ZAM, THE NATIONALIST WHO NEEDS A TIME-MACHINE

Umar Mukhtar

Zam, or Zainuddin Maidin, the ex-newspaper reporter and Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s Minister of Information, wrote in his blog that English schools will never make a comeback in Malaysia. He was, of course, as usual, speaking trough his arse and it cannot be left without a response because it stinks.

Zam, my father, too, fought for our nation’s independence. He was a Malay school teacher, and the house was flooded with the magazine ‘Majallah Guru‘, for those who can still remember it? It was our introduction to periodicals and became standard reading material for us kids, with articles about how a language defines a people and what not. Then came other magazines, Mestika, etc., andKomanwealth Hari Ini.

But my father sent all his ten children to English schools. He began to bring home Dandy, Beano, Beezer, Topper and then there was Commonwealth Today. Kit Carson, Kansas Kid, comic books,The Asia Magazine and Reader’s Digest began to appear next to Hikayat Malim Kundang, and novels like AHAD and Musafir. But he sent us to English schools, Zam!

He was still very much a Malay nationalist, and even became part of the Malay teachers movement that joined Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PMIP) the forerunner of today’s PAS. He and his friends championed the Malay language. Any train visit to Kuala Lumpur was incomplete without us kids dropping in at Dewan Bahasa Dan Pustaka and my father saying hello to Syed Nasir, its head.

So tell me, Zam, was your youth more ingrained with Malay nationalism than mine? Oh, I forgot to say that the reason we stopped at DBP was to pick up all newly translated books for that month. It must have cost quite a bit because my father always gave Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman a miss.

Our library was simply storage under the table and under the beds, and translated books were as many as the English and Malay ones. I still keep my first DBP early translated book, “Atom yang Amat Kuat“. Does DBP still translate books?

So tell me, Zam, was your youth more Malay than mine? Let me tell you, Zam, one of my father’s biggest disappointments which he told me during chats before he died in the millennium was that people had confused nationalism with the seeking of knowledge. They are separate. One tells you who you are, and the other tells you what you can be, without forgetting who you are.

So obviously, Zam, either you make sure Malay is a 21st century dynamic language that can be the medium for the acquisition of knowledge, or Malaysians become thoroughly bilingual, and really stressing on it as a second language. I always wonder how you can improve your English through doing mathematics and science in English. Which is more important then - the knowledge that you are trying to acquire without proper vocabulary and grammar, or the latter at the expense of the rudiments of algebra?

The trouble is that it is assholes like you politicians, now with blogs, who had used language as a currency for political popularity at the expense of it being a medium for knowledge. Whatever we do, my father lamented, do it well and do it completely. The politicians lost steam early in the journey, my father said with hindsight. Yet they still want to be dogmatic about it.

Let me tell you, if you get to live as long as your mentor, contrary to what you said, English schools will be back. Not because we look up to the Anglo-Saxons, it could be Arabic or Mandarin. It is because politicians like you have failed the Malay language miserably.

Imagine my frustration at employing a local graduate in IT who got stuck in the internet but she could not read the ‘Help’ that appeared at the corner of the screen because it was in English and dozens of different other languages and characters but not Malay? Zam, do you even care? Or are you still stuck in the sixties with your ‘Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa‘ slogan sounding hollow and empty?

So just shut up, Zam. Take a holiday to the land of your forefathers and see how they treasure English as a language medium for knowledge while still giving due attention to Sanskrit and Urdu and Malayalee and Sinhalese and Hindi and Tamil. Which one is your lingua franca, Zam? It is my children’s misfortune if you say it’s Malay because that language needs honest champions, not more trashy politicians.

It’s people like you that should be condemned to the rubbish dumps of the sixties because you have never moved on. Maybe for the lack of mind-expanding views of this God-given world, if your previous heart-breaking English TV interview is any guide to your wisdom or lack of.

I had always meant to ask you why you did the interview in English? The Japanese interviewees always insist on having interpreters, even though I bet you my last dollar, their English is better than your gibberish. Now, that is national pride. Not some pasember rojak misplaced sense of nationalism.

Leave our children alone. Don’t talk about anything that may affect their future, unless you plan to talk intelligently, you jerk.