These are excerpts from my first photo project, ‘Being Malay’.
Exposures on Kodak Tri-X and Ilford Deltas.
Ahh.. Wet prints. One of my favourite series. I had just got back from a month holiday in Malaysia and went straight to the darkroom. There’s nothing quite like making your own prints. Almost cutting your finger in the total darkness, shrinking skin dipped in chemicals, the savings for fibre based papers, squinting your eye studying contact sheets.. Beat the scanning, the Photoshop-ing or the machine printings. I hope I still remember how to do it if its destined that I were to set my foot in the darkroom again.
When I first published this, a friend of mine Amran, wrote to me this (and I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing an excerpt of his private email to me):
I think it’d be wonderful to depict Malays as being just like any other races. We love, we hurt, we have our own vices etc. The photos will have Malay subjects of course, but rather than narrowing it down to a specific situations, perhaps a more universal approach would have mass appeal. My idea is like saying, hey, being Malay is just like being any other races, infinitely human with our own uniqueness. We adapt, we evolve, we succeed.
In the end, ‘being Malay’ is being human. And that notion transcends all forms of racial or ethnicity divisions, skin colours and beliefs.
I wrote back to him:
Assalamualaikum Amran
Sorry it took awhile to write back to you. I got back from Morocco and I went on straight on my new job. And now I’m writing to you on my lunch break!
Well, on the photo project, nothing really. It’s just that I try to work every photographs I do now in projects, so that it’ll keep me in focus. I wish I had a longer stay in Malaysia to take more photographs, but hey, maybe I can continue on being Malay here in the UK?
There’s nothing ‘rocket science’ about the message I’m trying to deliver. I want to photograph the essence of being Malay such as what does it means being a Malay? How do we look like in general, the color of our skin, our face feature, our sizes etc – that’s physically speaking. Then I move to the environment, what does our traditional shelters look like, our surroundings etc. Then maybe our clothes, and why it is like that due to our climate? Then finally activities. Obviously we have things that only Malay people do, it’ll then relate to our religion etc. You know, general stuffs..
Your suggestion is really powerful and definitely something I will take note on. Your idea is great, really. Maybe in future I can develop a photo essay about social issues of being Malay, our dilemmas and all. There are just so much questions about defining your own self – I just hope I can find the answers from this ongoing project. It might take years you know… Hehehe.
It actually started on that Monday 2nd January when we all had a day off from New Year.
We were all supposed to go to Genting Sempah that morning, as Qadir promised he’ll get bikes from Nad the night before for the next morning cycling session. We discussed about it during New Year’s eve dinner two days before that and everybody was adamant to go. So I made Ewa come, even though she was reluctant at first, woke up way earlier than on any other normal working days, kissed the sleeping Daisy and left her on the bed and off we were to Qadir’s when Amer called us on the way.
“Weh, jangan keluar rumah lagi. Basikal takde.” His obvious just-woke-up voice echoed through our car speaker phone.
Typical Qadir. Most of the times his words were not as what they seemed. I was going to give him the lecture of his life (mostly about keeping punctual, be true to your words, stop troubling your friends and all that good behaviour/menace talk) when we learned that it was not his fault, that Nad had been unreachable since night before and being a cycling junkie, I guess he was still hoping Nad would’ve picked up the phone that morning. That’s why he didn’t inform us there were no bikes. So we were all there, all gathered at the self-proclaimed best mamak in Serdang, most importantly too wide awake it was almost not worth going back home to continue our sleep and have the rest of the day doing nothing. We were all talking about what to do when Qadir brilliantly suggested wall climbing.
Qadir brought his friend, Faizal who knows how to belay and have done it before so all the guys and Ewa climbed that day and I just sat and watched, because I didn’t feel like I could do it, plus I was shy people were going to stare at my ass. But Ewa and Fakhrul were talking about coming back so that Sunday the three of us went for a class (which they call clinic for some reason. Ewa and I have been joking that we have to go to clinic before we go to the hospital for falling off). We learned how to make the knots, safety issues, what’s this what’s that and most importantly how to belay a person climbing. The next thing I know I was making my way up the wall.
