The Idiot Behind the Iron Mask

My sister had left some of her schoolbooks on my study desk a while back.

Today, I began eyeing through the books half-interestedly, having in mind the noblest of intentions of getting rid of them all.

One book in particular caught my interest though: Belajar Sejarah Form 2 Melalui Komik (Learn Form 2 History Through Comics), or something like that.

Being such a noble young man, the first thought which came to my mind was, of course, this: “Curses be upon you, dear sister, curseeeeeeeesssssssss!”

An Explanation, As Regards My Obvious Sentiments

My… ‘anger’, you see, stems from the fact that when I was her age, my fellow students and I had no such reading supplements to help make a breeze of history lessons.

… We didn’t even have pictures. (Cue gasps of horror, yours preferably.)

Quite understandably, instead of pictures that told stories, we had streams, rivers, and seas of text, text, and even more text, to accomplish the same thing.

Which you would of course gather to be a rather exciting proposition for teenagers, a certain demographical portion of society, whose conquests at that time, unless you were of the book-digging sort, would mostly revolve around anything not related to text. (Especially if they were, like, to be found in school books; like, you know, like, ewwwww?)

Now, truth be told, if Malaysian history were to be comprised mostly of stories of the lively, riveting sort, the kind that put you at the edge of your seat and made you thirst for more — like East Asian History, for instance — then their giving us of only text to read would have been a forgivable mistake on the part of the Education Ministry.

But if such were to be the case I would not be ranting to you today, would I?

Anyway, back to where we were: In place of lovable pictures we were instead given text, text and even more text to consume, all of which told highly enchanting and romantic tales of feudal disputes over land for the control of tax, and civil wars between states, and of this particular mass of land (which we now collectively refer to as Malaysia) being slowly taken over by European imperialist powers of those times; indeed, subject matters of apparent and utmost interest to MTV-watching 14 year olds.

To make things better, like any subject craving to make itself seem deeper than it really is, History was fleshed out by the Lords and Ladies into a difficult subject.

In text-only mode.

Thankfully, it still remained perhaps only slightly more interesting to read than a book on the philosophical virtues of socio-legal-religious idealisms, minus the confusing and impractical philosophical parts.

But still in full-blown text-only mode.

(Do not take this the wrong way. I love history. But endless text is another thing altogether.)

How I Worked My Way Through History

I am grateful that I have a fairly quick brain. I grasp concepts, big and small, abstract or not, howsoever you throw them at me, rather well.

But I have an abysmal memory, and, in addition to that handicap, I absolutely despise doing anything, with mathematics and music being the exception however, by rote means.

You can thus imagine how enjoyable the subject of History was for me, then.

But I persisted. Largely through the use of mnemonics, although I never referred to my visualization acts as ‘mnemonics’ back then because I had not yet stumbled upon the word. (But now that I do, I throw it around whenever I can, because you just know that saying something in a foreign tongue makes you appear all-intellectual and ten times smarter than you really are, like, for example, when Latin is used in legal judgments.)

I’m quite imaginative (far too imaginative, really) so that helped a bit.

For example, to memorize the facts of certain historical battles I conjured fantastical images in my head to accompany them, such as this handsome-looking Datuk of this state staving off that dashing Dato’ from that other state, using shoulder-mounted pike bazookas, dart chainguns, gigantic fire-breathing dragons, laser cannons, ion laser guns, broadswords and rapiers, and so on and so forth, all of which you would of course gather to be immensely powerful arms available as they were in 14th-17th century Malaya.

Anyway, I had to use my imagination a lot back then.

In comparison, students these days, thanks to their goddamned colouring books history books with pictures, don’t have to.

Lucky cretins.