“ANAK” by Very Shy Gurl
Trauma, abuse, and power struggles haunt us in different ways in this 30th-anniversary rewrite of Noor Effendy Ibrahim’s seminal “Anak Melayu”
I always brace myself for Effendy’s work. I know it will express a kind of pain and anger acceptable in the performance space, a pain and anger that is often delegitimised or minimised or considered “inappropriate” elsewhere—and I cherish his work for that reason. Minority and Malay pain in Singapore is so often reduced, ignored, glossed over. I cherish that Effendy’s work is not afraid to bring us to these pits of despair, these sweaty catharses, and to linger there. His work relishes the act of menggali—mining, digging up, excavating, boring into—these inarticulable and “inappropriate” emotions buried in our viscera, bringing them to the surface, and narrating them on the skin and flesh of the brown body.
I watched ANAK (“child” in Malay) with an archive of Effendy’s work inside me. It’s not a big archive, but it contains an eclectic range of his projects and a rough index of the repeated tropes he often uses that I can now recognise and trace. ANAK, like all of Effendy’s work, is difficult to watch. It wasn’t unbearable—but very, very difficult, and this response I’m writing will subsequently contain descriptions of abuse and sexual assault. I will not have received all the subtext of the work because I am not a Malay person, and do not claim to have any of that lived experience. I can only guess at some things, and this is my attempt to make sense of them.
ANAK sustains Effendy’s interests in the porosity of the domestic, familial space, the way he’s dissected the multigenerational trauma of a more conventional family unit in Cerita Cinta (“Love Story”, 2018), and alluded to this space in the nonverbal performance piece Si Ti Kay (2012) where a performer, attached to a tiny house by a series of pulleys, raises and lowers the house over a dishevelled quartet of performers gorging themselves on rice. Effendy is also the set designer for ANAK, and it’s the first thing we see, lit in uncanny neon pinks and oranges by lightning designer Emanorwatty Saleh. My memory of performances past begins to layer previous performance encounters over the one I’m witnessing now. ANAK is also loosely set in what appears to be an HDB apartment space, but unlike the transparent, open-plan flat of Cerita Cinta that went almost right up to the audience’s seats, ANAK’s domestic space contains walls and structures that obscure certain rooms, putting space between us and the slow, spiralling breakdown unfolding on stage. The fluffy white clouds in the nursery, where a baby bouncer hangs from the ceiling, reminds me of the psychedelic space of playwright Nabilah Said’s ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative Of A Native (2019), which Effendy directed. But ANAK’s clouds feel sinister—like you’re in a horror movie involving an infant, and you can’t put a finger on that creeping sense of dread just yet.
The show opens with each of the six characters engaged in the obsessive repetition of a specific act. Norliza (Rusydina Afiqah) is crouched on the floor, scrubbing desperately at an unseen stain. Fuad (Al Hafiz Sanusi) yelps and cries and howls as he’s beaten and slapped by Johari (Ali Mazrin)—and while I can’t see the pair from where I am sitting, the thwack of skin meeting skin is painfully clear. These repetitions remind me of what Effendy returns to, again and again, in each show of his I’ve witnessed: the lascivious misogyny, the homoeroticism undercutting this toxic masculinity, morbid humour, the frustrated and hypersexual monstrous feminine, the relationship between the abuser and the abused, the pleasure of self-flagellation and masochism as a kind of atonement, and the animal figure (often a dog) who moves almost innocently through it all. These taboos are consistently difficult to confront, as is the relentless anger moving beneath them. It’s an anger and resentment not only of majority communities that police and denigrate minority race groups, but the policing that takes place within minority groups themselves. In the programmes notes to ANAK, Effendy describes the public reaction to Anak Melayu (“Malay Child”) in 1992, where “some folks… wanted to beat me up, believing that the play had insulted the Malay community”, and the state of anxious hyper-vigilance he entered in the weeks after these threats were made. This anger is potent and sharpened here by a new generation of younger performers. The late Black feminist bell hooks writes about how “the rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged”. With almost all of Effendy’s work, this rage is bare-knuckled and bald, and we cannot look away.
