The hashtag #KitaLawan appeared in February, after Anwar Ibrahim was convicted of sodomy and sent to jail for the second time. In the beginning, I saw both #KitaLawan and #KamiLawan being used, which was interesting.

‘Kita’ and ‘kami’ are collective pronouns meaning ‘we’, but the latter is closer to ‘us’ – an other, i.e. a ‘them’, is explicit when using ‘kami’. Thus, ‘negara kita’ means ‘the country belonging to all of us’, while ‘negara kami’ means ‘the country belonging to us, not including you/them/other people’.

The image of bright yellow lalang growing over a Barisan Nasional banner has hovered in my mind since 2013. It sometimes comes into sharp focus, but I’ve yet to pin it down. This was an experiment cutting lalang out of scrap pieces of yellow fabric – a patchwork of resistance, a loose web against an unchanging background.

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Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.