Brother Henri, Honorary Malay (1991)

Henri Fauconnier (1879-1973)

Recently a 1930 classic, set in old Malaya and written by a Frenchman, was reprinted by Oxford University Press. It is called Malaisie (English translation: The Soul of Malaya), and the author is Henri Fauconnier. I used to think it’s the best book ever written by a European about the Malays. I still think it is, but my feelings about it today are a bit more complicated than they were when I first read it almost thirty years ago.

           

Fauconnier was a rubber planter in Selangor in the early 20th century. His book, first published in 1930, is a semi-autobiographical novel. It paints an interesting, at times rather comical, picture of life on a plantation during that period; and the clubby British planters are treated with wry irony. It is a good book with some historical value, but to me its main interest lies in its insight into the Malay psyche and sensibility. The story has only a loose plot in the conventional novelistic sense, and this plot is really developed and acquires some elements of excitement only in the last third of the novel than when the main Malay character runs amok. There is a lot of extended ruminations and conversations about the meaning of life, the nature of the Malays, the uniqueness of the Malay language, and the aesthetics of the pantuns and so on. The story is really about the education of the narrator, a young untested planter named Lescalles, who acquires a deeper knowledge of life and of the Malays through his friendship with a mysterious recluse, Rolain, whose plantation he manages.

           

A reader familiar with Edward Said’s brilliant assault on Orientalism, and who is wised up to the romantic “imperial” perversions in Western imaginative writings about the East will no doubt find certain things quite repugnant in The Soul of Malaya. This is how the narrator describes his mistress, Palatiai, wife of his Tamil gardener: “She let herself be stroked like a docile filly, and looked up at me with great deep empty eyes… A woman is no more than a delicacy, sweet or sour… The choice of sweetmeat that Malaya offered me, on behalf of India, resembled one of those chocolates wrapped in variegated paper and filled with sugary liqueur.” One can argue, of course, that this is the perception of a character whose head is stuffed with Orientalist clichés about the East, and is not necessarily endorsed by the author. Rolain, who often seems to speak on behalf of Fauconnier, appears to be cynical at his protégé’s expense. He says to the latter, “You? For them (Palatiai and her apparent pimp of a husband) you do not count. You are beyond caste.” But Rolain goes on, “Palatiai brings you merely a propitiatory offering, and Karuppan (the husband) troubles himself no more than men of ancient days who gladly gave their wives to a god with a taste for mortal women.”

           

Fauconnier as a plantation boss

Despite the touch of irony there, the analogy of the “god with a taste for mortal women” is revealing of what Said would call latent Orientalism in this book. And the Palatiai episode is by no means an isolated case in this. Yet, I would hesitate to dismiss the book as hopelessly contaminated by “Orientalism.” Fauconnier is clearly a child in European romanticism, and that inevitably colours his perception of his Malayan characters and their values. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he distorts everything he sees – in the form of romantic idealization or unconscious condescension. It should also be remembered that his apparent spokesman, Rolain, is a character with very fluid views about life and man. Lescalles finds Rolain hard to pin down; his remarks are often allusive, and sometimes paradoxical, even contradictory. One gets the impression that despite the French-style philosophical sophistication of his talk, there is an unconscious attempt to absorb into it something of what he perceives as the peculiar allusiveness of the Malay mode of communication. While he can be memorably articulate about the Malays, he stresses that he “know(s) very few of the secrets of the Orientals.” And, more importantly, he keeps reminding Lescalles that every idea or perception is provisional. He tells his protégé that “men have settled ideas only on subjects they have never thought about.”

           

I must admit I find some of the things Rolain and his protégé say about the Malay quite acute and suggestive. The passages on the Malay language, the pantun, and the character of the “true Malay” reveal a mind that is deeply sympathetic. Is there beneath all this attempt to articulate the perceived reality of the Malays, an urge to “appropriate” its otherness? If there is, the act of appropriation is, I think, inseparable from the act of creative imagination itself, specifically of the romantic imagination.  And if it is “imperial,” it is so in the sense that the act of imagination itself is or can be “imperial”; the political ideology of Western imperialism is probably incidental or coincidental to it (unlike the case of imperial writers like Kipling). I would imagine when we Orientals write about the Occidentals, our imagination can be “imperial” too.

