IN CONVERSATION WITH Yante Ismail
Interview by Shanita Lyn. Images via Yante Ismail (hover over paintings for more info).
Untitled, oil on canvas, 76cm x 102cm
I am not this hair.
Neither my virtue nor iniquity is subject to how much of it I choose to conceal or reveal.
They are nothing more than keratinous filaments shrouding my cranium. They grow, they die, they turn to dust. What deeper meaning do they have than that. And yet, time and time again, I am reminded – you temptress, you sinner, you free-haired Jezebel – they do.
Believe me, my hair has no power to corrode the immortal souls of men. Oh no, you will find that proclivity for moral corruption well and truly inherent in the hearts of men, not in the strands of my hair.
This hair does not define me. But I have lived with it all my life, so these are the truths that I know: that this preoccupation with how much hair a woman shows, has never been a concern for the welfare of women. It is all about control masked behind false intentions of protecting women. It has always been nothing more than yet another glaring reminder of a society obsessed with regulating women’s bodies.
I’ve always believed that the universe conspires to make things happen for you when you’re on the right path — not necessarily to make things easier, but to make things clearer. This story is a testament to that — to the power of following your path and having it come full circle; of having the courage to take every opportunity and experience in your stride; and, in the process, end up fulfilling dreams you forgot you even had, but were always meant for.
Yante Ismail is a humanitarian worker, feminist and art activist, whose strength, confidence and passion in her work is driven by deep compassion, an innate desire to create a better world and a deep-rooted fear she’s had since she was a young girl. This conversation ranks up there as one of the most inspiring I’ve ever had, and I’m so excited to share it with you.
Yante’s story begins in Kedah, where her family is from and where she was born. Having moved around quite a bit when she was younger, though, she’s never really felt attached to any one place. “I feel quite comfortable in many different places, and it has influenced the way I look at the world,” she says. “I feel like I’m always open and ready for new places and new experiences and immersing myself in something new all the time, and I think that’s just shaped how I navigate the world.”
As a kid, she was often described as being very thoughtful — not in the considerate sense, but in the sense that she cared a lot about people and things besides herself. She was also quite the artist, dabbling in everything from drawing to clay sculpture to soap carving. However, she wouldn’t have any evidence to show you of her artistic capabilities from that time. “My mother,” she says, grinning, “as much as I sing her praises — one of her biggest flaws is that she’s very unsentimental. She has never kept anything of mine from my childhood. So I have no evidence at all that I was even able to draw when I was young!” She laughs.
As she got a little older, she started taking advantage of the perks of being a middle child more, doing her own thing and figuring out who she was on her own terms. “I was largely ignored,” she says gleefully. “Adults were always very distracted by my older sister and my younger siblings, and so I was left to my own devices a lot. And that was fortuitous for me, that was perfect.” She laughs. Having said that, she did end up making some decisions back then that, in hindsight, could have turned out to be disastrous. “People didn’t realise how independent I actually was, and I would get into a lot of experiences way too young. And it came from situations of, you know, you’re young, and you’re stupid, and you think you’re invincible, all that folly that is typical of young people.” Some of these risky situations include instances where she naively put herself in vulnerable positions with men. “I’ve been in situations where I’m certain that if I didn’t have guardian angels, I would have gotten raped,” she says. “Life could have turned really bad for me — it could have so easily turned the wrong way. And at that time, these experiences weren’t as scary to me as they should have been. But now, in hindsight, I feel the fear for that eighteen-year-old girl, because I [can] see that that was incredibly risky.”
Having been through these experiences herself, she understands better than most that the reasons young girls get themselves into risky situations is rarely ever as simplistic as just wanting to have a good time. There’s almost always something deeper — low self-esteem, or perhaps a need to compensate for the lack of affection from a male figure. As one of the fortunate ones who made it through these situations relatively unscathed, she feels she now owes it to her younger self — and other young girls in similar positions — to do something with the wisdom gained from those incidents. This is why a lot of her work in advocacy and activism today draws upon those experiences she had in her youth. “I really want to try to be that big sister to younger girls, the kind of big sister that I didn’t have,” she shares, “who could hear what it was that I was going through that made me make those decisions, understand what the motivations are rather than just dismissing the behaviour as risky, and guide me towards a safer pathway.”
Yante attributes the strength she had then in navigating those harrowing experiences to her mother. “My role model growing up has always been my mother,” she says. “Back then, as a young girl, I learnt a lot from my mother, and from the conversations that [she] had with me. She was the kind of mother who would talk to you, and she would have discussions with you. She raised me as a feminist without even saying the world ‘feminist.’” Her mother’s own strong personality — and the experiences, education and opportunities she gave her kids growing up — had a significant influence on the woman Yante is today. Perhaps most importantly, she credits her mother for instilling in her the ability to think for herself, which has turned out to be such a gift in a society where it’s all too easy to follow the mindless crowd.
