Having arrived in Singapore on Friday morning, and left early the day after, I saw spell#7’s National Language Class with a moderate case of disorientation. The Esplanade itself was daunting: on previous visits I had not known it to be so full of people -- not only show-goers, but shoppers and diners; it seemed as if the fancy establishments and gift-shops were the point, and that juxtaposition (a shopping mall-theatre?) unnerved me. A fool, I did not reserve a ticket for the night’s performance, thinking I could take my chances just by presenting myself at the box-office -- thankfully, director Paul Rae alerted me to a seat that someone had canceled on at the last moment.

Class Politics

Entering the Theatre Studio, I sat next to a Caucasian fellow -- who, five minutes into the show, asked me whether it had begun. The first half of National Language Class involved audience interaction; it was, for all intents and purposes, an evening class wherein we were taught Malay.

Yeo Yann Yann was a Chinese schoolgirl: she spoke in Mandarin with us, and communicated her eagerness to learn. Noor Effendy Ibrahim, kindly and imperious, conversed in Malay; he was the girl’s -- and our -- teacher. Under his watchful eye, the audience introduced themselves to each other.

“Assalaammualaikum,” I said. “Nama saya Zedeck. Saya tinggal di Kuala Lumpur, dan saya orang Malaysia.” Haltingly, my bench-mate told me that he was Australian.

The rest of the audience was less perplexed. They related to the nattering Yann Yann -- much of what she said passed me by, since I comprehend only the most rudimentary Mandarin -- but this assurance did not last for long, hobbled as it was by disturbing revelations. There was some hesitation as the room formed a consensus as to what its national language was. (It wasn’t English, except for the lone Englishman in the theatre.) Having established that our guo yu was, indeed, Malay, the actress proclaimed: “Saya orang Malaya!”

What?

The more vocal contributors in room attempted to correct Yann Yann’s error. “Melayu la,” a young ethnic-Malay woman said -- and she repeated the same thing, somewhat reproachfully, when Noor Effendy’s teacher introduced himself in the same way.

People seemed unaware of what the term “Malayan” meant; few caught on to the fact that the characters onstage were talking about nationality, not race. Finally, our exasperated instructor had to live with some members of the audience adamantly telling him that they were Chinese nationals -- an irony that, I am sure, did not pass completely undetected.

We soon realised we were caught in an anachronism. It was an alternate world. The date on the blackboard, which asked “Siapa nama kamu?” and “Di-mana awak tinggal?”, told us it was the year 1959: the year the island of Singapore became a self-governing state in the British Empire; four years before it would join the Federation of Malaya, Sarawak  and Sabah as Malaysia.  It was a hopeful time, when the ponderous path to independence was bearing fruit at last — a time when Singaporeans urged for unification with the peninsula; when Lim Chin Siong, one of the founders of the People’s Action Party, clamoured for the adoption of Bahasa, already the lingua of the region’s people, as the nascent union’s national language.

It was this sentiment that Chua Mia Tee, a Singaporean artist of the social-realist tradition, captured in his 1959 work National Language Class, the painting on which spell#7’s play is based. Sociologist Daniel Goh, writing for s/pores, an e-journal for literature “investigating different aspects of historical and contemporary Singapore society,” describes Mia Tee’s work thus:

Malay would not only bring together all the races but was also the language of the working classes, the socialist common denominator of class equality. Significantly, Chua’s painting shows young women and men, the future of the nation, of different linguistic habits and different classes learning Malay from the cikgu: the bespectacled middle-class man of pressed pants and shoes, the working-class man in white cotton shirt tucked out of khaki slacks in loafers, the woman in white Chinese school uniform dress, the smiling nonya woman in capped-sleeve baju Shanghai …

In August 1965, six years after  Mai Tee's rendering, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia.

Art Imitating Art

Paul, in the programme notes for the play, talks about his encounter with the painting:

In 1959, artist Chua Mia Tee painted a group of Chinese students learning Malay in anticipation of a future that never happened. When I first saw the painting in 2005, I was taken aback that the students were learning Malay -- and then I was taken aback that I was taken aback.

How could the past be so at odds with the present? And how did this past continue nevertheless to bear upon the present, in perhaps hidden ways that a theatre show might bring to light?

Time for some deconstruction, then.

National Language Class is descended from theatrical tradition, perhaps best symbolised by Yasmina Reza’s “Art”, of having a piece of visual artistry, already rife with its own meanings, serve as a lens to focus the drama. But it’s more than that: Mia Tee’s National Language Class really is the drama. Noor Effendy and Yann Yann’s lesson deftly segued into the play’s heart: a step-by-step enactment of the painting’s one frozen moment -- there is a boy standing up, trying to speak Malay; there is a girl holding a pen, laughing at him; there is a girl in a uniform, looking out the window; there is a painting on the wall, of lovers walking along a beach during sunset.

