A Notional History features three people onstage. One of them is Rahmah Pauzi, a documentary filmmaker and multimedia journalist.
Ahead of performances at The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (klpac) and BIPAM (Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting) in March 2023, Rahmah opens up about her history with individuals in the Notional History team, the parallels between creating non-fiction film and documentary theatre, and why the themes of home and displacement recur frequently in her work. Rahmah graduated with an MA in News and Documentary from New York University, and has done works for PBS, Al Jazeera, Channel News Asia, International Business Times, The Kleptocrats documentary, and BFM Radio. She is currently Head of Content and Editor-in-Chief at IMAN Media Group.
1. A Notional History is your first performance onstage. In this work, you appear as yourself – a documentary filmmaker and journalist. Could you share how you became involved in this project, and what's it been like to work on and perform this show?
I have no formal background in performing arts at all, but growing up in a Malay household, I had always been interested in the works of writers who have strong political undertones – Usman Awang, Faisal Tehrani, Shahnon Ahmad, Ahmad Luthfi Othman, Noordin Hassan, Dinsman, and A. Samad Said. During the height of Reformasi between 1998 to 2005, some of these writers had their works staged as teater rakyat – performed on muddy neighbourhood fields, touring to different cities – as a means of campaigning and starting conversations on the ground, especially when elections were round the corner. Pushing for alternative political expressions in the mainstream media was challenging and staging these works became a mode to organize people and incite dissent. Thinking back, much of my early exposure towards theatre leaned towards a more documentary or non-fiction format. I remember how much I enjoyed the personal, self-reflexive nature of these works. The political commentaries were fun, but they were so viscerally relatable because of the real, political questions they posed – even to me as a kid. It’s what made these works stay with me for a long time.
During college, I started attending some performing arts shows around KL. Not necessarily because I was intrigued about the discipline, but often the questions or subject matter opened up discourses that were new to me as a young adult. For awhile I frequented The Annexe at Central Market for their general programming at that time. I loved that place! I caught a few of Five Arts’ works there between 2008 to 2010, and one of the most personally impactful was the Emergency Festival. It was a two-week festival packed with so many programmes about politics and history. It felt like I got transported back to the poetry readings and theatre performances I attended as a child. At that point Mark Teh and I kind of knew of each other from different events, and I had bought Fahmi Reza’s 10 Tahun Sebelum Merdeka DVD and was showing the film to so many people. So, when I saw that Fahmi was screening his new film Revolusi '48, I was excited. That premiere night was the first time I saw the faces of 'communists' onscreen – outside the bounds of dramatic fiction – dressed in regular clothes. It was even more mind-blowing that Fahmi went all the way to Thailand to talk to these people. It left a big mark on myself as an aspiring journalist.
Fast forward 11 years later, to 2019. Mark, June Tan, Fahmi, Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri, Wong Tay Sy, Syamsul Azhar and I have been acquainted in more ways than I'd imagined since that screening of Revolusi '48 – personally, creatively, and collaboratively. I had just come back from the States after finishing my Masters in Documentary and was working at BFM when Mark told me that he was interested to re-excavate the footage from Revolusi '48, and invited me to get onboard. I think it was then that I realized Revolusi '48 was 'unfinished', and the complexities of the footage intrigued me.
It wasn't yet clear if the project would result in a performance. Initially I was opposed to performing on stage because as a journalist, I much prefer being in the background. So I went through the footage over a span of a few months with the gang, and what I found was a lot more complex than what had been included in the first draft of Revolusi '48 in 2008. I saw a lot of old communists recounting a narrative I had not heard before, but I also saw people who used to be young, talking about losing a war, and living with and maybe sometimes in the past. There were some charged moments, but there were also a lot of reflections about what it means to fight for an ideal. For what you believe in. It was fascinating. After coming up with a few short film vignettes, we devised a performance collectively with these vignettes sandwiched in between, and before I knew it I was already performing as myself – a day I never imagined was going to ever come! I still think Mark managed to trick me well.
