My granduncle had a misadventure with communism in China that would have made a nice Zhang Yimou movie. Some time during the Chinese Civil War – between 1927 and 1950, way before the Communists beat the Kuomintang and declared the country the People’s Republic of China – my granduncle sailed to Malaya for work. After a few years, he went home to Hainan Island for a visit. The island had by then become a hotbed of communist activity, many of Mao’s gang having escaped here after the bloody Shanghai crackdown in 1927.

On one market trip to purchase food, my granduncle bought enough to feed an army – perhaps he was afflicted by the grandiosity common among natives who return home with foreign money, or perhaps it was for his wife, who has, since his return, become pregnant. It was therefore this sense of invincibility that led him, when asked at the market why he was buying so much food, to joke: “To feed the communists.” He was arrested the next day. For months, he was moved from prison to prison, progressing from provincial lockups to state facilities. As his wife swelled with life, he got closer and closer to a death sentence.

My grandmother took it upon herself to rescue my granduncle. She was a plucky, independent woman, my grandmother. She and her younger sister had lost both their parents by the time my grandmother was ten; she was left to raise her younger sister by herself through farming. Her younger sister, while still a teenager, joined the Communist army and was eventually captured by the Kuomintang and executed. Unable to save her own sister, my grandmother was determined to save my granduncle. She pursued his doomed trail across the countryside, shuttling between village and prisons. She tried negotiating with relatives, hoping to borrow money to bribe the prison officers. By then, my granduncle was awaiting execution. My grandmother had no choice but to sell her farm. With the money, she ‘persuaded’ the officers to release my granduncle. They were persuaded. My granduncle left China on the next ship to Malaya. My grandmother and grandfather joined him shortly. They wanted nothing to do with communism ever again.

My granduncle never saw his wife again, and he never met his daughter in this lifetime. He was a lonely man in his old age; they found his body one day in a river in Melaka.

Space Travel

The banning of Amir Muhammad’s Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, the smearing of Yasmin Ahmad’s Gubra and vetoing of Danny Lim’s 18? (all the way in Korea) has despaired many. Our free spaces are closing up, they say. I, however, prefer to think of our free spaces as the universe, constantly expanding – people always find new ways to get their message across the galaxy. But for the purposes of easy governance, the state erects a force field – Shepherding 101. Most of us don’t see these arbitrary boundaries, but we defer to them by referencing our touchy subjects only obliquely, or we happily orbit our testicles until we get sucked into the black hole of our… never mind.

So, an artist comes along in his little space explorer. In his journey to where no Malaysian artists have gone before, he bangs into the force field. The collision frightens small minds but to others, reveals everything we always suspected. This clash between someone with nothing to lose and those with everything to lose brilliantly unravels of the clumsy mechanisms of the latter – the state’s evolving reasons for the ban, its fanning of a fear, its attempt to uphold its victor’s version of history. We see through them like Neo sees the programming of the Matrix. Amir Muhammad is – dare we say it – The One! So it is not that the free space is closing. It is that finally, finally someone has gone beyond the orbit that we’ve confined ourselves to, like the sheep that we are.

Numbers

So Chin Peng’s biography is okay but not the movie; the Minister of Information made the startling remark that movies are seen by more people and are therefore more influential, thus justifying the attempt to curb its influence. Now, if both book and movie are bad influences, why should numbers matter? What kind of a government protects moviegoers but not readers? Unless it’s not a matter of historical truth or untruth then, but a game of numbers. Perhaps this is damage control. If only a small number of people know the damning truths, no need to worry – ala, what can the intellectuals do, kan? But a larger number of thinkers can be a pain in the ballot box. The question that needs to be asked is: what are they so afraid we will find out?

Money

The film takes us through a tour of northern Malaysian towns. What is left of all these towns that Chin Peng grew up in, fought in, conspired with fellow communists in, killed enemies in? After a history of association with communism, these towns have gone the way of the world; folks are generally too obsessed with making money to worry about ideologies or how they are governed – as they have always been. The bicycle shop owner trying to persuade us that cycling is healthier, the pomelo chick dreaming of expanding her business, the charcoal factory owner selling charcoal to the Japanese, his biggest buyer – it is business as usual. If anything, the film glorifies capitalism.

Pawns

Communism is widely regarded as a failed political ideology. Its grand goal of establishing a classless system based upon common ownership is noble in theory but problematic in implementation, not the least because it doesn’t account for the selfish gene. In spite of its attempt to overthrow capitalism, many socialist parties end up merely “reforming” capitalism. But still, no political ideology in this world has yet proven to work perfectly without some sort of compromise, not even Islamic theocracies.

Yet the scapegoating of communists in Malaysia is puzzling. Communism doesn’t promote violence as its central tenet, though like most insurgent forces, it has armies. But confusing communism with violence is like confusing Islam with terrorism. And communism doesn’t have ethnicity. So confusing communism with the Chinese is like confusing Islam with the Malays. But in this country, our confusion is constitutionalised, so I don’t know.