           

In The Soul of Malaya, you’ll meet some of the common stereotypes about the Malays – our infamous indolence, our acute sensitivity to insult to our honour, our unpredictable violence, and so on. But in this book these stereotypes don’t come across as stereotypes to me. There is something about the quality of the writing, and the sensibility behind it, that accounts for this. The main Malay character in the book is Smail, Rolain’s servant and de facto tutor in Malay literature and manners. The portrait of this gentle, sensitive youth who out of hurt pride runs amok towards the end of the novel is delicately etched. Smail is a natural poet and a living demonstration of Rolain’s most memorable remark about the Malays: “They say these people are soft… yes, soft – as dynamite.” The build-up to the amok of Smail is powerfully done. And what is particularly worth noting is Fauconnier’s rare insight into the psychology of the amok itself. He describes it as a “lucid (my italics) frenzy that can utilize all the resources of guile.” In essence, it is a “self-liberation through revolt; a soul too… humiliated by its conscious enslavement, at last turns in upon itself and accumulates so much energy that only the faintest pretext is needed to release it.”

           

Fauconnier in the early 1970s

That, to my mind, is the best thing ever said about the much misunderstood phenomenon of the amok. It took a Frenchman with a rare empathy with “the soul of Malaya” to say it “ … en souvenir de mon pere bien aime, qui etait Presque devenu un Malais…” (in memory of my father who all but became a Malay …). Helene Fontaine Fauconnier, the author’s daughter, wrote that on the flyleaf of the French edition of Malaise that she gave me when I met her in Paris two years ago. Well, Saudara (Brother) Fauconnier, “latent Orientalist” or not, I welcome your spirit into the fraternity of the Malay race.

17 July 1991

Salacious Pleasures of 'Pantuns' (1991)

LISTEN to this pantun:

Tanam padi di Bukit Jeram

Tanam keduduk atas batu

Macam mana hati tak geram

Menengok tetek menolak baju

And my translation:

Plant the padi with a thrust

Stroke the seedlings with dew

It drives you crazy with lust

To see the tits tilting the baju (blouse)

(Note: The first couplet is a very free rendering of the original.)

The puritan will no doubt dismiss this pantun as “obscene” and therefore unworthy of being part of the treasured heritage of the race. Unfortunately for our friend, the “offensive” pantun is included in Kumpulan Pantun Melayu (A Collection of Malay Pantuns), published by that august body, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. I think this pantun is marvellous. Its very simplicity and directness, directness to the point of possible “vulgarity,” heightens its erotic appeal; paradoxically, there is a kind of subtlety in its stark salaciousness. What’s more, its eroticism is, in my perhaps eccentric reading, not of the limiting kind. Properly read, with the mind alert to the semantic and cultural resonance of the key words, you’ll see more than the surface evocation. In the tetek menolak baju (literally tits pushing at the blouse), much more than a lovely pair of tetek (breast) is revealed. I’d even say a whole world is seen to revolve at the tip of each tetek, on the point of each puting (nipple), or better still, mata susu (the eye of the breast). And a whole world view is suggested by geram (feel excited for, passionate for). The foreshadowing word Jeram (here the name of a hill, but literally “cataracts” or “rapids”) heightens the sense of life as rapids, and thus reminds us that one simply must seize the moment as it flies. Geram! Carpe diem! To see the tetek menolak baju in this pantun is almost like seeing a Blakean “World in a grain of sand,/And a Heaven in a wild flower,/Hold(ing) Infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And Eternity in an hour …” Absurd “Sallehcious” hyperbole? Perhaps.

Malay Girl by Irma Stern

The central word of the pantun, hati (literally liver, but the English equivalent here would be heart), is also the key word in Malay folk physiology. The liver to the Malays is traditionally the seat of the passions. (This was also the case in ancient English belief; you can find it surviving in Shakespeare’s plays and poems.) The hati, the organ that conceals the secret of the Malay as a creature of feeling and passions, is vital to any attempt to understand the race. If you want to know what the hati is to Malay, soak yourself in the pantuns. Only the hati can feel geram the way a Malay feels it, only the hati can generate it. None of the English equivalents for geram can match the fierce ambivalence of the Malay word. Geram is ambivalent because there can be an element of ferocity, even violence in the desire. The rhyming of Jeram and geram in the above pantun not only heightens the sense of carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”), but also strengthens the ambivalent ferocity of the desire. Menolak (pushing, rejecting), is also seductively ambiguous. You can see the tetek (what’s breast, busts, tits, even bosoms compared to the alliterative disyllabic tetek?) – you see the tetek, and the nipples pushing the kebaya (the baju simply has to be a kebaya), making the tight tighter, the stretched more stretched; and at the same time you have a flashing vision of the kebaya being violently stripped, pushed away, off the body – in other words, rejected. And the first couplet, the part of the pantun known as pembayang (foreshadowing), which in the best pantuns gives you through sound and imagery the foretaste of the meaning stated in the second couplet – well, this particular pembayang, this foreshadowing couplet truly, poetically and concretely enacts the foreplay of the anticipated coupling. What more can you want? The act itself? Well…

Talk of foreshadowing couplet enacting foreplay of the coupling in the concluding couplet, listen to this:

Di mana kuang bertelur

Di atas lata di celah batu

Di mana abang nak tidur

Di celah dada di alur susu

Where does the dove lay its eggs

In the rapids between the rocks

Where may I lay my head, my love

On the chest between the breasts.