I think a lot of things have evolved since 2018, when I first looked at that raw footage. For one, I no longer work as a full-time journalist battling with headlines and the endless news cycle. That alone has impacted the way I see and carry myself – no longer a journalist with a social responsibility to uphold “the truth”, who “investigates”, and who always needs to mediate her subjectivities. Not being in a newsroom full-time allowed me some space and pace – to listen to myself, and to allow my own personal history permeate and intertwine with what I see and what I make. I think I 'performed' as Rahmah the journalist the first time we did A Notional History in 2019, but I think now, I am mostly Rahmah – who is also a daughter, a friend, a sister, a documentary filmmaker, and maybe also just someone who watched Revolusi '48 back in 2008, and something about the subtext of that unfinished film never escaped her. This space allows me to continuously excavate and re-excavate meanings within the footage and myself, and that has been truly rewarding.
2. As a documentary filmmaker, your own subjectivity is always very present in your works, and this is also true in your role in A Notional History. Are there certain discoveries, nuances, or productive tensions about the documentary form that you've encountered through the medium of live performance?
My favorite thing about documentary filmmaking is how personal the editing process is. Most of my most personal works take place in the editing suite instead of during the filming stage because I enjoy observing and collaging the subjectivities and complexities in people’s speeches, in the silence and pause of others, and in the tension between what is said and what permeates from it. But the most important part of all is how all these are changing you and what you want to say about them. Through this process, making a film is like birthing a child – you end up sharing stories of labor and parading your child around but the one thing that has truly changed is you, but no one can ever fully understand that. In a way, there’s something intimate and personal that’s always kept to yourself, it ebbs and flows into and out of your work, regardless of how many times you get your film screened and shared.
To me, I think in a way this is the most subtle yet interesting difference between working on a documentary film and a documentary performance so far. A performance is of course very physical – I don’t just need to process things personally and emotionally but also physically. It’s personal and public at the same time – personally I feel like I am sharing my all, although I actually still keep some to myself. While a film can become a channel between the public and I, in a performance that channel is myself. And no two performances will ever get the same 'me' as I go through the journey of the performance each time. There’s an emotional and a physical stamina to be regulated – that is a space I'm still learning to navigate. But this public-personal tension has been an interesting ride so far.
3. A lot of your work as a filmmaker and journalist focus on questions of displacement – looking into the challenging realities and adaptations faced by migrants and refugees in Malaysia, the US, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Why have you been particularly keen to explore this theme?
Also your film Jiwa
Pendidik is about another kind of displacement – a spatial, temporal, but also
digital displacement – brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, and its effects on senior teachers who had to
adapt to online teaching in a government school. The film received the
Best Short Documentary Award at the Freedom Film Fest last year, but we understand
you're working on a different iteration?
I feel that displacement and exile bring out such beautiful and painful vulnerabilities, and at the same time, an amazing clarity in people. Things are a lot less uncertain in this state, and it allows the kind of perspectives that a routine life cannot provide. I grew up in the 1990s and that means I grew up around headlines of war – the Iraq Gulf War, Bosnian War, Kosovo War – and I was only 11 when the New York Twin Towers were struck by airplanes. I think as the world was experiencing this, headlines and news tended to solidify into black and white, forming an "us versus them" narrative, while most of the images shared often revolved around either world leaders shaking hands or wailing victims escaping war.
But this was not what I saw as a kid, growing up in a neighborhood in Kajang that welcomed some refugee families from the Gulf War, and some years later, from the US attack on Afghanistan. Playing with the children from these families and listening to their stories opened up new imaginings of these conflicts. It taught me as a kid about how it was possible to never go back home or balik kampung. I think this experience shaped my early understanding about the meaning of home, human survival and displacement, and the paradox of pain. I think that there’s something so beautiful about wanting things to work, pushing for a better future and ideal, and staying hopeful in times of hardship. It clearly continues to be a theme I am interested in. And I think you’re right that I have taken that concept of displacement further in my recent works – what does it mean to be aged out? What does it mean to be displaced spatially and temporally? And maybe historically?
I think I continue to bring these questions into A Notional History, as well as in my latest film
Jiwa Pendidik. This film started as a project for me to ask questions about my relationship with my
mother – who’s been a teacher for 30 years – as well as my personal history as someone who went through the
national education system. The first iteration of the film followed my mother’s journey as a senior teacher
going through the pandemic, and I think I want to make the film more personal in the next iteration. Most of
how it will work out is currently taking place in my head, but I think I’ll hit the editing suite again soon –
perhaps after the klpac run of A Notional History? It’s difficult to pursue a passion project with a
full-time job but I am optimistic!
More info about A Notional History and tickets at www.cloudjoi.com.
