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The Tongue Has No Bones
Every now and then, the perennial subject of language rouses Malaysia from slumber. Disputes over Malay proficiency, the constitutionality of vernacular schools, and the public visibility of multilingual signs have all unleashed bouts of tongue-lashing. As a tool known for bridging divides, language has unwittingly sown discord. This friction is typically ascribed to the fundamental failure of enforcing a unifying language across Malaysia. Reminiscent of the scene of the Babel, multilingualism is viewed with suspicion for impeding peace. Bad reputation precedes the tongue. For its immediacy in spitting malice, for its dexterity in creolising speech and language, the tongue carries the likelihood for inflicting chaos.
In The Tongue Has No Bones, Tan Zi Hao puts our common wisdom about language under scrutiny. Does a language truly unite its speakers? Does speaking distinct tongues pit us at odds with each other? What classifies a language? What do we expect language to perform for us? And why do we place so much faith in our tongues? A phrase equally idiomatic in Malay, “lidah tak bertulang,” or the tongue has no bones, readily suggests an untamable organ. A cautionary proverb, it reminds one to be wary of what the mouth lets slip. The tongue has no bones, and yet, it wreaks havoc. It usurps power. As counterintuitive as it may seem, Tan is precisely interested in the erratic nature of language in transgressing reified cultural and linguistic barriers. To begin with, why do we harbour such faith in our tongues that elude control?
Extending from Tan’s sustained interest in the politics of text, The Tongue Has No Bones probes the intersection of language and nation amidst escalating ethnic and generational divides in Malaysia. For the artist, the multiplicity of tongues and their unruliness are both a curse and a gift. Language does not bridge. It puts us in touch with others, but in so doing, implicates us in a position of responsibility where we must attend to others for a still undetermined outcome. There is no guarantee that our tongues will impart ideas and speech with fidelity, thereby presenting ourselves as who we are. Because language falters and struggles for clarity, language is always already translated. Inhered in language is an inadequacy, beckoning us to acknowledge the risk of mistranslating ourselves in the face of the other. Language difference, much more than a source of division, is an open invitation for subversive listening, for experiencing selfhood in the tongues of others, for rethinking care critically and tenderly.
FIONA LEE
Dear M: A Tongue-Twister 11 Exercise, While Dreaming in Confidance and Treachery
DƯƠNG MẠNH HÙNG Accursed Tongues: Language 18 in the Throes of Translation and Transliteration
The Life Force of Language
Fiona Lee
1 Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto Anthropófago, trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 (1991): 35–47.
References to the body abound in Tan Zi Hao’s solo exhibition, The Tongue Has No Bones. The “tongue,” is, of course, a metonym for language and the artworks’ various allusions to the human form point to the body politic, the people of a nation. The works displayed reflect Tan’s abiding interest and research in the language politics of peninsular Malaysia, particularly how the ethno-linguistic diversity of its people has routinely instigated heated political controversy along racialized terms throughout the nation’s history. The exhibition title draws from a proverb that issues a warning about language: “the tongue has no bones, but it is strong enough to break a heart.” Correspondingly, the artworks in the show explore the nature of language and how the state attempts to manage and control its citizenry’s multitudinous tongues.
The use of “tongue” as a commonplace term for language emphasizes the organ’s capacity for speech. Yet, the tongue also performs many other vital functions that are worth keeping in mind to better understand the impetus to harness and regulate language. The tongue plays an important role in the digestive process, facilitating the mastication (chewing) and swallowing of food. The thousands of taste buds on our tongues enable us to detect and avoid food that has gone bad, as well as to enjoy a wide range of flavors and textures. Not just a receptor for pleasure, the tongue is also an instrument for arousal, connection, and stimulation. The tongue’s capacity for survival, expression, sensation, pleasure, and relation speak to life itself. To use “tongue” to refer to language, which has the same range of functions as the tongue, is to recognize language as an inexorable life force.
The bodily metaphor of cannibalism, evoked in the Anthropophagic Strategies series, serves as a productive entry point for exploring language’s vitality. These works borrow from the avant-garde Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s idea of cultural anthropophagy or cannibalism.1 Conjuring the image of humans eating human flesh, Andrade argues that truly novel works of art and culture paradoxically emerge from devouring other cultural forms. This cannibalistic drive is epitomized in the ongoing evolution of language, as evident in the Gen Z Internet slang words featured in Tan’s installation works. The expression, “terpaling shaking,” is an example of how the English grammatical form of the double superlative (the combined use of “most” with the suffix, “-est,” e.g., “the most angriest”) can be ingested by the Malay to regurgitate an innovative
combination of the prefix, “ ter-” (which means “most”) with “paling” (which also means “most”) to produce a word that might be translated as “mostest.” The word “shaking” further underscores the phrase’s meaning of extreme outrage by referring to the embodied experience of that feeling.
Similarly, the viral catchphrase, “delulu,” “trululu,” and “solulu,” demonstrates how a set of random words of different syllabic lengths, “delusional,” “true,” and “solution,” can be chewed on and spewed out as a trio of rhyming words that sound like a musical hook.2 It is no surprise that English, being the most used language for web content globally, is prime fodder for cannibalization and is constantly being unmade and remade by Internet users all over the world. These linguistic innovations often arise when English interacts with other languages. By including “melulu,” a Malay word meaning “reckless,” Tan gestures at the translingual pathways along which the viral trend might further evolve. Besides, “lulu” has a history that predates its contemporary social media usage that extends beyond English. In Cantonese, “lulu” is a colloquialism for “idiot”, which is derived from the name of a ditzy female character in a 1990s Hong Kong television drama series, and popularized by the line “你咪當我 lulu” (nei5 mai5 dong3 ngo5 lu1 lu4, meaning “don’t treat me like an idiot!”).3
2 To understand how the phrase came about, see Know Your Meme, “Delulu: Part of a Series on Internet Slang,” Know Your Mem e, n.d., https:// knowyourmeme.com/memes/ delulu [accessed 15 June 2024].
3 “Lulu”, Wikipedia , n.d., https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lulu [accessed 15 June 2024].
Cultural syncretism is neither new nor unique to netspeak. Trace the history of any tongue and it would be quickly apparent that new languages are birthed out of the comingling of different languages and cultures. Listen in to a random conversation at the local mamak to hear a rojak of languages mixed into a single sentence, “Wei macha, you want to makan here or tapau?” 4 This creative life force of language is counterposed in Tan’s work with the state, represented by the first edition of the Kamus Dewan. Published by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP), the state institution established to develop and promote the national language, the Malay dictionary is emblematic of state efforts at defining and managing the body politic through the standardization of language.
Dictionaries, the historian Rachel Leow argues, were a technology of knowledge production used by the colonial state to assert authority over its subjects. Far from a benign exercise of learning the language of those it
4 The phrase is borrowed from a tweet posted in response to a politician’s racially divisive remarks that went viral in 2013. Jeet Thurai, “Where else in the world can you use 4 languages to form a perfectly acceptable sentence like, ‘Wei macha, you want to makan here or tapau?’ ” X , 8 May 2013, https://x.com/jeetthurai/status/331947438183174144?lang=en [accessed 20 June 2024].
5 Rachel Leow, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 92. For a detailed account on the historical use of Malay dictionaries as a technology of state governance from colonial to postcolonial rule, see Chapters 2, 3, and 4.
6 Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 7.
