01-Feb-07 | Thomas Carlyle once offered: "Happy are the people whose annals are vacant." Recent books on Malaysian histories are gradually revising this disguised bliss. But books on place histories in Malaysia remain rare finds; 'Malacca' is both unique and an exception to the rule. Its secrets are located in the passionate observers like Huck Chin and Fernando, the book's authors. So while buildings and places 'tell' stories, the authors have deciphered and amplified, in the case of Malacca, what otherwise would have remained mute and muted.
But 'Malacca' is saturated with anxieties and, at times, by a palpaple sense of hopelessness. Indeed, one feels that this "inventory" of place stories, using the authors' description, sometimes spiral into a "documentation (of) last will and testament." In fact, every stage of their record and reflection appears ominous. The four frontispiece photographs of Malaccan sights attest to this - a strangler fig sapping an architectural artifice,a shattered corrugated iron warehouse, a torn photograph of a loved one, and a vandalized tombstone. They are succinct emblems of decay and degradation. Images deplete of assuredness of history and self-confidence. Despite their forebodings, I for one, as a son of Malacca, am thankful to the glimpses. The authors managed, even in these dark images and descriptions, to vivify and to give them specificity in place and significance in time. They resuscitated what would otherwise be loss in oblivion.
The captivating aspect of the book is based on a skillful weaving of the larger historical events - the Achinese sieges, Portuguese invasion, Dutch lackadaisical policies, rubber boom, British colonial governance - to the fates and fortunes of Malaccans and their places. The work relied on archival documentations, chronicles and established histories from mostly the pre-World War II period. This temporal bracket unfortunately slants the portrayal of the town's history, emphasizing the accounts of its local elite societies - its colonial administrators, mercantile elites and voices of the comprador classes. These 'past voices' are only marginally mitigated by snippets of interviews and recent anecdotes to establish the contemporary conditions of life in Malacca.
Though interesting, the book is not an easy read. It is burdened, in places, with too much detail and redundencies in many parts as histories of streets inevitably overlap. It also lacks good plans of the town which would have explained the transformations more forcefully.
The detailed accounts of twenty significant places is underpinned by a recurring theme, namely the scourge of the town's history and cultural thinning-out of its heritage: the anachronism and obsolescence of trades such as the chettiars and iron-smiths in First Cross and Blacksmith Street respectively; the homogenizing of a street of life to a street of cheap trinkets in Jonker; the dissipation of bourgeois wealth and displacement by get-rich houses of swiflets on Heeren; the gross falsification and negation of history, and all-round commoditization of history for tourism at St Paul's Hill,; the 'quick fix renovations' all over the town. Thus, recognizing an exemplary street of continuity such as Second Cross Street, and learning from its natural vitality, offers a more lasting lesson about conservation.
Other than natural attritions, it is inevitable that every physical built intervention will be an act of violence of sort, as 're-writing' and 're-inscribing' of new stories over others. In my view, a more damaging trend is the depopulation of the town, and with this physical thinning, the real loss of rituals and practices which once gave specificity to places. It is a recurrent pattern in the other smaller Malaysian towns as new agricultural lands are converted into housing suburbs. While the population previously remained in the town by necessity, and thus forced under those circumstances to continually renew and repair its building stock, albeit crudely, the present building losses have accelerated, and the passion for anything old is lost on a generation who prefer the more insulated settings of the suburbs.
As always, in writing history, there is a fine line between historical empathy and condescension. It is not that Malacca people do not know their local histories; but as the authors highlighted, the dominant and unfortunate practice is the misled practice of packaging historical auras and nostalgias to titilate the tourists.
Peoples' relation and reaction to history and the past are more complex than they appear. Amnesia, ignorance, falsification and purposeful forgetfulness are variants of attitudes and conditions that we readily recognize. But conservation of the past must not be framed by an instrumental view of history, such as 'how much history' or 'what type of history.' Rather, if anything Malacca shows how the town's various histories are intertwined, and that attempts to sustain its cultural continuity must be cognizant of these pasts. It also highlights the necessity to recognize that histories, metaphorically speaking, like sedimentations, are layered and, sometimes, fissured. In this sense, while the book adds to my personal reminiscence of Malacca, it also cautions me that the historical imprints of one's past on one's memory are not academic matters to be discussed in a distancing way.
The more pressing though not the book's most important question is who would benefit most from reading it. And more directly, how would this book ignite Malaccan interest in their histories, and impel them to action. Unfortunately at a hefty RM200 price-tag, the book will remain inaccessible to many in Malacca for whom, knowledge of its rich histories would have, I believe, made a difference. In the worse case, and paradoxically, it will reinforce the perception of history as an elite realm, another occasion to fortify the glorious histories of 'big' local men, albeit Straits-born Chinese, as 'their' histories rather than as 'our' collective histories. There is the power unrealized, leashed in this book, which I propose could be realized as pamphlets and if prized more affordably.
It is said that one misses things only when they are 'gone'. A horrific and a hard fact, but nontheless true. But, still I often wonder if it is really so. To the many new people in Malacca, its history is a curiosity and worse, encumbering of 'development.' Under such circumstances, Malacca will be received as a piece of quixotic devotion. Yet, I am glad that someone younger in my generation together with a sympathetic traveler, more than passing casually through the town, instead stayed on for five years, and saw it both fit and urgent to put on record, using their personal resources, for the next generation to remember. The most valuable aspect of the book is that it argues against conventional perceptions of the town. Malacca is historical and significant not just because of its colonial pasts, but because its local histories are equally persuasive in rendering a picture of the evolving conditions in Malaysian urban societies at large. That picture is a diverse racial, cultural and social mosaic, and therein, histories exist everywhere. It is an unfortunate fact that aside from the economic exigencies of development, colonial history and its hegemonic stay capture only the artifices and render them more permanent than other modes of knowing the pasts. |