“I remember at one point I had this really conscious thought that I did not want to be part of the rat race. I didn’t know yet what that would mean, or how it would look like — I just wanted to affect change.”
It was in university, when she was doing her degree in communications at USM Penang, that she really began to develop a clear idea of what she wanted to do in life. “I remember at one point I had this really conscious thought that I did not want to be part of the rat race,” she says. “And I was certain. I didn’t know yet what that would mean, or how it would look like, but I felt that I couldn’t just plod along. I needed to find meaning, you know? I needed to be able to do something that gave back, in a way, or contributed. I just wanted to affect change.”
While in Penang, she became more involved in NGO work, living on an organic farm and volunteering with the Women’s Crisis Centre there. But it was her time in Canada, where she spent a semester abroad, that really solidified her certainty that she needed to do something more meaningful with her life than work a commercial job. There, she was exposed to discussions at a whole other level, and took an eye-opening backpacking trip across the United States which drastically expanded her worldview. “Part of the process of finding myself when I was in university [was taking] a month off to travel,” she says. “I didn’t know that I was trying to find myself, but that’s what I ended up doing. I was travelling with a bunch of hippies, so we were backpacking, and we were hitching for rides — oh, so bohemian! So bohemian.” Living this way for a whole month showed her that there were so many alternative ways of life besides the linear one we’re most commonly taught — finish school, go to university, get a job, get married, have children and die. “When I was out there experiencing different kinds of human beings, I found that so interesting and eye-opening.”
Yante ultimately chose to major in journalism and, eager to put her skills to good use, applied for her first job with the Malaysian AIDS Council before she’d even completed her degree. “I applied for that job before I graduated, and I was able to start work literally after the last paper of my final year,” she recalls. “I started work the next day.” Her first job was as the assistant to Marina Mahathir, daughter of former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. It was a role that opened her up to entirely new worldviews and experiences, and is an opportunity she’s forever grateful for. From there, it was a natural progression for her to seek out increasingly challenging opportunities that would allow her to contribute even more, which led her to where she is today — working in an international humanitarian organisation which works to protect refugees.
Having worked in this organisation for the past fifteen years now, it appears that Yante has found her happy place. Her job allows her to exercise her creativity for the benefit of the people she serves, a role and challenge she relishes. “I work in public engagement, so I look at advocacy and trying to help people change their minds about difficult issues, like [the] rights of refugees,” she explains. “I know that my strengths lie in taking a step back, looking at things more strategically and helping to change the enabling environment that we exist in to be more accepting of issues that are difficult. The work of advocacy is all about shaping messaging and putting it out there, you’re trying to help people feel compassion and understand. And that’s all related to the world of communications.”
It’s tricky, finding the right balance between telling stories that will elicit compassion and inspire people to help, while also preserving the dignity of the refugees whose stories she tells. “People need to feel something first before they can take action, you know? So what I try to do is I try to tell stories of strength, and stories of empowerment, and stories of people doing their best in spite of it all, as a way of evoking a reaction from people that would compel them to give, or to help, or to support. And you don’t want to tell sob stories — that’s important to me, that you need to be able to tell stories with dignity. But at the same time, you want people to feel compassion, so it’s that balance.” Of course, nothing is ever simplistic, and storytelling in itself isn’t enough to solve everything. Her work, after all, is not just about swaying public behaviour — it’s also about advocating for change in existing fundamental structures that simply aren’t humanitarian enough. That’s where it gets really complex, and where Yante’s skills in her field are really put to the test.
Adding to that challenge is the fact that the stakes are so high in the humanitarian world, with every mistake having far-reaching, real consequences on real people. “It doesn’t affect people superficially,” Yante says. “It affects people fundamentally. I’ve been in situations where it could mean life or death. You could cause inaccessibility to services for the people that you’re supposed to protect; you could inadvertently turn people, the public, against the people that you’re trying to protect; you could inadvertently create an environment that’s less humanitarian. All those things really cast a shadow over those of us who are working in the humanitarian world. So you take that burden — and that privilege — very, very seriously. [Because] to serve is a privilege, I believe that sincerely.”
From her two decades of experience working in this field, she finds that the thing that drives a wedge between two groups of people — such as refugees and the communities that host them, or HIV patients and the public at large — is often, ironically, the very thing they have in common. “I think that fundamentally we’re all driven by the same need, and the need is to be safe,” she says. “To be safe and secure, for ourselves and for our family. I can really see that for most people, that’s their motivation, and that’s what causes these two groups to break away from each other. For a refugee [it’s], ‘I need to protect my family from war and from human rights abuse, and I fled to a country where I think I could find that.’ But for the host community, it’s that feeling that, ‘I need to protect myself from the “other,”’ that you don’t understand. So the motivation is quite human, actually.” But what people need to understand, she explains, is that it’s not a zero sum game. “Giving someone else space to live with dignity doesn’t take away your own dignity and your own space as well. Nothing is taken away from us if we give something, some rights to someone else.”
