13/11/2023
Sails Unseen Across the Srivijayan Sea
I apprenticed my youth to a Cambodian bird-feather gleaner, the clan that furnished the world with the intense blue feathers only royalty could wear. Together we went a-dhowing the Srivijayan isles, sailing the riverine lanes to Araby, and betweentides slept in Borneo too.
With the Melanau, the Dayaks, Budiah, Bidayuh, Iban. The people along the Saribas River, who called themselves Kami Saribas – “We Saribas” – for to them their river and they were one in the same.
I was at the ancient healing ceremonies of berbayah and berayan. Sold belum get-well fetishes to the Selukau people of Lundu and Sematan. Stored my memories in Martaban jars I bought from riverboat vendors of Mukah. I bought pua kumbu talisman carpets from the women on the slopes of Santubong, and traced the arabesques of Uzbeki pastels on the masjid ceiling above.
Yes, yes, O yes, and yes of much else, too. I was there river bathing with the Tedayan, feasting with the Orang Minik, laughing with the Bakong. I chaffered with the Dalek of Bintulu and Miri, danced with the Dayak at their gawai harvest festival, lived among the Bukar Sadongs in the Serian, among the Biatahs of Kuching, the Singgais of the Bau, the Jagoi, the Lara. The Kayan in the upper reaches of Apo Kayan, that soft, brown eel-kiss of a river so limpid its flow, where one can smell each color and taste every sound. Then ascended upland to Usun Apau above Kenyah to where Sarawak becomes Kalimantan.
I am Kelabit, Penan, Lun Bawang. Ferns grew from the boards of my weary docks, the brownish grey of windweathered wood, doorways filled with glim-eyed cats.
I was the art of the Orang Ulu with its eerily Kwakiutl feel, flat faces with wide noses. And too am I Kayan fetishware, demonically composited of wild boar ears and human eyes. I am why the Melanau carved miniature coffins into burial posts, door guardians, lobe ends of boat paddles, fishing amulets from bone and antler, and the most elaborate and fantastic part of the burung kenyatang, the sacred hornbill – or more exactly its highly imagistic false coxcomb so strangely Aztec-like in features that do not exist on the real bird.
And I wondered from which recess in our commonality comes the impulse to fantasy and is that recess mayhap where our troubles begin?
Yes, me. Bedazzled, begalleoned, bestrewer of dream deeds. From Mantai in Serendib to the Solomons I plied, kingfishers for blue, macaws for beak, orioles for yellow, parrots for everything else (for when it comes to colors parrots don’t miss a trick).
O yes, yes, O yes: sun and soil, night and day, quick life and quick death, I saw that, too. The tiny insect bite on a thumb growing blue then black for no reason. And how the eyes gape in the end screaming because the voice no longer can. I was there, too, marrying multiply – not for why the ta**ry may think, but because time in common is precious while time alone is meaningless. And because of four sons who go to sea in four years time three widows will make.
My feathers bought salt which I traded for pearls. I planted cereals. I burnished utensils. Coiled clay ropes into pottery, and into those pots coiled ropes. For the coil is as commonplace to me as the petrol pump hose is to you.
The ropes I then sold to orang asli, the sea gypsies who passed the rainy season in dwellings on stilts, not that they should remain dry in the rains but to keep the rats away, and therefore the snakes.
I wove kajang and attap mats for wall and floor, hewed woods with sharp stones, built megaliths and dolmens for my spirit and nature gods. In Kelebit I told the chiefs that to inspire their subjects to revere their mortal remains so they would be thought of as gods (a notion they rather fancied) they should take to embalming themselves atop a hollowed tree, copper inside bronze and that inside iron, till they turned into the ages, that all may see.
Three thousand years past I left behind stone slabs which for curious reasons the farangi term “artefacts” — Now please, please, dear scholars, those are my immortal remains you trivialise with that name. If I used the word “megalith” would it open a different window on the matter?
“Mega” may strike a certain resonance in you, but it strikes dissonance in me. I deem myself not grand, nor am I great. I am but my people. We are not a me, we are a We. I use “I” because I am obliged to write it in your tongue, even though while you might hear your word you will never grasp my disdain in uttering it.
We whose thriving traces back three thousand years of docking cargoes, hewing iron adzes, kilning pots large and small, with twilight-blue lapis, seafoam-green malachite, celadon, jade. We, who brought to the world, ground glass beads, fragrant sandalwood, silkwood (and not for nothing is it so named), nests made by bespittling sparrows, animal horn, camphor, orchil — all this, all, from the I who is not a me but a We (and mind the upper case, please).
You think this is academic, arcane, tribal, remote, don’t you, my friend? The gnashing of an empire a thousand years gone. So listen now to the sweet song of my revenge. As the refined classes from Santubong to Rome relied upon my sliver-thin hull to ply the Silk Sea, no less glorious a tradeway than the hundred-camel caravans bedusting ’neath the stars, from Taklamakan to Chengdu, from Pegu to Ghandara, Aceh to Mataram, Cochin-China to the Kochi of the moormen, Ternate in remotest Palawan — all these but a gurgle beneath the woven reeds of my lateen. Out, yes, yes O yes, to isles as distant as Maguindanao, the Isles of the Thieves, where Magellan met his murder.
