Hari Malaysia 2012 – Dan Lain-Lain
Date: September 16, 2012 (Sunday)
Time: 6pm-10.30pm
Venue: Rumah Anak Bangsa Malaysia
66 Loring Setiabistari 1
Bukit Damansara, KL
RECENTLY at a group conversation, a genuinely-concerned ethnic Chinese asked a friend of mixed parentage: “How does it feel to not have a real culture?”
Excuse me?
For so long – too long – we’ve gone about bandying our respective ethnicity as if, without it, we’re rudderless. Yet we’ve all heard it before, haven’t we, in various emphasis; guilty of it even.
Our politics is shaped by it, local surveys are modelled along it, the media blares it. Worse, we judge. In our minds, many of us imagine ourselves the quintessential Ethnic Thoroughbred. There’s us, and there’s them, the Others.
That’s curious, because genetically, between one human being and the next, we’re 99.5 percent alike. And in this 0.5 percent difference – which translates into height, length of nose, colour of skin, shape of eyes, texture of hair – this whole Other business emerges.
We’re obsessed with the Other.
To be fair, we’re not unique. It was a reason for imperialism and that slant was expressed candidly.
British cartographers for example centered Britain on their maps, and drew it proportionally larger than it should be…
Other, then, describes the process of justifying the domination of individuals or groups in the periphery to facilitate subordination. The creation of the other is done by highlighting their weakness, thus extenuating the moral responsibility of the stronger self to educate, convert, or civilize depending on the identity of the other. – Wikipedia
Today, the world’s religions promote the same virtues, and yet so much of religious discourse and practice is focused on differences with the Others. Women’s rights groups exist to correct centuries of being the Other in a male-dominated world. Slaves were a convenient Other. The LGBTs are a convenient Other.
Perhaps it is time to pause and dig for solutions which conjoin rather than divide. Let us contemplate the very phrase that so mocked and divided the marginal communities: Dan Lain-Lain.
Dan Lain-Lain includes. Dan Lain-Lain is the creative hybrid which gives life its zest. Dan Lain-Lain FTW!
Every community in this country has in some way or other adopted and adapted to the geography, and culture of its neighbours. Forget the thoroughbred; we’re all mongrels. Whether by language or food or thought, we are mongrel.
On September 16, this Hari Malaysia, join us for a celebration of Dan Lain-Lain.
