Letter from America 5

By Bunga Pakma @ HuEditor

Many, many Malaysians have travelled abroad.  Many, many Sarawakians have explored the whole planet.  The Iban in particular, with their ethos of bejalai, turn up everywhere. Over a hundred years ago, one Brooke officer found a postcard stuck on the Tuai Rumah’s bilek wall.  His son had sent it from New York.  The late scholar Henry Gana Ngadi studied at Hull in England.  He told me that the North Sea was chock-a-block with Ibans who had come out to work on the oil rigs, and that from them he could assemble a respectable gathering when Gawai time came around.  I could have sworn I heard a couple speaking Iban on a street near Yale University when I visited a few weeks ago.

It’s a pity then that so few Malaysians have written us travel-books.  Perhaps Malaysians view travel-writing as an exclusively Western genre.  They have some reason. Western travel-narratives have been stuck in a rut for the past, well, three thousand years.

The first travel-book in the European tradition is Homer’s Odyssey, and the Odyssey shows, fully developed, all the common themes of travel-writing.  Odysseus, the hero at one point in the poem names himself “No-Man,” and the opposite is true—he is Everyman, and by now attitudes are enlightened enough to assert that Odysseus is Everywoman, too.

Odysseus is, first of all, a long way from home.  He starts out sailing home from Troy with a proper ship, and ends up banging around the Mediterranean Sea by guess and by (literally) gods.  All along the way he meets monsters, and he escapes by a hair’s-breadth from nightmarish dangers, though his crew, to a man, perish.  He sees plenty of bizarre and unheard-of behaviour and is on the brink of floundering when he tries to cope with unfamiliar manners.  The only problem Homer doesn’t inflict on Odysseus is that of language.  Everybody speaks Greek.

Then there’s the flipside.  On his last stage before Ithaka, home, he’s washed up naked on the island of Phaeacia, and Phaeacia is the ancient Greek equivalent of Tahiti, Bali, Bali-Hai, Shangri-La, The Shire, you name it.  The climate is perfect, the land is rich, life is easy and fun, and the natives are kind, happy, and generous.

I know that readers of The Hornbill Unleashed are cultured and literate people, and so I can trust you to take the foregoing list of topics and see how they apply to the travel-books you have read.  Most such simple-mindedly develop the theme that Other People Are Weird.  A very few authors use the experience of being in unfamiliar lands and peoples to explore themselves and their own being.  Foremost among these is the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—still with us at over 100 years of age—whose critique of modern mass civilization, developed in contrast to the lives of Brazilian forest Natives, goes to the very heart of his own culture.

The most famous such travel-book concerns places that never existed and was written by a man who never went anywhere.  I refer to Gulliver’s Travels.  Swift, a master of deep irony, dupes the reader into believing he is reading about Weird Other People, when Swift is forcing him to confront that that Other is himself, not only Weird, but irrational, capricious, cruel, and, occasionally and with effort, noble and great.

Actually, I wish that Malaysian authors would give us more of the Other People Are Weird genre of books, because, whether the writer intends it or not, every observation he makes mirrors the Other, the world, and himself. I’d like to risk a little in this vein.

In a previous piece, I told you how I gauged the mood of America this time around.  Then I was looking through my political eyes and trying objectively to describe Americans.  Now I look through my cultural eyes and I kind find plenty here I can react to only with disquiet.

By temperament as well as habitude I am a kampong boy. My earliest memories are of the country. Pengerami cheers me; crowds upset me. The wealth and energy of America is to be looked at with awe and exhilaration, but the immense waste cannot be ignored. There is plenty of activity, and plenty of that is futile, to no purpose. Where I am staying, the country roads are filled with busses and cars heading to and from the world’s largest casino, built on the tribal lands of the Pequot Indians. This was bankrolled was Lim Goh Tong, and it looks just like an oversize Genting Highlands plopped into the Connecticut woods.

My body cannot feel comfortable.  I came to America at the end of a hard winter.  The cold was not nearly so much a bother to me as having to be clothed all the time.  The layers of insulation convinced my skin that I was outdoors in midday Kuching and I sweated through my shirt.  The air temperature can be chilly even when the sunlight is hot.

When I arrived, daylight lasted for a mere 11 hours.  Now that the earth’s North Pole is tilting toward the sun, the day is nearly 15 hours long.  My day has always been 12 hours year-round, and even after three months I can’t adjust to bright light at what my body feels as bedtime.

Semi-rural Sarawak is my home.  We live in a kampong and there is plenty enough within the space of a few houses to keep us busy and give us all the human contact we need.  Our connection with the outside world consists of a little BBC in the morning, a peek at the internet, and a newspaper if I’m in town.  The books I read are old.  In the US, all the world seems to be talking about themselves all the time. Malaysia’s radio and TV may be too “lite,” but America’s media speaks in a tone of grave near-panic.  “What’s wrong with us? What’s going to happen to us?  All these awful things are waiting to kill or maim us, nothing but misery everywhere around us.”

You can imagine the stifling oppressive atmosphere this obsession with events creates.  Perspective is everything to a happy life, and Americans are simply too involved with themselves.  Here, you’d think nothing exists but politics, war, poverty, and disease. Such has always been the nature of News, which is, as Edward Gibbon said of history, the mere chronicle of the “crimes, follies, and disasters of mankind.” But in America this is the incessant daily diet.

The population here is dense, but many people are not rooted to their menoa. Your next-door neighbor is not related to you, or, most often, not connected to you in any meaningful way.  Obesity is a terrible problem.  I am amazed at how ugly people let themselves be.  Go out in public during the day and the only people you see in the shops are the elderly.

In Sarawak things are the exact opposite.  Many fewer people hold tighter social ties. Extended families are the rule, one person means something to another, company, and help, are always at hand.

I have always wondered at those western writers who say that privacy doesn’t exist in more traditional cultures. Our house sits on the edge of the forest.  If I’ve had enough of other people, I can wander into the trees, where everything reminds me that the world is a much bigger place than the tribe of Homo sapiens, full of creatures—even the bushes—living their own purposeful lives.  Much of the attraction of growing rice is akin, to be out fulfilling one’s own nature.

At least where I am, on the East Coast, Americans don’t have this retreat from the ennui of society.  The close-mown back yard is open to view on all sides, the parks are full of strangers.

Any city-dweller will recognize this as the standard-issue life that modernity has furnished all around the globe.  To kampong people, it may not be a shock to be immersed in it, but over time they may learn that there is something irreconcilably different to which they cannot adapt.  This conflict is another secret discontent in Malaysia.

“Hornbill Unleashed invites readers to email us at hueditor@gmail.com with leads or other specific information on issues or individuals involved in or related to the article above.”

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• It’s the End of the World, and We Love It
• Week of Wonders 14—The closet artist
• Morgan Spurlock in Search of Osama