Catalina Writes

(The following is not written by me)

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Sulu Stories
Whilst in the Philippines I was constantly asked, “Where are you from?” “I am from Sabah” I would answer. “Ah, a Filipina,” was the common response. I smile but am thinking difficult surf, troubled waters, dive in the deep end, not drowning, waving…but I am welcomed with a knowing embrace; we know we are connected; our histories, fate and horizon line is shared. A Sabahan in the Philippines has no option but to address Sulu, I just wasn’t sure where to begin.

[...]

The Sulu Sea, powered by the pull of the moon, filled with her tears, becomes my vessel on which to suture the dioramas I had found. It is a haunted sea, barred to the world for over thirty years by the currents of politics and prejudice and guarded by the ancient Tausug ‘people of the current’ and Bajau ‘sea people’ that turn to pray to the horizon of Mecca. The sea is their life, land a graveyard. The sea for a millenia brought with it empires, traders from every corner of the world and yet the peoples of the Sulu ride the currents and hold their frontiers. The sea is the constant backdrop to the hundreds of stories I encountered, the subjects tantalizing: pirates, slaves, opium, M16s, priests, tau taus, typhoons, shipwrecks, boogey men and sultans.

I stand on the Malaysian Pulau Selingan off the coast of Sandakan in Sabah. I see two islands in front of me. On the left is Pulau Bakkungan, Philippines, on my right is Pulau Bakkungan Kecil, Malaysia. The three islands form a triangle; I am told we are all about 4 kilometres apart. Somewhere between us is a watery formless border but I neither see it nor sense it. We are in a zone not quite Filipino, not quite Malaysian but very aware of being Sulu. At night I see a giant green back turtle lay her eggs. The guide tells me she has not been previously tagged; she is probably laying her first batch of eggs. He goes on to tell me turtles return to their place of birth when it is time for them to give birth. He estimates this mother to be about thirty years old. I think to myself, here is the communion of landscape and memory, as I help release day old green back turtle hatchlings into the Sulu Sea carrying with them the genetic memory of their being and place.

– Yee, I-Lann. ArtconneXions: SYD-MAL-KUL. Goethe Institute. 2005

Cat’s note:
It’s easy to automatically assume that being Malaysian equals to being Valley-ite. Whenever I return to Kuching, the visit becomes a reminder of how it is not. I feel that in the attempt to write and deal with Malaysianness, writers forget that there are other versions of Malaysianness, formed by geographies and histories that are more true and more immediate than the policies of power-hungry men far away.

I’ve just heard that KT Tunstall is coming to Singapore. I really wish that I’ll be able to go for it; prices of tickets are not available at the moment, but they will be!

I don’t usually listen to music like KT Tunstall’s — I’m known among my friends for having extremely trashy taste — but this is the kind of stuff that’s worth traveling and paying for. Well, depending on the price, of course.

So where’s your office?

A: Starbucks.

Some outlets are surprisingly comfortable, and more condusive for work than my regular office. I wish I could clean that one up, but I cannot help but feel somewhat reluctant to throw away all the old crap that keeps cluttering the place, which includes a tea set and some cutlery (seriously). There is a wooden elephant sitting on an unused shelf. Someone must have gotten it out of some significance and never removed it when they removed themselves from the tutor’s room. Dr. Ashraf recently gave me two other things that would serve to clutter up the place once I leave: a Buddha head and a statuette of a meditating monk (who looks a little angmoh).

Oh I really need to clear the real office up. At one point sparrows built a nest at the air-conditioner. It has since been cleared, although they sometimes return, and then we have to clear the place again. Sometimes I can still see remnants of nest, in the form of rotten twigs and things, falling through the gaps and unto my work table.

Dr. Ashraf Jamal, an academic of South African nationality who has been working with the English Department for about two years or more, will be leaving Malaysia for Cyprus today.

During the years that he has been here he has been quite a personality. Extremely unconventional in many ways, those who have been in his acquaintance will say that he can be, in many turns, intimidating, emotional, frustrating to deal with, and also incredibly intelligent and very inspiring.  The last is very true on my part; most of my better work has resulted from prompts fed by him, and it was due to his influence that I slowly decided that my place in the humanities is in cultural studies.

Back to work. My schedule is extremely packed but things are on pace at the moment. If all goes well, I will be teaching Prose and Texts for Schools this semester.
It’s nice to be back home — I mean KL home, that is. It’s nice to see the teddy bear back again, flip through tactics, and fiddle around with my PS2. Rob Spence, a scholar on Anthony Burgess, will be coming down to KL to give a talk, and I will have to prepare a few things for him beforehand.

My father told me offhand that there are about 40,000 Ibans residing in Johor (the link points to a Google search result). They came there to work as blue-collar workers in Johor’s many industrial areas, before becoming permanent residents there. According to my father, there is even an Iban guy who set up a record store that sold Iban music.

I’m not a true-blue Iban. I can’t even speak the language, although I can understand simple conversation. I was brought up to be more familiar with Chinese culture, but I don’t really relate to Chinese-ness entirely. The most dominant culture in my life was Western culture, but even that doesn’t quite fit. Even so, there’s a part of me that’s a little affected — in that kind of “I really, really don’t want to be pulled into a cultural obligation” way — when I think of how poor many Ibans are, and when I think of my longhouse in Ulu Krian, with no one there except for the very young and the very old (like this post says, all the aki and ini). I’m glad that in this case, poverty does not translate to the lack of will and empowerment.

