Kurang ajar eh?

A lot of people I know struggle with the knowledge that their activism — or conversations that are designed to build on activism — are often stuck within the same walls, time and again, in spite of constant efforts to tear these fences down.

In smaller civil society spaces like Singapore, it is even tougher to convince yourself that what you wish to share or add is something that no one else would otherwise say: especially when even the act of speaking up comes with massive emotional and mental baggage — sometimes we fight against our personalities, other times against our identity as minorities, our anxieties and fears, our past experiences of being silenced or punished, or some fun combination of all these things.

It becomes personal resistance in and of itself to express your anger despite it all, because the act of expression is often centralised within voices that sound a certain way, that call for the things you believe in using words that don’t come naturally to you, words that don’t always translate across cultures or languages.

I had a conversation with family a few days ago. Like a lot of our conversations, we talk about experiences with racism or marginality or otherness or mental health or decolonisation or indigenous reparations or Islamophobia or police violence. We use none of these words and we separately operate within vastly different values systems. We have little in common when it comes to activist frameworks of understanding PoC experiences, which I am used to indulging in in the online world.

When we started the conversation I think the phrasing my concerned brother used to ask me if I was experiencing racism in New Zealand was: “Nana experience anything macam orang irritating kat sana tak?”

I snorted and asked him, “Apa tu orang irritating, you mean dengan the COVID racism semua?”

“Yah lah, COVID, BLM and everything”.

“Abang, did you just describe racism as irritating?”

And we all laughed darkly, and he shared his experience of being racially attacked in Christchurch, and my sister shared an old experience she had in Singapore, and neither of them used the word ‘racist’ but they didn’t have to, no one said “Islamophobic” but the weight of the word reverberated on our tongues.

My sister said, “Kat sini pun ada macam gitu”.

I said, “Yah uh uh, orang cina memang”.

And we got to talking about BLM and the murder of George Floyd and they said, “Teruk eh si polis tu. Kurang ajar”.

And I said, “Polis mana-mana pun macam setan.”

And my dad chimed in and said “Yah, polis ni semua sama.”

I think a lot of people I know might flinch at this form of articulation of the narrative. Of hundreds of years of the destruction and oppression of Black and brown bodies, seemingly simplified down to “kurang ajar” or “polis macam setan”.

But I think to dismiss it is to do a disservice to the wrath that simmers within such exchanges. ‘Cultural competence’ isn’t the ability to speak a tongue as much as it is to understand what is unspoken in a tongue. To read into the silences more than the words.

There is a kind of anger that crude, malleable words can contain: the only kind of language you have at hand when you’re at a loss for words, or when you’re at your most helpless or incoherent or senseless. It reminds me of being a child and not knowing how else to cry or scream but to say the first words your parents yell at you. Jangan kurang ajar eh! It is grabbing the power that adults wield over children, the power you’re told you don’t own, and, as children, wielding it over belligerent friends or siblings. And, as furious adults, wielding it, in desperation, over our oppressors.

I relied, then, on injecting this juvenile venom into the words of our culture. A way of expressing pain, grief, oppression, helplessness or vulnerability, and recognising it not as uninformed or base, but as exhaustion. Or maybe even as resistance. Of subtle, concealed solidarity.

It was satisfying.

After that conversation with my family, I dumped in my family group chat a slew of other activist material that I’ve found helpful over the last week — content in a structure more familiar to me and my peers. I realise that each time I think about what lies beyond the ‘walls’ that some activism tends to feel confined in — the walls of inaccessible, colonial forms of education, the walls of a colonial language, the walls of wealth of capital or time or power — I think of these ignored conversations with family.

There is so much power and potential that lies in these cultural ‘dead spaces’, these fields often thought to be depoliticised, where cathartic forms of growth reign, and in which so many of my family and friends live.