Each of these performances I’ve witnessed over the past decade—whether they’ve been staged with Teater Ekamatra, under Effendy’s previous moniker akulah BIMBO SAKTI, or the new interdisciplinary collective Very Shy Gurl—is a repeat exorcism. The ghosts and demons refuse to leave, and I wonder how much of the anger sustained here is tempered and tamped down by a sense of “penat” or exhaustion. In this case, 30 years after Anak Melayu, I wonder how the exorcism has changed. I think about what Effendy is trying to exorcise of himself through his work, and if he considers himself to have ever succeeded.
Anak Melayu was also restaged digitally earlier in the pandemic as part of prolific producer Fezhah Maznan and Teater Ekamatra’s baca skrip series that ran from May to August 2020. The performers, each isolated in a tiny Zoom box, felt like separate and lonely entities orbiting around each other. ANAK constellates their relationships very differently and offers us a familial reading of six otherwise unconnected people. Their relationships are deliberately muddied. Who is related to whom, and how? The power hierarchies are also less clear. There are two male characters jostling for the alpha title (Johari and Khaizal; played by Ali Mazrin and Saifuddin Jumadi), and initially I assume the power belongs to one of them, but then this switches and I’m surprised at how quickly the dynamics can shift. The cast manages these taut transitions remarkably well. Who has control, who relinquishes control, who doesn’t look like they have control, but actually has all the control? So many sexual relationships espouse this dynamic, where one might assume the dominant partner must have power over their submissive partner, but when in reality the opposite might be true. I think of anthropologist James C. Scott’s term, the “weapons of the weak”1—the repertoire of quiet refusal and defiance that marginal or less powerful communities in a Malaysian village made use of to retain some kind of dignity or agency. Scott describes these gestures: “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth”—all means of silently undermining those who extract labour, taxes, rent and profits while maintaining an air of social and cultural acceptability.
These weapons of the weak can be lethal. I see it in the character of Shalawati (Shafiqhah Efandi), who dares the men to fuck her, is clearly repulsed by them and finds them abhorrent and reprehensible, then turns around and taunts them. Other female characters respond to abuse and intimidation very differently. Hayati (Farah Lola) crawls around the space on her knees, begging others to let her help, to be useful, to be worth something, to be valued in any possible way. Her trauma response isn’t fight or flight—it’s fawning; fawning over her abusers to keep herself safe. Norliza (Rusydina Afiqah, in a terrifying turn) takes an almost diametrically opposite tack, a gaunt mother figure who enacts violence on her own child, one of the most difficult maternal taboos to stomach. I also wanted to spend some time with Fuad (Al Hafiz Sanusi), who wanders around the space trapped in a dog mask. There’s a moment where he cries out, plaintively, Aku anjing? Aku… anjing? (I’m a dog? I’m… a dog?), and it just broke my heart. What happens when people cannot even recognise the debilitating roles they have taken on in a family, in a community? How do they even escape?
The entire production is underscored by the responsive and incredible live music of Sri Setia Pulau Singa, Mohamed Norazam Bin Hakub and Nurfaizal bin Ja’afar. At the curtain call, I could see the exhaustion etched onto every single performer’s face. I have a sense of what rehearsals felt like from producer Shaza Ishak, who struggled with whether audience members or the performers themselves would be traumatised or triggered by how violent and visually assaulting the work can be. From what I understand, the performers worked on de-roling2 after each rehearsal, and there was an emphasis on frank, open and honest communication, as well as a deep respect of each performer’s boundaries. Effendy, Shaza, and production stage manager Khairina Khalid also made it a point to check in regularly with each performer.
Over the past two years, I’ve been thinking a lot about approaches to the choreographies of intimacy and violence in the rehearsal room and in performance. I am curious about how much performers and practitioners can push themselves and delight in challenging themselves with proper and rigorous support throughout the process and after. I don’t think implementing care practices in these intense productions means that violent work can’t be staged ever again, but that both performers and audience members feel confident and supported and ready to engage with the material, with as few detrimental effects as possible (or none at all!). How might one communicate the very real fallout of abusive relationships without replicating their horrific consequences? How can we confront the very real violence and humiliation faced by minority groups without reinscribing these outcomes, particularly when it comes to gender-based violence? This intergenerational production spanning several generations of Malay performers feels like a microcosm of these questions and how each generation responds to what it inherits. We may have been forcibly moulded by those who have come before—but what does it mean to allow ourselves to be shaped by those who come after?
ANAK ran from March 17-20, 2022, at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. I watched the March 18, 8pm show. You can read more about the production here and follow the Very Shy Gurl collective on Instagram here.
James C. Scott (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.