For the sake of gossip, I learnt Bidayuh

 

 I learnt my mother’s mother tongue for the sake of learning gossip. Every other weekend of my childhood was spent making phone calls to her relatives and friends, inviting them over for lunch.

The common denominator between the two groups would be their Sarawakian, if not Bidayuh, heritage.

Separated from their families who were now an ocean away, they had sought to forge a new community of their own in the sprawling and forever-growing metropolis that is Kuala Lumpur, their new home.

These invitations to touch base over warm bowls of sago (normally served with sardines and tempoyak) were always a welcome opportunity for my aunties to unwind briefly as their children and I wreaked havoc in my downtown Ampang neighbourhood.

The topics of conversation ran the gamut from small-town tragedies to discovering some distant relative had won the lottery (or, KTM - an acronym for the three main 4-Digit lottery providers in this country: ‘Kuda, Toto, Magnum’ - as they called it).

Growing up almost entirely on the melodrama of Southeast Asian soaps and Sunday lunchtime gossip rags like ‘Melodi’ on the local TV channel TV3, these sago sessions were always a delight to bear witness to and, in retrospect, were formative experiences, serving as an access point to my Bidayuh heritage.

Perhaps, in years to come, my “access point” to my heritage may no longer be a viable one for various reasons - ageing, migration, the younger generation’s preference for English.

That lack of continuity scares me. If I don’t attempt to document these personal histories now, it may no longer be there for me to trace back and reflect on in the future.

Connecting with other Bidayuh folk may also not be as clear-cut. It is a rarity to come across someone who speaks the same dialect as you do outside of Sarawak. On these occasions, we resort to Malay or English instead.

My mother comes from a village in Padawan, Kuching - where the dialect spoken is Bidayuh Pinyawa - though she spent the majority of her childhood speaking English in boarding school and later, Kuching, Miri, and Kuala Lumpur where she would eventually settle in on her own.

Coming from a working-class background, she never had the foresight to imagine herself starting a family; financial stability often came first in her list of priorities. Needless to say, when I, her first-born child, arrived, it took her by surprise.

Truth be told, Bidayuh was not a language that she intended to pass onto me or ever expected me to pick up with that great of an interest, confiding in me years later that she felt pressured to raise me in a household that spoke the national language.

“Even though your father was Malay, he spoke to you in English. Speaking to you in Malay instead of English or Bidayuh felt right at the time,” she explained to me in recent years.

“To the government, I gave birth to a Malay child, not a Bidayuh one.”

This dilemma for her was thrown back into deeper waters years later. When I was four, my parents decided to enrol me in an English-medium kindergarten.

What troubled my mother was that by the third day of kindergarten, I had decided to stop speaking Malay altogether and told her so with great determination just before we parted ways at the school gates.

Family history

Language plays a vital role in linking us to our family’s histories and origins.

In losing a language, we untether ourselves from this past and the knowledge that comes with it - feelings and personas we are only able to emote in certain languages.

It could mean taking on a more carefree, loose-tongued persona when speaking Urdu because you associate it with a window of your youth where you were happier, or being able to channel your anger better when you curse in the Kelantanese Malay dialect because your relationship with the people around you who speak it takes on that particular tone. 

My mother’s early departure from her kampung for her education, coupled with the unexpected death of my late grandmother in her teen years, left her overwhelmed for the majority of her life, with little room to reflect on what it meant to a Bidayuh woman in a rapidly evolving Malaysia.

Even before she arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 1986, she had fallen back into using English as her default language when communicating with friends and family. 

It was a language that she felt gave her far greater opportunities than her native language and one that inspired her to pursue a life that her own parents were not privileged enough to dream of.

She continued to use Bidayuh as well but in a mangled form that combined Malay and English - which I eventually inherited from her.

Tumbling down the stairs of her longhouse with her younger sister on rainy days and going fishing with her mother are her strongest memories of growing up as Bidayuh girl.

By the time she reached secondary school, in the mid-1970s, Christianity had made a breakthrough in her village and the paganistic ways of her village held sway no more.

The dead were no longer buried by nearby streams with strategically positioned stones demarcating where their bodies lay and parents started becoming more ambitious with the naming of their children.

If you were to visit Kampung Sira (the village where my mother comes from) now, you would find at least two generations of men, born after Christianity reached this little nook in Padawan, with names of famous footballers but more importantly, names of biblical origin. Enter the Simons, the Brians, the Jobs and the occasional misspelt-at-the-birth-registrar Poborský.

“Right before when Gawai is celebrated (on June 1), the whole kampung gathers together in the jungle and stays there overnight. I was excited back then because we didn’t have to sleep! 

“There was a weaving competition where we would try to weave a kasah (Bidayuh tikar mats which are made from rattan) as fast as we could.”

I realise my experiences of this culture as a first-generation Bidayuh woman born outside of Sarawak are likely vastly different from my relatives who grew up in Kuching. 

Over the past few years of reconnecting with my relatives to learn more about my family’s roots, it is obvious to me that our histories are being disregarded and overlooked by elders in our communities in favour of “the future”.

I don’t blame them for this as it stems from an overpowering drive to encourage the pursuit of stability, which my mother’s generation lacked in the early years of their lives.

Ultimately, we have more to gain than we do to lose in remembering the past. 

So, today, I am choosing to recall the past, calling my aunties and their kids to check if they’re free to get together for the holiday.

I hope you call your aunties too. Selamat Andu Gawai! Gayu guru gerai nyamai - Mkini

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ALENA NADIA is a member of the Malaysiakini team.