What does our history tell us? The Communist Party of Malaya believed it was fighting for Malaya’s independence. First they fought the Japanese (with the help of the British) during World War II, and then subsequently they fought the British during the insurgency. But both the Japanese and the British learned to recruit locals to fight the communists, who were also locals, thus turning the insurgency into a kind of civil war. The British then took this ideological struggle and reframed it as a racial struggle, cleanly dividing the races against each other and leaving us today with major distrust issues and persecution complex. Does it take an imperialist mindset to perceive others as imperialist threats? Now, why don’t we ever blame the British and Japanese for using us as pawns in their fights?

Natural Selection

“Malaria menjajah Malaya” sings Zalila Lee in one of the five songs in Lelaki Komunis Terakhir. Jerome Kugan’s lyrics in one of the five hilarious musical numbers suggest that sometimes homo sapiens are locked in a less ideological, more primal struggle – the evolutionary fight to survive against competing organisms, especially those feasting on us. In such a scenario, the human race seems to unite against the common enemy – leave no stagnant water, live far from swamps, fumigate the buggers. In West Africa, folks living in Malaria infested zones have adapted through a genetic mutation of their blood cells that prevents the Malaria parasite from living in the cells. Sickle cell anaemia, as the condition is called, weakens the individual and reduces life expectancy to 40 – but that seems the next best thing to being wiped out by Malaria. In spite of what the X-Men series would have you believe, evolution is not a highway to your higher self. We simply adapt to whatever helps us survive in our environment. So while religious biology teachers are taking troubles to remind students that evolution is “just a theory”, our society manifests the tribalism and territorial aggression that is the legacy of our inherited primate genes.

I worry that if left unchecked, Malaysian society will adapt to a primal culture of fear and aggression, our natural instincts carefully stoked by political manipulations, resulting in more, not less, Darwinism. Why is the apparatus of the state invested in propagating our baser elements? Why is it not correcting our ill-informed prejudices, resolving our unfounded fears, teaching understanding?

Amok

Look around, lots of other voices out there are uttering far more damning things. A former Prime Minister casting doubts on the present Prime Minister, the police claiming they will allow crime rate to escalate if the Independent Commission should be established (thankfully they have retracted that statement), a mufti trying to ban an exercise in muhibbah, a newspaper columnist asking us to select our heroes based on race – all these are far more threatening to national security (yet our country has not crumbled to ruins). Why are these loose cannons allowed to run amok through the media? I am not suggesting Dr M should be banned (though he could use better PR), but that Amir’s far less dangerous, far better informed voice be allowed to counter the ongoing madness (though he does have a wicked column in NST). Still, why is there so little room for rational voices?

Food

Sometimes all that remains of our patriotism is in our love for food. In Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, we hear stories about petais, pomelos and lotus buns. The petai story reveals that while fruits and food certainly define our culture, they can do so in a reductive manner – one kind of petai for every race in Malaysia! You are what you’re fed. The pomelo, featuring prominently on the poster, is perhaps Amir’s way of suggesting that, if the Operasi Lalang issue is thorny like a big durian, then Chin Peng is as unthorny as a pomelo, pulpy even. Finally, the lotus bun story shows how a bun can be more than just a bun – it can be a flower, a deity, a mother’s love, and the horror of war all at once. If anything, Amir’s use of food teaches us that cheap metaphors and stereotypes are plenty, but some people are more than the symbols we want them to be. So a former opposition party leader can be more than a devil, an enemy of the state, and a pomelo.

Absence

The most dangerous thing about Amir Muhammad’s Lelaki Komunis Terakhir is how it shows that Communism is no longer dangerous. It isn’t quite as the Minister of Home Affairs suggested, that the film is akin to presenting Osama bin Laden as a humble and charitable man. Hello, the man is not even there! In fact, by removing the physical representation of Chin Peng from the film, Amir has presented the last communist as a man whose days of influence are clearly over.

Perhaps the real danger is for the authorities, not the public. Without the idea of a dangerous communism, they have one less “enemy” with which to frighten the populace into toeing the line. They can no longer say, hey, the communists can come back anytime, so you better listen to what we tell you to do. Perhaps a better strategy to making sure people behave in accord and harmony is to impart forgiveness and grace.

Like my granduncle and grandparents, I have no personal interest in communism. But I have an interest in knowing my history. What happened in that interim time between the emergency and now? It was a period of narrative forming – when the victors made up their version of the story, a story with heroes and villains. Now is the time to hear other stories.

Art

“It is the art that is important, not the censorship.” – Abdullatif Abdulhamid, Syrian filmmaker

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Lelaki Komunis Terakhir is available on VCD and DVD in Singapore. Amir says: "Possession of this VCD or DVD in Malaysia is a criminal offence since it is banned. If you are caught with it, you can be fined up to RM50,000 or jailed up to five years. Don't say I didn't warn you."