How distant am I from the reality of the ethnic group of which all forms of my official identification claim me to be a part of? I’ll tell you this anecdote about an incident that happened when I was in Form Six. Our teacher, a Kelantanese, asked us about crocodile attacks in Sarawak, marvelling (in a way) about the number of large and predatory crocodiles here.

“But they won’t eat people!” I said. And why did I say so? Because I didn’t see many reports, and because my education about crocodiles were documentaries on television, all Western-produced, which perpetuated that predatory animals will not harm human beings unless provoked.

“They do~!” one classmate said, and –

“They DO!” said another.

“Why don’t they move?” my Kelantanese teacher asked.

This guy, his name was K, he answered her: “Because they are too poor to leave.”

K was a good-looking guy, and like me he liked comics. I think he was definitely interested in furthering his studies in something like design or animation, but at Form Five he was already thinking of quitting school. He wanted to work to help his younger siblings out, but his father had told him to keep studying up to Form Six. That would mean a slightly higher qualification, and perhaps better employment. I have never kept in contact with him — in fact, I never contacted anyone whom I studied with back then, because I was so focussed on going elsewhere, somewhere out there, where I could spread my wings — so I don’t know what has happened to him since then, whether he has indeed left to work after Form Six, or somehow, found a way to earn himself tertiary education.

There’s a difference, I think, in the way that the Ibans have handled this state of things, and that has to be understood by my readers (eh, who?) who do not come from Sarawak. The poverty that happens is caused by the usual displacement when economic patterns change along with cultural changes. The routes that determine trade are no longer the rivers.  This happens to almost any tribal community, in any part of the world.

But the Ibans have not let it get to their spirit. I can, in some way or another, get that vibe, even if I don’t really belong to the community.  Poverty is a sick word, because it puts the person who suffers from being at the crappy end of an economic system with a kind of moral and spiritual destitution. That’s the sick part of poverty — not the lack of money, but what it does to your spirit. The Ibans I know have not let it get to them. They have not made them wallow in a loss of sense of place, or in anger. Home is always home — with its great mountains, and rivers — and that’s something that I can appreciate. But in the meantime, there’s no reason why you cannot set sail, and seek your fortunes around the world.

One afternoon I spent some time to walk around inside an empty house. I imagined how it would like to fill up some of the spaces with a few things: perhaps some books in bookshelves dark or white. Dark, preferably.  I’m not keen on socializing in the hometown; I have always been a recluse. The few people whom I have felt very comfortable socializing with have all been in the Klang Valley.

But there are a few things that make the Klang Valley unappealing. Well, not really. It’s just that living the life of a recluse, surrounded by nothing but books, the Internet, and living very close to nature, is truly bliss.

Wow, this is an idea I never thought of. Niche and elite online advertising.

I have Timothy Tiah’s blog on my link list and I knew Josh Lim of Advertlets back when we were involved in Phases (I don’t think he remembers me, though, he kept to himself a lot). Either it’s true that people involved in Phases tend to grow up to be high achievers, or the Klang Valley community just happens to be incredibly small, especially when we’re talking about the community that forms the slightly upper middle classes (I tend to use economic class terms a bit liberally) — you know, just to digress a bit, I really hate the huge letters used in WordPress’ entry panel — which I consider a cause for concern, because Malaysia seems to function on two levels of societies, but that’s another story.

I digressed too much. While Nuffnang and Advertlets both attempted to keep their ads user friendly, there are people who are already sick of them and are blocking them. People hate advertising, but advertising is necessary to generate revenue for certain sites, especially if they provide services. There’s a good article on Fortuitious about how Metafilter tried to toe the line between profit and annoyance. It’s worth reading, as with many things there.

I spoke to a friend about leaving a legacy after one’s death. He said he was not interested in leaving a legacy; the most important things that influenced the lives of people have become nameless. Who invented computers? Who shaped the Nuclear age? Who discovered modern electricity? You’d have to look at records to know who did them, and records are there only because someone wanted the records to be there.

Those kind of achievements don’t feel like ‘real’ achievements to me, for all their pragmatic use. I once drove past a cemetery, and saw the markers of graves of many who passed so long ago, their names and their identities disappearing — or have disappeared — into blank nothingness. What would matter as transcendence would be a voice. A re-imagination into existence. A narrative. Above all else a voice, in the same way that one can read a play by Shakespeare and be transported, almost, to the very life and the colour and the presentness of his writing as though it were performed in his mind right at that very moment (I’m not making that much sense, am I?). Keats believed that beauty has a way of transcending all inanities of life, and in some way or another, I believe in it too.

“It’s all ego,” he said. Yeah, definitely. We’re all motivated by fear, in some way or another. Some of our physical fears become transformed into different shapes when we are capable of thinking in more abstract terms.

Doris Lessing, aged 88, calls the Internet a piece of crap that brings the minds of the young to inanity. That is true. But I am reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, and I’m thinking to myself: this woman desperately needed a Livejournal. So did Charlotte Bronte, incidentally. They did not, and so they wrote great novels.

So the would-be Charlotte Brontes and George Eliots have succumbed to inanity and resorted to spewing their angst out on Blogspot and Xanga. All the better; there’s a smaller chance of squabbling for space, and more space for Doris Lessing’s writings to exist outside of the world of electronics. Well, some would argue that she would deserve it nonetheless, so perhaps, for those who would be Doris Lessing.

One of the scientific theories for the existence of homosexuality in species is population growth control. I like evolution. We have mental population growth control going on now.