Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours

Monument vs Shrine

In “Replica, Aura, and Late Nationalist Imaginings”, the political scientist Benedict Anderson (most famous for his Southeast Asia scholarship and that definitive critique of nationalism, Imagined Communities) muses on the Lincoln memorial:

Within a temple explicitly mimicking “the religious edifices of a safely pagan Greece”;
Mazda Corp floodlights designed “to ward off unnatural, indifferent sunlight”;
The abstract enshrinements of “Lincoln’s memory” in the “hearts of the people”, while neither Lincoln’s actual remains or any rites for people to perform are present;
The sense that ultimately the most reverential thing to do there is to take photographs.

The Lincoln Memorial; the Jefferson memorial next to it; both figures repeated again on Mt Rushmore; both figures repeated ad nauseum on dollar bills.

These monuments are designed to proliferate. Not only must they create a sober, stately experience for the visitor—but they must also do so consistently, because they are built for visitors: the mass audience of the national population.

Otherwise they must be physically replicable: a memorial to a particular national hero, erected in every city.

The very format of monument-building get copied:

Post-colonial countries, in need of new myths, choose to manufacture national cenotaphs of their own, in imitation of Western models.

Malaysia has Putrajaya, a federal capital sprung ex nihilo from palm-oil agricultural land, its buildings all arches and onion domes and imitation arc de triomphes in inhuman scale, its avenues broad and utterly unwalkable in the tropical heat.

At such monuments the citizen is cast as tourist.

Of this state-sanctioned object of devotion you are encouraged to take photographs, sell merchandise—ie: continue the process of replication. With every copy nationalism is reified.

God forbid you tweak the official monument with your own meanings, though! While writing this post, I found the following story, from December 2023:

“Lincoln Memorial temporarily closed after being vandalized with ‘Free Gaza’ graffiti”

Anderson’s essay cites instances where the personal and irreproducible sneak back into, or leak out from, or vandalise, national monuments:

“Early in the 1910s,”—in Manila’s Cementerio del Norte, a municipal cemetery planned by an American urban designer—“a small pantheon was constructed for the interment of Filipino national heroes.”

This monument was to emulate the Pantheon in Paris, where “great Frenchmen” of the national canon are memorialised.

But the Filipino version failed.

“Today, hardly anyone in the Philippines is aware of this dilapidated pantheon’s existence … What has happened is that the Filipino Voltaire and Rousseau have managed to escape, summoning devoted, often familial bodysnatchers, to convey them to home-town shrines.”

Not that the municipal cemetery itself is deserted. Custodians and their families live in the very mausoleums they care for.

Further, Anderson describes All Saints’ Eve in the Cementerio del Norte, when thousands pour into its precincts.

But these multitudes adjourn to their own myriad family graves and small ancestral shrines: spending the day with immediate loved ones, “drinking, praying, gambling, making offerings …”

Most of the Philippines’ presidents have mausoleums in Norte, “but no one pays attention to them … and only their separate descendants come to attend them.”

“There is something exhilarating here that one rarely sees in national celebrations, maybe because the structure of the ceremonial is not serial, but entirely cellular.”

Hometowns re-exerting themselves within the nation; ordinary people scrawling meaning onto the edifices of the uppercase-P People. A multitude of the singular, instead of a single mass.

Despite nationalism’s efforts to centralise and clone a national identity, still we mutate, still we bootleg, still we graffiti, becoming once again ourselves.

And—particular to post-colonial societies—in doing so we casually continue the work of liberation, sneaking the idea of freedom away from our own architects and elites and prime ministers, who would seek to seize its meaning for their own purposes.

The churches or mosques or temples to demos that the federal government builds are ours to transform. To take from. To ignore.

“No need. We’ve got our own shrines at home.”

National heroes become local saints and slip out of national control.

Does the Filipino government really control the various Rizalista sects? Karpal Singh is now a datuk kong, without his political dynasty’s consent.

Across Melaka and Negeri Sembilan there once existed shrines dedicated to Hang Tuah, Malay folk hero, now a powerful figurehead of Malay-Muslim ethno-nationalism.

One such shrine existed at Tanjung Tuan:

With a plain altar—more a porch, really—of poured cement, for folk to leave food offerings;
Sunlight mottled from the surrounding forest, and fluorescent lights from a nearby gazebo;
A large rock, with an indent on its crown, said to be Hang Tuah’s actual footprint;
The idea that this was a sacred space, where you could come to ask the spirits of the place for love or children.

The shrine that existed was sited in a forest reserve. It was swept clean of leaves by locals; its adherents belonged to all faiths and ethnicities; following the transactional logic of folk religion, those who had received its blessing would’ve paid for its maintenance.

“Existed”.

Because the Religious Department of the State of Melaka destroyed the Hang Tuah shrine sometime in 2022, for the crime of idolatry.

A double heresy. An affront to both orthodox Sunni Islam—

But also to the Malaysian state, that sanctions Sunni Islam as its official religion; whose nationalism requires its mythic hero to have only the attributes and magics the state ulama and historians say he must have—and no others.

Local shrines are destroyed, because the nation-state intuits them to be threats to its exclusive franchise.