7 Yildiz, Ibid., p. 2.
8 Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 62.
sought to rule, the British production of Malay dictionaries had a profoundly transformative effect, facilitating “the socioeconomic transition from manuscript to print, the cultural transition from orality and aurality to textuality, and the orthographic transition from Arabic to romanized script.” 5 The changes to language imposed by colonial knowledge production were not only material in nature, but ideological. In creating the effect of fixity—of turning language’s mutable, heterogeneous nature into something stable and discrete—dictionaries exemplified a conception of language espoused by the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Language, as Herder conceived it, is “a clearly demarcated entity that has a name, is countable, and is the property of the group that speaks it, while also revealing that group’s idiosyncrasies.”6 Following from this view, the mixing of tongues is deemed undesirable because it would blur the boundaries that distinguish one language from another, thereby posing a threat to a group’s cultural cohesion and authenticity. This understanding of language gave rise to what the literary scholar Yasemin Yildiz calls the monolingual paradigm, the belief that “individuals and social formations are imagined to possess one ‘true’ language only, their ‘mother tongue,’ and through this possession to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nation.” 7 Significantly, the monolingual paradigm, which proved influential in developing the idea of the modern nation-state, readily dovetailed with theories of biological race and evolutionary hierarchy, which underpinned European civilizational thought and legitimized the imperial conquest of so-called primitive peoples.8
The concept of cultural cannibalism, insofar as it embraces syncretic, heterogeneous cultures, may have been intended as politically progressive. Yet, we would do well to recognize that the postcolonial government of Malaysia has also cannibalized the British imperial state, absorbing its racial logics and structures, and reconstituting them for its own ends. The DBP’s development and promotion of Malaysia’s national language has essentially pursued racial lines in the sense that it reinforces the view that Malay’s status as the lingua franca of its multilingual citizens owes to its being the language of the Malay race. Ironically, the hegemonic status of the Malay language (and, by extension, race) can only be maintained in a multilingual nation as long as there is the freedom to use any language in all
areas of public life other than for official state purposes, a right guaranteed by the Federal Constitution. Hegemony, as the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci theorized, is not simply imposed via domination from above, but can only be secured with the consent of those who are dominated from below. These two constitutional provisions are meant to operate in tandem to uphold the postcolonial racial order. Yet, the structures of racial governmentality—the state’s implementation of race as a meaningful social category to manage an ethno-linguistically diverse population—have also resulted in positioning these two constitutional provisions as antagonistic to one another.
This antagonism is evidenced in the dissatisfaction that arose from different ethno-linguistic groups in response to the 1967 review of the National Language Act, Article 152 in the Federal Constitution. Ten years after independence, amendments to Article 152 affirmed the standing of Malay as the national and official state language while adding a clause that permitted the use of English in legislative, judicial, and other official proceedings. Malay ethnolinguistic nationalists, who viewed the English clause as undermining Malay’s national status, mounted a street demonstration that came to be known as the Keranda 152 protest, in reference to the sculpture of a coffin which was paraded on the streets to symbolize what they perceived to be the death of the National Language Act. Also displeased with the amended act were Chinese language educationists, whose petition for Chinese to be recognized as one of the official languages in the country, had gone unheeded. The English-language Malaccan poet, Ee Tiang Hong, who was also an academic expert on education, observed that legislators, as part of the consultation processes involved in revising the National Language Act, had interpreted Malay’s designation as a “main language” in a 1960 education report to mean “sole language.” The dominance of Malay in the national education system, Ee adds, was secured in the wake of the deadly 13 May 1969 race riots in Kuala Lumpur, when Parliament’s suspension paved the way for the conversion of English-medium schools to Malay.9
Opposition to government legislation on language from multiple fronts is not limited to the 1967 act. In 2002, the Keranda 152 coffin made a comeback when a coalition of Malay-based NGOs with the support of several National Literary Laureates mobilized street protests in
9 Ee Tiang Hong, “Literature and Liberation: The Price of Freedom,” in Edwin Thumboo (ed.), Literature and Liberation: Five Essays from Southeast Asia (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House), p. 15.
10 Mulaika Hijjas, “Jawi: Identity and Controversy,” New Mandala , 20 July 2021, https://www. newmandala.org/jawi-identityand-controversy/ [accessed 18 June 2024].
response to the government policy of teaching Science and Mathematics subjects in English, to which Chineseand Tamil-medium educationists were also opposed. In 2019, the incorporation of Jawi into the national curriculum was protested by Chinese-medium educationists on the grounds that it was a form of insidious Islamization. Meanwhile, several Malay groups were also against the move because they “asserted that the Jawi script was intrinsically Islamic and should not be profaned by being taught to non-Muslims.”10
It should be emphasized that the recognition of Malay as the sole national language does not inherently entail an endorsement of Malay ethno-nationalism. After all, for centuries, Malay served as a lingua franca between the diverse ethno-linguistic peoples of the Malay Archipelago well before the Europeans’ arrival to the region. In the artwork, A Future Imperfect Presumed Dead, Tan’s phonetic transliteration of “Keranda 152” onto a wooden coffin into Jawi/Arabic, Chinese, and Tamil language scripts signals the possibility of the national language being disarticulated from its monoracial significance. Reminiscent of the protests decrying the supposed death of the national language, the artwork beckons towards imagining a shared language that capaciously accommodates difference. However, its title—the future imperfect is a verb tense for actions that have yet to occur—acknowledges the unlikelihood of the deracination of the Malay language anytime soon, given the death grip taken hold by racialized ideologies of language on the national imagination. *
Images of the living dead recur in Tan’s work: leather and denim jackets evoking ghostly human forms, pay tribute to bands with deathly names, Sepultura and Sarcófago; knocking sounds emitting from within a wooden coffin allude to an undead corpse hidden from sight. These images perhaps allude to the unending controversies about language in Malaysia, which are like zombies that simply refuse to die. Conflicts in multilingual, multiracial societies, it would seem, are inevitable, thereby justifying the need for the state to police language. Admonitions from politicians to not make any negative statements about the 3Rs—race, religion, and royalty—are supposed to help keep the peace and avoid outbreaks of violence: “Don’t talk about 3R or 13 May might happen again!” How convenient
that these calls to curb our tongues for the sake of national unity also trigger our fear, mistrust, and anxiety towards one another.
Rather than seeing multilingualism as an unruly desire that requires state control, we might instead consider whether efforts to uphold the racial structures of the postcolonial nation-state are what sparks heated controversies about language. Racialized conceptions of language actively deny the reality of our mongrel tongues, insisting on linguistic purity, because doing so makes it easier to distinguish us from them. Such racial logics reinforce a zero-sum worldview that conditions us to see the protection of someone else’s freedoms as encroaching on ours, to view the sharing of someone else’s culture as somehow diminishing our own. Racial structures recognize the vitality of language and harness its power to divide and rule. We, therefore, need to better understand how racial structures work, what they are maintained for, who they ultimately benefit, and at what cost. In their place, we need to build infrastructures that affirm and nourish the creative life force of language and the multitudes it contains—not against, but with and for ourselves and each other.
Fiona Lee is a literary and cultural studies scholar. Her essays on Malaysian literature, art, cinema, and culture have been published in various venues, including Postcolonial Text, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and The Margins by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, among others. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Universiti Malaya.
