03 April 2025
Reexamining history
The word “haunt: in English contains the same letters which make up the Malay words hantu (ghost) and tuhan (god). “Haunt” also refers to a place that one revisits frequently
Implicit to hauntology is the notion of lost futures – of things which never happened but could have, of paths not taken.
The performances I make investigate the hysterical symptoms of our history and attempt to deal with their ongoing afterlives in a more human way.
I collaborate with activists, artists, filmmakers, historians, journalists, politicians, and sociologists. They appear onstage as social actors, playing versions of themselves, sharing their occupations, preoccupations, lived experiences.
In these performances, the people onstage friction the personal and familial against the national and official. The audience witnesses the performers sharing their own subjectivities while dissecting historical and autobiographical documents, images, footage, and other research materials. We leap across times and eras, zooming in and out of different scales of memory and history.
I often describe what we do as making visible an editing machine onstage.
I’m currently devising with my collaborators in Five Arts Centre a project that excavates narratives, objects and locations related to Hang Tuah – a mythical figure loved by right-wing nationalists in Malaysia.
Hang Tuah is a legendary warrior who may or may not have existed in the 15th century. Variations of his narrative are found in the Hikayat Hang Tuah as well as in the Sejarah Melayu and Sulalatus Salatin. These chronicles chart the rise and fall of the Malacca empire between 1400 to 1511, a strategic sea portal between China, India, the Arab world, and Europe. The golden age of Malacca is geographically and politically conflated with the history and trajectory of modern Malaysia. A sultanate and a state, feudalism and federalism, Malacca and Malaysia. Avatars – 600 years apart.
The most famous episode in the Hikayat sees Hang Tuah take the life of his closest friend at the Sultan’s order. It persists as the most exemplary act of loyalty to king, country, culture. In the past five years, fuelled by the pandemic, paranoia, and online conspiracies, attempts to definitively prove Hang Tuah’s existence have intensified, culminating in a series of expensive, state-funded projects to entrench these claims: experts assigned to fact-finding missions in Europe to gather “new” artefacts about Hang Tuah, a Tuah Research Centre, a Hang Tuah exhibition, a Hang Tuah musical, etc.
Running in parallel, our project traces other faces, facets, and phases of Hang Tuah – looking at how this figure has mutated across different historical eras, landscapes, and forms. At some points we’ve felt like doubles, doppelgangers, mirrors of the state-funded “experts” working on proving Hang Tuah’s existence.
In recent months I’ve travelled to Europe to look at various Hikayat Hang Tuah manuscripts across archives in Leiden and London. We’ve visited places that bear his name in Malacca, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, and Yogyakarta. We’re excavating other depths and dimensions of this complicated figure – looking into the ignored second half of the Hikayat, when Hang Tuah leaves the Malay world and journeys to India, Ceylon, China, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, and Constantinople.
This will culminate in a documentary performance that deconstructs hegemonic readings of Hang Tuah for a more complex, poly-perspective and reparative rendering of these phenomena.
