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Sunday February 5, 2012

Stick to the facts

CONTRADICTHEORY
By DZOF ADZMI


Only then can we interpret the truth about history.

I ONCE was asked to help write a script about the fall of Malacca. I travelled to museums in the city to research the topic and realised a lot of the available information was sketchy. There was a story to be told, but I worried that to make it exciting for an audience, I might be sacrificing fact for fiction, thus enhancing entertainment at the expense of truth.

If I knew the value museum authorities placed on historical facts, I might not have worried so much.

In a recent newspaper interview, Malacca Museums Department director Datuk Khamis Abas said: “Debating on whether Hang Tuah was real or fictitious, handsome or ugly, or whether he preferred one colour over another, will not benefit Malaysians much.”

I agree that looks or what colour kain pelikat Hang Tuah preferred is trivial, in the scope of things. But if our history is built on falsehood, then what is it that we as a nation stand for?

This entire debate stemmed from a comment by historian Prof Emeritus Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim, who stated that stories about Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat and Princess Hang Li Po were just myths (History books to stick to facts, The Star, Jan 17). That struck a nerve among many Malaysians, I suspect because although deep down we know that much about Hang Tuah might have been suspect (“legendary”, even), at its core we believed he was mostly based on someone real.

And we knew it was true because our school textbooks said so.

Yet, surely a failure of our education is that we assume what is written in textbooks is permanent. When even facts such as the number of planets in the solar system are up for change, how surprised should we be that the study of history is, in reality, a collection of interpretations that change over time?

It is the honest revisionism of history that brings value to the subject. History should not be viewed as a static truth, but facts that we should be ready to reassess it in the light of new evidence. In that sense, it is not much different from science – when evidence appears that contradicts your hypothesis, it’s time to re-evaluate your original ideas.

It is ironic then that we are discussing what content should be going into our history books, when the Internet gives us access to more information than we need. Our real problem is in understanding the morass before us.

I think history is far more interesting when you appreciate how complex past events were. For example, the conventional, simplistic interpretation of the Portuguese invasion of Malacca is that it was a greedy colonial power looking to steal the riches that state and the region had to offer.

However, research indicates that in 1508, a few years before that fateful event in 1511, the Portuguese were already trading in Malacca. Unfortunately, something happened that soured the relationship and they were forced out by the locals in an ambush.

Clearly an interpretation by the Portuguese side would say that they wanted to profit by trade, but they was forced to declare war when the peaceful option was closed to them.

Furthermore, in one account of the final attack in 1511, the Portuguese eventually broke through with the help of a Chinese junk (the flat-bottomed boats that the Chinese traders used), raising the possibility that it wasn’t just the former’s intention to see a regime change in the city.

These facts inspired the partly-fictional story I worked on about what was happening behind the scenes in the palace then. (The final script put forward the idea that Malacca was already crumbling from the inside, and the Portuguese just gave it the final push.) However, I would be the first to admit it was mostly guesswork based on a puzzle whose pieces were sparse and disconnected.

I hope there are historians out there who are trying to ascertain the truth implied by these scraps of information. This is the truth of history; that we learn from the past in an incomplete way, and what may seem obvious at the outset is often confusing and complicated.

Isn’t this the same truth our students should learn for themselves – that history is messy and you have to work hard to understand it fully? Instead of measuring out whitewashed facts by the teaspoon, shouldn’t we be educating a generation of Malaysians who can independently make sense of contradictions presented before them?

We are not alone in oversimplifying history. Japan was heavily criticised for downplaying its sins during World War II, and until recently, Pakistan’s textbooks cast Hindus as antagonists and oppressors of Islam.

I think it would be to our nation’s advantage if students could learn that decisions made on a national level are neither trivial nor simple. The teh tarik critics of our government rarely understand the complexities involved in decision-making, and I believe that it is partly because we think our history is a construction of simple facts that conveniently fit together.

So let us debate the existence of Hang Tuah, the benefits of British colonialism, or even whether May 13 was inevitable. And let us do so with the facts at our full disposal, and not hidden by those who interpret history on our behalf in order to keep us on their path of truth.

In that sense, I should take my own advice and seek to better understand what parts of the Hang Tuah legend have strong evidence to support it, and which can be better understood. I have no doubt that in the current climate, the Malacca Museums Department will find a special exhibition on Hang Tuah both educational and profitable, and I look forward to visiting it should there be one.

And, who knows, I might even get a film script out of it.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make of life’s vagaries and contradictions.

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