Dear M: A Tongue-Twister Exercise, While Dreaming in Confidance and Treachery
I am writing to you from inside the dark heart of KL, the same place you dropped me off last time in Jalan Petaling. The room is narrow and oddly rectangular, with connection as bleary as a landscape seen through a rain-splashed window. Still, the sheets are relatively clean, and there is a boiler to make Nescafé. The window looks out onto a corridor. Sometimes, I would see silhouettes whiz by, their shadows would temporarily imprint the curtain. I cannot say whether I am happy here. But, I am here, nonetheless.
Tongue, tang, the flick of a serpent tongue, the bite of an insect, a metal blade. I scrunch my face as the calamansi juice permeates my taste buds. My thoughts trail to the anatomy of the tongue, how this uncanny, boneless organ packs eight intertwining muscles, making it one of the strongest muscles in the body. Often, my tongue seems to possess a will of its own, blurting out things that my brain is too slow to catch. This treachery is always committed without my consent, against my consciousness. I have always been cursed with mouthing difficult truths, perverse taboos that are best left unuttered, saying them even when my tongue knows naught where to begin. It thrashes around, flicking in thin air, hissing and sniffing out invisible traces like a bloodhound, threatening to dissolve any barrier. It is a creature who seeks truth yet is entirely capable of sweet lies. I can taste its tangy sweat as it lays dormant, biding time for whence my mouth cave opens again to wreak havoc.
I have trained my teeth to bite my own tongue. Spiteful, is it not, to traumatize your own organ so as to remain safe? One thoughtless slip, and mayhem might erupt like Mt. Pinatubo. I tried coaxing it too, dulling its edges with sweets, only to rot my teeth and weaken my first line of
defense against truth-spilling. I have looked up procedures to tame the tongue. The Internet struck back with countless forms of medieval torture that would send chills down the spines of the bravest of us. Metal brackets were used to force open the gleeless mouth, and a device called the “tongue tearer” was doused in hot flame before mercilessly ripping off the tongue like a stretch of rubber. Vilified in mythologies and folklore, the tongue has endured endless traumas and a tarnished reputation as untrustworthy and a traitor. Lidah tak bertulang, lưỡi không xương nhiều đường lắt léo, a boneless tongue can veer into many directions. I pulled out my tongue, pinching it hard enough to draw blood, the Scarlet Letter.
How many times have I punished my tongue for speaking? It is a habit, by now. My tongue, a veteran of random blows and intentional clamps. I can feel it seething behind my teeth whenever I swallow a remark or pulverize a response. What good comes from speaking the truth, if all it does is land you into quagmires?
I must rest now. A tingling of pain is surreptitiously spreading from the black spot on my tongue. The taste of sulfur slowly engulfs the room. No more dilly-dallying today. I will write to you again soon. Hopefully without too much laceration, next time.
Yours, H.
sarcophagus (n.)
“limestone used for coffins,” “flesh-eating” from sarx: “flesh” + phagein: “to eat”
I went out for lidah goreng last night. The chewy texture was hard to register. It was coated with crunchy chili flakes and spicy sambal. The taste was akin to soporific wrath.
Another protest broke out two days ago, on February 15. Something about strengthening the role of our language, how it is losing ground on its home turf, how no one is lifting a finger to dig into the beauty hidden beneath its casual slang and lyrical prose. The protestors pinpoint English as the culprit, that we have abandoned our roots to chase after the language of colonizers and imperialists, worshiping the tongue of capitalist devils. They carry around a coffin with words scribbled all over it, a funeral for our mother tongue, a linguistic martyr whose heritage is constantly threatened by foreign sounds and shadows. Purge your tongue, they call, cleanse the pungent taste of the devil’s lair from your palette, protect your lingua matria before it slips away prematurely.
I, too, have a complicated relationship with English. I grew up praised for my English, how I am able to distinguish between “ship” and “sheep,” one with the tongue thrust up and the other down, how I am able to trill my r’s perfectly, how I can code-switch and sound like such a foreigner. My tongue used to rejoice at the completion of an English sentence, eagerly awaiting the shower of compliments that ensued from relatives and visitors. No one praised my mother tongue. It sat grouchy and stumpy, bland as chicken breast, as I basked in the joy of saying things poetically and accurately. I became a foreigner in my own home. While English was my key to unlocking one treasure trove after another, one achievement after the next, my mother tongue only seemed to invite punishment and controversies. English granted me
opportunities to escape and ascend. And I find my roots unclenched from my home country, drifting further away on whitecaps and sunken ship debris. There is truly no place like home.
A westernized tongue, someone had commented. You speak like a white person, even think like one too. On certain days, those words ring like a backhanded compliment, and other days, as a foreboding omen. Perhaps I have swallowed English whole, washing it down with a cup of teh tarik . Can I return to who I was before English? Most certainly not. That whimsical fantasy of replacing one pre-Babel language for another is merely a mirage of inferiority complex, a halcyon hallucination that sprouts from the arid soil of feeble minds. I have claimed English as my tongue as much as it has claimed me as its spokesperson. An act of mutual addressing, whereby I have masticated the anglophonic shards as its syntax and lexicon pierce my tongue, gulped it down, and let it run amuck throughout my veins. A parasite that constantly lurks behind my mother tongue, merging with it, a symbiotic tug-of-war between a virus and its vessel. A ghost that rattles its bones occasionally, reminding me of its existence when I try to translate its essence or attempt to flesh out my mother tongue to deliver a point. The conservatives would disagree with me. The traditionalists who would rather entomb their mother tongue in a limestone coffin, banishing it to the bottom of Pandora’s box, than see it flourishing and growing. I read an article about an ex-trans woman who left KL to return to his home village, where he took up the crafts of coffin-making to perform burial rites for queer and trans fellows, villainized bodies who were shunned by their families in life as in death. He had built numerous coffins for
bodies that no one would touch or accept, traitors to their own sexual script and gender role, satanic spawns who led a life of carnal diseases and vile slangs. The queer bodies, their exiled tongues, are now laid to rest by one of their own. No conservatives will put flowers on their graves, but they will march and proclaim epithets for an ideological tongue. Terror, is it not, a tongue-in-cheek way?
It grows heavier by day, dear M. Oh the burden of our tongue, of having to juggle and jump between linguistic realms, of constantly navigating tempests and icebergs. Walking on lexical tightrope. Some days, I wish I were mute. Or that the whole world would be devoid of spoken languages and our brains replaced with AI-speech generators. But if that were to occur, could we still crack a joke and laugh at our pitiful situation?
Yours, H.
vernacular (a.)
“native to a country,” “domestic, native, indigenous; pertaining to homeborn slaves” from verna: “home-born slave, native,” a word of Etruscan origin
Dear fickle M,
I seem to have developed a knack for writing to you from streetside eateries. It has been storming here in KL. Elsewhere, at this point, the world seems unperturbed by catastrophes. And all I can do is sit here, nurse my kopi o, and twirl my tongue into a frenzy to squeeze out a few legible words. My words barely made sense before, and they feel even more worthless now.
