Sensitivity Is Optional

"There is another world, here... in the darkness of our closed eyes" -- Bertha, played by Faridah Merican from the play 'Bottom Top', KLPac.

SEX AND DRUGS are taboo things if to be touched on openly in our society. And so are racial and religious differences issues -- which are frequently, sometimes harshly, dubbed as 'sensitive issues'. The same goes for political ideologies, sexual orientations, freedom of speech, some basic human rights, and many other things you can't really shout out loud. Come to think of it, there are many things that we can't ponder about, our mouths shut up under the name of sensitivity.

We're sensitive all right. So sensitive we can go crazy, too.

Most Malaysians are driven away by these questions simply by being told to go study and work, with some becoming even more blinded simply by being fed scholarships and contracts. To discuss about all things sensitive would equal to being shushed and given weird glances, resulting in many of us plummeting ourselves with unanswered questions and indulging in perplexing solutions, risking ourselves whilst living double lives shrouded with guilt and paranoia.

Maybe a woman giving out free condoms in the streets would spark a little change, but that would rarely happen here. But it's a true scene that has inspired a movie, Life Support (2007) that lingers around Ana Wallace (Queen Latifah) who is an HIV-positive woman struggling to survive her disease while coping to keep her family from falling apart, grasping to regain the custody of her teenage daughter whom she had lost due to drug addiction.

Set in Brooklyn, New York, the movie magnified the social problems that lurked particularly in the black community -- touching smoothly everything from gangsters to poverty. Ana, who is now devoted to an AIDS outreach group by the name of Life Support, got the virus through his husband Slick (Wendell Pierce) while taking up cocaine before they were married.

One of Ana's ways of reaching people, is simply by giving out free condoms while wandering around in the streets of Brooklyn. Ana's daughter, Kelly, is under the care of Ana's mother, Lucille, whom has take extra precautions as to avoid her granddaughter from becoming like Ana.

The story goes as Ana tries to save one of her clients, whom while she struggles with HIV, are suffering from domestic violence -- something she didn't tell Ana until she was murdered by his own husband. Ana came to crossroads when she had to cope with her illness while at the same time she has to grab the chance of persuading her daughter to move in with her, instead of following her grandmother to move to Virginia.

Alarmingly and simultaneously, she also has to save his daughter's gay friend Amare, who is also critically suffering from HIV and, worryingly, ran away and is nowhere to be found.

Less-stereotypically, the movie pokes around the balloons of prejudice and discrimination against people who are infected with HIV, while blowing up the usual questions in life which centered on trust and belief, playing them around the characters we know best that are both ordinary and extraordinary -- family and friends.

Strongly 'Life Support' lifted a pinch of awareness that it is vital for us to wake up and realise that some 'sensitive' issues, if let away and flushed down into the holes of ignorance, can really tear ourselves apart.

Back to our soils, many have tried to stand up and speak up for these issues. Some has succeeded and some definitely has failed. However due to the sensitive-minded people still living out there at large, the efforts and commitments done by far have been clouded by stagnancy. Making things worse, some of these issues has been taken clumsily into the political race as means to secure greed and power than to bring prevention and cure.

However some efforts by some Malaysians, such as the comedy 'Bottom Top' which was on from November 27 until November 30 at the KLPac -- starring Feridah Merican and Mark Beau de Silva and directed by Joe Hasham -- can be considered as a surprising (and hilarious) opening in the local arts scene, if not Malaysian mentality (read here). Another play directed and written by Mark, 'Oh My God!' -- strictly for the open-minded -- will run in KLPac from December 18 till 20, which will also touch on the so-called sensitive issues, something not to be missed.

But things are still not sufficient enough.

This drought full of nonsensical 'sensitivities' has made a lot of Malaysians thirsty in dire of something refreshingly revolutionary. We can still be grateful, however, that we still can bear a bit of our rationalities albeit the wave of craziness over the much taunted sensitivities, and that piece of rationality has helped us redeem our awareness about things that really matter, things that we should really reach out and inject a remedy or two.

Maybe what we really need is some real maturity.

December 1 is World AIDS Day. An exhibition, One Life Revolution is on-going at Berjaya Times Square, organised by World Vision. PHOTO Amare and Ana, Life Support (2007). (Got myself a new tripod!)