the internet has turned me into a one-click activist. all i need is connectivity, a kind of name, an email address. i don’t have to leave my room, i don’t even have to get up from my chair, i don’t have to experience or touch or smell. all i need to do is see through an interface, read and have a split second think. then insert my name and click.
today, i received an email that called for a petition to boycott an artist – Guillermo Vargas “Habacuc”- from representing his country at the Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008. I’m not sure what the event is, apart from being some kind of art exhibition.
he definitely caught a stray dog from the streets, leashed it with a rope inside a gallery in nicaragua last year as his art piece for an exhibition entitled ‘Eres Lo Que Lees’ – ‘You Are What You Read’. The title is written on the wall with dog biscuits while the stray dog walks nearby, just out of reach, tied with a rope around his neck.
it caused outrage, understandably, and pictures were released and sent over the internet that showed the dog gradually starving to death. the gallery owner insists that the dog escaped and it was only tied for 3 hours during the exhibition, before which the artist fed the dog with food he brought himself. other petition sites pulled quotes from him here and there and concluded that he admitted to starve the dog to death.
whichever way the truth, there are currently more than 2 million signatures in support of the move to boycott this “animal-hating” artist.
on the flipside, the “One Million Signatures” campaign organised by Iranian women’s rights activists since 2006, demanding for changes in laws that discriminate against women has to date only managed to get slightly more than 7 thousand signatures.
so let’s see. artist drags stray dog to be exhibited as art, disputed intentions and conclusion of actual death, 2 million supporters. whole populations of women and men in a country facing clearly documented discrimination, violence and suppression, 7 thousand odd supporters.
so the one-click activist is not only lazy in terms of activism, but also lazy in terms of analysis.
give me some pictures, clear visuals of a starving dog, easy to understand terms, and i’ll give you my name.
give me an actual complex reality of shit happening in the world, where i have to actually do some search because even information is clamped down, campaign sites filtered and blocked, people struggling to get some small measure of truth out in the open, i just can’t be bothered.
too difficult. time is passing on too fast. hyperlinks are waiting, and only those dished out ready to be served with cute buttons and easy navigation.
give me a story, full of drama, heart-rending pictures, moral outrage and digestible ethics. i’ll give you my name.
*click*
“Closet Victim”
Nobody knows, somebody knows,
Sometimes it seems like everyone knows
My closet is made out of love
Twisted from inheritance of a see-saw -
I’m on the heavy end and you are light
If I walk away, you will fly in fear before you fall
My closet was made out of shame
Threaded from ideas of a price tag on my vagina
I’m on the cheap side and you are expensive
Even if I never chose the sale at all
My closet is being made out of words
Strung from ballooned buffoons blathering their might
I’m on the poster and you are eyes
When I start to speak -
Nobody knows, somebody knows,
Sometimes it seems like everyone knows
Then it happens.
orchestra
i saw monochromatic women and men
slowly take their seat
and place their instruments in varying
gestures of affection
on their laps;
with wind and strokes and pauses
the murmuring begins.
i closed my eyes and let
the keening colours swim inside me in
slipping streams of yearning;
a cup of silence lets the girl in gold
stride in
then her violin
sings.
the man in his coat gesticulates
as wildly as the flecks of sweat that
flies across the space between us
like a graceful ballerina
committing suicide.
or so i imagined.
how did the music know
when to bow
and when to show
a centre of attention?
what instinct do the leaves possess
to huddle when it’s time to flower?
or is it merely a kind of wisdom
to adhere, sometimes,
to a manic stick that’s wielded?
++++++++
rahmat harun stole the show on friday night when on top of his usual, magical grasp of the malay language in rhythm and taste, he lit up a self-confessed “balut” on stage. he recited 2 poems, read an open letter to benjamin zephaniah and even sang a leonard cohen song — despite having being forbidden by the one who forbids forbidding. either way, he was in top form.
the first piece was about the multiple denial of identities that might be (have been?) labelled on himself. aku bukan… xyz. the only thing he confesses to being is a “bangsat”, which he gleefully invites everyone present to name him as so. i’ve always thought bangsat was a bastard or asshole or something similar. but checking my little MPH dwibahasa dickie, apparently, it means “vagrant”. i don’t know if this is meant to be a cleaned up version for the populasi.
anyway.