I want to question this obsession with authenticity, with purity, a terminal illness that seems to plague our countries. For as long as I can remember, I never felt aligned with our national identity, or at least its linear, straight-laced façade. Do we become our nation if we speak its one tongue, eat its one type of food, dress in its one type of gown, and pray to its one kind of god? Do people riot when they feel their tongue, enmeshed into their identity, at risk? I am sitting here in this roadside café , caramel liquid that would burn you, tongue to throat. Anneh, one roti canai dabao. Ala bang, your teh tarik coming up lah. Aiya, don’t be noisy-noisy ah, I whack you later then you know. Which tongue am I supposed to choose to make me a nationalist, a tacit performer in this make-believe theater of imaginary boundaries and racial ideals? When did the vernacular become a prison made of cultural standards, and subsequently ghosts of inadequate belonging?
Hybridity is a chimera, feared for its mythical status, yet founds the basis of homelands where multiple streams crisscross. Don’t you feel so fulfilled and intimate, blending in, allowing our tongues to twist around one another? When we shelter one another from harm, regardless of the tongues in which we speak? What might happen when we allow ourselves to shed our armor, and our languages to play and explore and discover, together? Then, we can truly see ourselves in others,
as we too carry a part of them in us, on our tongue. Or am I daydreaming again here? Is this linguistic mélange forever a mysterious beast that exists only in vestiges of a stunted collective imagination? Where there is potential richness, we see only xenophobia. Why is that, M?
Maybe I should stop trying to dig for the root of words. It only brings me further away from the current situation, an esoteric form of escapism. I best finish my kopi o, and head back.
Yours, H.
address (n.)
“power of directing one’s actions and conduct,” “act or manner of speaking to,” “formal speech to an audience,” “a place of residence” from French adresse
Dear fugitive M,
The black spot. Hanging. In my tongue. Behind my eyelid. Like a blackhole. Like stardust. Like Plato’s cave. Like death, dripping with molasses and cicada shrills. I forgot to ask for your new address. You just moved to another neighborhood in PJ, yes? I thought of visiting you, but the train broke down the other day. I was waiting at the station for an elastic century, trying to untangle flea-ridden bats from chaotic nets wrapped around the platform. I also wonder if you have given me your correct address. I stumbled across a website the other day that can randomly generate fake addresses. Here is one:
R. Shamini
SM Teknik, Batu Pahat, Jalan Kluang Batu Pahat, 83050, Johor
See how easy it is to commit address fraud? What we are unwilling to address will only fester to unimaginable scale, wounds that grow gangrene and pustulating. Underneath this feigned harmony and multiculturalism, do we truly see what drives the wedge between us? Or are we complacent with being blind and isolated, like islands in an archipelago? The bereft will claim possession to keep warm, and the chastised will warn others of their tongue’s duplicity. We tend to do unto others what was done to us.
Are you sure that you still want me to address you, or to be addressed at all? Had my tongue been too blunt? Maybe if I had tucked it away better, you would be returning my letters. Still, I hope to hear from you, no matter how that hope has shrunk.
Yours, H.
appropriate (v.) “take possession of, take exclusively, to make one’s own” from Latin ad “to” (see ad-) + proprius “one’s own”
Dear fading M,
A delirious sense of determination runs through me today. I wish to write to you, one last time, perhaps. I am leaving KL soon. Where to, I do not yet know. I will take the train to the border at exactly 13:00. Now you know where to find me.
I had a vision today / I was sleeping inside a coffin made of teak wood / the smell was so pleasant, I wanted to stay there forever / then, the coffin lid burst open, and I was inundated with the sound of metal rock / an Indian man, wearing a shirt that said “Iravu,” was jamming on stage to the raging electrical and emotional waves / a dagger to the heart of outsiders, the outcasts, the margin dwellers / surrounding him, people snapped away with their phones, screaming “terpaling shaking” / so shaking / I felt the ground rumbling / and giving away underneath my body / riotous calls to indulge in the joy of tongues, to bypass / to blend / to blur / to become / ecstatic hearts beating outside the ribcage / my own tongue / rejoice / and dissociate from my body / to merge into this colossal tornado / of sounds / accents / voices / and slangs
In that dream, I carry many names, written in various scripts, whispered in a myriad of tongues. All these names address me, refer to me, trace the outline of my multivalent self. As I peel away layers of myself, another name emerges. Each name carries a different tone, a unique hue, a history wrought through blood and tears. After a long hibernation, I broke from my chrysalis and saw my many faces, switching at a dizzying pace, morphing from one tongue to another. You too, M. In my dream, I saw your face as mine. I became you, for a fleeting minute, but a more holistic, eager, and jovial you. You are much kinder when you are vulnerable. In that split moment, we claimed one another. I yours and you
mine. We fold into one another, like gloved hands or two sides of the moon.
The delulu of a melulu. Yet it rings trululu solulu. Anyway, I have run off on a tangent for long enough. Forgive me, for I know not how to stop my tongue once it has set its course.
I will dress myself in a nice saree, don my best hijabi, and put on gold-rimmed glasses and polished shoes before leaving. This way, you cannot miss me if you go to the station. You might wonder if I am running away like the others before me who saw the grass as greener on the other side and thought that their tongues would be more accepted elsewhere. No, cintaku, I am not going anywhere. I never said I was going to give up on you. Whenever my tongue dares to speak, it echoes your sounds, your spirits, your memories. The silent dark spot within my mouth cave. I cannot speak of you without embodying you, and while your tongue might not be as sacred and incorruptible as that of St. Anthony of Padua, it is still the one I know most intimately. With our tongues, I am willing a future into existence, no matter how imperfect. We can only live another future inside our imagination anyway.
So, knock on my door. Let’s have kopi and eat lidah goreng again.
Always yours, H.
Du’o’ng Ma nh Hùng is an independent writer and translator whose criticism on Southeast Asian contemporary art spans a diverse spectrum of forms and themes. Their practice weaves textual intricacy with visual subtlety to deliver responses and raise questions about art and society. Their writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Asia Pacific, Art & Market, and Mekong Review. Du’o’ng is currently building their website sea-through. net, which will serve as a digital platform featuring artists and art events across Southeast Asia, along with their personal projects.
Accursed Tongues: Language in the Throes of Translation and Transliteration
Tan Zi Hao
1 Tan Chee Beng, “Nation-Building and Being Chinese in a Southeast Asian State: Malaysia,” in Jennifer W. Cushman & Wang Gungwu (eds.), Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese Since World War II (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1988), p. 148.
2 Santhiram R. Ramana & Tan Yao Sua, “Ethnic Segregation in Malaysia’s Education System: Enrolment Choices, Preferential Policies and Desegregation,” Paedagogica Historica 46, 1 (2010): 117–131.
3 Tashny Sukumaran, “More Malaysians Are Learning Mandarin, Even as Chinese Schools Struggle for Recognition,” South China Morning Post, 4 October 2020, https:// www.scmp.com/week-asia/ people/article/3104016/moremalaysians-are-learningmandarin-even-chinese-schools [accessed 5 May 2024].
4 Targetting primarily NorthAmerican and European countries, the survey concludes that proficiency in the country’s most prevalent language is of utmost important, compared to other factors including one’s birthplace, religion, and customs and traditions. See Christine Huang, Laura Clancy, & Sarah Austin, “Language and Traditions Are Considered Central to National Identity,” Pew Research Centre , 18 January 2024, https://www.pewresearch. org/global/2024/01/18/languageand-traditions-are-consideredcentral-to-national-identity/ [accessed 10 May 2024].
