An essay about Ayuh, Merapat! (Assemble, Now!) – a proposal for a decentralized collective decision-making model for the visual arts community in Malaysia. Published in SEARCH vol.1: Independence in December 2021.

River, Key, Door

Ayuh, Merapat! (Assemble, Now!) came from the spirit of 9 May 2018. It seems very long ago now, when we woke up to Malaysia Baharu under a Pakatan Harapan government. I was filled with an almost belligerent sense of possibility, and wanted to put into practice what had previously only been daydreams.

Ayuh, Merapat! is a proposal for a collective decision-making process, based on participation at the local level. Every session, people gather in groups of five (5) or more, to discuss and determine their top three concerns. These small, self-organized groups are called Local Assemblies. Each Local Assembly nominates two delegates to attend the General Assembly, a large gathering held in a public space, where they will present their Local Assembly’s concerns to delegates of all the other Local Assemblies.

It was designed to address aspects of the visual art scene that I saw as obstacles to building collectivity or genuine peer-to-peer networks. That is, the over-centralization of resources and influence, whether in urban centers, or in specific institutions and agencies.

Our community is dizzyingly diverse, made up of people from all kinds of class, language and cultural backgrounds. Time and again, there have been attempts to survey and map this scene in order to compile an accurate enough picture to design one-size-fits-all policies. These attempts are doomed, because even before the map is finished, the territory has already changed. Well-meaning consultants and arts managers can’t keep up with the glorious complexity of this living arts ecosystem. They are looking at it and tinkering with it from the outside, sometimes securing large government budgets to do so.

Meanwhile, artists are lured by the promise of access to these funds, and by the notion that our only role is to produce creative content. When we take this money (who can blame us? In this economy?), we legitimize agencies that were not formed by democratic processes, and thus are not overseen by them. Unwittingly, we also cede our ability to build horizontal networks of mutuality. Instead of exchanging cultural and economic value directly with each other in a dynamic system, we become competitors for scarce and finite resources.

Ayuh, Merapat! seeks the lowest entry level for true community involvement. That’s why it starts with the local. Small groups of five or more people already exist – when we get together to hang out at a warung, café or on Zoom, well that’s your Local Assembly! The Ayuh, Merapat! process tries to build on these existing networks. We can’t forget, this network of relationships is what constitutes our power as a community. This power should be managed democratically and collectively, not ceded to just anyone, even the most well-meaning.

Politics, in its true sense, means the management and distribution of power and resources in a given community. It’s totally tedious, but also absolutely necessary. We should probably be suspicious of anyone who LIKES doing politics (that includes activists). Political process should be short, simple and infrequent. Gardening, cooking, caring for loved ones, having sex, learning, making art – all more important and fulfilling uses of our time than politics.

Ars long vita brevis. Art is long, life is short. I’m getting older by the minute; I want to get back to my studio, not sit in interminable community meetings. However, it’s politics that guarantees our freedom to create in conditions of dignity and fairness. Freedom means the freedom to choose one’s tasks and responsibilities.

~

Postscript

I’m writing this in October 2020. Malaysia is in the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. In March, after 21 months in power, the Pakatan Harapan government collapsed due to political maneuvering. The backdoor government that replaced it holds a terminally slim majority in Parliament, and looks likely to fall in turn.

By my side sits a slim book called A Small Key Can Open a Large Door. It tells about the Rojava Revolution, and the 150-year long struggle of the Kurdish resistance movement in the Middle East. The first chapter opens with a line from a Kurdish folk song: ‘A mountain river has many bends’.

Sometimes we come to a politics through nothing but the sheer glamour and beauty of courage. Around 2013, I started seeing images of olive-skinned women wearing camouflage and holding assault rifles in my newsfeed. There was a light in their faces, and steel in their eyes. I learned that they were the female fighters of the YPG (People’s Protection Units) and YPJ (Women’s Protection Units). These Kurdish militias were battling on the frontlines against ISIS, while building an autonomous society based on the political philosophies of Murray Bookchin, a radical American leftist. This was how I came to know about the Rojava Revolution.

I was led to Bookchin by another route: the writer Ursula Le Guin, whose work has been like a river cutting a course through my life. She wrote the introduction to The Next Revolution, a collection of Bookchin’s essays that describe his anarchist philosophy of an ecological, libertarian municipalism.

In 1999, a man called Abdullah Öcalan was reading Bookchin in a Turkish prison, where he remains incarcerated to this day. Öcalan is the political and spiritual leader of the Kurdish resistance. He described himself as Bookchin’s “student” and vowed to put his ideas into practice, ‘as the first society that establishes a tangible democratic confederalism’. From prison, he issued a directive to all Kurdish militants to read Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom (1985). These ideas formed the basis of Rojava, a polity of three confederated autonomous territories, or cantons, in Northern Syria.

I don’t know how that mountain river found its way to my door. I’m a 40 year-old Malaysian woman who lives in peace and plenty. I’m barely familiar with Bookchin’s ideas, and know even less about the centuries-long conflict in the Middle East. For some reason, I told myself I would try in my own way to enact the spirit of Rojava in this land on the equator. The original structure of Ayuh, Merapat! is based on the neighbourhood councils that formed the core of administration in Rojava.

It was Kurdish militias who led the victorious fight against ISIS alongside American forces, liberating many territories from the brutal Islamic State regime. In late 2019, in a stunning but typical betrayal, Trump withdrew American troops from Syria, leaving the Kurds to face Turkey, who consider them terrorists. I saw a tweet about Kurdish political leader Hevrin Khalaf, dragged from her car and executed by Turkey-linked jihadists. The image of her mutilated face and body in the dust crushed my heart. I told myself a strange story: it was not impossible that these glorious women fighters, geniuses in war and survival, had faked Hevrin’s death. She is alive with her comrades in a secret commune, maybe one similar to Jinwar, the female-only enclave established in Rojava by Yezidi women. There they live free, and tend the fire of the revolution, waiting for the day it breaks on the world like a bright dawn, again. Again and again.

I find myself now approaching the end of 2020, discouraged, distracted and demoralized. The candle flame that first started Ayuh, Merapat! is dim. I can barely feel the warmth. But its light has never died.

Sharon Chin
Port Dickson, October 2020