Though convincing people to consider different perspectives and have empathy for complete strangers is a tough job, it’s a challenge she greatly enjoys. “I find it — I don’t wanna say enjoyable cause it sounds so sadistic,” she says, laughing. “But it’s why I’m in the job I am, and why I’ve been in this humanitarian field for twenty years now. It’s because it’s challenging, because the issues are difficult, because you’re fighting the hard fight. The moment you’re starting to deal with issues that people would just rather not think about, or would rather just sweep under the carpet and leave within the shadows of society, it will be a hard fight. But that’s what makes it worthwhile, I think.”
Yante’s advocacy is far from over when she leaves the office, though — she is also a celebrated artist who uses her work as a platform to draw attention to women’s rights issues. Her transition from hobbyist to professional artist came about early in her professional career, after a brief hiatus from painting. “After I finished university, I left my art for a little while,” she says. “Because, you know, you’re just starting your career, and I was in a hard sector. But I got to know a community of artists through my HIV work, and when I was with them I felt such a longing for art, because I hadn’t really done it seriously for such a long time. And it was after that that I went and I bought myself my first set of oil paints, and I bought my first canvas ever, and I just started to paint.”
Yante’s first choice of subject matter when she started out was women — and till today, she exclusively paints women. Having been passionate about feminism and women’s empowerment for as long as she can remember, it was only natural to her. “I always say that I was a feminist long before I was an artist. Because I grew up with a firm understanding about women’s rights and the misogyny that surrounds women, and how patriarchy and dangerous societal and religious norms try to dictate how women exist; I think that when I started creating art, [that understanding] started to inform the kind of art that I created.” Though she specialises in figurative painting and works primarily in oils, she avidly continues to dabble in other mediums. “I’m trying to teach myself how to do clay sculptures, and I’m teaching myself as well right now how to do lino prints. It’s a lifelong journey of learning, right?”
It was when she started to use her art more in her professional work that her career as an artist really got going. Her bold, distinct style and powerful message made people sit up and take notice, and she began receiving requests for commissions, book covers, murals and other projects. Her work has been shown locally in prominent galleries such as Interp8 Gallery, Montage Gallery, HOM Trans Art and Artemis Art, as well as internationally in Singapore and Vietnam. She has also had her work featured in various publications around the world.
Keep your laws off my body (street art version), wall paint on external wall
Painted at @at27telawi (27, Jalan Telawi, Bangsar) in conjunction with International Women’s Day
“Keep Your Laws Off My Body” is my defiance against damaging patriarchal, societal, and religious constructs and norms that constantly dictate how a woman should exist in society, as though society has a right to stake a claim over a woman's body, or how she should behave, or what she chooses to wear - or not wear, what shape her body should take.
This painting says, a woman's body is her own. That her body is more than ornamental, more than a commodity, more than merely reproductive, or for the pleasure of men. Her body belongs to her alone.
Every day, and especially on International Women's Day, I am saying, women have had enough. We are saying, “my body, my choice.”
Enough. Keep your laws off my body.
One valuable lesson that she’s learned as an artist is to get clear on what you’re creating art for. Without this clarity, she says, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the insecurities and doubts that plague so many creatives, professional or otherwise. “I think in the last couple of years, I reached this place where I can feel at peace with what I’m doing. For so long — like every other artist, we always compare ourselves to people who are greater than us. And there will always be people who are greater than us. There will always be people who have more following; who have the biggest shows; whose artworks people will pay far, far more for. And that really screws with your headspace. That’s when you begin to wonder, ‘Oh, am I good enough? Am I producing something that’s gonna be sellable?’
“[But] just a few years ago, I came to the conclusion and the realisation that what mattered to me as an artist was to be able to produce art that said something about the issue that I was concerned about — challenging patriarchal norms. When I came to that realisation, I freed myself from any kind of need to be commercial, or to compete commercially. I lost the need to prove [myself] as an artist by being in galleries all the time, or being collected by collectors, or selling in art shows. And I’ve been through all of that — my work has been collected, I have been in gallery shows, and people have paid for my art pieces — but the moment I came to my own realisation that that didn’t matter was when the doubts disappeared. I knew that I was making art because I wanted to say something, and that became most important.”
“I came to the conclusion and the realisation that what mattered to me as an artist was to be able to produce art that said something about the issue that I was concerned about — challenging patriarchal norms.”
A question Yante gets asked a lot is whether she would give up her humanitarian career to be a full-time artist, if she had the opportunity — an unsurprising question, considering they’re both such demanding and time-consuming professions. Her answer? “I always say that I could no sooner pick a favourite star in the sky.” It’s not just that the two are equally important to her personally; she also sees the symbiosis between them, how her humanitarian work brings more depth to her art and vice versa. “I think that if you’re going to work in the area of art activism, you have to understand the issues that you’re dealing with. And I think that my experiences in the humanitarian world and the human rights world really contribute to that.”