Language gathers us in the middle; it thrives where communication takes place. Often likened to a bridge, it transmits what matters in thoughts. No analogy has so singularly seized our imagination of language, except for this metaphor of a bridge. Innocuous as it seems, the metaphor is hackneyed and worn, it speaks in almost platitudinous fashion, ill-equipped for a world of vast disparities and diversities. Laden with its own value propositions, the metaphor tacitly demands of language what remains unfulfilled in the aggrieved babel of Malaysia. If the subject of language has cast a shadow over Malaysia since its beginning, it is a long and pernicious one, marking the failure of language to act as a bridge. Or, to be more exact, the failure of the Malay language in fulfilling its promise as a unifying tongue in Malaysia.
Frustration at the lukewarm reception of the Malay language among non-Malay communities is always evident.1 Vernacular schools and the ethnic segregation they unwittingly contributed to are the immovable thorns in the flesh of the broader national imaginary. 2 Prominence of the Malay language, long enthroned as the lingua franca, has also fizzled out as English maintains its prestige among digital natives more adept at TikTok colloquialism than Malay aphorism; Mandarin, too, is gaining new speakers in Malaysia, signalling not a belated recognition of MalaysianChinese communities, but a conceding to a soaring China as a geopolitical and economic powerhouse.3 Amidst this interplay of global and domestic variables, to what extent could the nation-state assert the primacy of Malay as a bridging tongue? Furthermore, could Malay literacy ever be monitored, and its unproficiency be made punishable by law? Should the extensive use of non-Malay languages be encouraged or constrained? Are national language policies mere futile consolation as we capitulate to the globalising influence of English?
In an age when machine translation seamlessly translates across linguistic barriers, the curse of babel appears to have been lifted. But to consider this a death knell to the ideological role of language is a misrecognition of the affective values language still holds sway. A recent global survey conducted by Pew Research Centre reaffirms the place of language, above all else, in determining one’s sense of belonging. 4 In Malaysia, particularly in West Malaysia, recurring linguistic racism gives a telltale sign that language politics retains a haunting presence. Inability to correspond in Malay at governmental offices has fanned
public shaming. Citizenship status has been questioned as a result, and passport renewal, barred by the immigration.5 A report by Suhakam or the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia further underscores the arbitrary demands on Malay proficiency by authorities, adding unnecessary obstacles for citizenship application among stateless non-Malay persons living in rural hinterland areas.6
A state’s refusal to address its multilingual subject stems from an enduring legacy of nationalism whereby Romanticist notions of “language” and “nation” form an unwilling couple.7 A language, hitherto inseparable from a nation, must be reified as a standard national language. In this exemplary role, the national language becomes the bridge for a heterogenous population. Such are the vagaries of nation-building, as historian Rachel Leow puts it: “For how, exactly, does a monoglot state govern a polyglot society?”8 Language is the soul of a nation, so they claim. A nation manifests itself in duality: a sovereign territory marks the exterior, within which a primeval essence called language dwells.
Ennobling the Malay language as the sole national language was easier said than done. The awkward compromise of Tunku Abdul Rahman’s Language Bill in 1967, which prioritised the Malay language while tolerating the continued use of English and other languages, fuelled the controversial Keranda 152 protest.9 Born from the twinned concerns of pragmatism and political correctness, the Language Bill was Tunku’s middle path that appeased none. Described as a “time bomb,” it was viewed, on the one hand, by the Malay nationalists as caving in to the interests of former colonial masters, but on the other, denounced by Chinese educationists for being exclusionary.10 Today, embittered rivalry between Malay and English, and to some degree Mandarin, preservers as a proxy battle for much wider questions about nationality and loyalty to one’s country.
Language as a problematic has cropped up from time to time to jolt us into revising our warped conceptions of “Malaysia” and “Malaysian.” Uses and disuses of language are inherently politically charged. An authority determined to enforce a language will have to nurture its growth and expand its reach through national education and state-sponsored lexicography. Similarly, in refusing to speak another’s tongue or translate itself for others, the same authority demonstrates indifference to its variegated and multilingual subjects. The unevenness of power
5 At a government service centre in Penang, an officer prevented an elderly woman from renewing her passport on the grounds of not speaking Malay. “Passport Renewals Can’t Be Rejected Solely for Poor BM Proficiency,” New Straits Times , 25 April 2024, p. 6.
6 Melati Nungsari & Nicole Fong, Human Rights and Statelessness in Peninsular Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Human Rights Commission of Malaysia, 2023), pp. 157–159.
7 Tomasz Kamusella, “On the Similarity Between the Concepts of Nation and Language,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 31 (2004): 107–112.
8 Rachel Leow, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 3.
9 The Keranda 152 or “Coffin 152” protest lamented the death of Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, which states that the Malay language is the national language of the country. See also Persatuan Linguistik Malaysia, Keranda 152: Bahasa Kita, Air Mata & Maruah Kita [Coffin 152: Our Language, Tears & Dignity] (Kuala Lumpur: Persatuan Linguistik Malaysia, 2002).
10 “The Bill would very well be a ‘time bomb’ which would blow up some time in the future,” says Lim Chong Eu, then of the United Democratic Party. “Language Debate: House Warned of a ‘Time Bomb’,” The Straits Times , 4 March 1967, p. 8. See also “The Language Bill Trouble Makers — Khir,” The Straits Times, 8 March 1967, p. 7.
11 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 179–200.
12 Haun Saussy, The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 14.
relations structures the politics of language and dictates the precondition for translation. As has often been asked, for whom and why are we translating?11 Literary scholar Haun Saussy is perceptive: “For inhabitants of a peripheral culture, translation is necessary, imposed, sometimes a lifeline; for inhabitants of a central culture, it is optional, decorative, at most educational.” 12 Indeed, translation is a luxury for speakers whose mother tongue has been instituted as a national language. Only the minorities are compelled to translate. For them, translation is a coping mechanism, a survival strategy in a world being denied access.
13 Naoki Sakai, “How Do We Count a Language? Translation and Discontinuity,” Translation Studies 2, 1 (2009): 71–88.
14 Tomasz Kamusella, “The History of the Normative Opposition of ‘Language versus Dialect’: From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe’s Ethnolinguistic NationStates,” Colloquia Humanistica 5 (2016): 164–188.