his letter was on the spot. mocking the colonial traces of bejamin zephaniah’s presence (a UK performance poet brought to KL by the british council), and stitching a relational version of malaysian reality through the various laws and surveillance practices when it comes to smoking ganja. afterwhich, he casually lights up what looks like a reefer (i sat right in front and sniffed like crazy, but couldn’t smell the weed though) and read a poem about smoking up.
nice.
after the show, he literally left his mark by scrawling all over the walls in central market some rantings about forbidden to forbid and more love notes to benji.
i guess if you’re looking for “artists”, then don’t expect them to take boundaries too seriously 
then benjamin came on. and he surprised me by performing stuff that was almost all political in some way (and good on him, making lots of references to ganja along the way;)). i didn’t think too much of his poems, but his performance was awesome. the beats and rhythm of his stuff was actually quite similar to rahmat’s, which was odd, and got me thinking in various strange rasta directions. anyway, he was witty, his humour cheeky, his intentions earnest. one of the poems i liked most from that was:
White Comedy
(from ‘Propa Propaganda’)
“I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death.
People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined de white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don’t worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.
really got my mind flipping like when i was watched babel. thinking about where i am positioned in that discourse. strangely, nowhere. which got me thinking about racism in general. and the kind of annoyance i sometimes feel when racism as a violation only seem to apply when it comes to black/white. actually, the epicentre still lies on the white.
++++++++
supernova
such brilliance, it pierces the heart
of my eye;
i feel myself pulled to your
Excellence.
how could i question
the bringer of light,
the breather of life,
the blessed anchor of relevance?
i find myself hoping
to be drawn to your edges
so my hues can shimmer
as your shadow.
at least if i am marked as
black
as middle eastern
as muslim
as oriental
as japanese
as russian
as a threat of terrorism
or nuclear weapon
or simply a victim of mass exploitation
that you could save,
then i can have a name
that will echo.
even if mispronounced.
i found malay taxi drivers in cape town,
chinese lesbians marching in london,
burmese organic celery sellers in bangsar;
they appear like a magic trick
and i am left breathless;
under-prepared by Hollywood, Bollywood and Al-Jazeera.
supernova.
when will you implode?
and will you take me with you?
++++++++
then it was poetry slam at sek san’s impossibly beautiful space on jalan tempinis. singapore vs malaysia. gosh, however will it turn out? heh. there were a few awesome things: the space, the fact that lots of people came to watch/hear poetry, lots of people doing poetry, hearing some new decent stuff , and best of all, poetry hooliganism.
it basically works like this. after some individual and collective performances by a few people, the slam starts. and there’s a pool of poets reading their stuff, and a panel of judges giving their score at the end of each recitation. poets get eliminated until there’s 3 left standing for a final round to decide which comes first.
i think i might have expected something like chow sing chi’s lawyer show, where there’s lots of witty rhymes in response to each other spluttering spontaneously in the air. but it was prepared stuff, not really speaking to each other. so i’ve heard some of the local ones before.
there is a difference between poetry to be performed, and poetry to be chewed on at each reading. or maybe it’s just a different texture of appreciation. i wouldn’t know. i guess it might be a little like shakespeare’s stuff, where it works differently when performed and read (or even filmed). anyway, it seems like doggerels and limmericks are good for performance, humour works like a charm, and sex, as usual, sells. but then sex also, as usual, has varying degrees of resonance.
thick stuff can’t really be performed i think. it’s going to be hard to perform emily dickinson’s stuff no? but on the other hand, symzborska might work. maybe it depends on the performer, the space, the audience.
there was also a lot of suspicious singing or humming of tunes going on in this performance poetry thing, or at least at the slam. it worked for the travelogue thing done by the trio, but was ingratiatingly irritating by the solo-ists. i guess music and words crafted for tempo and rhyme is quite close to each other. i could see both benjamin’s and rahmat’s stuff work as spinal chords of songs. but humming? hmm
part of the rules is that audiences get to snap their fingers if they get bored, and stamp their feet if it gets really boring. so we did. a herd of hooligans at the back, clicking our fingers, booing the judges, calling for mutiny… it was fun! it was really good sport of the poets to not be ruffled by the crowd, and take it in stride. it must be awful, having your creations disrupted by an audibly unappreciative audience. it would kill any sense of self-confidence (for me at least). so i have deep respect for the bravado, the humour and the confidence it takes to go on stage and be assessed by a bunch of idiots.
heh.
i loved the fact that poetry hooliganism could happen. with so much vanilla and nursery school caution in the air, a jibe can do so much.
