Kuala Pilah – Seremban route

I OVERHEARD A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO MEN ON A BUS YESTERDAY...

The two men were actually sitting on the rear steps of the bus, and I was seated about a meter away from them so I could hear them well. It was late in the evening but the bus was full with people wanting to go back to the city. Most people decided to remain quiet, perhaps still thinking of the weekend’s fun at home, but these two men decided to make friends:

Duduk sini saja uncle
Sini boleh ka? Oklah
Uncle kerja mana?
Saya kerja kontrak KL, you?
Saya kerja Nilai
Apa buat Kuala Pilah?
Saya ada kawan sini. Uncle kerja apa?
Saya kerja kontrak bina rumah. Renovation.
Saya pun bina rumah
You buat apa? Sapu cat ka?
Macam-macam, uncle sudah lama kerja?
Sudah lama, syarikat kecik saja dalam 8 orang, lu kerja company besar ka?
Besar juga ada dalam 20 orang
Ooo itu besar punya
Lu orang mana? Indonesia ka?
Saya orang Sarawak, Kuching
Sana banyak balak, bukan?
Ya, getah pun ada juga
So, you tau banyak pasal kayu, itu jati, setang
….
Setang, orang panggil setang
….
Akasia
Akasia, itu boleh buat kertas
Baik buat kertas, kayu banyak lembut, jati orang tanam banyak jugak, kawan saya tanam 80 hektar Kuala Pilah, senang hidup
Tapi kena baja kalau sudah banyak ekar, uncle
Ya, tanah pun kena baik
Ya, mesti sejuk

This conversation continued for a while until we neared Bukit Putus and the “Kuching” man decided to stand up, perhaps he was getting dizzy from the meandering bus ride.

What's in a name? [I am not an arab]

The flora of Malaya has fascinated many people, including some of the world's greatest naturalists. The colonial botanists/ foresters' attitudes toward vernacular names of our forest-related resources were originally positive, and words such as belukar, lopak, utan and countless native plant names were used alongside the scientific (or international to borrow E.J.H Corner's term) names. It is difficult to find the exact date when the hindi-derived 'jungle' became disused, and the french-derived term 'forest' became more 'correct' but one person, Corner, did retain the use of 'jungle' in his third edition of the Wayside trees of Malaya, published in 1988.

Back then 'ethno-botany' was not even a recognised (or created) research field, but the early colonial botanists/foresters were doing it! Someone recently suggested that an ethno-botanist is a non-native person studying a locality's flora--so by his definition I am not an ethno-botanist when I study the plants in my kampung even though I'm employing the techniques of 'ethnobotany' or 'western scientific botany'.

Sometime during the previous century it became unfashionable to use vernacular names of plants when studying or classifying them! This happened (and still does) in the scientific fields of plant ecology and botany. The rationale for this seemingly 'reverse-xenophobic' decision is that local people classify plants differently from ecologists/botanists--the former may focus more on the uses of plants, therefore those plants that have uses are given specific names, sometimes more than one name per plant. For instance, the enau palm; its sap, which can be made into sugar or toddy, is known as nigho anau, whereas its fruits are called buah belulok in the villages of Negeri Sembilan. The plants that do not have local uses are, otherwise, lumped into a 'category' of lifeforms, such as aka or ghumput.

The ecologists/botanists, on the other hand, divide plants based on their physical appearance--the shape of fruits, flowers, the many parts of fruits and flowers, the shapes of leaves...and so each plant is named accordingly, although some stupid/sychophantic/self-important individuals have chosen to name plants after some humans. These names are given in latin, the language of the learned europe once upon a time but is now effectively restricted to the Vatican and the field of organismal systematics!

Actually the villagers of Negeri Sembilan (and in other places) do use 'appearance' as a basis of naming. For example, pokok buah kotolir kambing, is a name given to a tree that has fruits resembling the penis of a goat! In a sense, these local people are more in tune with their plants than the foreign botanists/ecologists ........

And guess what the folks in Negeri Sembilan call the cute-looking passiflora.....

The contributions made by the Japanese during WWII

In 2003 I interviewed many elderly people in Negeri Sembilan to find out what happened during World War 2, i.e. the Japanese Occupation Period of Malaysia. They told me that,

.....in the villages, the Japanese army undertook some measures to continue rice production by installing irrigation and drainage for the sawah to ensure continuous supply of their staple food, rice. They introduced a variety of rice, which the villagers aptly called padi Jopun (Japanese rice), for the villagers to plant.

The Japanese rice variety had shorter stalks than the local varieties, therefore the villagers had to adopt the long-handle sickle (sabit). Before the Japanese, the villagers used the traditional hand-sickle (tuai) to harvest the local rice varieties....

my grandfather was an anglophile

Well he had to be.

I never got to know him because he died many years before I was born. In fact he died when my father, his son, was only three years old.

Unlike my father who attended a sekolah melayu, my grandfather went to a sekolah inggeris back when malaysia meant Malesia. Then he became a rubber superitendent in Muar, working for the English planters there.

He had to be an anglophile to be a rubber man in those days.

NON-INDIGENOUS PLANTS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

An excerpt from a paper I wrote recently:

"In a recent study on the uses of non-native plants by Malay villagers in Negeri Sembilan, the author found that these villagers, who were living close to secondary forests, had been for several generations using non-native plant species for ‘traditional’ medicine and foodstuffs. While some of these plants were planted around the homegardens for household use, many non-native plants were common in the secondary forests and had long acquired local names. On the one hand, this incorporation of non-native species in the local traditional knowledge is anthropologically interesting because it demonstrates the resilience of indigenous peoples. On the other hand, it raises concern that the challenge to stop the spread of non-native species may be very difficult."



And, a poster that I submitted for a competition at the university last year (it won a bronze medal):

Heritage Matters!

Heritage Matters!

In Malaysia, heritage is now in serious contention.

A case in point is the demolition of a leprosia recently to make way for a medical school . The supporters of the demolition work claimed that the destroyed buildings had no heritage or historical value (as reported in a local daily). They also thought out loud that building a medical school was more important than preserving a leprosia.

The built environment is one thing, the natural environment is quite another. There have been for many decades campaigns against deforestation in this country. But if you look up at the hills above you, you'd see signs of deforestation.

So in the spirit of Malaysia boleh, Heritage Matters!

So much more so now than ever!