15 Kamusella, Ibid., pp. 165–168.
But can one truly refuse translation? Translation is only optional if we confine its operation to the conversion of text from source to target languages. In actuality, we are always already translating. Rudiments of what language is, and what translation does, must be prised open and given a broader interpretation. To begin with, there is little consensus as to what constitutes, following translation theorist Naoki Sakai, “the unity of a language.”13 Distinction between speech varieties, between a language and dialect, is typically filtered through political lenses. A spoken tongue has to weather through contamination and mutation, before arriving at a transitory state where one could discern a language. Given time, intonation and accents could effortlessly queer a tongue: a slang makes a pidgin, and a pidgin makes a creole, soon enough, a socalled “dialect” emerges. 14 Once nationalised, the dialect ascends to the absolute, and begins propagating its rule as the official standard. Setting the threshold for what makes a language “language” is a matter of political judgement, or nationalist bravado to boot. Perhaps to query what makes a language misses the mark; a more fitting question is, when does a language become one?15
A language is also translated in the course of being written. It is usually presupposed that the script with which we inscribe a language is supplemental, transparent, and does little to affect the language itself. But the script is a language of a language. Not only does it transcribe and transliterate, but it also bleeds into and contorts pronunciation, thus initiating a subtle process of translation that escapes notice. Compare, for instance, the orthographic conventions between Jawi and Latin Malay, otherwise known as Rumi. Jawi Malay is adopted from the PersoArabic script and follows the abjad system where the consonantal outweighs the vowel. Unlike Jawi, Rumi is an
alphabetic system that spells out each phoneme with complete vowel indication. When vowels are injected into Malay writing, it represents a new language variety based on the Johor-Riau Malay, at the expense of other regional vernaculars. 16 The Malay word “ bahasa ,” meaning “language,” is spelled in Jawi as ساهب with the Arabic letters ب (ba), ه (ha), ا (alif) and س (sin). Because the final vowel is never specified, the Jawi ساهب could double as “bahasa” for Johor-Riau Malay and “bahaso” for Kelantanese Malay or Minang-infused Negeri Sembilan Malay. Philologist Ulrich Kratz contends that the advantage of Jawi lies precisely in its capacity to accommodate different speech varieties, all the while maintaining a common writing system. To quote him at length:
Jawi bridged the various Malay dialects and usages in the palaces, the markets, and the religious schools much better than Rumi would ever do. Rumi took away the freedom of the speakers to pronounce and speak Malay in the way which they were used to locally, and it broke the shared written link. With its insistence on spelling conventions which were influenced by Dutch or English, Rumi helped to divide the Malay-speaking community, whereas the major perceived shortcoming of Jawi as written in the Malay world, namely that of not presenting all vowels, was, I suggest, in fact its major strength.17
That the Johor-Riau Malay was indirectly endorsed as the standard Rumi attests to the unevenness of power relations in every act of transliteration.18 The shift from abjad Jawi to alphabetic Rumi transliterates Perso-Arabic writings into Latin alphabets, just as it translates a variety of Malay languages into a specific Malay language, displacing other Malay vernaculars.
The standard Rumi, decreed as the sole official script for the Malay language in the National Language Act, was a result of a concerted effort between Malaysia and Indonesia to codify Malay in 1972. 19 Historically, Latinised Malay had straddled between competing orthographies, mainly between the Wilkinson and the Za‘ba spelling systems, respectively devised by British administrator-cum-historian Richard J. Wilkinson (1867–1941) and Malay intellectual Zainal Abidin Ahmad or Za‘ba (1895–1973). The initial objective of Latinising Malay lay in
16 Mukhlis Abu Bakar & Lionel Wee, “Pronouncing the Malay Identity: Sebutan Johor-Riau and Sebutan Baku,” in Ritu Jain (ed.), Multilingual Singapore: Language Policies and Linguistic Realities (Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 142–158.
17 Ulrich Kratz, “Jawi Spelling and Orthography: A Brief Review,” Indonesia and the Malay World 30, 86 (2002): 23.
18 Abu Bakar & Wee, “Pronouncing the Malay Identity,” pp. 143–146.
19 Asmah Haji Omar, “Supranational Standardization of Spelling System: The Case of Malaysia and Indonesia,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 5 (1975): 77–92.
Tan Zi Hao
20 Lars S. Vikør, Perfecting Spelling: Spelling Discussions and Reforms in Indonesia and Malaysia, 1900–1972 (Leiden: Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 1988).
21 Ibrahim Ahmad, “Perkembangan Kamus Ekabahasa Melayu Sehingga Abad Ke-20” [The Development of Malay Dictionary up to the Twentieth Century], Pelita Bahasa 5 (1993): 32–34.
22 Asmah Haji Omar, “Language and the Uniformity of Spelling,” Philippine Journal of Linguistics 3, 1 (1972): 13–14.
23 Vikør, Perfecting Spelling , pp. 15–28.
rendering the language legible to colonial officers who were accustomed to the Latin script. Contributing to a still inchoate system were the Van Ophuijsen and Soewandi spelling systems from Indonesia, the Fajar Asia spelling system during the Japanese Occupation, later promulgated by the literary movement Asas ‘50, and the Melindo system in 1959. Priorities differ in each orthography, but with due observance of prior conventions and ideologies, each performs a delicate balancing act between concerns for accuracy and accessibility, manifesting a different imagining of what the Malay language is and should be.20 Subsequent decades belong to a watershed period of turbulence in the newly independent Malaysia. In 1969—two years after the Keranda 152 protest—a riot broke out in Kuala Lumpur between Malay and Chinese communities. Clamouring Malay nationalism swept the country, harrying the government to espouse Malay supremacy through mandates and policies. A year after, Kamus Dewan was published by the government body Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (House of Language and Literature) under the editorial supervision of Teuku Iskandar. Authoritative in approach and ambition, the dictionary succeeded in embalming the Malay language, and its merit has remained unsurpassed in Malay lexicography. 21 1971 marked another year of zealous proclamations as the Congress of Malay Teachers and the National Cultural Congress advocated for Malay unity and urged the immediate implementation of a standard Malay spelling system. 22 The standard Rumi that now polices the Malay language was forged in the crucible of ideological battles, without which uniformity is but paltry vanity. Absence of a standard Malay prior to the 1972 spelling reform suggests an uneasy relation between power, language, and writing. 23 Numerous orthographies exist because a script is never neutral nor universal in its provision. Neither could a script be completely faithful in representing sound. A spoken tongue can never sneak through a script unscathed. One-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is wishful thinking, no script is a reliable conveyor. Every written letter could only annotate so much, whilst our tongue could enunciate an infinity. Sound resists codification. Transliteration is translation. If translation is taken to mean not a conversion of language, but an encounter of linguistic difference in a given context, then, we are always already translating. Nothing best exemplifies the mundane absurdity of
translation than our personal names—the singular linguistic register we readily admit without consent. A name conferred spells out our existence. It lays claim to us, before our tongue could grasp it and subvert its ownership over us. Foisted on us, a personal name is essentially impersonal, says philosopher Denise Riley. “Necessary and thoughtfully considered as it may be,” Riley vividly argues, “giving a child its first name is a small violence.” 24 The name is the primal gift of language and, ineluctably, our first encounter with language’s unshakeable power as a definite marker of being. Totalising and essentialising as it is, the name is constituted by a profound event of translation. My name “陳子豪 ” is a parent’s conceit. Dreamt up in the Chinese script, a name has to be Latinised to be treated as valid in Malaysia. In this process of transliteration, my given name “ 子豪 ” is rendered as “Zi Hao” in Mandarin, while my surname “ 陳 ,” following my forefather’s, becomes “Tan,” retaining its Southern Min or Hokkien pronunciation. From the outset, my name is already a bilingual composite, for a completely Hokkien appellation would potentially transliterate “ 陳子豪 ” into “Tan Chee Hoe.”
As a person of Hokkien ancestry, the HokkienMandarin hybrid “Tan Zi Hao” reflects a naming convention peculiar to a generation caught in between the rising popularity of Mandarin and the vilification of the so-called “Chinese dialects,” or more appropriately, Chinese heritage languages or non-Mandarin Sinitic languages. Since the 1930s, Chinese schools in Malaya had begun to adopt Mandarin at the expense of their mother tongues; more systematic attempts at formalising Mandarin were apparent with the establishment of the Selangor and Kuala Lumpur’s Speak Mandarin Campaign Committee in 1980 and the Chinese Language Standardisation Committee of Malaysia in 1997, among others.25 As Mandarin stepped up to become the beacon of modernity, parents were incomparably more inclined to name their children after the Hanyu Pinyin system, a modified Latin script for Mandarin, leaving only the surname intact—not in Mandarin—to insure ancestral continuity against oblivion. And hence, a Mandarin given name “Zi Hao” with a stubborn Hokkien “Tan.”
