Tag: iban history and culture

What the Dead Leave Behind

I finished Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory thinking about the characters and people in my life. Johnny Lim, Snow Soong, Peter Wormwood and Mamoru Kunichika had occupied far too much space in my head by the time I finished the novel. I was thinking about my family too. My parents, my grandparents and, eventually, my ancestors.

One idea keeps getting emphasised throughout the book: death erases all traces, all memories of lives that once existed, completely and forever. Different characters in the book express it in different ways. Jasper heard it from his father, Johnny. Johnny most probably heard it from his wife, Snow. Snow writes about it in her diary, and Peter repeats it in his own narrative.

I honestly think it is not that simple. I don’t think death erases everything. It leaves fragments: what we can see, hear or touch. Photographs, diaries, houses, objects, newspaper reports, rumours and memories. All these things survive long after someone is gone. The problem is that each object is just a fragment. It is not the same thing as a person.

The novel gives us three narrators trying to understand Johnny Lim through their unique perspectives. Jasper sees his father through his research, family history and resentment. Snow sees her husband from inside a disconnected marriage that neither of them seems capable of fully inhabiting. Peter remembers Johnny from the distance of old age, guilt, friendship and secrets. Each of them is convinced they know something important about him, but none of them knows him completely.

In an interview included at the back of my copy, Tash Aw explains that Jasper, Snow and Peter project their own insecurities and aspirations onto Johnny. In the end, no one truly knows who Johnny was. He simply becomes a construction made from other people’s memories of him.

That idea made me think about the people in my own life. How much do I really know my parents? I know them as my parents, but who were they before I existed? Who were they before they met each other? What were their fears, disappointments and ambitions when they were growing up? What about my grandparents and my ancestors? I will never know any of these things, but eventually I learned about my ancestors through family stories, oral history, genealogy and scattered historical accounts. 

Recently, I followed a long discussion on Facebook concerning two of my ancestors, Panglima Nakhoda Budin “Gerasi” and the anti-colonial fighter, Aji Apai Limpa. The accusation was about the practice of taking heads during the era of ngayau (head hunting). The discussion became increasingly tangled, moving through questions of warfare, adat (customary law), historical context and how acts committed in another century should be understood today.

Much of the discussion itself did not interest me. After a while, it seemed to become disagreement for the sake of disagreement. But it led me to this question: how much can any of us really know about people who died generations before we were born?

We certainly can learn about them through oral traditions, family accounts and colonial records. We can also learn about the social structure and adat that shaped their world. We can distinguish between warfare and murder, between the norms of an earlier society and modern legal categories.

We must keep in mind that historical context and evidence are important before pronouncing any moral judgement. We don’t have the complete picture of the past, but that does not mean every interpretation is equally convincing. 

At the same time, The Harmony Silk Factory reminded me how easily we construct people from fragments. As a direct descendant of Budin and Aji, I naturally want my ancestors to be honourable. But I also recognise that family pride can shape the way descendants interpret the past, just as assumptions, inherited stories and modern perspectives can shape other interpretations. A colonial official may interpret Iban warfare through assumptions formed somewhere in Great Britain. A modern reader may judge the actions of my ancestors entirely through twenty-first-century perspectives. Even the details of family stories can change depending on who tells them.

And I am not exempt from this. I have my own emotional investment in these people. They belong to my family history and I want to understand them fairly. Naturally, I feel offended when they are reduced to crude stories about violence or headhunting.

However, I don’t deny that family pride can also become a lens. Perhaps the best I can do is remain curious, keep asking questions, keep reading, keep learning from those who are qualified, understand the historical world in which these people lived and accept uncertainty where certainty no longer exists. And resist the temptation to put labels on complicated human beings. 

I think that may be what affected me most about The Harmony Silk Factory. No character remains fixed once another person begins telling their story. In another person’s eyes, Johnny is a gangster, husband, father, businessman, survivor, traitor, protector and coward. Snow is a wife, daughter, lover, diarist, observer and intellectual. Peter has his own secrets. Mamoru writes a memoir that totally ignores his involvement with the Kempeitai and turns his experience in Malaya into something pleasant. Everyone constructs a version of the past they can live with.

And maybe we all do this too. We remember our parents according to how they treated us. We remember our ancestors through genealogies and stories that survived because someone considered them worth telling. But what about everything that disappeared? Who did they love? What frightened them? What did they regret? What things did they enjoy doing?

