My mother's milk ... part 3

by Fernando Rosa

I had watched a performance of Portuguese dance and music in Melaka. Almost all of the songs and the dances were from Portugal. Minha Rosinha was one of them, Casa Portuguesa Com Certeza was another (the titles mean respectively 'My Little Rose' and 'Surely a Portuguese Home'). They are both well-known songs. I am familiar with them from watching Portuguese folk dances on television as a child. I remember I usually changed channels after a minute or two, for I found the singing and dancing terribly tacky, and very un-Brazilian.

The most famous Portuguese singer in Brazil back then was Roberto Leal ('Loyal Robert' - it turns out it is a stage name). He usually donned a folk costume while he sang and danced. The costumes were also thoroughly Portuguese. (Interestingly, although he was Portuguese-born, he moved to Brazil as a child and had lived there. He was our own indigenised Portuguese folk dancer and singer. He was also the most famous Portuguese in Brazil. Nobody seems to care that he was also very much Brazilian).

This is what many anthropologists and historians call a clear case of invention of tradition: namely, none of it was around before the 1950s. The youngsters doing the dancing in Melaka seemed to do it correctly. One of the girls was very striking: she was tall, had bright green eyes and a beautiful smile. (I learned she died in a road accident, last year.) I was invited with several guests to take part in one of the dances. The green-eyed beauty came to me but I was reluctant to show off my astonishing lack of skill in Portuguese folk dancing. All the same, an Italian colleague urged me to get up and dance. I was a Brazilian after all, and fancy a Brazilian not being able to dance. Almost as weird as an Italian not gesticulating!

Several of the students - they were Malaysian Portuguese language students - also danced. The group was in fact performing not to the community but to a large group of students and staff from the University of Malaya. The venue was Papa Joe's restaurant that advertised Portuguese and Nyonya cuisine, as well as Chinese seafood (Papa Joe himself was one of the singers). I find the combination of Portuguese, Nyonya and Chinese seafood revealing: I have found local cuisine to be often related no matter what ethnic origins or labels that were attached to it. Rather than being in opposition, the three were part of the same culinary continuum.

During one intermission, I noticed the young men and women who were dancing, speaking to one another in Malay. Noel (my Portuguese-teacher friend) regrets deeply that it is not the government nor local non-Portuguese society who is undermining the community heritage; it is the community itself. Traditional feasts are not 'properly' carried out any more; traditions are discontinued, and the language is slowly but surely falling into disuse.

I muse that perhaps everything is changing, and very fast. Noel is very religious, like all the community elders I have spoken to so far. He easily goes off into a long tirade about morals and religion. I wonder how appealing that is for the younger generation. Also, the Portuguese community has always been an open group: the descendants of the Dutch in Melaka, for instance, also speak Portuguese and are often counted as members of the community. (I don't believe anybody speaks Dutch in Melaka any more). Noel still inveighs against the designation 'Eurasian' every now and then: his point is that it does not root people in any specific country, but is vague and general. It was a British colonial designation used by the community before it refashioned itself as Portuguese in the late colonial era. Noel must have been a teenager when the identity shift took place. I am not aware of anyone in Melaka who styles himself or herself as Eurasian. The point Noel hammers home again and again is that the community is Portuguese and as well as Lusophone (i.e. Portuguese-speaking).

My Mother's milk ... part 2

I muse that perhaps everything is changing and very fast. Noel is very religious like all the community elders I have spoken to so far. He easily goes off into a long tirade about morals and religion. I wonder how appealing that is for the younger generation. Also, the Portuguese community has always been an open group: the descendants of the Dutch in Melaka, for instance, also speak Portuguese and are often counted as members of the community (in fact, I don't believe anybody speaks Dutch in Melaka any more).

Noel still inveighs against the designation 'Eurasian' every now and then: his point is that it does not root people in any specific country but is vague and general. In fact, it is a British colonial designation used by the community before it refashioned itself as Portuguese in the late colonial era. Noel must have been a teenager when the identity shift took place. I am unaware of anyone in Melaka who styles himself or herself as Eurasian, and there is certainly no visible community that claims that identity now. The point Noel hammers home again and again is that the community is Portuguese and as well as Lusophone (i.e. Portuguese-speaking).

His point is important as far as the name of the language is concerned. He ridicules the appellation 'Pápia Kristang' often used for the language. To him 'kristang' is a religious identity, not a language. He says that the designation started in the Dutch times. To me it makes sense, as the Dutch East Indies Company did have an all-encompassing category of 'Christenen'. It was a complex category as it had a legal as well as a religious nature. It also included people who were not ethnically European or not only European.

Also, calling oneself and one's language 'Portuguese' during the Dutch era must have been slightly tricky as the Portuguese remained enemies of the Dutch - the Catholic church was officially suppressed in Dutch settlements - for quite a long time (the Dutch conquered Melaka in 1641; the Portuguese community's Church of São Pedro was only built in 1710).

Joti - a man from Penang, who long ago married a woman from Kampung Portugis and is fluent in the local language, told me that the language became Creolised (he says, meaning 'full of short forms') during the Dutch period, as locals tried to avoid the impression that they were speaking an enemy language. Hence, also the name of the language. There was also more to it: religious identity -- Catholicism -- that was obviously enormously important. In fact, the community moved to its current location due to the efforts of at least two priests - one French, the other Portuguese - to get the colonial government to give them land. The efforts eventually succeeded in the 1930s and the community then moved from its various previous locations - mainly in Tengkera -- to Kampung Portugis. Joti tells me that the land is still often called 'chang di padri' - the priest's land ('chão de padre' in my Portuguese).

