Outcasts of the Islands: The Sea Gypsies of South East Asia. Sebastian Hope
into the stilted suburbs south of the town. A jongkong from Bum Bum passed close by, a mixture of ages and sexes, all freshly scrubbed and ready for the mainland. The children were in school uniforms, red and white or blue and white depending on their grade. The men and women were smartly dressed too, the women in brightly patterned dresses, many of the men wearing the traditional Malay songkok velvet hat and the name badges of clerks and officials on fresh short-sleeved shirts. The Bajau Laut have their own caches of clean clothes. Above his dark shorts Sarani had put on a gingham shirt in the red-browns and pale yellows of Ralph Lauren’s Western palette. He looked very fetching; only the tear at the shoulder and his long white stubble let him down. I put razors on my list. The women looked comely in clean blouses and tight sarongs. Sumping Lasa wore a lacy dress and her hair in bunches. She was taking her flip-flops for a test drive, running to and fro through the cabin. There was very little clearance between her head and the roof beams; I did not want to be near when she grew that last millimetre. Arjan had been persuaded to wear his one shirt, grubby beyond measure, pseudo-Tom and Jerry characters in pink and yellow chasing across his back, the front held together, sometimes, with a safety-pin.
We passed the fish quay where the trawlers were unloading, the ramshackle drinks stalls and ice houses at the end of the mole, and on into the mêlée of craft milling around the margins of the water market, jongkong nipping in and out, disgorging their passengers, taking on cargo, pump-boats puttering around in between. We came in slowly, shouldering our way to a place at the mooring, and trading for our catch had started before the engine had been cut. A pump-boat from Bum Bum with a family aboard came up astern, and the matron in its bows started to bargain for fresh clams. We docked and before we had tied up, there was a man on the bow deck, picking over the shark-fin. Another shouted down, did we have any kahanga, and who’s the whitey? He climbed aboard to examine both. The women seemed to be in charge of selling the produce, so Sarani and I went to a café. We stepped up onto the walkway and were swallowed by the crowd.
The water village, the kampung air, is a particularly Malay phenomenon. Most coastal towns have one, in fact most coastal towns began life as a kampung air, a hamlet on stilts over tidal flats. It is a practical way for a coastal people to live. Your doorstep is the jetty to which you can tie up and from which you can launch whatever the state of the tide. Your house catches even the lightest sea breeze and living beyond the beach you are untroubled by the mosquitoes of the coast and the diseases they carry. You are ideally positioned should danger threaten from the land to escape to the sea, and vice versa. On land, the mosque nestles at the edge of the coconut groves; behind the palm belt are the well and the gardens. Sanitation and waste disposal are left to the care of the sea and its creatures. The system works just as well on rivers and in estuaries. Such is the Malay idyll, a life of simplicity, sufficiency and virtue, and such is its continuing power in the Malay imagination that ‘to go back to the kampung’ is a rustication much wished for by urban types. To be ‘just a kampung boy’ is certainly no barrier to high political office. Dr. Mahathir, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, was a kampung boy.
Leaving sewerage to nature is all well and good whilst the concentration of effluent-producers remains low. Garbage disposal is equally simple if the packaging is biodegradable – rattan and woven palm-frond baskets, banana leaves and coconut fibre string, containing foods clad in skins, scales, peels, rinds, husks, shells. Introduce plastic into the equation and trouble is not far away. As we shuffled with the crowd past dry-goods stalls, selling slabs of cassava sealed in plastic, sugar, rice and tea at pre-measured weights in plastic bags, the sweets and snacks, the pills and cigarettes, all wrapped in plastic, all waiting to be carried off in a black-blue-white-pink stripy plastic carrier bag, it depressed me to think that much of it would end up in the sea.
