Hygiene as a tool of segregation

COMMENT | It is already 1am and Mum is still downstairs cleaning the living room. I ask her to go to bed, but she refuses. She says that the house must be without a speck of dust. We suspect Mum has mysophobia: an extreme fear of dirtiness. She spends most of her time cleaning the house. When my housekeeper so much as leaves a speck of dust on the vase, Mum chides her harshly. No one in the house can clean as she does.

Mum, like many traditional Chinese, is superstitious. To have a clean house is the only way to attract the God of Wealth to your house. Every morning my Mum opens the door wide and tie the curtains to the side to let the daylight in, welcoming the good energy into the house, as if saying, “Come see how clean I have made this house.” A clean house for Chinese New Year is the highest priority of all.

The Chinese in this country have never been known to be dirty. But preacher Zamihan Mat Zin doesn’t think so. Rationalising the Muslims-only laundrette, he claimed that the separation was necessary because the Chinese leave filth or ‘najis’ on their clothes.

To him, the Chinese do not know how to clean themselves after peeing and defecating. These dirty stains ought not be mixed with the prayer clothes of Muslims. The cure, he argues, is segregation.

Here Zamihan does two things: using the Chinese body as a site of derogatory description, and targeting the Chinese body with insults and indignity, in an attempt to destroy it.

A scan through history tells us that the racial body is often used as a site for the most convenient target for inflicting terror, pain, and humiliation. Early colonial masters used pathological stereotypes to define each race, like blacks as violent, uncivilised, and backward. The purpose of doing so is to outline the parameters of “them” who are inferior and “us” who are superior.

For most of the 20th century, African Americans were described as dirty and unhygienic, so that governors could segregate them from the white population using the excuse of disease prevention. Laws prevented African Americans from using the same restrooms, drinking fountains, and swimming facilities as the whites.

At the time, African Americans being dirty was simply accepted as “truth” or “common sense”...