My impression is that religion has therefore been a very important binding element in the community. For it is not only a Christian community in a Muslim-majority country and in a city where (non-Christian) Chinese are dominant; it is also a minority Christian community within the varied and multi-denominational group of Melaka Christians itself. Besides, most Catholics in town don't count themselves as members of the community. (The other church in town, Saint Francis Xavier, was built in 1849 by French missionaries from Siam and south France, and is mainly a Chinese church today. Donations from as far away as Peru and the erstwhile Brazilian Empire went into its construction.)

It strikes me that one other thing that may have kept the community together is their comparative poverty (that used to be worse in earlier times). Incidentally, this is also something they have had in common with local Indians, a group with which they have obviously been closely associated, also through marriage. Some of the houses in the settlement in fact still look very modest. Part of the settlement is also made up of ugly blocks of public housing that probably can be found in every Malaysian city. Jorge, one of the elders, as well as Kátia - a social worker from Portugal who has just left the community to go back home - have told me that there are quite a few families in need, or who live very modestly.

My mother's milk is expensive (Melakan Portuguese dilemma) -- Part 1

I spend an entire lazy afternoon in Kampung Portugis speaking in papiaçam -- the Creole Portuguese of Macau/Melaka -- with Noel Felix. With us is one of the few Portuguese-speaking young scholars of Malaysia. (She's not of Portuguese origin.)

Felix can speak for hours on end in front of his Carlsberg. As I heard him out, I realised the many complex paradoxes of being Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. For that's what Felix considers the Melakan Portuguese to be, besides being Portuguese-speaking Malaysian. They are not a Creole community; they are Portuguese and speak Portuguese, though of course he is aware that they are not European Portuguese, nor is the language the same as that of Portugal.

Felix says he speaks old Portuguese, not Creole. He has been to Portugal once. He has a daughter who once lived in Brazil and now speaks to him in Brazilian Portuguese. He does not mind. He finds Brazilian Portuguese and Melakan Portuguese to be very close. Or, at any rate, closer than either of them is to Portugal's Portuguese. (I have difficulty with this in its spoken forms. I would often ask friends in Macau to repeat what they had just said to me, sometimes twice, only to realise that I was unable to make it out. It would have been embarrassing to ask them to say it in English, of course.

In Melaka, I have difficulty following local Portuguese, but if I'm persistent and my interlocutor patient -- and Felix is patient -- then we manage to communicate. (I must confess, however, that I'm more a listener than a talker). In another context and in another time, he might be considered a language nationalist of some sort. However, in the modest environment of the kampung in Melaka, he is someone who does not want his traditions to disappear, perhaps because he grew up with them. He says his mother's milk is expensive. He imbibed the language from her.

He does not want to give his language up nor does he take easily to the fact that his community is clearly losing it -- young people in particular can understand it though they do not speak it as fluently as their parents. They prefer to talk in English and Malay. In fact Felix interrupts our conversation for about an hour to go and teach a Portuguese class to some of the kampung's young people. Voluntary work.

The lady who runs the restaurant where we are sitting and talking puts his beer bottle into the refrigerator. At one point, he was in doubt if he should take it along with him.

Perhaps everything is changing, and too fast. Noel is very religious, like all community elders I have spoken to so far. He goes off into a long tirade about morals and religion at the slightest provocation. I wonder how appealing that is for the younger generation.

The Portuguese community has always been an open group: the descendants of the Dutch in Melaka speak Portuguese too and are often counted as members of the community. (I don't believe anybody speaks Dutch in Melaka any more.) Noel still inveighs against the label Eurasian every now and then, his point being that it does not root people in any country, but is vague and general. It was a designation used by the British colonials, that was accepted by the community before it refashioned itself as Portuguese. Noel must have been a teenager when the identity shift took place. I am not aware of anyone in Melaka who calls himself or herself Eurasian, and there is certainly no visible community that claims that identity now.

The point Noel hammers home again and again is that the community is Portuguese, and Lusophone (i.e. Portuguese-speaking).

Call for New Asian Short Stories

Call for New Asian Short Stories

Professor Kirpal Singh of Singapore Management University and Professor M.A. Quayum of International Islamic University Malaysia will coedit a new collection of Asian short stories. New and previously unpublished short stories are invited from writers of Asian origin/background or those writing about Asian life, culture and experience. Submissions should be sent to asianshortstories@gmail.com by 15 July 2014. The edited volume is expected to come out by the end of 2014.

Terms and conditions of entry:

1.     Writers must be of Asian origin/background or writing about Asian life, culture and experience.

2.     Submission ought to be new, unpublished and not submitted elsewhere.

3.     Each author is allowed to submit only one story.

4.     Stories must be in English, typed double-spaced in Times New Roman.

5.     Stories should not exceed 6000 words in length.

6.     Submissions in any other genre are not considered.

7.     Writers should include their name and a brief profile (100 words max.) on the cover page of the submission.

8.     No submissions will be accepted by post or after the deadline.

9.     Successful writers will be contacted on or before 30 September 2014.

10.  Further queries about the project should be sent to the email address above.

About the Editors

Kirpal Singh is a renowned poet and academic, and Director of the Wee Kim Wee Centre at the Singapore Management University.

M.A. Quayum is the author, editor or translator of 27 books. He is currently Professor of English at International Islamic University Malaysia and Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University, Australia.

Please forward this to friend who might be interested.