The café’s television was already on, loud. It was at the far end of the room, but where Sarani and I sat, at the back, near the door, was not a quiet spot. The sound was quadraphonic, the set vast; they were showing a beat-’em-up movie on laser disc player. To think that a lad from, say, Pulau Tiga, an island with two papaya trees and a volleyball net, could come to Semporna and watch phoney American kung-fu films on laser disc, in a kedai on stilts that felt as unsteady as a tree-house and shook every time a boy-porter trundled his blue wheelbarrow along the sun-lit walkway the other side of the wall from our table, toting jerrycans of fuel, sacks of salt, that I was sitting here watching extravagant fight scenes, more blows to the head than a skull could take, and the pugilists getting up to crack more ribs, to extract more gut-wrenched groans, in quadraphony, that I was watching with an old man who had two teeth and lived on the sea – I was in a state of culture shock for a moment.
A man in a songkok put his head round the door and greeted Sarani in Sama, ‘Magsukur, Panglima,’ shook his hand, touched his own to his heart. ‘Good morning,’ he said to me in English. He sat down at our table, and studied me carefully, my hair dirty and swept back by the wind like Sarani’s, four days of stubble and sun on my face. I did the polite thing and offered my food to the new arrival; he did the polite thing and refused. ‘Who is this, Panglima?’ The conversation went ahead in Sama, but words like ‘Italy’ popped out.
‘But what does the American eat?’ This I could understand, my first complete Sama sentence, ‘Melikan amanggan na ai?’
‘Pangi’ kayu,’ said Sarani.
‘Pangi’ kayu? Cassava?’ he said, glancing at the plate of fried rice in front of me.
‘Aho’,’ I said, ‘yes,’ a Sama word I could pronounce with confidence. It was a cheap trick, but it took him aback. Sarani was delighted.
‘You speak Sama?’
‘Belum, not yet,’ I had to admit, in Malay.
‘But he speaks good Malay,’ Sarani added, and I got the feeling he was a little proud of me. The man studied me a while longer. I slurped my iced coffee.
‘So what does he drink?’ – this in Sama again.
‘Bohé, water.’
‘And where does he sleep?’
‘On the boat.’
The man was silent as he looked at me, until his manners recalled him, and he nodded and smiled. I sat back in my chair – a chair! – the heat of the chilli still on my tongue, the cold milky coffee, the sweetness of a clove cigarette on my lips – and listened to no more of their conversation.
Sarani cracked a red-lipped grin at me after he had left. ‘You see, he was very surprised,’ and he laughed out loud. ‘Pangi’ kayu! He said he had never seen an orang putih like you before! Pangi’ kayu! Did you see how surprised he was when you said aho’?’ His old eyes creased up, his twin teeth like comic store vampire fangs, and it was the same wherever we went together, the surprise, the questions were the same. ‘Pangi’ kayu?!’ That seemed to surprise the interrogators above all and indeed I had come across this low opinion of cassava before. I cannot say that the prejudice against it is unjustified. Given the choice between a ball of steamed cassava flour and the plate of fried rice I had just put away, I know which I would prefer. Yet it is not just that cassava and that school canteen favourite, sago, are not as savoury as rice. They are both poor man’s food, and above all it is the fact that they are the staples of ‘primitive’ people, orang asli, the wild people of the woods who eat pig and monkey, haram foods. By association sago and cassava are considered uncivilised, un-Malay and un-Islamic.
Rice on the other hand, that gives twenty-fold, is revered. Throughout South East Asia, there are propitiatory rites to be observed at its planting, from the spilling of blood to the casting of spells. Its harvest is celebrated. Rice is the cornerstone of all South East Asian civilisation. Where there is wet-rice cultivation there are royal courts, god-kings, temple cities, art, and people. Java has three crops of rice a year from its rich volcanic soil. Its population density is 800 people per square kilometre. In Borneo, where there is one crop and cultivable land is confined to the coast, it is around twenty-five. That a white man from a culture they regarded as the acme of civilisation, a man of means, should eschew rice in favour of cassava was eccentric in the