So how on earth does she balance her time between her work and her art? Simple — she just does. “It is driven by the necessity at the time,” she explains. “If there’s a crisis in the work that I’m working on, then of course priority has to go towards [that]. But if there’s a deadline — if I’ve got an [exhibition] coming up, if I’ve got commissions — then I would work on my art. And I have a ridiculous work ethic. So I work through the day until about five or six for my day job; and then from about eight o’ clock onwards, till about sometimes three or four in the morning, I do my art. That’s during periods when there are deadlines on both ends. I don’t know how long that can be sustained, I’m sure I’ll burn out one day!” She laughs. “But for now that’s the methodology that I use in order to be able to do both. I mean, you sacrifice for what matters to you, right?”
Sanguinis, oil on canvas, 76cm x 102cm
For the “Merdeka Menstrual” campaign to raise awareness on the issue of period poverty.
The concept behind Sanguinis is a simple one – that blood is life-giving, not dirty. The idea that blood could be dirty is a social construct, and exclusively reserved for vaginal bleeding because anything that comes out of women is seen as abject. The shame, disgust, dirt, fear associated with menstruation is constructed by a culture of misogyny. In Sanguinis, blood flows over, through, and from the female form, and nurtures and gives life to the ground below.
Yante’s passion for creating art with meaning means she’s more than willing to step on a few toes in the process, and to face the criticism — sometimes even threats — of those who are opposed to her views. “I think anybody working in human rights in this country would be foolish to feel that they’re impervious to those kinds of risks,” she says matter-of-factly. The issue of women’s rights in particular is still a highly sensitive topic to many — even, surprisingly, among other human rights activists. “Even among people who fight for, say, equality among ethnic groups or races, for economic empowerment, for civil liberties, for people to be able to speak up — even among those communities, if you try to bring up the issue of gender, it doesn’t always get the support that you think [it] should get,” she says. “Because as liberal as we think we are, we still exist in a patriarchal society, and we are still entrenched in the constructs of patriarchy without even realising it. And that’s really difficult to unravel.”
This deep entrenchment in patriarchy manifests itself and rears its head in ugly, unexpected ways. Often, Yante says, the danger lies not in the authorities coming after you, but in the backlash from the public themselves. “How many female leaders have we heard of that speak up for women and get threatened to be raped, because people just don’t like what they’re saying?” As a woman working in her field, these are risks she’s constantly aware of. But she’s not alone in the fight — there’s a whole sisterhood of feminists in Malaysia today who are putting themselves out there and facing these same risks alongside her. “If you have conviction in what you’re doing, you’ve just got to do it. It is what it is.”
“I think that if you wanna change the world, you’ve got to be able to imagine what that changed world can look like.”
Yante has conviction in what she believes in, alright; no amount of societal pressure will stop her from doing what she feels is right and creating work that is authentic to her. Indeed, she loves challenging people’s views on patriarchal norms through her art. This is apparent from the moment you encounter her work — full of colourful, brazenly voluptuous, powerful, naked women. It challenges you to take a good look at yourself and your own values, and if it makes you uncomfortable, to ask yourself why. Take, for instance, Yante’s decision to portray only curvy, Rubenesque figures. “I choose to paint my women curvaceous, because I want to challenge how beauty is seen,” she explains. “It’s not that [I’m] a proponent of ‘fat’ or ‘thin’ necessarily. The point is that a woman shouldn’t be judged by her body, that a woman is more than just her body. But also that the prevailing image of women in popular media right now is a woman who is thin, fair-skinned and able-bodied; she fits only this very narrow definition. If young girls are only ever seeing women who are thin, that’s what they grow up believing women should look like. And I believe that we have a role as media practitioners to reshape that reality. So in my own little way, as I have this little space to put out a certain media content, I’m choosing to put out this image, because this is my contribution to this discourse. I think that if you wanna change the world, you’ve got to be able to imagine what that changed world can look like. And you can’t imagine it if the imagery that you’re flooded with doesn’t show you that.”
Wild Women II, oil on canvas, 76cm x 76cm
Re-write the books on fairytales.
Because they tell us that only the girls who are sweet and pretty and innocent and virtuous, end with their happily ever after.
Because the fairytale they don’t want you to hear is how happily ever after is only the start, and it begins when all the girls write their own tales of being wild, and fierce, and brave, and loud, and angry, and outrageous, and disagreeable - and still win.
So be wild. Be untamed. Be your own kind of fairytale.
