I’VE been having trouble getting a good night’s sleep this past week. No, I’m not nervous or anxious about anything that has happened or is about to happen. 

I used to suffer from insomnia in my 20s.

Although the roots of this affliction can be traced to various reasons that point to some form of psychological turbulence in my young adulthood, the luxury of hindsight has given me a different perspective on how that period of my life has shaped me and how I perceive the world now – also professionally as an artist and an academic.

It’s safe to say I’ve managed to overcome my insomnia without medication or therapy – primarily because I couldn’t afford it – and the clarity of how I look back at that phase of my life and not denying that it was primarily psychologically triggered gave me a greater appreciation of how our personal histories are continually revised as we mature.

Likewise, a nation looks back at its seminal period through the lenses of hindsight albeit a contested one by the victors and the minorities in the side-lines.

I’m not suggesting that nation states suffer from insomnia. I’m hinting on the ironic lucidity that insomnia brings along in its condition which mirrors, in my opinion, the various tropes nations tell themselves and their populace.

An insomniac’s lucidity mirrors that of how national tropes are adopted, adapted, revised and contested through centuries via its written and oral histories, often in favour of the victor’s narrative.

As time and space becomes interwoven with sentimentality and whatnot, it’s hard to look back at history with certainty although from the perspective of official grand national narratives, this certainty is often defended with great stubbornness – just like how an insomniac blames everything and everyone else but themselves.

It is this ironic lucidity which intrigues me while watching the video essay, Fragments of Hang Tuah – a collaborative effort by theatre director and researcher Mark Teh, production designer and producer Wong Tay Sy, performer and content creator Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri, and multimedia and lighting designer Syamsul Azhar.

Before you get turned off by the word “essay”, video essays as a format succeed to convey more than just a hypothesis and argument because of the power of suggestion and subtext in their interplay between the visual elements. It really depends on who produces the video essay.

As a fan of Teh’s works – I am a friend and collaborator (he directed the 2013 anti-musical Something I Wrote based on yours truly works back in 2013) – I find his exploration of Malaysia’s contested historical landscapes fascinating because it often suggests that the audiences too have consider their own private histories and biases within our own official national narratives.

Oftentimes he does so in engaging formats – notably devised theatre – that to me is very punk rock because of its clarity of inquiry.

Fragments of Hang Tuah is another welcome addition to his body of work – albeit credited as a collaborative effort – by using Faiq’s first-person narration and search for Hang Tuah within and outside of his identity as a Malay male in the present.

The fact that it’s unclear who directed it or not is part of the appeal because historical inquiry is both personal and public.

Fragments of Hang Tuah succeeds in what I had called earlier it’s ironic lucidity of the search for the past – in this case, the Hang Tuah v Hang Jebat trope (because you can’t discuss the former without the binary of the latter) and Hang Tuah as a composite figure whose origins remain shrouded by selective facts, historical allegories, and hearsay.

Personally, I’m a Jebat kind of guy and while some may be turned off by another piece of work about Hang Tuah because of what he publicly represents now as an ethno-nationalist figure, one needs to understand that the figure of Hang Tuah is, as Faiq aptly describes in the video essay as “a hero with a thousand faces”, both “myth and man” and “Malay and malleable”.

This video is an important addition to that inquiry and contestation away from ethno-nationalist chauvinists who insist that Hang Tuah is “theirs”.

The video’s clear and searching pacing and wandering multi-faceted use of visual elements (including a probing Google Earth sequence in silence) and cinematography allows, for once, Hang Tuah to be discussed “rationally” without any of the usual ethno-centric baggage.

Instead, we see and experience how personal identity is questioned and formed by searching both inwards and outwards. Faiq’s search is terrestrial and celestial at the same time – something that my earlier anecdote about my insomnia hinted about.

History is a continually contested collective hindsight that all stakeholders in any nation partake in which the present desperately grasps onto to find something, even remotely, resembling a confirmation of something mythical. And like nations, we are, to quote the late Bill Hicks, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. And that is fine.

The best representation of Hang Tuah, to me, is still the 1956 self-titled film starring P. Ramlee which the video explains ends with a scene not in the original story in which a despondent Hang Tuah, who shies away from the celebration of his victory over Hang Jebat, asks the question “Who is right? Was Jebat right or was I right?” alone.

All heroes are conflicted, like the rest of us mere mortals, and we see ourselves in the various fragments they appear, real or imagined, in our histories, culture and narratives.

It is in these fragments where the agency of heroes lies – not in their constructed totality. Most pundits miss the point.

The 45-minute video is available on Vimeo here. – April 15, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.