Seriously, I can’t believe I waited until I am almost 30 years old with a kid to do this. The excitement of putting your feet at the right place pushing your body up. There’s an intense joy or happiness when you find out your next hold can be grabbed and an intense fear when it’s otherwise. The sweat that keeps dripping from your face which you cannot wipe as if you are hanging to your dear life. The fear of falling once you’re on top and the complete trust you need for the person belaying you to come down from the point of an equivalent 3 to 4 stories high. How convenient for me that I can trust both my climbing partners; my husband and my best friend. And how alive it makes you feel once you have come down to the ground safely. The cramps on your arms and fingers that hurts afterwards it makes tasks like flushing toilet such a burden. These mixed emotions and physical pain are apparently instead of uncomfortable has become what it is to me – addictive.
Suddenly in less than 2 weeks, we did our forth climb yesterday. Ewa asked me before, how many climbing sessions do we have to do until we can decide to buy our own climbing shoes and I said five, at that time thinking achieving three will be in months time. All I look forward now is that phone call from her or Qadir (who are also hooked after his first climb he immediately purchased his own harness days after – pfft!) and I’m all up for it. Fakhrul has been going on about how his “dream” has turned into reality now that both of us have found something we enjoy and can do together, instead of dressing up, hitting the malls, buying things we don’t need and stuff our face with food.
There’s nothing I enjoy more currently than dressing down, getting sweaty, tied to my crotch and grabble my way up just to go down.
Work has been manic since the 3rd. Everybody kept asking the things that were apparently requested by them last year. And by ‘last year’ they mean the last week of December ’11. *Slaps forehead*. Therefore there is nothing I want to write more but emails and letters to my consultants asking them to get off my butt. My JLo butt. No, Beyonce butt. Wait, JLo lah.
And as per 2011, here’s a shout out to all of you. To those who visited, commented, linked, searched, referred and followed this blog last year – I thank you.
Where I was New Year Eve. Picture borrowed from TendToTravel
Venice is undoubtly beautiful. But like I’ve heard before, it’s true that it is too “touristy”. There were just too many visitors, and you couldn’t identify the real local of the island. When you were there, you know for sure that you will be in the pictures people take with their cameras, and vice versa. The hardest part taking photos there was having to disregard the crowd, but Fakhrul, Nizam and I were fortunate enough to see the real Venice when we went out at 1 am in the morning when the whole city was deserted. (Oh, Amer went back to hotel ).
We were there for 4 days and God no, it wasn’t enough.
Ever since Amer wrote about his first backpacking trip, my hands have been itching to write the same – but not in a traveller’s context like he did, just sort of reminiscing the time when we were in Venice. I think Amer said it all in his post. None of us had ever really travelled before. I remembered the four of us sat in my room back in Oxford for hours, each with our own laptops or computers, refreshing Ryanair’s website over and over again, finding the cheapest tickets to anywhere in Europe, being really safe with our choices of destination, flustered to venture for the first time out of our comfort zone together. Until finally Venice made its mark on our minds.
I also remember, once we got to the “real” Venice from the mainland Treviso, we were unprepared about how expensive the food was. Well, what did we expect for such a touristy place during Easter break, right? So we walked for hours until I felt terribly exhausted (and terribly famish) and moaned about it in a way that apparently made Amer really snapped. He shouted something really mean to me and walked off. I was pretty shocked with it because I never saw him angry ever since I’d known him, and the first time I saw it, he was angry at me! After we had our cheap pizza and he came to apologize on a ferry, I was actually fighting back my tears. I managed to act like everything was cool because knowing Amer, it’s hard to stay mad at him.
We continued on our next 3 days really enjoying Venice and the companies of each other. I guess that was the starting point for me (or us, even) to learn how to tolerate with your travel buddies, to respect each other’s wishes or personal goals and gains because you’re not the only one paying for the trip. We might want different things out of the same excursion and travelling together make you see a different perspectives on each other. It can also either make you grow apart or bonded more.
During my half way of watching this documentary which was narrated by Matt Damon, filled with too many financial or economic terms that I did not understand, I said to Fakhrul on my way to the toilet, “Does Matt Damon even understand what he was talking about? I mean, he’s just an actor. I’m a university graduate and still struggling to understand it!”
“Matt Damon is a genius, you know..” he sillily replied.
“You know he’s not the real Good Will Hunting right?”
“No. He’s the Talented Mr. Ripley”.
