Catching a Lost Frequency from the Sixties
Notes After the ‘Surat Dari Tawau’ Five-Day Programme’
Before the opening talk began, I had mentally braced myself for an empty room. In an era of social media governed by the attention economy and algorithms, my largely-dormant personal page was naturally ill-equipped to push news of such a niche event into the so-called “traffic loop.” Yet, thanks to Joe Sidek’s rallying power across various networks, we finally breached out to our target audience’s orbit just two days before the event.
The most gratifying sight was the attendance of a drama professor from USM, Andika Aziz, along with his students. It was great to have them actually jump into the discussion about academia and the theater scene mixing, talking history, talking creative ethics, talking the ecosystem, and talking about themselves. Regrettably — though perhaps predictably — there wasn’t any practitioners from Penang’s Chinese-language theater scene. But on second thought, seeing Penang’s Malay theater practitioners, English theater practitioners, and the cultural workers drawn in by COEX gathered in one place was already a profoundly moving landscape. Hosting a Malay-language lecture at COEX — a space that traditionally serves as a hub for the Chinese intellectuals — and allowing different linguistic groups to converse in the same physical space felt particularly precious.
I am deeply grateful for COEX’s ongoing support, and especially thankful to the Penang Arts Council (PAC) for stepping outside its established curatorial safety zone to facilitate an event that, under strict market logic, promises “little substantial yield”. Yet, we must ask: did this one-time event truly bridge the linguistic divides of Penang’s performing arts scene, or did it merely offer a syok sendiri fleeting intersection of parallel orbits? I guess, for those who came to exchange ideas, this was undoubtedly a massive step forward.
During the talk, Nurul Aizam and Ridhwan Saidi shared their ‘re-imagination’ approach for the radio drama Surat Dari Tawau. We discussed the Konfrontasi (the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation), national mobilization, political propaganda, and the once-prominent medium of the radio play. As a leftist intellectual, Usman Awang did not resort to obscure didacticism; instead, he used a heartbreak story — one that barely even qualifies as melodramatic — to effortlessly articulate the ideological justifications of that turbulent, nation-building era.
However, does this reliance on a romance narrative inadvertently dilute the political urgency of the Konfrontasi, or does it ingeniously smuggle radical thought into the domestic sphere?
The Era: An Unfixed Fluidity
When we talk about the sixties, what are we really talking about?
It was the twilight before the Islamic revival movement, the May 13 incident, the New Economic Policy (NEP), and the comprehensive Islamization of the Malay demographic. It was an era defined by its fluidity: on the silver screen, P. Ramlee and Saloma could earnestly perform the classic Chinese legend Sam Pek Eng Tai (1969); in his script, Usman Awang felt no need to use ‘Allah,’ opting naturally for ‘Tuhan’.
It was also an era when the concept of ‘the nation’ began to be forcibly injected into the daily lives of the masses. The massive shadow looming behind the script is the Konfrontasi, a conflict that nearly rewrote the history of the Straits. Looking back at this conflict today: What did it leave for modern Southeast Asia? Why didn’t Southeast Asia subsequently devolve into the fierce, swords-drawn sovereignty disputes seen in East Asia? But returning to that historical moment, the Konfrontasi absolutely harbored the explosive potential to escalate into something akin to the Taiwan Strait crisis. Accompanied by the frequent anti-Chinese and racial conflicts of the sixties, the entire region’s society was held in a state of extremely tense mobilization. All these grand historical narratives were compressed into the everyday sighs within the script.
The Radio Play: Politics Wrapped in Sound
Returning to the form itself. Why, in today’s world of information overproduction and severe visual exploitation, bring the archaic form of the “radio play” back into our field of vision?
Most of the audience who attended grew up during the golden age of radio plays; the static of “Rediffusion” might still echo in their memories, and the embodied somatic memory of listening to a broadcast can still be activated. Chatting, gossiping, critiquing; eating, looking at the view, going to the restroom. In an era before television was ubiquitous, the radio was the most accessible and cheapest source of information that offers public an almost ‘zero-time-lag’ experience of the world. International news, pop culture, state propaganda, all were shoved out through that small, vocal black box.
Capital understood how to manipulate the market, the state knew how to manage ideology, and the playwright sought out the fissures between these two pulling forces.
Unlike today’s audiobooks, which emphasize private, isolated listening, the radio plays of that era possessed a profound publicness. Usman Awang could easily have made a film or written a novel, but he didn’t use impenetrable avant-garde theater to educate the masses. Instead, he utilized the most mainstream medium of the time to tell the simplest of stories. Half a century later, if we merely read the text, we might find the plot thin. We might need to Google what the “Minggu Perpaduan Kebangsaan” (National Unity Week) was, and we might feel alienated by the patriotic melodies praised in the play.