Yet, we are at risk of hypostasising language by treating “Tan Zi Hao” as merely a Hokkien-Mandarin composite. If translation occurs in the course of being written, we must also account for the encounter between the spoken
24 Denise Riley, “Your Name Which Isn’t Yours” in Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 115–128.
25 Loot Ting Yee, Tang Ah Chai, & Yow Lee Fung (eds.), 沈慕羽言 论集 (下) [Collection of Sim Mow Yu’s Remarks (Vol. 2)] (Kuala Lumpur: The United Chinese School Teachers’ Association of Malaysia, 1998), p. 52; Wang Xiaomei, Mandarin Spread in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 2012), pp. 52–70; Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, “推 广讲华语, 改革应用文” [Speak Mandarin Campaign, Reforming Chinese Practical Writings], KLSCCCI Gallery, n.d., http:// historygallery.chinesechamber. org.my/cn/speak-mandarincampaign/ [accessed 10 June 2024].
26 There exists no official standard for Latinising Sinitic languages in Malaysia. The Chinese Language Standardisation Council of Malaysia, established in 2004, concerns only the Mandarin language. Sinitic heritage languages have free rein. Modified Latin scripts, from the Wade-Giles to Yale and Jyutping systems, can be deployed at whim to encode a MalaysianChinese personal name, leading to widespread inconsistency.
27 Letter doubling in “Loo,” “Lee,” and “Chee” are but some examples. See Peter K.W. Tan, “Englishised Names? An Analysis of Naming Patterns Among Ethnic Chinese Singaporeans,” English Today 17, 4 (2001): 45–53.
28 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira, “Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haraldo de Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation” in Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (eds.), Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (New York & London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 95–113. See also Isabel C. Gómez, Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2023).
and written. The pronunciation of my official name “Tan Zi Hao” is predicated upon a Rumi convention that telescopes both Malay phonology and English orthography.26 Through Rumi, English orthography introduces the Latin script with which Malay phonemes are transcribed. The same system encodes my Chinese name. Owing to English orthography, the Hokkien “陳 ” is Latinised as “Tan”; owing to Malay phonology, the Latin alphabet “t” in “Tan” is enunciated with an unaspirated voiceless alveolar plosive /t/, and the word “Tan” can be pronounced atonally, unlike in Taiwan or southern China where Southern Min prevails. Observing Latinised Chinese names in Singapore, linguist and onomastic scholar Peter Tan evocatively describes such a complexity as “Englishised names,” since English orthography-phonology convention has been employed.27 For beyond the Englishised environments of Malaysia and Singapore, the word “Tan Zi Hao” is read differently. In China, for example, the three-lettered “Tan” as a surname signifies the character “譚 ,” which is pronounced with an aspirated /t/; in places where English is mother tongue, “tan” denotes a colour, likewise pronounced with an aspirated /t/. My Latinised Mandarin given name “Zi Hao” is not exempted from this translingual operation. While based on Hanyu Pinyin, “Zi Hao” is read atonally and is rendered as two separate words, uncharacteristic of Hanyu Pinyin that combines Chinese given names, like “Zihao.” Transliterating “ 子豪 ” in Mandarin as “Zi Hao” does not guarantee a Mandarin pronunciation either, for the Latin alphabet “i” in “Zi” is commonly vocalised (or mispronounced?) through Malay phonology, with a close front unrounded vowel /i/, resembling the Rumi “i” or Jawi “ﻱ” than the Hanyu Pinyin “i.” Whether this norm should be construed as error returns us to the unresolved debate between linguistic prescriptivism and descriptivism. Trudging through this treacherous labyrinth of language systems, it is no exaggeration to postulate that my name has been Englishised, Mandarinised, and Malayised. Writing my name in the Latin script surrenders it to the recalcitrance of translation, echoing Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos’s notion of cannibalistic or anthropophagic translation, appropriated from Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto, whereby foreign elements were ingested and absorbed to create a tongue anew.28 “Tan Zi Hao” is a mangled name, a cannibal and chimera, a translingual collision of what remains of Hokkien, Mandarin, Malay, and English.
The babel of tongues envelopes us in ways more than we can ever comprehend. In a multilingual environment where diverse orthographies and phonologies have coexisted and competed, mispronunciation and miscommunication are commonplace. Innate in language is an anarchy of enunciations, each of which awaits transgression. The voyage of translation my name has undergone above illustrates how language exists in motion and in multiplicity. Every word, every attempted pronunciation and transcription, reveals a rich tapestry woven from an intricate history of ancestry, migration, colonialism, and nationalism. My name—in addressing me and in acknowledging my validity—situates my being in a flux of power and translation. Language has been a site for the tussle for power, and for centuries, we have deployed it to fight our myopic battles. But language belongs to no one, just as our names do not belong to us. The tongue knows no allegiance. The tongue has no bones.
Regarded as an untamable organ, the tongue simply enunciates, scapegoated for all shortcomings language is to cause. Such negative conception is only a caricature of what we expect of communication: a seamless transmission of intent for which language is tool—the metaphor of a bridge. Hidden in plain sight is how language is always already translated by virtue of being used. Even a monolingual speaker, if ever exists, must translate. By activating our tongues, we become complicitous with its idiosyncrasy, its carelessness. Language is never a bridge but an erratic, traitorous rebel: words could escape us; meanings could slip beyond our reach; undesirable accents could intrude our speech. We are bound to be inadequate in our addressing. 29 Drifting in the way of words, we cannibalise our tongues, uttering what we do not mean. But for all the confusion our tongues lay bare, language compels us to listen, to respond to others, and to acknowledge our collective fallibility as unreliable bridges. Even at the risk of mistranslating ourselves, we must translate ourselves for others.
29 Jacques Derrida considers the scene of the Babel as “the inadequation of one tongue to another,” and thus, insinuating translation—or communication altogether—as “necessary and impossible.” Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Joseph F. Graham (ed.), Difference in Translation (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 165, 170.
Ph.D. Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore
2014–2015
M.A. International Relations, University of Nottingham Malaysia
2012–2013
B.A. (Hons) International Communications Studies, University of Nottingham Malaysia
2007–2009
Diploma in Advertising & Graphic Design, The One Academy, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
Tan Zi Hao (b. 1989, Malaysia) is an artist, writer, researcher, and educator. His works have covered a wide range of subjects from translingual practices, imaginary creatures, to posthuman entanglements. Dwelling on issues of ontological insecurity, his works present a deep investigation about what it means to be singular-plural in an age of global and ecological interdependence. As an artist who moves across different disciplines, he also holds a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. His scholarship has been published in ARTMargins, InterAsia Cultural Studies, Indonesia and the Malay World, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, among others. He is also a member of the type and design collective Huruf.
