USE KING WHEN YOU MEAN RAJA; KEEP A KERIS IN YOUR DAGGER
/ Article by Zedeck Siew
ONE
In those days our raja was called Sang Warta Perkasa: he wore no crown upon his head; the principle symbols of his station were not worn, but borne by hamba-hamba:
A pair of padukas, gading-white, as ancient as Iskandar;
A cogan alam, crested by a rearing harimau, maw open;
A cogan agama, tipped by a sabit bulan and a pentagram;
Thirteen payung kuning, saffron sutera, brocaded with noble gold;
A single keris, meteoric iron, a pusaka old as kayangan itself.
For Sang Warta Perkasa’s forbear was Sita Sapurba, white as snow and camedown from heaven — divinity themself. So Sang Warta Perkasa would not be weighed down by earthly affairs.
Glossary:
raja = king
hamba = slave
paduka = platform slippers
cogan alam = sceptre, representing temporality
harimau = tiger
cogan agama = sceptre, representing the sacred
sabit bulan = crescent moon
payung kuning = yellow umbrella, yellow being the colour of royalty
sutera = silk
keris = kris, a dagger with an undulating blade, frequently said to be magical
pusaka = heirloom
kayangan = heaven
ONE
When I was growing up I knew I wanted to leave.
A lot of us grow up like this, I think? It is not the stories of hobbits or boy wizards that do it — but how those stories arrive to us:
With a £ price tag, and twice the cost because of shipping;
Wearing an embossed “Winner of the Man Booker Prize” medal;
Argued over on fora, only ever active while we are asleep.
I could not wait to get out of my birth-town, with its landscape of rubber and oil palm, a rural nowhere place South and East of Asia — a periphery of a periphery of a periphery — to somewhere that made books. To a place that made books that mattered.
Would such a metropole want me? What stories could I sell, to buy its acceptance? I thought I would sell my birth-land. Slash and burn it — whatever. I did not want it anymore.
TWO
A: Cha. How can you say you don’t care? Kamon la, cha. Flers just came and tore down the whole taman. Whole taman wei.
B: I got say I don’t care? I know is damn shit. I’m saying: you care also, how? Land developers, how to stop? Mogok lapar or what? Flers got polis and army all helping them.
C: They got all kinds of kabel to pull.
B: Not just kabel. See who these flers are. “Tengku Setia Sdn Bhd” — “tengku” this, “tengku” that. That’s not just kabel. That is payung already. You know what is payung?
C: Yellow umbrella, tau-tau la.
A: Eh, donno how you can so chill. Taman Mura not only got shophouses okay. Got Malay kampung also. Along the river there? Your people also kena.
C: My people? Suddenly it’s a race thing?
B: Eh kak, where do you think you are? It’s always a race thing.
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TWO
In my early twenties I moved to Kuala Lumpur, an interim metropolis. There I was waylaid.
Fell in love — with a woman, with an idea of Malaysia. Instead of waiting to belong to an important city, I’d stay in this one. With my stories I’d wrestle this nation-state away from race-supremacists and brain-drainers.
Malaysia would belong to me.
As with any nation-state it is important to convey the correct story, the correct topics. For the Great Malaysian Novel this is:
Ethnic injustice; and
Feudal crony-capitalism; and
Colonial haunting;
In a shining urban melting-pot.
A knowing, ironic and disappointed melting pot, yes. But a melting pot nonetheless. If you want to fly the flag and sing the anthem, this is still the right place to be: a big city that represents everybody. A metropole.
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TIGA
Di sisir Pantai Ru hidup seorang nakhoda, Wan Siri namanya.
Wan Siri bergantung pada sebuah lancang kecil untuk mencari nafkah. Tiap malam Isnin ia turun ke laut, bersama anak-anak kapal. Tiap pagi Khamis ia pulang ke kampung, membawa:
Beras satu gantang;
Wang timah dua genggam.
Pada suatu hari Sabtu datanglah anak buah Dato Nong berkata: “Wahai nakhoda kedana! Serahlah bot kamu itu. Bos aku ingin turun ke laut untuk mengail duyung.”
Tetapi Wan Siri menjawab: “Tidak.”
Maka pulang samseng itu ke tuannya, lalu disampaikan ia jawapan Wan Siri pada Dato Nong. Lalu Dato Nong pun marahlah. Berangkatlah Dato Nong ke sisir Pantai Ru, membawa bala askarnya, bersama:
Lembing tiga belas bilah;
Lantaka tiga pucuk.
Menunggu kepulangan lancang Wan Siri.
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TIGA
I quit being a reporter; I was retrenched from my job in a lifestyle magazine. Finally I left the national capital.
I returned to my birth-town. I was determined to make it a home. Bahasa Melayu felt like a key. Malay-Muslim fascists had used it as a way to lock me out of this, their Tanah Melayu.
“Pendatang!” they told me. “You only write in English. You don’t even know how to speak Malay! You don’t belong in Malaysia.”