On top of that, she almost exclusively paints her women in the nude, which comes with its own set of risks as nudity is still considered pornographic and even illegal in some quarters. Even without the legalities, the response from society itself can often be discouraging. She recalls a recent incident when she was ousted from a group of women’s artists for posting a piece of artwork that showed nudity. “That was really interesting to me,” says Yante, “because even in the safe space of an all-women’s group, that was still an issue that people were uncomfortable with, you know?” What Yante wants people to understand, though, is that nudity is not inherently pornographic — it’s the objectification of the female form over centuries that has made it seem so. “I’ve tried to explain this, but people don’t get it,” she says. “The female nude, the female body itself, is not dirty, and it’s not shameful, and it’s not pornographic. If you look at the female nude and you still see smut, then it’s your mind that’s pornographic. It’s your point of view, it’s your point of reference. And so that’s what I try to challenge.
“I paint the female nude,” she explains, “because how we define the nude female body all the while has always been from the point of view of the male gaze. And the male gaze defines the female nude as an object, and it can only ever be an object that is sexual, or that is lewd, or shameful — or virginal. I wanted to reclaim the female nude, and give it a feminist point of view instead. So I draw women that aren’t being watched, if that makes sense. Because an art piece of a nude, when it’s painted by, particularly, a man, [is a painting of] the woman in the pose of somebody who knows she’s being watched. And that’s what the male gaze is — she’s being watched, and therefore she controls herself. She’s guarded; she’s putting on a show for someone.”
This subconscious but powerful awareness of the male gaze also influences the way women carry themselves in public as well as in art. “We — the Malay word, mengayu (to become like wood)? Ah, that. You always have to keep yourself, contain yourself. And it’s difficult to try to break away from that burden of the male gaze; it’s impossible. I mean, I’m nearly fifty, and yet in my entire life I don’t think I’ve ever been free from [it].” The less obvious problem with the male gaze is that it’s not just men who perpetuate it — women do, too. She references Michel Foucault’s Panopticon theory, whereby a circular prison is built around a central watchtower in which guards are stationed, so the prisoners always feel they are being watched — to the point that they become so used to feeling like they’re being watched that they begin to govern themselves, even when there aren’t actually any guards present in the watchtower. “So you translate that to the way women exist — even when nobody is watching, we’re watching ourselves. When men aren’t watching us, we watch each other. So women themselves are perpetuating these patriarchal norms and structures that oppress women. And this is what we’re trying to break from.”
Desire, oil on canvas, 76cm x 102cm
To be a woman is to know the weight of the Gaze that watches us - the Gaze of men, of society, of religious and cultural norms. The Gaze that chide us when we laugh, when we speak, when we move our bodies, when we seek what is pleasurable.
And so we learn to mind ourselves. All the time. That even in our private spaces, we still feel the weight of the Gaze. We make ourselves small to fit within these narrow definitions of what a woman should be. And we censor ourselves. Control. Curb. Suppress. Conceal.
That I should be made to feel ashamed of everything that makes me human - and those that make me a woman - is preposterous.
I am in defiance. I am bold, I am beautiful. I am intelligent. I am sexual. And I am a woman.
It bothers me that I’d never noticed this before, and yet, when the topic comes up in our conversation, I know exactly what she’s talking about instantly. The awareness of the male gaze affects our every decision in the subtlest of ways — from the number of buttons we choose to leave undone; to which street we choose to walk down; to where we choose to hang out; to how we sit, stand, walk, talk, eat, drink and move. It scares me to think that I’m not sure what a woman completely free from the weight of the male gaze might look like. It scares me even more to think of all the ways I’ve been unconsciously perpetuating it myself. But why on earth do we do it?
“Society won’t accept women who disregard the weight of the male gaze,” says Yante. “And that’s why women who are free, truly free — who don’t give a damn, who do what they want — that makes society uncomfortable. Talking about fear, I think that’s what people fear. Patriarchal society fears a woman who is genuinely free of the weight of patriarchy and the male gaze. Because imagine what she would do if she wasn’t controlled. She would rock the world. And that’s the power of women. And I think that deep down the [perpetrators] of patriarchy realise this, which is why it’s always convenient to keep women in their places, and why women keep each other in their places, too. Because you would birth a revolution if you let women be free.” It’s inspiring to think that even one truly free woman is powerful enough to shake the earth to its core. But due to widespread conditioning, these women are few and far between — as a society, we still have a long way to go. “We try though — that, I think, is what’s important.”
“Patriarchal society fears a woman who is genuinely free of the weight of patriarchy and the male gaze. Because imagine what she would do if she wasn’t controlled. She would rock the world.”
What’s also important is that we finally learn to draw the distinction between feminism and man-hating. “I like to blame patriarchy for a lot of things — that’s my favourite,” Yante says mischievously, “because it takes the discourse away from the dichotomy of men against women. I don’t think it’s inherently men that oppress women — I think it’s the patriarchal system that oppresses women. And the kinds of fears that women go through, men go through as well, because of damaging social constructs. The living up to unrealistic standards based on gender — men and women both go through that. So if you are having a discussion about women’s rights, it must be contextualised within this concept of the damage of the patriarchy. Because men and women are equally victims to it, and men and women are equally the tools of oppression within [it]. And this is where many detractors of feminism get [it] wrong, because they assume it’s women bashing men. It’s not. What we are trying to unpack or unravel is patriarchy, because you can really see how that impacts all of us equally.”
