Race, Discourse and Diversity

ARCHIVES 2009

By admin-s On Sep 26, 2009

By Hornbill Unleashed

Irony is saying what you don’t mean, but differs from lying in that the ironist expects his hearer to know he doesn’t mean it.

As was one of the commentators, I too was surprised at the eruption of the first real ruckus in Hornbill Unleashed, “unleashed,” one might say, by the article “Help the hungry Penans” [22 Sept]. This altercation in words has not amounted to an all-out “flame war”—pace said commentator—but it comes close. Certainly neither the vehemence of responses to that article nor those many thumbs-down (a boo-ing in uncanny silence) have been seen before in this blog.

Hornbill Unleashed was founded as a site for civil discussion. We have common enemies enough and our anger is justly directed at them. These enemies are the epidemic vices that infect and corrupt our lives and which have made our government a grasping tyranny—greed, apathy, prejudice, arrogance, pride, contempt and so many more. When vices are institutionalized as the foundation of the State, many of the rest of us feel permitted to practise them ourselves. Corruption at the top metastasizes like a cancer and spreads to destroy lives and relations even at the kampong level. On the converse, good qualities are also self-reinforcing. Malaysia will rise out of the mire only when enough citizens resolve that, whatever the big-shots do, whatever dirt is promoted by the media, they themselves will be damned to hell before they foul their souls with the same viciousness.

Actually, I like a good verbal battle. It gets the pulse racing. Yet, in the interests of maintaining the “tone” of HU, so that the sparring doesn’t go beyond Queensbury rules, I’d like to do a little rhetorical analysis.

A writer once said that good writing was not just about getting one’s point across plainly so it can be understood, good writing is writing so that one cannot be misunderstood. The latter aim is by far the harder, and becomes impossible to reach the more artful the writer is. The most difficult skill in writing is irony. Irony is saying what you don’t mean, but differs from lying in that the ironist expects his hearer to know he doesn’t mean it. Here is Jonathan Swift, the greatest user of irony in English:

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.

Is Swift, or his character, such a monster that he can see a live woman having her skin peeled off and scoff so coolly? What about Swift’s “modest proposal” that rich Englishmen should eat unwanted Irish babies for food? Swift’s purpose is to push our faces straight into the horror. If we’re alert to irony, we read him and we know Swift doesn’t mean what he says. But Swift goes further. He really does mean what he says. In the case of A Modest Proposal Swift is telling the English colonizers that they might as well roast and eat poor Irish babies because they are deliberately killing off Irish babies anyway. Irony makes people uncomfortable, for irony looks into them, and very often people respond to irony by refusing to face it.

The contributor Kaypo anak Sarawak arranged an irony of a plain and pedestrian variety. This is how he builds it—

Schoolchildren have fasted 30 hours in symbolic support of hungry children around the world, and have contributed money to buy food for them. The backdrop to the singer who is entertaining them to reward their sincere sacrifice and wish to help depicts a hungry black African child. This is in Miri, and Penan children are going hungry 100 miles away. The contrast is plain enough.

Two little problems. First, the schoolchildren are “Chinese.” Second, there’s an inconsistency in the use of pronouns in paragraph 19. I’ll highlight them in red:

Why is it that we are so indifferent when our own Penan brothers and sisters cannot attract the same kind of citizens’ compassion for foreigners? Have they not learned this old proverb that ‘charity begins at home’?

The “we” refers back to the “Malaysians” and “Sarawakians” of paragraphs 17 and 18 and includes all races with no implied contrast. The “they” that follows is inconsistent and the antecedent is unclear. It looks to me like an editor’s error. Columnists write in haste, and you won’t believe what editors get up to. So is the tempest about a typo?

Kaypo’s real point is explicitly the following:

…those students probably have never heard of the existence of the Penans in the backyard of their own country.

Taiwan has a considerable number of Aborigines who are related culturally and by language to the Penan. What if Ms. Chang were informed of conditions in Sarawak and planned to hang up a huge picture of a hungry Penan child? She would never have gotten into Sarawak. Assuming she replaced the African photo at the last instant, I’d have given her five minutes to get out her message before the cops shut the event down.