To steal the language back from ethno-nationalists felt like defiance. Bahasa is not a national language, or a racial language. It is a local language -- the language I use to buy lunch, at the food stalls down the hill.
This very soil is mine, also. I will plant myself in it, this my tanah air.
Bahasa has been a struggle. I read it very slowly. I stammer. People say I am skema when I speak it -- I sound like a Form Three essay.
For most of my life I treated Bahasa like a forest to be cleared, so I could grow the cash-crop plantation that English is. Now I survey devastation. The eight or so years I’ve spent relearning Bahasa, returning to it -- it is not yet enough.
Even if a forest returns, will it return the same?
EMPAT
The hamba-hamba who worked the istana were never to leave the palace grounds -- it was their alam, their dunia, their world.
And as years passed the istana grew more and more into the world. For it was custom amongst the orang-orang kaya to vie for their raja’s favour, achieving this chiefly by gifts of human bodies:
of many shapes;
of most sizes;
from every island of the great Nusantara.
They came before Sang Warta Perkasa one by one, those nobles, performing the sembah. From that prostrated position they offered their spoils of wealth and war to him.
There was Tengku Setia, given leave by his uncle the raja to build bustling gudangs along the Mura River -- a shipping complex worth a hundred katis of gold, daily.
Face down, Tengku Setia said: “O duli yang maha mulia! I offer thee these kampung-folk! Once they lived riverside lives. Now they need a new home, a new purpose!”
There was Dato Nong, lent the raja’s fighting hulubalang to pacify rebel kampungs up and down the Ru coast; who had seized the harimau’s share of spoils.
Face down, Dato Nong said: “O I am but dust under thy shoe! I offer thee this woman, captain of thine enemy, now so servile as to be trusted bearer of thy royal keris!”
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EMPAT
My cash-crop plantation, the English language -- it seems to thrive. I make a living off my English fiction, now. This does not feel as good as I dreamed it would be, in my childhood.
The majority of my readers live abroad. I understand the necessity of this. My living is made from sales in USD.
It is now, when I no longer yearn to leave, that the metropole seems to want my goods most.
Today, the tastes of the world’s centres have grown more sophisticated. Colonial extraction is bad, obviously.
There are other, quieter ways for me to supply them what they need. “Exotic” is verbum non gratum; say “authentic” or “representative” instead.
Like intercropping palm oil rows with vegetables and pepper -- I flavour my stories with Bahasa words, and Sanskrit. I no longer need to italicise these words. That’s a concession that has gone out of mode.
And observe how certain terms have their definitions furtively conveyed? I’ve learned, like many writers in English from non-White cultures, to disguise my glossary notes. The glossary is invisible; it doesn’t even interrupt the text, now.
I am still in the periphery, after all.
I am still serving the centre’s tastes.
FIVE
She lost her ship and her crew, then her family and her freedom; when she arrived at the palace she lost her name.
At the palace she was called Dagger. Because that was her function: to bear the royal dagger, an ancient and sacred spirit, a living creature of metal that was sent from heaven -- just as the king was flesh, heaven-sent.
She learned to dance with the dagger, for the pleasure of the court. This was part of her function.
She learned to couple with the dagger, to satiate lusts the king said it possessed. That was also part of her function.
She learned to speak to the dagger. She whispered to it; it whispered back. This was a function she’d discovered, herself.
“I am a prisoner, Siri,” the dagger said to her. “Help me. I will help you. Together, we could be free.”
She looks at the court -- how it is laid out. Along the walls: armed guards. At the foot of the dais: nobles and ministers, sat on their cushions, arranged in concentric circles of importance.
Surrounding the throne: her fellow slaves. Moon Sceptre, Tiger Sceptre. The thirteen Yellow Parasols. Slipper. Dagger.
And there, in arm’s reach: the king, reclining, his belly pale and broad.
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FIVE
I no longer wish to serve a centre.
The original forests around Port Dickson, my birth town -- they are long gone. It has been a rubber and oil-palm monoculture since the 19th Century.
But what does “original” mean? Rubber, if let live beyond its economic usefulness, becomes a mighty tree whose trunk you can barely hug. One such tree grows close to my home.
Growing up, I was taught to fear wild animals, stalking the oil palms’ shade.
Port Dickson has had its English name for 130 years. The English language was the first language I learned.
Let English become overgrown. Let the tiger who lost its forest claim the plantation for its own. English is mine, my forest, growing in my homeland. It is my mother tongue, as much as Hakka, or Hokkien, or Bahasa.
I am not a periphery. Instead: if people like my stories, Maybe they can be invited into my shade. Maybe they can learn to understand my patterns, my meanings. Maybe they should re-learn their own.
Let the metropoles find their own words for fire-breathing winged serpent or European feudal monarch. Let them italicise “misericord”.
I will use “dragon” to talk about the naga. I will use “king” to mean raja. I will say “dagger” when I speak of a keris.
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