Well, just to open this post with a conversation with Fakhrul which I found funny. Sorry if you don’t get it but I was still idiotically grinning after flushing the toilet, thinking how stupidly funny it was. And only later I found out that Matt Damon might be a genius after all. He was accepted to Harvard and wrote Good Will Hunting for his English class. Dropped out however, but not for nothing I guess. And after watching this important film (believe me, its a lot more crucially important than Breaking Dawn. Even if you’re not interested of what happened), I have grown respect and admirations to people who majors in finance or economics or anything like that. It seems bloody hard! It’s not like architects with our easy words of windows, walls or doors.
By the way, at the end of it, I did get it. The documentary was so unbelievable it made my blood boil. It basically gave me an understanding of why the recession in 2008 happened. In a layman’s words like myself, it actually went like this: the big investment banks in U.S did some risky trades that resulted the collapse of AIG and Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy, the stock market went crashing, the U.S government used their taxpayers’ money like 700 billion USD or something to bail them out, the CEOs or individuals responsible for this still walked away with their fortune intact, people around the world hit by recessions and unemployment and the Obama administration apparently isn’t doing much at the moment to recover the situation either, instead he hired people who made bad decisions in previous terms as his current advisors. There you go. Some serious shit happened in the real world I’d never thought I’d knew.
Truthfully speaking, I was one of the many people affected by the 2008 financial crisis. I was working in this architectural firm with offices around UK, which I joined after resigning from another a practice also based in Oxford. I was there only for over a year and a half when the project I was working on became one of the many government projects selected to get a big budget cut. Ultimately they had to put the project off and consequently, I and some others unlucky ones were made redundant as they couldn’t put us on any other project at that time.
I was not so shocked when it happened, I kind of knew it was coming. Most of our Malaysian friends had left months before and setting up nicely back home due to the same thing. I didn’t cry or wail or stare at the ceiling, instead I took a flight back to Malaysia the next day. The timing for them to drop the bomb couldn’t have been better, I left for 3 weeks break and never came back to the office. I also felt that it was some sort of “call” that my time in UK was up. 6 years – if I had stayed any longer, I would probably ended up like one of those people who doesn’t want to leave or waiting for the right reason to. Fakhrul on the other hand was surprisingly doing great in this small practice he joined about the same time as I did. But we felt like we didn’t want to push our luck any further; plus at that time we just found out that we were expecting Daisy.
I had made great friends at work (one was Grainne) and actually enjoyed a little bit of those luxury shopping without breaking the bank. But truthfully speaking I despised my work. I was a CAD monkey who doesn’t have any ownership to any projects, stuck to boring tasks like preparing door or window schedules for months, calling up suppliers and organizing CPDs for the office, like blergh! And my life became like a routine which was so dauntingly and discouragingly boring! But I only have myself to blame. If I had been more interested and proactive, people would’ve probably noticed. You know all this office politics or politic of any kind – I’m plainly bad at it.
There were just so many reasons to go back, and like those people, I was actually waiting for a reason to. And I guess Allah had it all planned out for me, turned out it was the best plan after all. Grainne couldn’t stop saying how being laid off was actually the best thing that could’ve happened to me. I agree. The situation back in UK has not really improving, all of office gang who were saved in 2008 eventually made redundant last year (there were rounds of redundancy if things aren’t improving) and Grainne is the only one left standing. Even that, they just started a 10% salary cut last month and she’s eyeing on other countries to relocate and kept making joke if I would hire her.
For awhile I was quite bitter about it, it’s always a sad thought to leave the country where you studied and landed your first job. I kept answering, “It was time..” when people asked why I was leaving UK. And how convenient that I was also pregnant then. But you know what, it actually was time. And soon enough I accepted that redundancy was not about performance or anything you’ve done wrong, it is not as if you’re freaking fired. And come on, I’m not going to waste your time telling how much I have been enjoying both my life and career more since coming back. Even if Daisy hadn’t happened, I still feel I’m happier here on my own soil.
So in a way, although Inside Job did make me feel pissed at a lot of people, I can’t also help but feel that it was a blessing in disguise. It was one of those things that was meant to be and luckily for me, it was for the best. I can only hope it’s the same to others affected as well.
That was 2008, which I have put it way behind my back. It’s 2 more days to 2012. I think I shall look forward to that instead.
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