Transcultural Lullabies: Rohingya and Malay Folk Songs

https://artsequator.com/lullabies-rohingya-malaysia/ 

For Rohingya poet Mayyu Ali and Malaysian artist Sharon Chin, these cyclic works of art are not simply gifs; they are a virtual bridge for “the immeasurable distance and pain” between Rohingya refugees seeking asylum and increasingly hostile Malaysian shores where boats of asylum-seekers are being turned away. These visceral and ever-shifting patterns are the stage of Ali and Chin’s most recent collaborative project, pairing Rohingya poetry and Malaysian lullabies to assert Rohingya culture which continues to be threatened by the ongoing genocide in Myanmar and ironically employ lullabies to “wake up [Malaysians] to the truth of who [they] are… and what has been done in [their] name” by government policies. For Chin, this piece comes from a place of collective shame, seeing Malaysia’s current treatment of Rohingya refugees mirrored in the historical treatment of Vietnamese boat people also turned away from Malaysia in 1978. For Ali, this piece emphasizes the importance of creating art as a medium for affirming Rohingyan heritage, rights, and identity. It builds off of his work with Art Garden Rohingya, the first Rohingya online art website and facebook page in history, which began in a refugee camp and has now published over 540 poems in Burmese and English as of February 2020. 

These curated songs evoke a patchwork of transcultural exchange and connection. One Malaysian folk song about fishing heavily features Hokkien and Hakka Chinese dialects, sparking the possibility of tracing deeper relationships and movement of communities through influences on art and linguistic hybridization. Another pairing of songs both centering the land and harvest sparks a different discussion on imagined communities which Chin encapsulates in this interpretation of the songs’ messages: “If I say I’m of this land, I have to follow its example of generosity and hospitality. This is the principle of belonging. It’s so much more than a legal document.”

The use of the word “legal document” brings to mind Benedict Anderson’s piece, “Census, Map, Museum” which centers classification and order-producing technologies to define nationhood and assert power. In stark contrast to those technologies are these transcultural lullabies, sources of intergenerational knowledge disseminated through oral tradition and preserved by refugees facing the continued violence of cultural erasure as their written language and art is lost in Myanmar’s genocidal policies and even further back through wars during the British colonial era. The challenge of creating an alternative archive and using this to reassert identity is an incredibly important and challenging task. I’m reminded of Saidiya Hartman’s work using “critical fabulation” and poet Tyehimba Jess’ Pulitzer Prize winning collection “Olio”, both of which bend and renegotiate the limits of the traditional historical archive in telling the stories of people who fall in the margin.

Other sources:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/18/malaysia-allow-rohingya-refugees-ashore

http://www.theartgardenrohingya.com/about/