History often preserves the dramatic things like wars, migrations, marriages and conflicts. But a human life is mostly made from ordinary things. We inherit what survives and build a person from it because traces do remain. It’s melancholy and oddly beautiful too.

One day, the same thing will happen to us. Our children, descendants, friends may inherit photographs, social media posts, messages, objects we once touched and stories told by people who knew us. They will construct us from those fragments. They may get some things right or wrong. But we will no longer be around to correct them. That’s what The Harmony Silk Factory ultimately left me thinking about. We spend our lives trying to understand the dead from what they left behind while slowly becoming the fragments from which somebody else will one day try to understand us.

I write about Iban culture, ancestral rituals, creative life, emotional truths, and the quiet transformations of love, motherhood, and identity. If this speaks to you, subscribe and journey with me.

The Forgotten Script of My Ancestors | Remembering the Papan Turai

The majority of us are familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, not many people are aware that the Iban used to have their own type of pictorial writing. My ancestors’ written language, known as “turai,” is carved onto wooden boards called “papan turai.” During major festivals like Gawai Batu and Gawai Antu, lemambang (ritual bards) used these boards to recall and recite the pengap (folk epics), timang (invocations), and many other types of Iban poetry (leka main asal).

The papan turai is more than just a ceremonial piece. It serves as a link between oral and written tradition. Some of these carved symbols date back about four centuries. They preserve fragments of genealogy (tusut), the Iban’s migration history from the Kapuas region of Kalimantan to Sarawak, and even tales of tribal conflicts and legendary Iban leaders.

Researchers from the Sarawak Museum and UNIMAS have been examining these boards to find out what they symbolize. What is remarkable is that lemambang from various areas can comprehend each other’s papan turai. This demonstrates that there was once a common symbolic language among people in different communities.

This discovery goes against the previous belief that the Iban were completely “pre-literate” before Western influence arrived. The papan turai shows that our forefathers had their own way of keeping records of what they knew, which was based on ritual, cosmology, and collective memory. It reminds us that being able to read and write doesn’t just imply knowing the alphabet and how to write on paper.

In 1947, an Iban scholar named Dunging anak Gunggu expanded upon this tradition. He developed a whole writing system based on turai. However, few people know about this writing system, even among Sarawakians.

When I stood in front of the papan turai at the Borneo Cultures Museum, I felt a sense of recognition. They reminded me of the pua kumbu patterns that Iban women wove to tell stories about spirits, dreams, and journeys. Both have the same goal: to record, remember, and preserve meaning alive beyond the present.

It made me realize that each culture had its unique way of retaining memories. Some people carve it into stone, some into wood, others into sound, and yet others into cloth. For the Iban, it may have been all of these things at once. The lemambang sang what the papan turai contained, and the pua weavers wove tales and ancestral history into the thread. These were our books before books.

As I stood there, I thought about how easily such histories fade away. It’s not because they aren’t relevant, but because they aren’t documented in the systems that the world relies on. The papan turai lived on through continuity of ritual and faith. Its knowledge lived on through the lemambang, in various ceremonies and festivals, and in the community gathered around the ruai during Gawai. When modern eyes look at the papan turai, they may see only strange markings. But these are not just symbols. They hold our heritage. They are reminders that our people were already keeping records of their lives in their own way long before British colonials came with pen and paper. However, I am not sure how long we can keep them alive, as the lemambang is becoming a dying breed of heritage guardians of the Iban. 

I felt pride and loss as I left the museum that day. Pride, since the papan turai shows that Iban civilization was more complicated and deep than most people realize. Loss, because so few of us can interpret those symbols today.

Maybe this is why I write and draw. I want to continue that old rhythm in a new form. My writings and drawings are like my own papan turai, illustrating the lines that connect the past and the present. I strive to document things that could otherwise disappear, including stories from my indigenous perspective, feelings, and fragments of my identity.

To me, the papan turai is more than an artifact. It is a mirror that reflects an ancient hunger to make meaning clear and to preserve memories alive before they disappear. And maybe that instinct to leave a mark and to tell a story is something that never truly goes away. It exists in our language, our art, and our digital words. It’s the same urge that led a lemambang to carve symbols into wood hundreds of years ago, hoping that someone would remember it someday.

Sources: Religious Rites and Customs of the Iban or Dyaks of Sarawak by Leo Nyuak and Edm. Dunn (1906), UNIMAS Gazette. 

I write about Iban culture, ancestral rituals, creative life, emotional truths, and the quiet transformations of love, motherhood, and identity. If this speaks to you, subscribe and journey with me.