Au.dac.ities II, oil on canvas, 95cm x 95cm
It seems that today, all it takes for a woman to be considered audacious, is as little as insisting on making for herself the decisions about her own body. To be self-determining.
Refusing to be complicit in her own dehumanisation. Fighting for her right to be treated as a human being. Refusing to be reduced to a number on a scale. Refusing to measure her morality by the lengths of cloth shrouded over her being. Refusing to measure her worth as a woman by a ring on her finger or a fetus in her womb.
Today, a woman is audacious for as little as looking you in the eye and saying, "I matter."
I celebrate the audacities of women.
One aspect of patriarchy which had a deep and long-lasting effect on Yante personally has been misogyny. In her teen years she somehow developed a reputation among the boys for being a bimbo, simply because she was pretty and, therefore, couldn’t possibly be smart too. This misplaced judgment led to years of constantly feeling that she needed to prove herself, that she was more than just a pretty face, that she had depth and deserved to be taken seriously. Her fear of being perceived as stupid carried well into the early years of her career, and led to a lot of missed opportunities which she would later regret. “I think that, had I had the wisdom that I do now in my older age, I wouldn’t have let my fear of appearing uninformed or ignorant make me so timid,” she says. “In the activism world or the human rights world, you’re not noticed unless you speak up. If you want to establish yourself, you’ve got to be able to demonstrate that you have an opinion, and your opinion is worth listening to. And I let fear stop me from doing that for many years. I’ve only been able to really overcome that more recently.”
Overcoming this fear doesn’t mean that she doesn’t experience it anymore. Rather, she’s simply come to form a different relationship with it. “What happened to me was — particularly when I hit my forties, and became more and more established in [my] career — the confidence you have in yourself [overcomes] your fear. Right now, I don’t fear sitting in a meeting, and thinking about something somebody is saying, and putting up my hand and say[ing], ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’ I couldn't imagine doing that fifteen years ago, or ten years ago. And that only comes with age, and it comes with experience, that you know yourself. You know that, ‘I don’t know that fact, and it’s not because I’m stupid.’ It’s because, well, I don’t know that fact! And it’s okay to ask.”
“When you have that fire under your ass, because you need to prove yourself, I think that really helps to motivate you. That’s where that root fear propelled me to become better at what I do.”
In fact, in a way, making peace with this fear has actually inspired her a lot, too. “When you have that fire under your ass, because you need to prove yourself — even if that comes fundamentally from the fear of being seen as stupid — I think that really helps to motivate you. I think it really drives you, because it gets to a point where you work harder, you try harder, you spend more time learning. So I think that’s where that root fear propelled me to become better at what I do.” It’s also helped her become far more compassionate towards a lot of young people she sees who are now in the same situation she was in just a few years ago. “They’re not speaking up not because they don’t have something to say, but we’re not giving them that space to be able to say it. A lot of people don’t have the confidence to just speak up in a room of a hundred. So you have to have cognisance of that, that sometimes you have a role to play as well, in allowing those voices to come forward. Because people are all grappling with different kinds of fears.”
Sorrow Finds Her, oil and acrylic on canvas, 76cm x 76cm
I rarely paint emotions, but this painting was inspired by a poem of longing and melancholy by Constantine P. Cavafy, that resonated with me:
“Return”
Return often and take me,
beloved sensation, return and take me -
when the memory of the body awakens,
and old desire runs again through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.
Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember...
One fear she hasn’t been able to make peace with, though, concerns the climate surrounding women’s rights, especially in Malaysia. “What affects me is the fear of where things are going to go for women,” she says. “Because I can clearly see that it’s probably not going to get better for women, in this society.” With every passing day, Yante notes with increasing concern how safe spaces for women in this country are getting narrower, and society is only becoming more conservative rather than liberal. It’s enough to keep her up at night, sometimes. “It’s a deeper, more visceral fear; this gut-wrenching thing that makes you worried about the future. In my mind, maybe I should have contingency plans of how [to] escape this country. Because anybody who’s moderate and liberal [is] demonised; anybody who calls themselves feminists are demonised. And that does nothing but perpetuate this environment for us where we are going to see more and more civil liberties get taken away and eroded. I think the fear also comes because I can’t see the endgame — I can’t see how we can change this. I don’t know how we would fight it unless a fundamental shift happened in society. It’s complex times, I think,” she finishes thoughtfully.
“What’s compassionate? What’s humanitarian? What helps people live in dignity?”
