Cinta untuk Semua

Comic Illustrations / Ilustrasi komik: Johnny Ong

She chose not to tell her story. She said maybe she would do it another time… a later time… one day… I understand how difficult it is to tell an intimate story and be unsure as to how people would receive it, to be unsure how you would feel after you have shared such a story. I know her. I have met her in my younger years, and I wish I could reassure her, but I could not. That kind of reassurance comes with time. That kind of reassurance comes possibly with age. I don’t know… I really don't. That kind of reassurance may never arrive. 

Stories, personal stories, are gifts. I chose to accept her gift. It is certainly an important story. The overly romanticized notion of marriage is not the reality of many, and very few people realise that underaged marriages take place in Malaysia. Old men marrying school-going girls. Just imagine the power inequalities in such a relationship, not only between the man and the young child, but the man and her family, her parents. 

Ya lah, I am always being pressured to marry.

Marriage, it is like someone else's agenda, an agenda to exploit.

Some dismiss it as a “culture” that they cannot curtail. Most others know that when such marriages take place, in all likelihood, the root cause is related to poverty, further perpetuated by unfounded beliefs of virility and averting the risks of being infected with HIV and so on.

Marriage is so obviously a contract, but the terms and conditions are not always based on a mutual and respectful love for each other, but expectations, shortfalls and agendas that have nothing to do with such love.

The way society looks down on a woman who is deemed already "old" and still single—what people would condescendingly call "an old maid" (anak dara tua) adds to the misguided valuing of marriage. I am indeed lucky, for I have never had to face that pressure, those expectations forced upon a woman, that everyone else seems to have, like her.

I am lucky. I've never faced any pressures to marry.

How many people in Malaysia feel pressured to marry? If people marry not because they really love each other, why marry? Is it true that life will be easier?

Her story speaks of a universal love, a love that is challenged by the norms of society that decides for all of us who is deemed lovable and who is not. Every society has a long list of these—the illegitimate children, the drug addicts, the homeless, the LGBT (Q, P and A), the immigrants, the illegal immigrants, the foreign spouses, the refugees, the asylum seekers, the jobless, the beggars, the street children, the stateless, the trafficked. At least for a moment in time, we could both laugh at each other, we "old maids", the storyteller and I.

Old maids!

Love for All

When will you get married?

Don’t become an old maid…

Marry? Why should I?

Why should I give birth to any child and allow that child to suffer?

Suffer to demands of the market

or

Is this an opportunity to build many buildings,

dams,

and to kill the earth for a concrete jungle?

I love not only the love for that one,

But the point I want to make is my loyalty to

My love for all.

All men or women,

homosexual or heterosexual.

My love to all,

is an ideal of freedom from captivity.

Because the land is an extension of my body and the earth,

The ties connecting all of creation.

And my sexual life is a service to the world, and the universe.

because,

there is no Jew or Greek,

slave or free person,

male or female

homosexual or heterosexual,

But,

a return to the whole being,

which transcends all differences in human acts.