And when on the other side of the silver sun those rustics the pirates of Sumatra fancied themselves important enough to ally with the bumptious new state of Kediri, I threw out the King of Kediri to much cheering from the crowds as he rose sixteen cubits into the air and vanished into a black cloud that rained gold glitter, I replaced him with the tribesmen of the Singhasari, of whom I also found wanting, so replaced them with the Majapahit. And soon again in my own due time, I moulded all these bits of trade and tribe into Srivijaya — which I count as rather a bauble to my credit for my Ramayana is still retold in its every boisterous nuance with leather puppets acting the great drama behind sheets strung on a rope from two limbs lit from the rear with fire lamps, via which village theatre prospered. Until electricity brought television and doomed my time, my children, my history, and me.
“My” Ramanaya? you demand with raised brow.
Yes, “My.”
I didn’t write it, I am it.
And if you follow its ancient plot in full you will realize how subtle I am, how intricate my thoughts, how quietly I lurk despite enormous passages of time — by which the culturally astute among you might distantly foresee my rise atop the dust crumbling off the edges of your supremacy.
But as this recital already belabours the ears excessively, let us move beyond my Jambudipa days, save to say that they sure were fun (frightful lot of idols, though). My Berjaya Melaka endhowed Siam to the Moluccas, wiped out the pirate nests of Pontiniak, Brunei, Bandjarmasin, and turned them into respectable trading ports with temples, docks, and a stuffily prosperous merchant class. And if you disdain bourgeois values, remember that citizenries don’t start wars like those cowardly curs the politicians.
I spun tops into the game of main gasing, flew kites into the aerial combats of wau bulan, took them to Kedah to Johor to adopt as pastimes, and visited on the way the feast tables of India, China, Khmer, Kutch, Sindh – the better to savour the tasties when back in my House of Melayu. I gave everyone tuak rice wine and taught them to dance. And urban source code, I gave that, too, but it took two thousand years to be made manifest in the Petronas Pair of Kuala Lumpur.
A bit melodramatic, you mutter with wrinkled nose? Be forewarned: This is leading to your cultural finale, where you will be obliged to live in spite of me as I was once obliged to live in spite of you.
You left unopened my Srivijayan album for nigh a thousand years. It is now my time to close the covers on yours. You think of your culture Occidental as one, good, true, beautiful. Well, I do not. I take you to be mirror-loving fools, whose sun is about to set as mine is about to rise. You dismissed me without a thought. You saw surfaces when I am depths. You extracted and shipped all my minerals till they groaned the strakes of your hulls, then sent back overpriced gadgets in exchange. I have given you three thousand years of unbroken past, and quarterly reports is all you offer in return. Now, my friend, it is your time to consider the bitter gall I have tasted for centuries:
I know the chivalries in your Heimskringgla. Do you know my chivalry of Hang Tuah and Hang J***t?
I know how your Villon laughed away the choking noose. Do you know how my Töng Chih laughed away the boiling cauldron in the court of Sun Ch’an?
I know the shedding of worldly nostalgies in the tears of Hèloise. Do you know the verses in which my Ho Nansorhon shed too her tears?
I know your Magna Carta and Constitution. Do you know my Mahavamsa, my Sejarah Melayu?
I know your Gilbert and George and your Tamara de Lempika. Do you know my butterball infants painted on glass in Tanjore?
I know your Pied Piper. Do you know my lagi tutu lagi incit?
To you your erudition is amazing. You know all about yourself and hesitate not to say so, yet you have not a clue of any I have just said. Why do you who limn the nights away preening before your codependency mirrors think I have no anthem of my own:
In the Spring of the year Uryu
when I was young and in my morning
I climbed a mountain of beads and jade rising from the sea.
Peak upon peak of white above blue sparkled and dazzled
till I was able to see with the eyes I wore as a child.
Rainbows shrouded the peaks and the springs welled with red gems.
Between the rocks I followed a languoring cloudward stream.
Strange plants and exotic flowers everywhere,
leaves wearing jackets of scarlet and great green hats.
Phoenix, cranes, peacocks, kingfishers, sprang onto the path,
urging me upward withal their sweet sounds.
When I reached the summit the great seas of the four directions
joined me to the sky and all became emerald.
The sun rose red and bathed me in wind,
the pool at the summit was deep and clear,
heart-of-lotus raindrops shone in my eyes.
A voice said, “This be Mount Ophir of Mahmud Shah,
the best in all Johor.
You must be one of the Immortals
or you would not find your way here.
Please write of us in verse and take back with you
our Spring and Autumn Annals.
Tell the world you saw shimmering in the sky
the most distant land of Noni Tawangsari,
the Heaven on the other side of the sky.”
Petrarch, Petrarch, where were you when my forebears plied the Srivijayan Sea and I went a-dhowing to Noni Tawangsari?