There’s a sudden heaviness in the atmosphere, when you realise just how much of the way we function in society is rooted in fear — fear for our health, our safety, our loved ones, our basic human rights — especially in light of everything that happened in 2020. “What I’ve taken away from this last year is really looking at how the fear of the other, and the fear of alternative points of view, have shaped a lot of the destructive patterns that we’ve been seeing in our society,” says Yante. Though it’s common to resist and even fear perspectives that are different from ours, it’s how we choose to respond to this fear, and how we allow it to govern the way we behave towards others, that matters. And this goes beyond political leanings, religion, backgrounds, education, gender and all those other labels society deems so important — in the end, what it all comes down to is how compassionate and accepting we can be towards people who are different to us. “That, to me, is the barometer of what’s right and wrong,” says Yante. “What’s compassionate? What’s humanitarian? What helps people live in dignity? But our fear of the other, our fear of these views that don’t align with ourselves, it stops us from looking for any kind of opportunity for engagement, or for breaking down these kinds of barriers. And I think that says a lot about not just Malaysia, but the world.”
How Yante chooses to navigate this is by keeping to her true north, and sticking to her moral compass — now so sturdy and reinforced by years of exposure to and empathy for people whose experiences are so different from her own. “That’s the only way that I can sleep at night, knowing that I’m doing what I believe is right. I’m trying to do something that makes life more liveable for people who are downtrodden and disenfranchised.”
Though it may be difficult to see the path ahead, it helps to know when you’re on the one that’s right for you. A few months ago, Yante’s story came full circle when she came across a half-forgotten memento from that eye-opening backpacking trip across the States. “I had kept a diary, in that period,” she says. “And when I came back to Malaysia, you know, life got in the way, and I hadn’t bothered reading that diary until just a few months ago. I opened up the pages, and I was looking at my reflections about the places I went, and the people I met — all the people that I was inspired by. And one of the things that I had done while I was on that trip was I had gone to a few art galleries, I can’t remember where — might have been Seattle or something — and the art was about social issues. Then at the end of that trip, I had written down some reflections about what I had learnt. And I said, when I get back to Malaysia, these are the things that I have to do to change my life.
“I was a theatre geek back then, so I said that I wanted to be more involved in musical theatre. And I did that for a little while, but I gave that up. But there were two things that I wrote that I thought [were] particularly significant. I said, whatever career I choose to do, it has to be working in social issues and making social change. And the third thing I wrote [was], I’ve got to get back to art, and I need to do feminist art. I need to start portraying women the way they need to be portrayed.
“I was 23 when I wrote that, and I forgot that I had written it. I hadn’t even seen it, and life just went on, and as it turned out, that was precisely the path that I took. So a few months ago, when I opened my diary and I read it, I was completely blown away by that, because I didn’t realise that I had articulated it, so specifically, way back then. And [that] I had managed, without even realising it, to find myself here today.”
Looking back on the trajectory her life has taken, it’s pretty amazing to see how she ended up where she is today — exactly where her younger self hoped she would all those years ago. “I really do believe that the universe conspires to help you on your path towards somewhere. The opportunities that I found were to try to meet those two goals; everything that I did, I [ended up setting] myself on pathways without even realising it. But I think where I should take credit for it is that I recognised those opportunities, and I had the courage to take them. That, I think, is what I’m most proud of. That I’ve lived this life. Because I’ve reached a point where I’m [like], yes, this is where I wanted to be. And it’s good.”
BRAZEN QUESTIONS
At the end of each interview, we ask our guests a series of BRAZEN questions about what inspires them, in the hope that you will be inspired, too.
What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning?
“Well, you probably know what I’m going to say already, because I’ve said this a few times in the interview! But for me it’s just the decision that I made to live life for something greater than myself. I think that really helps me get through every day. Like this last year, with what’s been happening with COVID, it’s so easy to spiral down. But even on days when I don’t want to get up in the morning, I get up knowing that I have a vocation, that I’m doing this because I believe in a greater cause. And I know it sounds incredibly cliche, but honestly, that’s the truth. It really does help you look at life differently, when you know you’re not living just for yourself.”
Who inspires you?
“When I think about the work that I’m trying to do as a feminist and in women’s rights, the people that I look to that really inspire me are the people who’ve managed to start a revolution. It’s these kinds of women who are the game changers in the area of women’s rights, people who started something when nobody else [did]. In the US, it’s people like Gloria Steinem. In the late 60s and early 70s, she led a revolution of feminists, and even now she’s an icon of feminism. I always say, how does it feel to wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m Gloria Steinem’? [laughs] What does that feel like?
“Closer to home, there are also similar people that I regard as heroes in the feminist world. Zainah Anwar, who’s part of the founding figures of Sisters in Islam and Musawah — you listen to how articulate she is, and how intelligent she is, and how she speaks up and says difficult things, all the time, to push against the norms that [are] trying to take away rights from women. Those are the kinds of people that really inspire me. They’re not politicians necessarily, they’re not leaders in that way, they’re not millionaires, no. They weren’t looking to be a leader. But [they] had conviction in [their] belief, and [they] went and started a revolution, and [they] inspired people to follow [them], whether [they] wanted it or not. I think that to be part of a revolution would be amazing.”
