Malaysian Moors: Ethnicity, Speech, and Identity in Jarum Halus (2008)

Abstract

Malaysian Moors:Ethnicity, Speech, and Identity in Jarum Halus (2008) Su Mei Kok The directorial debut of Malaysian Mark Tan, Jarum Halus (2008), is a film adaptation of Othello which is unique within the landscape of Malaysian Shakespeare. Malaysia is home to a long tradition of Shakespearean performances, the earliest of these appearing on the nineteenth-century bangsawan stage, which appropriated Shakespearean tales and embellished them with song-and-dance routines and extended comic interludes as befitted the popular operatic form (Abdullah, "Bangsawan Shakespeare"). But Shakespeare today has little popular appeal, even when presented through a popular medium. Despite being packaged as mass-market cinema, none of Kenneth Branagh's Shakespearean movies have been screened in Malaysian cineplexes. Movie adaptations are also given little shelf space in DVD stores; at best, one finds Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990) and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) in select outlets, their availability due more to the reputations of Mel Gibson and Leonardo DiCaprio than of Shakespeare. Instead, Shakespeare is largely relegated to the world of pedagogy, be it in the form of campus productions or the teaching of Shakespeare in schools offering British-based curricula. At present, only one theater company regularly performs Shakespeare, and the annual installments of its Shakespeare Demystified series are clearly pedagogical; they frequently dramatize texts which are part of the GCSE English Literature syllabus and feature interpolated commentaries which instruct audiences in the rudiments of plot, theme, and imagery. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that Shakespeare is greatly associated with British systems of education, having been compulsory reading for children in English-medium schools during colonial rule and studied today mainly by pupils learning British curricula (Kok 43–46). [End Page 225] In this light, Jarum Halus is a bold attempt to repackage Shakespeare as popular entertainment and to prove the relevance of his works to contemporary Malaysia. The very novelty of a Shakespearean movie adaptation cannot be overstated. To date, only one other such production has been released: Gedebe (2002), a Malay-language recreation of Julius Caesar featuring the punk and skinhead subcultures of Kuala Lumpur, and which was not shown in local cineplexes (Burnett, Shakespeare 156 n11). Jarum Halus is also set in twenty-first-century Kuala Lumpur, but its more mainstream appeal is evident. It follows a group of hip young urbanites who frequent nightclubs and climbing gyms at a time when these were fashionable novelties in the capital. Additionally, by dealing with inter-ethnic romance, Jarum Halus builds on a fashion which emerged shortly before its release for on-screen depictions of such relationships. Othello is reimagined as Daniel Oh, a Malaysian of Chinese ethnicity, who elopes with Mona, the daughter of his Malay colleague at the "Eco Tech" company. Envious of Daniel's corporate and romantic successes, Iskandar, his Malay colleague and longtime friend, convinces him that Mona is having an affair with Michael, another Malaysian-Chinese working in the same firm. He then arms Daniel with a gun, which Daniel duly employs to kill Mona and himself. Granted, Jarum Halus can hardly be termed a commercial success. It was screened in only four Malaysian cinemas and garnered a modest gross income of MYR8,197 ("Tayangan"), approximately USD2,500 at the time. But it won "Best Digital Film" at the 2008 Malaysian Film Festival, a valuable nod from the local film industry. Additionally, the presence of local celebrities at the otherwise poorly-attended premiere and the inclusion of veteran actors amongst its cast generated a fair degree of media coverage in the form of reviews in newspapers and blogs. These served to bring Jarum Halus, but also Shakespeare, to the attention of the general public; as Greg Urban reminds us, culture circulates through time and space as it is reincarnated in various forms, and metaculture, which includes the discussion of both original and reimagined cultural objects, further "imparts an accelerative force to culture [….] helping to propel it on its journey" (14). "Based on William Shakespeare's Othello" is emblazoned across the screen in the opening credits of Jarum Halus, and the reviews consistently made mention of the movie's Shakespearean source. Despite its importance, there is little extant scholarship on the movie...