But in that era, sitting in a noisy traditional kopitiam or your family dining room, you would hear the female protagonist, Asiah, weeping in depression over the loss of her fiancé, Lehman, who had gone to the front lines. Even though the play only mentions the word ‘Konfrontasi’ once, that single word was enough to instantly conjure images of newspaper headlines, Tunku Abdul Rahman’s impassioned speeches, and the ubiquitous chant of “Malaysia Berjaya” echoing in the streets. These unwritten realities are the deliberate blank spaces of Surat Dari Tawau, because, at that moment, reality was already a self-evident background noise.
This is exactly why I’m profoundly eager to explore collaborations with USM, perhaps even having drama students to read and practice the creation of radio plays. We are not just reviewing history, but hope to circulate the seventy-plus scripts from the 1960s — collected during last year’s What The Elders Left Us festival — into the academic lexicon and contemporary market discourses.
In an age where our vision is utterly hijacked by algorithms, forcing oneself to sit down and construct a world solely through hearing is, in itself, an act of resistance against the attention economy.
Performance: A Latent Synchronization
Although Surat Dari Tawau was collected and published in Dibawah matahari (Siri buku2 derama PPSB bil. 1) in 1969, based on events mentioned in the play — such as the first “National Unity Week” and Deputy Prime Minister Razak’s visit to Algeria — we can roughly deduce it was written or first broadcast after November 1964. However, the exact year and specific date of its broadcast on RTM cannot be verified by the production team from the archives, let alone the original audio recording. Back then when they churn out radio plays everyday, they likely didn’t view it as an art form demanding permanent archiving.
Therefore, the interpretative strategy of Joni Atari (the moniker for Ridhwan Saidi and Nurul Aizam) could never be — nor did it need to be — a pure, replicative restoration.
In their “re-imagination,” the performance opens with a detailed exposition of the historical backdrop, even embedding the original audio of Suharto’s indignant, accusatory speech upon Malaysia’s founding in 1963. They deliberately maintained the Malay language radio broadcast without providing surtitles, yet projected a progress bar onto the screen, visualizing the invisible sound. The play was divided into four distinct musical interludes, inviting the audience to step up and dance according to prompts — sometimes a romantic pairing, sometimes a solitary loss.
I vividly remember that in last year’s festival version, when the projection read ‘Female, alone, sad’ — echoing the widowed Asiah in the play — only curator Jo Kukathas danced melancholy, alone on stage. Yet, in this performance at Soundmaker, when the same music played, a group of close girlfriends stood up, formed a circle, held hands, and swayed together cheerfully. We witnessed a turning of the times. The Asiah of the play seemed trapped in the stagnant grief of losing a man, but modern women half a century later showed us that in times of sorrow, one is never short of friends. Women’s sisterhood has long transcended the narrative constraints of that era.
Beyond the dancing, during the operational rituals at the opening and closing involving the added theme song Irama Lagu, Ridhwan and Aizam each had to operate an audio player, attempting to press “play” simultaneously to achieve perfect synchronization. They tried repeatedly before succeeding. They were striving to tune into the frequency of that space and time from sixty years ago.
Any re-enactment of history accompanies a “latency” that cannot be eliminated.
We can never, and have no need to, truly “synchronize” with the father generation’s war, passion, or fear; we can only piece together the afterimage of that era in the latency, through those noises and cracks.
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And at the end of the performance, the theme song plays again:
Di mana saja pun kita berada / Hanyalah dia dan aku berdua
Dengan irama lagu yang bergelora rindu / Membikin hatiku sangat pilu
Di dalam taman berpegangan tangan / Dengan kekasih, mata berpandangan
Sungguh girang rasanya / Bagai ada di dalam syurga
“Wherever we are, just the two of us” (Hanyalah dia dan aku berdua), “As if in heaven” (Bagai ada di dalam syurga) — these lyrics desperately construct an absolutely private, tranquil romantic utopia. Yet, within the play’s narrative, Asiah and Lehman’s love is precisely what is not permitted to remain “private.” The grand national mobilization and the ruthless fires of the Konfrontasi had long since mercilessly crushed and usurped their personal sphere. The more romantic this melody is, the more it paints an illusion of the two holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, the more it highlights the powerlessness of the individual beneath the massive state apparatus and the crushing wheel of history. Through this musical selection alone, Joni Atari accurately captured how Usman Awang used the most popular, comforting shell of a love song to wrap, and even satirize, the generational trauma erased by mainstream discourse.
Midway through the light, romantic lyrics, instead of the usual fading out music, it abruptly collapses into a loss of radio frequency, the melody gradually swallowed by static noise.
This is merely a faint signal captured by us, standing in the 2020s, reaching backward in time.
Exhibition: Fractured Publicness and Unexpected Echoes
After spending hours sitting in the dimly lit corner of Soundmaker Studio throughout the whole exhibition, from evening to midnight, just watching people listen. I realized that the so-called “profound publicness” of 60s radio drama completely morphs depending on who is in the room.
