Focus Focus: What's in a name?

I'm sure you've all heard or read recently that Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL) has changed the name Jalan Alor to Jalan Kejora, and that there are further moves to change the names around town be to better organized and, according to a newspaper report, “to avoid confusion for postmen, the police and DBKL staff doing their jobs.”

According to the same report, a Yahoo search for 'Jalan Alor' revealed over 900,000 returns. What this means is that in public consciousness (or more apt, cyber consciousness) Jalan Alor is pretty up there. Why is it that DBKL is deciding to make this move now? Who benefits from such a move? Why now?

 The report also mentioned that the name change had been thought about a long time ago, but deliberations had been long-winded yet finally unanimous (contradictory?). And that more names would soon be changed.

Before we go any further, I just wanted to take a look at the response from the deputy director-general of DBKL, who was quoted above. For anyone who has ever tried giving directions to tourists or out-of-towners, KL is a veritable maze of little roads and illogical systems of wayfinding. Changing the names of roads won't help you find your way one bit, Datuk, but having a GPS navigation system for your postmen and other officers would.

In other words, I'm smelling something fishy here, and it's not the Klang or Gombak rivers.

A few months ago, residents in Lucky Gardens, Bangsar, faced a huge problem from City Hall: officers were going round and lobbing off 40-year-old angsana trees, much to the chagrin and consternation of the people living in that area. The rationale: to stop crows from nesting in those trees and being a public nuisance.

The move to thrash the trees was initiated by the president of the Residents Association (RA) there, without informing or consulting the majority of the other RA members. So the DBKL officers said that they could do nothing if what they did was what the RA president had said the residents wanted. The residents, angry with the inability of the newly minted Member of Parliament (MP) for Lembah Pantai to deal with the problem, called on the personal assistant to the previous MP for help. And immediately, and within minutes literally, the cuttings stopped. (As relayed to me by a friend close to the events.)

 Hmm.

 I wonder if... nah, it can't be.

Hang on, isn't the MP for Bukit Bintang someone from... nah, that would be too far-fetched. Would it? Some kind of Public Relations sabotage?

But conspiracy theories aside, the naming of things is always a dangerous affair, because more than anything else it reveals the hierarchy of 'namer' and 'named'. Let's take Bahasa Malaysia, for instance. Why is it that we've changed 'keretapi' to 'tren', 'belanjawan' to 'bajet'? And where the hell did 'komited' come from? These are English words, and while I'm not an ultra-nationalist, I do wonder about the 'komitmen' of certain ultra-nationalist parties to be the vanguard of their ethnic group. Maybe it's not about 'komitmen' after all, but more about the power to say yes or no to something.

How does a thing get named? Let's take a look at 'Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman', which runs the length of downtown KL: before Malaya's independence in 1957, it was known as Jalan Batu. This was because it was the road that people would take to go to Batu, a town at the end of that road. And then, some time after the departure of the British, the road was accorded the name of Malaya's first Yang di-Pertuan Agong (check out Amir Muhammad's Malaysian Gods for a wonderful remark about the road). Basically, from something organic (Jalan Batu, because that was what was at the end of the road) to something ideational (the first Malayan King).

Strangely, if you speak with most older Malaysians, they would still call Jalan TAR by its original name. It almost seems like Jalan TAR never existed.

And that's important. If enough people refused the authority of the namer, then public perception would win the day. In the mean time, we must fight on to maintain the way of life we believe we deserve. And at the same time, shout out that we deserve to treat KL better than to just cosmetically beautify the roads that had been so haphazardly built in the first place.

Text Fahmi Fadzil