A wonderful thing, the use of the stage to reinterpret action in a work of visual art. These descriptions, acted out by the bodies of the performers and repeated multiple times, interacted differently, depending on who did what: Noor Effendy mockingly laughed at Yann Yann’s attempts at Bahasa, while she looked on, upset but silent; when it was her turn to laugh at him she was shushed by a growl.

It is clear that National Language Class, having evolved over the course of three years with almost as many stagings, was technically slick. The actors were expertly directed, commanding the space with ease (they’d better, in a play about a painting so composed), investing the characters they played with sufficient life to transcend the playwright-surrogates (or, since the text was devised, actor-surrogates) they could’ve become.

The writing itself (with additional text by Kaylene Tan) is intelligent and quite beautiful: when the unspoken conflict between authority and his pupil comes to a head, the teacher asks: “Why do you come?”, and this sparks an English-language exchange that paint other paintings for us: there is a man, lying on the street, lovers walking down a beach, someone has lost her cat, they all live in the same
houses -- Hassan’s mouth is filled with blood.

The Language of Race

Yet, further and further into the play, being so enamoured with its form did not prevent me from being dismayed.

National Language Class more than its inspiration, is about race -- and there is nothing wrong with this, in itself, but for the fact that it seems to be about race in a rather questionable fashion. Essentially: the male Malay figure of power, suppressing the young Chinese girl’s right to speak her own tongue.

As the performance progressed this impression was only reinforced. Noor Effendy silenced his student for sketching the scene in her own Mandarin words -- the “class” was repeated with Yann Yann silently mimicking her master’s confident (and Malay) instruction; when she gave in to this we felt for her, and when she finally stood up to her nemesis it is clear where our sympathies lay. We felt like cheering when she triumphantly stormed off: the underdog had her day.

 

This is rich fantasy, of course: the underdog, in Singapore, is the Malay community; the Republic’s so-called national language is one with which comparatively few of its citizens can speak with any proficiency. This juxtaposition is damning -- more so, since we are made to empathise with Yann Yann’s wish to retain her use of Mandarin, the language that is less Chinese than it is Imperial Beijing.

Well, that’s if one manages to infer these things -- because there is nary an indication of the ironies in the performance’s internal logic. National Language Class taken at face value, traffics in black-and-white dichotomies: the Chinese Us and the Malay Them. Towards the end -- in another appropriation, this time of a 1960s lesson from “Learn Malay with Radio Singapore” -- Yann Yann, now dominant, directs her seated counterpart to bring her his chair:

“Bawa kerusi itu,” Yann Yann says, “Bawa kerusi itu kemari.”

“Tolong bawa kerusi itu kemari,” Noor Effendy answers, slouching in place.

“Kerusi itu tidak berat,” Yann Yann replies, “Kerusi itu ringan.”

“Suruh Hassan,” Noor Effendy says in a why-me tone, “Suruh Hassan angkat kerusi itu. Hassan tidak ada kerja.”

More than anything, I saw a mere repeating of the Lazy Native trope. The Malay -- and Muslim, since Arabic salutations are irrevocably intertwined with religion in this region -- Other is still a loathsome caricature.

Silence

Noor Effendy’s teacher eventually acquiesces: one of the final scenes has him trying to learn the correct pronunciations of the various objects -- window, blackboard, table -- in Mandarin, with us in the audience helping him along.  The stage curtains are drawn back to reveal a wall-wide, chalk reproduction of the seaside painting-within-a-painting -- only now that the lovers were gone, the moon had risen, and two power-line pylons occupies its right side; a haunting image of lost human aspirations replaced by economic growth. The play ends with both performers wordlessly sketching the outline of the meja bulat and meja segiempat that are present in Mia Tee’s painting: their silence unites them, but the fact that draw different forms seems to say that these two people (and, by implication, their representative societies) are irreconcilable as a square and a circle.

It was a beautiful image -- but it was one I could not take seriously, because National Language Class had peddled in so much simplification. Yann Yann says as much, at one point: she admires the two lovers on the shore, walking with their hands together, their simple affection shielding them from the harsh realities of the world around. Aw, you’d want to go, seduced by her hopefulness -- romance will save us.

Sadly, it will not. The text’s wisest proclamation comes from Noor Effendy’s response: power lines need to go up, there are fishermen working, in the distance there are trade ships, and “there are men still hiding in the jungle.” Life is complex. It is a lesson that was difficult to learn in the theatre, because National Language Class’s teacher was such an irredeemable villain, but it is crucial. Blind love will not save us; the failure to deal will the issue of race on both sides of the Causeway is largely the fault of societies that have let themselves progress down the years in a kind of unconsciousness. There are still men hiding in the jungle, yes. We cannot ignore them. We need to meet these bogeymen, aware of historical facts and social complexities, aware that both them and us are false divisions. We were Malayan, once — and we can be, still. We have much to talk about.

~~~

Zedeck Siew writes and blogs for Kakiseni.

This article is a mildly edited version of a Kakiseni Blog post, first published on April 11th, 2008 -- to which National Language Class's director Paul Rae has responded.

Photographs courtesy of spell#7.