(Translation)

(Note: kuang is actually pheasant; I’m sorry to have sacrifice it for reason of poetic necessity.)

There is one well-known saying: ikut hati mati; ikut rasa binasa (to give rein to one’s passion means death; to give rein to one’s feelings means destruction). Here too my manic mind can detect a hidden ambivalence. This saying is usually taken as a stern warning against listening to the dictates of the heart, of the liver. In a sense, and on the surface, yes; but if you listen to the hidden hati of the saying, to the surging of the ancient blood in the subterranean veins of its meaning, you’ll hear ancestral voices prophesying spiritual and metaphorical bodily death to the race if it keeps on denying its instincts for life, freedom and joy. Hang Jebat knew that; he heard the ancestral voices in his hati and did what he felt he had to do. His hati simply refused to mati (die), even at the expense of the body. Tepuk dada tanya selera (tap your chest and ask what your appetite is like.) That’s what Jebat would say, taking the saying in his characteristic individual way.

In my reading, which I imagine Jebat would endorse, the saying doesn’t necessarily mean “look before you leap,” as it is normally taken to mean. This common interpretation is, I believe, another instance of life-avoiding caution insidiously supplanting the original dare in the psyche of the race over the centuries of historical development. The insidiousness of this silent contagion of the spirit was such that the modern Malay can only hear the tone of caution in the saying. The other tone, its opposite, which is “hedonistic” (for this saying is actually ambiguous), is to me much stronger. I can imagine Jebat saying it with a ringing voice, his clenched fist beating against his burning breast. Note that dada, literally breast, can also be a synonym for hati, and selera, literally appetite, can also mean zest for life (selera in the hikayat is sometimes a poetical name for the body).

But then even the most defiant line can be emasculated. The emasculated is someone whose hati has become atrophied. The puritan is an example of a person whose hati has become atrophied; for in order to become a true liver, meaning open to the marvellous possibilities of life, your hati (liver, remember) has to be alive. Always looking before you leap can be dangerous for the spirit. Jebat knew that. And never listening to your hati when it’s sakit (sick), always ignoring the complaints of the liver, can be fatal for the liver. Jebat knew that too. Sakit hati (literally “sickness of the liver”) is always associated with the amok and the lover blighted in love. Remember that. And remember too that the amok is not always a mad zombie who runs amok without rhyme or reason. Don’t ignore your hati when it’s sakit. Don’t repress or betray the cries of your instincts, your body, your spirit. If you do that, you might run amok or, if there’s nothing left in the liver to fuel an amok, you’ll just die in life and become a liver without a living liver.

Only the living liver can feel the kind of passion expressed in this marvellous and powerful pantun:

Kerengga di dalam buluh

Serahi berisi air mawar

Datang hasrat di dalam tubuh

Tuan seorang jadi penawar.

Red ants crawling in bamboo shaft

Vessel brimming with rose water

When my body’s possessed by lust

Only you can be the appeaser.

                                                (Translation)

A race that can produce a pantun so passionately compact as this, coupling the crimson ferocity of sheer lust, embodied by the image of the red ants in the bamboo shaft, with the lovely tenderness of diaphanous desire, suggested by the fluid vowels, the assonance, as well as the imagery of serahi berisi air mawar (serahi, vessel, and berisi, filled) so sensuously, seductively flowing into the unspoken berahi, lust, desire – this race cannot be a stranger to sexual hedonism, however you define that word.

If it is true that hedonism was part of the essential nature of the race, what has happened to it? If in fact it is no longer a determining force in his being, it is still lurking in the subconscious, kept suppressed here by some bigger alien force? By way of suggesting possible answers, I’ll give you a parting pantun:

Ke Teluk sudah, ke Siam sudah

Ke Mekah saja aku yang belum

Berpeluk sudah, bercium sudah

Bernikah saja aku yang belum.

I’ve been to Thailand, to the Gulf too

Only to Mecca I haven’t been

Kissed them I have, and known them too

Without going through the wedding scene.

                                                (Translation)

 29 May 1991