Desimentu di Sementi

I don't even know how to spell the word. Cátia who runs a Portuguese-language programme, on no budget, for the community has cards with names of parts of the body in English, Portuguese, and, well, Portuguese. Noel Felix, a very outspoken elder of the community, thinks that is what it should be called, and not Papia Kristang. He argues that they are Christian, but that their language isn't Christian. I follow his reasoning closely in his own language. I miss a word or two because I am not used to the vocabulary or the pronunciation. He argues strongly for the case of old Portuguese - namely, Melaka Portuguese would be old Portuguese from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The word  'Creole' doesn't appear once. He also stresses that Brazilian Portuguese is closer to Melaka Portuguese than both are to Portugal's Portuguese. He has a point. The only reason I have any difficulty following him is that this is virtually my first long exposure to the language (we talked for over an hour: or rather he did the talking and I listened). They use words I know but that I am not used to listening in conversation, as I am a middle-class paulistano and on top of it from the academic world. One of these words is 'mezinha for medicine. To me it sounds both outdated and rural, and possibly dialectal. I also find it remarkable that they use simple words with metaphorical meanings where I am used to employ specific terms: Noel says 'semente' (seed) for 'raiz' (i.e. a word root). His point is that our words - my Brazilian words and his - are different but they come from the same root. He also stresses again and again that the desimentu of the community is Portuguese, not Eurasian. He says his skin is 'pagado' (apagado, namely, erased or opaque, that is, dark), but his desimentu is Portuguese. Desimentu would be descendência in my Portuguese, namely, descent.

I don't really know how to write Melaka Portuguese. Kabesa is how Cátia writes 'cabeça' (head) for her students. In fact, the language does not have an established orthography. It is not even taught in the local school. Actually, as I looked across the fence I saw some girls doing their PE class: they wore veils. Therefore there are not only Portuguese in the school. Also, the language is not taught there. Cátia in fact uses a makeshift room next to a large open air stage as a classroom for her students: she tells me she teaches people from the age of 5 to 70. She is fluent in Melaka Portuguese, and she shuttles back and forth between Portugal's Portuguese and Melaka Portuguese. She also tells me Melakans find her Portuguese too 'deep'. Indeed Portuguese accents are often too 'closed'. I myself have difficulty understanding some Portuguese colleagues in Macau, for instance (in a few cases even after the person repeats her sentence two or even three times). The school used to be a missionary school, but as in the case of all such schools in Malaysia, the postcolonial government has taken over. Taking over missionary schools was not necessarily a bad idea in the postcolonial era. It must have seemed the right thing to do. However, as in all such cases, there were drawbacks for specific communities, the Portuguese among them. Noel complains Portugal has never bothered to open a school in the community. I guess the answer is obvious: this has not been Portuguese territory since 1641. He wants a school where the medium of instruction is Melaka Portuguese. That is going to be tough, to say the least. As far as I know, the language has just over two thousand words or so. More than enough for daily needs, but not nearly enough to teach school subjects such as sciences, maths, history (now for the first time I guess a compulsory subject in Malaysian schools), and, alas, Portuguese itself. This is so especially if you receive a veritable grammatical education as I did under the military dictatorship in Brasil: I had to learn the difference between a complemento nominal and a complemento verbal, and also of course how to do both concordância nominal and concordância verbal properly. Naturally, in such cases Melaka Portuguese can just borrow directly from non-Melakan forms of Portuguese. I just wonder how far that process can go before it becomes meaningless. Namely, beyond a certain point it will start to make sense to switch wholesale into non-Melakan Portuguese instead of keeping to increasingly more convoluted renderings of what are at bottom foreign terms.