On the first night, a pair of Chinese-speaking sisters walked in. They told me they saw COEX’s Instagram stories and got serious FOMO. What fascinated me was how they interacted with the medium. Whenever the music interludes hit, they stood up to stretched and walk around, or went to the toilet, treating it exactly like a TV commercial break. But the moment the dialogue resumed, they were hooked. They actively gossiped, projecting their own social circles onto the characters. “Do you remember so-and-so? Aiyer! Hanah! They are also exactly like this,” two of them chitchat freely throughout the play. They debated Karim’s creepiness versus his “good guy” potential, and were genuinely shocked by how openly the Malay mother and daughter discussed romance. At one point, the younger sister tried to peek at the translated script to see what happens next. Her older sister immediately slapped her hand away, scolding her, “No, that’s cheating! Back in the day, you really had to listen to understand the story. If you spoil it, you’ll just judge the characters.” It was hilarious, but also a beautiful testament to how our inclination to connect through shared drama never really changes.
The following night, a group of 18-to-20-year-olds from Tawau — kids who are regulars in Soundmaker’s underground metal and punk scene — came in to check out the exhibition. They honestly just came to take some photos and vibe, but once they hit play on the cassette, they ended up staying for the entire hour. Their engagement was completely staccato: scrolling their phones and headbanging during the music but snapping right back to attention for the dialogue. Perhaps because of their East Malaysian roots, or maybe just their punk sensibilities, they instinctively rejected the era’s grand narratives. When the character Lehman gave his passionate, patriotic speech about fighting for the country, they literally scoffed out loud, muttering,
“Bodoh sial Lehamn, fuck negara.”
Instead, their empathy lay entirely with Asiah, yelling “kena Friendzone sial!” at Karim’s advances and calling out his toxic masculinity. To them, Asiah was a modern woman setting boundaries. After the tape stopped, we ended up talking for a long time. They admitted they had no idea their hometown, Tawau, even had a history of war.
Getting this exact demographic — the non-theatergoing public existing entirely outside the institutional arts bubble — to sit down and accidentally learn about their own history is exactly why Ka-kī Baca does this.
By the final day, the cassette tape proved its strange elasticity across borders. Three European visitors — two Dutch and one Italian — walked in. As we chatted after the listening session, they started drawing these wild, unexpected parallels between the Konfrontasi and the socio-political tectonic shifts of 1960s Europe. For the Dutch visitors, the underlying anxiety in the script echoed the Netherlands of that exact same decade — a time marked by severe housing uncertainties, the rapid decline of church authority, and the dismantling of old institutional pillars that used to dictate common practice. The Italian visitor found similar resonance with post-war Italy, where everyday people were just trying to survive while caught in the machinery of ideological state-building. The 1960s broadcasted a universal frequency:
the exhausting tension between the oppressive demands of a newly forming nation-state and the fragile, private realities of ordinary people.
This elasticity stretched across our own diaspora, too. We had an older Malaysian theatre director who had lived in Taiwan for decades. His Malay was super rusty, but he insisted on sitting through the whole thing, relying purely on the precise voice acting and the atmospheric music to grasp the emotional arc of the story.
Conclusion
The voice of history has been replayed; that past regarding the Konfrontasi and the nameless sacrifice “Bang Leman” was briefly awakened in forty-five minutes of darkness. But the real question is: Can this radio play, simulated by us in the theater, truly be reactivated? Can it be more than just a nostalgic simulation of the past, and transform into a voice capable of speaking to the Southeast Asia of this moment, of articulating the spiritual impoverishment of our contemporaries?
The static continues, and the answer, perhaps, lies hidden within the ears of each of you who presses the ‘play’ button next.
About The Five-Day Programme
Organized by the Penang-based play reading group Ka-kī Baca, this event features a special five-day residency and presentation by Joni Atari (a creative unit formed by Ridhwan Saidi and Nurul Aizam) from Kuala Lumpur.
Day 1: Artist Talk & Dialogue
Date/Venue: 7 Feb 2026 @ COEX
Content: Centered around Surat Dari Tawau, the creators Joni Atari shared their process of unearthing this text and how they reinterpret the art form of the radio play through a contemporary lens.
Day 2: Onstage Radio Play
Date/Venue: 8 Feb 2026 @ Soundmaker Studio
Content: This is the version previously performed at the What the Elders Left Us Festival 2025. We witnessed how Joni Atari constructs a space within the black box for guided collective listening, movement, and the sensory experience of space and time.
Days 3–5: Analog Listening Exhibition
Date/Venue: 9–11 Feb 2026 @ Soundmaker Studio
Content: A self-guided nightly listening station. By operating the cassette players, the audience allows the story to unfold at their own pace within a private auditory space.