Past exhibitions include Prosthetic Memories, A+ Works of Art, Malaysia, 2023; Dream of the Day, ILHAM Gallery, Malaysia, 2023; Synthetic Condition , UP Vargas Museum, Philippines, 2022; Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Nepal, 2022; Phantasmapolis: 2021 Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2021. In 2023, Tan’s work was selected for the Singapore Art Museum S.E.A. Focus Art Fund.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS/PROJECTS
2024
• Not Just In Black and White, GDP Campus, Bukit Damansara, Malaysia
• It Depends..., Blank Canvas, Penang, Malaysia
• All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
2023
• Prosthetic Memories, A+ Works of Art (off-site), Damansara Heights, Malaysia
• Perseverance: Art Crossing Borders, Art:1 New Museum, Jakarta, Indonesia
• Dream of the Day, ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• Man&God, Pearlfisher’s Gallery, London, United Kingdom
• Gerai Commemorative Crap Endless Possibilities 1Malaysia, Publika, Solaris Dutamas, Malaysia
• #Bettercities Urban Residency (UrRe), Georgetown Festival, Penang, Malaysia
• The Soil Is Not Mine, Art for Grabs, Annexe Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• Barricade: 7th Kuala Lumpur Triennial, Publika, Solaris Dutamas, Malaysia
2024
• “We Are Always Already Translating,” in Nadya Wang & Ian Tee (eds.), CHECK-IN 2024 (Singapore: Art & Market, 2024), pp. 18–25.
• “The Forest Withdrawn: A Historiographical Trope for Mediating Change in Cirebonese Chronicles,” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde 180, 1 (2024): 1–35.
2023
• “Bags of Stories: Thinking with Household Casebearers in the Anthropocene,” ARTMargins 12, 3 (2023): 76–88.
• “The Fall of Singapura: The Necessity of Unjust Violence in the Sejarah Melayu,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 54, 3 (2023): 367–388.
• “Multilingualism and Its Discontents,” Selamat Datang | Welcome: Typographic Streetscapes in Malaysia (Seoul & Kuala Lumpur: Sojanggak & Huruf, 2023), pp. 12–25.
2022
• “The Chimeric Trace: The Makara and Other Connections to Come,” Art in Translation 14, 3 (2022): 338–370.
• “In the Trail of Fragrance and Tigers: Sensing a PreIslamic Fugitive King in the Islamic Present,” in Ute Meta Bauer (ed.), Climates. Habitats. Environments. (Singapore, Cambridge, MA, & London: NTUCCA & MIT Press, 2022), pp. 150–159.
• “Sejarah Perkamusan dan Pembahasaan: Seputar Bahasa Melayu dan Aksara Cina [History of Malay Lexicography and Languaging: On Malay Language and Chinese Characters],” Svara 11 (2022): 25–29.
2021
• “Unfulfilled Monolingualism, Deferred Multilingualism,” Further Reading Print No.3: Graphic Design and Southeast Asia 3 (2021): 42–50.
• “Glossing Over Multilingualism: Translation and Mimesis in Chinese Pawnbroking,” SEARCH Magazine 1 (2021): 104–109.
• “Intimate Afterlives: In Dialogue with Ark Fongsmut,” “Let’s Detox: In Dialogue with Nur Hanim Mohamed Khairuddin,” and “That Indescribable Magic: In Dialogue with Russell Storer,” in Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Anca Rujoiu (eds.), sentAp!: Special Issue for Roslisham Ismail aka ISE (Ipoh: Teratak Nuromar, 2021), pp. 21–48.
2020
• “Xenophobic Malaysia, Truly Asia: Metonym for the Invisible,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 21, 4 (2020): 601–613.
• “Raja Bersiong or the Fanged King: The Abject of Kedah’s Geopolitical Insecurity,” Indonesia and the Malay World 48, 142 (2020): 263–280.
• “What Animals Teach Us About Islam: Animal Reliefs in the Mosque of Kramat Mbah Buyut Trusmi,” IIAS Newsletter 87 (2020): 8–9.
• “An Artist in Migration,” in Kentaro Hiroki: Malaysian Citizenship (Kuala Lumpur: A+ Works of Art, 2018), pp. 4–10.
• “Imagined Minorities: Rethinking Race and Its Appeal in Malaysia,” New Mandala, 11 July 2018, https://www. newmandala.org/imaginedminorities-rethinking-raceappeal-malaysia/
2017
• “Circumventing the 1980s Along Zulkifli Dahlan’s Meandering Lines,” in Nur Hanim Khairuddin (ed.), Bumi Larangan: Zulkifli Dahlan (Kuala Lumpur & Ipoh: Zulkifli Dahlan Gallery & Teratak Nuromar, 2017), pp. 52–65.
2014
• “Double Mimicry, or, the Pleasure of Getting There and Not Quite,” in Gan Siong King – The Pleasures of Odds and Ends: Landscapes, Figures and Still Lifes (Kuala Lumpur: OUR ArtProjects, 2014), unpaginated.
• “A Conversation between Jun Kit and Tan Zi Hao,” in GANGGUAN by Jun Kit and Tan Zi Hao (Kuala Lumpur: OUR ArtProjects, 2014), pp. 4–21.
2013
• “Invisible Body: An Othering Narrative,” in Nur Hanim Khairuddin, Beverly Yong, & T.K. Sabapathy (eds.), Narratives in Malaysian Art, Vol. 2: Reactions – New Critical Strategies (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2013), pp. 113–126.
SELECTED RECOGNITIONS
2022
• SAM S.E.A. Focus Art Fund, Singapore Art Museum and S.E.A. Focus
2015
• NUS Research Scholarship, National University of Singapore
2013
• IAPS Scholar, The Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies, The University of Nottingham Malaysia
Acknowledgements
A+ WORKS of ART and Tan Zi Hao would like to thank:
Fiona Lee
Du’o’ng Ma . nh Hùng
Chuah Chong Yong
Chun Hee Lim
Izat Arif
Lim Jwo Han
Umar Sharif
Theyvapaalan S. Jayaratnam
Siti Gunong
Yvonne Tan Yit Fong
Syukri A. Rahim
Chan Teik Quan
Eunice Alexander
Imran Shamsul
Mike Hoo
Tengku Hadhira
Kavivarmen Vigneswaran
Hoo Fan Chon
Muthu Nedumaran
Tan Sueh Li
David Ho Ming Aun
Louie Lee Wei Yi
Fam Kai-Cong
Low Hsin Yin
Rizal Sufar
Zoe Mohd Kamal
Amir Hadzeeq
Oon Ewe Lye
Denise Lai
Lee Weng Choy
Ezrena Marwan
Simon Soon
Fairuz Sulaiman
Hamdan A.
Afiq Ali
Alvin Lau
Ryan Tang
Philip Koh
Syahnan Anuar
Chloe Ong
Wang Jiabao
Family of Tan Zi Hao
With special thanks to
Huruf
Malaysia Design Archive
Kedai.co
Bogus Merchandise
Chengal House
Lye Advertising
Eng Bee Suppliers Sdn Bhd
Yong Huat Design Trading
A+ WORKS of ART is a contemporary art gallery based in Kuala Lumpur, with a geographic focus on Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Founded in 2017 by Joshua Lim, the gallery presents a wide range of contemporary practices, from painting to performance, drawing, sculpture, new media art, photography, video and installation. Its exhibitions have showcased diverse themes and approaches, including material experimentation and global conversations on social issues.
Collaboration is key to the ethos of A+ WORKS of ART. Since its opening, the gallery has worked with artists, curators, writers, collectors, galleries and partners from within the region and beyond, and continues to look out for new collaborations. The gallery name is a play on striving for distinction but also on the idea that art is never without context and is always reaching to connect—it is always “plus” something else.
