes

Fifty not yet-still she may have been but a beauty of no comparison she seems, her hair like Yoko Ono’s flow gloriously all over her sanctuary, the kitchen of a paradise of any woman’s envy and she sang happily

Ahh … beautiful woman I could see her from my upside-down-ness
Where have you been all these years
As mysterious as the origin of the Teriyaki
As precise your tale as the perfectness of the wasabi
As calm in the face of death as the martyrdom of the salmon with a pink Atlantic body
And the kitchen and her became one

Immersed in the finiteness of the cybernetic technology in her hand and her salsa-flamenco hybridity in her mind, she danced and danced until she is the danced and the dance become her
Hours may have been for the joys of suffering of the salmon teriyaki that the woman was already in ecstasy that nothing else matters but the act of becoming of bodhishakti and to detach one with the salmon blessedly bathed in the holy teriyaki

Then suddenly
Suddenly
Actually more than just suddenly

The salmon was well cremated
As it was well-intended
Ashes it has almost become
At the fifth heaven it has arrived
En route to purgatory it has traversed
Singing hallelujah along the path to ultimate glory
Bathed in teriyaki it was

The whole kitchen was smoking like a concert hall playing beethoven’s fifth symphony
And still, the woman who burned her salmon
Did not even realize what a panditha to salmons she has become
As she continues to dance
Not even glancing out of the window
Where an upside-down being hangs wondering
How many fish get martyred the Japanese-way!

malaysia turning red?

2011-07-07T22:35:00.001-04:00

The Malaysian government should be glad that the country is only turning yellow and not red; yet the ideological state apparatuses are used to pound the people blue and black; how can we find a green pasture in all these and agree that all politicians must first be bathed in clorox white? ... hmmm ... i 'd rather be wearing an orange robe sitting under a blood red sky listening to deep purple ... -- azly rahman

BERSIH RALLY in America ... circa 1960s.

2011-07-03T22:48:00.000-04:00

Fellow Malaysians ... bring yellow flowers to the rally ... give to them.

2011-06-27T23:09:00.004-04:00

MALAYSIANS: On July 9th. to promote peace and brotherhood/sisterhood and to exercise fundamental rights to freedom of speech, bring yellow flowers and give them to PERKASA and UMNO members ... they will appreciate your peace-loving gesture ... let peace and freedom reign ... we shall overcome .. with yellow flowers of peace ... FLOWER POWER TO ALL ... sing "Lancang Kuning" too if you must -- ar

AZLY RAHMAN

Epihany of a mediated self

Amerika and I

Ode to folks of kuala lumpur city

From a dream

From a dream

On Malaysian education: poverty and margnalization

Azly Rahman

meditations: south china sea

Whirling and whirling

by the sea, midnight

"by the sea, midnight"

by azly rahman

Ode to Darkness

155] A Malay view of "Ketuanan Melayu"

Re-reading WS Rendra's "Perjuangan Suku Naga" (The Struggle of the Naga Tribe)

eternal flame

Malaysia: A collapsing grand narrative

VIDEO: How Malaysian mainstream media works too

ESSAY: Hijrah in reverse

Dawn

LYNAS ISSUE AGAIN: Malaysians learn from this video! Protes against the Kuantan Lynas Plant.

Occupy Dataran, too?

eleven-eleven-eleven-eleven

far and near

far and near

by Azly Rahman

from up above looking down below i could see so far yet so near and at times.so near yet so far yet a deep blue sea we are watching the waves come back to the shore till eternity the waves come back to the shores in tears wiped dry by the blue ocean

in her eyes

STATEMENT: On culture

Love-- not yet known

We have become hyper-real

Malay is a fruitless language

OPINION: Are the Malay linguistic nationalists betraying our children?

Only Love is the Absolute

Times like this

Times like this

by Azly Rahman

Recitation II: Random verses

Death

Pronouns, Pathetically yours

Pronouns, pathetically yours ... by Azly Rahman Sitting in my garden under a flame of the forest today I close my eyes

Arjuna II

Arjuna II

Wasteland II (with apologies to TS Eliot)

Intellectual apostasy by Azly Rahman

Malaysian academicians and their pledge of loyalty

Is HIMPUN against apostasy necessary?

MRSM schools a successful failure?

In my garden I asketh

goodnight poetry by azly rahman

Trishakthi and Malaysian Politics by Azly Rahman (with Malay translation)

The Wise Man of Semabok, Part 2

The Wise Man of Semabok, Part 1

This world is too much for me

And I bathe in you

She died at heaven's gate

Phaedrus II: The Last Judgement of Thamus

Phaedrus II: The Last Judgement of Thamus

by Azly Rahman

__________________________________________

Go back to the cave

Scream of Consciousness

Wuthering Heights II

That Light

On listening to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata

Thanatos cometh, she may

O' child of wonder

Man in blue, part 1

Snow-covered bamboo leaves

My philosophy of teaching

To Pablo Neruda: by Azly Rahman

Mao of Love by Azly Rahman

We Shall Meet again

Totem poles of the Unseen

Paradise lost paradise regained

In silence by Azly Rahman

Nature in me

Mother's Day

Gently on my door she knocked

from up above
looking down below
i could see
so far yet so near
and at times
.so near yet so far
yet a deep blue sea we are
watching the waves
come back to the shore
till eternity the waves
come back to the shores
in tears wiped dry
by the blue ocean

Pronouns, pathetically yours ...
by Azly Rahman

Sitting in my garden under a flame of the forest today
I close my eyes