The perils of certainty and the last room
Thinking about the death penalty in Malaysia, the possibility of uncertainty, and how we see the world.
“Dubito, ergo cogito; cogito, ergo sum” [#]
between our dreams and actions lies this world
—Bruce Springsteen
I think I’ve always felt the idea of injustice keenly. It probably had a lot to do with reading, during my pre-teen years, books like To Kill A Mockingbird and A Tale of Two Cities—my favourite novel by Dickens, who was a court reporter for several years. To be honest, I don’t remember much of it now, but I remember that it had something of a transformative impact when I finished it for the first time. Emerging from its pages in my family’s end-of-the-road terrace house in one of Malaysia’s quieter second cities, the world felt suddenly bigger, its depths suddenly visible to me.
During my primary school years, I would creep out of my bedroom late at night to watch movies in the living room after my parents had gone to sleep. I frequented a laserdisc rental shop (while my parents waited in their car outside) and judged movies by their cover sleeves—and in hindsight, I was surprisingly open to suggestion. I don’t remember the uncle and aunty behind the counter ever trying to disabuse me of any titles. Some of my favourites were crime and courtroom dramas, like A Time to Kill and A Few Good Men (who can forget Tom Cruise’s “I want the truth!” and Jack Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth!”) Later: Dead Man Walking, which I found more unsettling, and 12 Angry Men.
After we moved to Kuala Lumpur, I had access to a much larger bookshop, Kinokuniya, and picked up more books on the subject. Back then, online culture curation wasn’t what it is now, and Kinokuniya was my guide: just by randomly browsing its maze-like shelves, I chanced upon nonfiction reads like A Trial by Jury by D. Graham Burnett and The Juryman’s Tale by Trevor Grove, which went some way in shaping my ideas on justice and reason and why diversity matters—an impartial jury only possible with a legit cross-section of the community and all that. It made my teenage self wish that I would one day be asked to carry out jury duty too, until I realised that the Malaysian government, having no faith in the laymen’s capacity to make reasoned judgments, had abolished it in the mid-nineties.
I think what captured my imagination about all these stories was the boiling cauldron of conflicting ideas you are invited to grapple with: guilt and innocence, denial and acceptance, damnation and redemption, life and death. Everything is at stake. That was probably why I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, and I did study law at university, but my writerly side won out in the end. It turned out I wasn’t interested so much in practicing law, but more in the theory of justice and how it came into being (reading case judgments to see what I could learn from judges’ reasoning process was an occasional past time), which goes hand in hand with the theory of truth, which of course has everything to do with reporting and telling stories, and informs every aspect of how we see the world, how we make decisions, and how we live.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the possibility of the untruth and the unknown. I think of myself, generally, as a gentle skeptic—in that I’ll hold something anyone tells me lightly, in a sort of state of suspended truth: I’ll accept it nominally as true, until something either reconfirms it or debunks it. Honestly, it gives me quite a bit of anxiety, this delicate business of determining the truth (I’m speaking, here, of something more nuanced than fact), especially when something neither debunks nor confirms but remains just off-kilter, just disobliges to conform to what you already know: a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit. That’s when it gets tricky—though it can also be exciting if you find something unexpected. And sometimes, it can feel downright existential.
By which I mean: I worry often about all the shades of truths to a truth, and how just one tiny piece withheld, obscured, or uncovered could change how one sees everything. It’s kept me up at night when I’ve turned over a piece to editors, made me dream about my teeth falling out. I’ve even dreamt about editors replying, pointing out all the ways in which I’ve erred, and then I’m re-writing the piece in my dream, line by line—it’s very specific!—and all of a sudden I’ve penned a whole piece and I wake up and realize that none of it actually happened. Sometimes, even months later, when a piece has long been published and no one has decried anything I wrote as myopic, inadequate, or false, I’ll come across something that reminds me of a piece I wrote and I’ll feel the urge to double-check if everything in it still holds.