Hickling misunderstood
Yes, it is quite impertinent for an ex-British colonial officer to tell the Malaysian government what to do. But perhaps if Mr Fan had read the article more carefully, it would be quite clear to him that Hugh Hickling was asking for the re-instatement of judicial review.
In all practicality, no one expects the government to do away with the ISA overnight. A free press would indeed make more sense now as Hickling suggested.
Still, Mr Fan did make several interesting points. I am impressed by his conflation of literary theory with practical material reality, something that many literary students and lecturers fail to do.
However, it is a bit unfair to label Hickling as a colonialist with no redeeming feature just because he wrote in a similar vein with Conrad.
I must admit that I know very little of Mr Hickling and have no personal experience of the colonial era, but whatever little I have learnt about Mr Fan that can be gleamed from his one article (a totally unfair measure of a person just as a few lines can be no real measure of a literary figure), I can say that both Mr Fan and Mr Hickling must originate from the same soil. Or worse, that Mr Fan had just begun to read Said. Achebe or Fanon and decided to quote arbitrarily from them. But I shall not repeat what he has done and avoid speculating on uncertainties.
While Mr Hickling cannot divorce himself from his experience as a colonial administrator, a fact that opens his comments about the ISA to a lot of scrutiny, Mr Fan cannot tear himself away from his typewriter, a rather obsolete piece of machine these days. I sometimes wonder whether it does not take the colonised mind to read colonial inscriptions everywhere even when they don't exist. This is endemic with a generation of leaders (government and in the opposition) who cannot get on with their lives without looking for Fanon, Conrad and Hickling to justify their reality.
However, I am impressed with Mr Fan's attempt to convince. It is a well-written piece that jumps at you and one almost feels sorry for the writer after having lost his portable typewriter to lose the ability to write a coherent piece highlighting the sub-text of the article.
As Mr Fan is a fair-minded individual, I am sure he would not disagree that even a colonial relic deserves a more empathetic reading. If he can be so attached to his typewriter, I am sure he will find many redeeming features in Mr Hickling.
Mr Hickling is a respectable individual who having served his country, having served the Malayan Civil Service even after independence and who having helped with the drawing-up of the land laws in this country, is more than the law that he wrote. He also recounted in an earlier article that Mr Fan obviously did not read, how much he wanted the government then to take into account opposition views.
As a retired civil servant and professor of law (Hickling worked in the University of Malaya and UKM for more than 10 years), his opinions about the ISA may not be ideal but as he claims, it was not the law he had drafted in 1960. To suggest that the interview with Hickling was a desperate attempt to justify the use of the law would be to miss the alternative views expressed in the article.
I would like to remind readers here that the article's sub-heading read: 'But judicial review needed'. While the other English dailies highlighted nothing really substantial, The Star ran two interviews with Hickling among other reporting on the ISA detentions then. It was a bold step that was never acknowledged in the recent Nanyang takeover debacle. Malaysiakini as usual did a service but really in a much more liberal environment and with risks it can much afford. I am sure Mr Fan is not blind to this.
I am also not blind to the fact that for a person like Mr Fan, there can be no reason to have the ISA and no opinion even qualified with a sub-heading as the one we published is good enough. Therefore it would be better to offer constructive criticism where views can contribute to change.
In the case of Mr Fan's career as a literary critic, I am not sure of his eventual success. But then I know better than to judge a person by a few lines in a novel and a few convenient ideas from foreigners, colonised or otherwise. Perhaps it is not a bad thing that he lost his typewriter though I would recommend that he try using the personal computer and not revert to something even older!
(The views above are entirely my own and do not reflect the opinions of my co-writer of the articles on Hickling and the ISA.)
