Museologias

         



          Muzium Samudra. I asked at the Voyager Café where the Maritime Museum was, and the boss and staff looked at me as if I had asked for directions to a remote and unknown place. Then a tourist who was around told me it was just across the bridge over the river.

         Full of families with children. No wonder - it is a pilgrimage site for the pious. A museum about the birth of the nation - not Malaysia, which is a country full of diverse people, but some other, unnamed nation somewhere in the middle of the samudra. The panels inside showed the wondrous history of Melaka as Venice of the East. The Kesultanan-ate with the Bendahara, the Temenggong, the Laksamana and other august personages, the warrior who repelled a Siamese invasion, its superb administration system  based on Islamic principles, and its cosmopolitan trade. Above all, its zaman kegemilangan, golden age, when it stretched far beyond its shore in glorious independence. However, the Siamese attacks were once successful - Melaka therefore became a Siamese vassal for a time just as several other states in the Peninsula. Not a word about this anywhere.

        An admonishment stands by the door: if you lose political freedom, you lose everything.

        It is actually quite appropriate that a museum of the nation should be a museum of the sea. For the ocean has certainly made this nation what it is. Then a curious detail: the ship which houses the museum. It is not a Malay ship, of which there are several models on display inside. Nor is it a junk, nor an Arab vessel, much less an Indian ship. In fact, it is a Portuguese nau. Kapal besar Portugis. The origin of the nation is therefore celebrated in a maritime museum housed inside a ship whose distant ancestors carried the people who ended the political freedom. Alternatively, the origin of the nation is remembered inside the replica of the ship of the conquerors housing a museum of the ocean. Nations are certainly full of ambiguities and grey areas. To me, the uncanny appearance of the Portuguese in what is clearly a museum to celebrate the origin of the nation is a surprise. Malaysia was never a Portuguese colony. Only Melaka was, and then only for about one hundred and thirty years. And it happened a very long time ago. The Sultan who reigned when defeat struck him continued to wage war against the Portuguese, away from Melaka, until his death, and so did his various successors for many years to come. And yet the Portuguese are celebrated. They are even physically present inside the ship: the captain's cabin has dummies as does the hold of the ship, except that they are dummies of the Portuguese. There is a lack of continuity to me between the history being displayed and explained in detail in the ship's hold and the ship itself that reaches a paroxysm in the captain's cabin.

      However, what is to me a ruptured narrative of ancient glory that somehow seems to celebrate conquest by outsiders is in fact a story that makes sense. If the identity of the nation is oceanic, as the museum seems to stress, then the ship of the conquerors - and the conquerors themselves - are part and parcel of this fluid, oceanic history. Also, Portuguese history literally envelops the history displayed and told inside the hold of the ship in a wrap that points right to the ocean. It therefore undoes whatever consciously nationalist foundations there may have been behind the narrative of the Museum of the Sea.

      Aso, strangely, the museum panders indirectly to Lusophone narratives of the nation that I imbibed in Brazil a long time ago: stories of the greatness of Portuguese discoveries and conquests in far away places, of the uniqueness of Portuguese colonization, of their mimicking and mingling with the Native (whereas the English segregated the Native...). A Portuguese ship was built - not a Dutch nor an English one - in this incredibly remote place (as far as Brazil is concerned) that was once in fact far more cosmopolitan than my country has ever been, and where I am now learning to de-provincialize myself.

      The museum was opened by no one other than Mahathir Mohamad. I wonder whether the Portuguese ambassador was present (Portugal has in fact no embassy in Malaysia, only in Singapore...).

      Of course there is still a tiny but well-known Portuguese settlement in Melaka. But you don't learn about it through the Muzium Samudra.  So the Portuguese are part of the nation and somehow also outside of it, not entirely unlike the Orang Portugis, the people who are thought to be their descendants in Melaka. Not quite sons of the soil, but not quite foreigners either. Eerily, their position is somehow also similar to the status of the Portuguese in Brazil. In fact, until 1993 both Portuguese and Brazilians could go to each other's countries for six months without a visa and eventually even settle there. Then the European Union decided to close that door or else it would have a ghost member with nearly 200 million people.

       Now nobody cares. Portugal is sinking fast, the European Union is a mess, and Brazil an emerging economy.

      Terminei de comer o nasi lemaki. O garoto nepali que me serviu o nasi perguntou surpreso por que eu não havia comido o ovo cozido que vem junto.









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