No, it won’t work. What “multi-culturalism”?

Jeff Ooi has posted the full text of Dr Keng Yaik’s speech here. It’s full of hope, but I remain skeptical, more so because such a call is disingenuous. While I do agree that the discussion of national identity shouldn’t be subsumed in communitarian ideology, I find it hard to imagine how else a ‘homogeneity’ can be envisioned without, in the end, putting to the sword any idea of a genuine ‘multi-ethnic’, ‘multi-religious’ society.

My contention is that we should remove our multi-cultural lenses rather than putting them on.

The only constant in our social landscape currently is our differences, amplified by ethnically chauvanistic policies engaged in and promoted by the incumbent.

To plead for a ‘multicultural’ understanding of the social landscape is disingenuous precisely because, as Dr Keng admits readily, we should ‘look for common ground’. And looking for common ground is precisely to give importance to qualities that are common to all, and in effect to place more importance in our commonalities rather than the differences that make us “multi-cultural”.

And this is precisely the homogeneity that Dr Keng, in the first few opening paragraphs, exhorts us to avoid.

Hullo?

If we want to promote nationalism, let’s discard our pretensions to multi-culturalism and aim precisely for the homogeneity no one seems to want.

That’s why we should promote english, precisely because a neutral language (or relatively ethnically neutral with respect to the languages normatively related to ethnic groups) is crucial to achieving a nationalist vision of Malaysia.

We displace, all at once, all our cultural baggages. Destroy it all, let it die with our other post-colonial mistakes!

We should, instead of taking the direction Singapore has, implicitly encourage things like ‘benglish’, ’singlish’ or what have you. It’s these syncreticised elements of our society that bring us together rather than separate us. Let’s give ourselves a chance and be done, finally, with the attempt to define different cultures and then throw us all into a single pot, hoping that our differences will engender a amalgam.

It’s close to impossible, it doesn’t work, and worse, defining and identifying cultural heritages in our country only serves to delineate us into this or that group. I should’nt need to call myself a Malaysian Malay, Chinese or Indian; I should be able to call myself a Malaysian in my own country.

Have you seen tourism ads in both Malaysia and Singapore? What do you see? Malays wearing baju kebayas, Indians wearing their traditional costumes, Chinese wearing their cheongsams and such; our ‘multi-culturalism’ has been reduced and diluted for tourist consumption. I argue that that’s precisely what we need to do.

That’s “Malaysian Malaysia”. We must lose our culture before we find our nation. We must discard our history before we can grasp our future.