Who inspires you to be better?
“So… [laughs] Actually, to be very honest with you, who inspires me to be better is actually myself. Not myself today, but myself yesterday. I spend a lot of time really dissecting things that I’ve done, things that I’ve said, things that I wish I had said better, or things that I said well and want to remember. And all these versions of myself inspire me to be better. How I move forward is always based on, ‘Did I do better today than I did at that time?’ Because I always want to try to be better than I was before. So it sounds incredibly narcissistic, that I inspire myself to be better! [laughs]”
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“Ahh, here’s an answer you’re not gonna expect. Actually, the best advice I was given was when I was fifteen, and it was by this boy that I was dating. And he said to me, ‘Oh, I don’t think you’re smart enough to do that. You should just give up.’
“In my life, there have been way too many men who have given me that kind of advice. And it’s ‘advice,’ you know — they treat it like it’s advice because they’re trying to shield you. More than anything, my memory of these misogynistic relationships that I’ve had have really fuelled me to prove them wrong. And not necessarily that particular guy — it’s that version of myself that I’m thinking about, that I want to try to do better for. And so [it’s] that, actually, more than any positive affirmation that’s been given to me — those words of the boys that I knew when I was younger who assumed I was a bimbo, who assumed that I was stupid, who assumed that I would amount to nothing because I wasn’t how they imagined an academically-inclined person to be. I give credit to that moment in my life where I listened to what they were saying, and I realised that, goddammit, no! You’re wrong, you’re absolutely wrong.
“I’m proud of who I’ve become, now. I’m not the best at everything, but I think that I live with integrity and with honesty, and I’m authentic to myself. I’m not a millionaire, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not successful in my own ways. And I always think about that boy. Every so often, it comes back to me, what he said. And I think, the best thing, the thing I love the most, is when people underestimate me. Because then I can really show them that, you don’t know. You have no idea.”
Do you have any practices or routines that you include in your lifestyle, to keep you feeling like yourself and functioning at your best?
“I think this is such an important question. Because we all rely on these certain things that keep us sane, right? I think for me, what centres me is that obsessive practice of self-reflection — how could I have done something better? How could I have changed the outcome of a particular incident? I also spend a lot of time forward-thinking. I imagine scenarios of particular issues, and what my position is on those issues. Like, I imagine — if I were asked a question regarding something, how do I honestly feel about that particular issue? How would I articulate it? And when I ask myself that question, I force myself to back it up with data. So this is my way of making sure I’m authentic, that I’m being as non-hypocritical as I can [be].
“Sometimes it works to my advantage — like, I was on radio one time where somebody said to me, ‘So, what do you have to say about these feminazis?’ And I was pleased that I was able to respond quite quickly and say, [sarcastically] ‘Yes, that’s right, because fighting for women’s rights is exactly like the genocide of millions of people.’ And I remember that this was an answer that I had been rehearsing in my head ages before that! I try to have those situations where I rehearse possible responses [in my head], and [what] I believe about certain issues, because when the moment comes for me to speak up, I will be able to do so with conviction.
“And this boils down to my fear, because I am obsessed about the fear of being ill-informed. So these quiet times that I spend reflecting, I think that’s really important for my process. It’s important for my art, and it’s also important for the humanitarian work that I do as well. More than anything else, that really centres me.”
What’s your idea of the fullest version of yourself?
“I think that, to be very honest, where life is right now for me is comfortable. Not to mean complacency, but more of like, I feel very settled. I don’t feel like I need to chase anything. But what I’d like to achieve would be to be able to start a movement [and] community of feminist artists. I think that’s really important. I feel like I may be at the cusp of it, I just need to strategise and move towards it a little bit more.
“And for myself, as well, I would like to build my credibility in the feminist world in Malaysia, or regionally. That’s my long-term, fifteen-year-plan, for retirement — where I really wanna build myself as a strong feminist. Not just an artist, but as an intellectual. So part of my plan is also to go back to school and get a masters in gender studies, so that I can marry these two worlds and be able to speak and write and to be published with credibility on these two issues, and hopefully affect change that way. I’d like to help generations of young girls think about things differently. When I finish with my professional work, that’s where I’d like to transition to.”
And last but not least, when do you feel truly alive?
“I think when I’m up against a challenge. I know it sounds a bit cliche, but it’s true. I mean, it’s why I choose to do certain things in my life. I like to be in the thick of whatever is helping to change certain things. Those opportunities come up far more in my work than in my activism, but when they do come up, that’s when I really feel like I’m part of something, and you really feel like you’re alive. To just live a life that’s bigger than myself.”