Noel stresses there there is no libro or books in Melaka Portuguese. In fact, Creole languages everywhere usually have somewhat restricted written archives even in much larger places (such as Haiti). His point is that the presence of books in the language might help the language survive. He has a point. But then the conversation - there is someone else sitting at the table though he hardly utters a word - veers towards Malay. It is a hybrid language - a mix of Indonesian (sic), Portuguese words and English words, besides Arabic. Amazingly, they also say Malay just as Melaka Portuguese also has no books. I take it to mean that the pre-colonial written heritage in Malay is assumed to be rather thin compared to that of other languages. In fact before the twentieth century the Austronesian language with the most extensive archives must have been basa Jawi or Javanese only, even though Malay has been a written language for well over a thousand years now. Therefore, I find placing the hopes of preserving the language on the presence of books somewhat optimistic under the circumstances: Malays for instance are literate but they read far less than other ethnic groups in Malaysia (the range of written literature in Malay also seems to me to be more restricted). In a growing mass culture based on the internet and visual culture, reading books is almost a quaint activity. I also remember that quite a few of my students engage in it only hesitantly and almost under duress. Of course, I don't mean by this that books in Melaka Portuguese should not be written. Children's books and popular history books might be quite appropriate, besides some creative writing as well as local folklore and oral histories. 

Even if there was schooling in local Portuguese, the question will then arise what you do with your schooling once you finish it. There are about two thousand Portuguese in Melaka according to Jorge, one of the community elders in charge of the local museum (a modest room mostly with some objects from Portugal and photographs of the community in the 1950s. He complained he had no objects from Brasil. He particularly wanted a flag he had been promised). It is not an economically very vibrant community. Of course I assume people would also learn both English and Malay, the starlets of the Malaysian school system, and would therefore not be confined to their own turf. However, I also ponder about the vast distance between Noel's daydreaming of a school in Melaka Portuguese and Cátia's experimental classes carried out in her classroom behind the stage and with no books. Fundação Camões pays her a ridiculously small salary even for local standards let alone European ones, and gives her no school books or anything. She works with donated dictionaries and materials she herself has bought with her own money (her family has also helped). Rather than a mere language teacher she is actually a community worker. She is involved therefore in all kinds of activities. She also lives with one of the local prominent families as she cannot afford a place of her own. I meet her at her home. Miguel is also there. He is very good-looking and young. He has been living in Amsterdam for years: yet another Portuguese I meet who is dissatisfied with Portugal's smallness - and narrow-mindedness. His father is actually from Cubango (colonial Sá da Bandeira) in the south of Angola and therefore though his skin colour is white his family history isn't entirely European. He has never been to Brasil but feels very attracted to the country. No wonder: he would probably fit over there to the point that nobody would eventually notice he is an outsider. He is in Melaka to do a documentary film on Cátia's work and her students and the people in the community. He is actually quite at home in Melaka as he has been here for three months now. He seems to be very friendly towards everybody in the community. His work is done and he will soon fly back. Cátia is also leaving as her visa is running out, and her Portuguese contract has not yet been renewed. My impression of both Cátia and Miguel is of two young people very much on the move. I am almost glad that Portugal does not have a place for people like them.

This brings me back to Noel's complaint about Portugal's indifference. If Portugal actually has no place for two dynamic upbeat young Portuguese born there, why would it have any room for a couple of thousand Melakan Portuguese? Noel and Papa Joe - this last I have met through Ai Ling and her friend Joy - have both been to Portugal years ago. However a donor from São Paulo paid for their trip, not the Portuguese government. I find it remarkable that someone from São Paulo would have paid them to go to Portugal (instead of say paying them to go to Brasil). I guess it is the desimentu. I assume the guy who paid for their trip is a Luso-Brazilian and therefore he shares desimentu with the Melakans. Noel in fact points out that the descendants of the Dutch in town do not speak Dutch; instead, they also speak Portuguese. He inveighs against the term Eurasian; he insists he is Portuguese. I find that very interesting as it seems to replicate the situation in Sri Lanka in former times. His skin is dark but his heart is white, he says. I know this sounds bad in English, but actually in Portuguese and in Noel's mouth it sounds less racialist. He is certainly not pandering to whites. Rather, he wants to stress a connection. 'Eurasian' to him means nothing, because it does not anchor the bearer of that identity in any specific part of Europe - or Asia. Melaka Portuguese does. I remember talking to a Singapore colleague once about Eurasians. The desimentu here is however quite complex. Jorge told me a story in the museum that is slightly different to Noel's, though it does not contradict it: namely, he mentioned a land-based people and a sea-based one that would have been here when the Portuguese came. 'Natibu' or 'Natives'. Orang Asli in Arabic-Malay, the original people. Melaka used to have orang laut, or sea people, a group that still exists in south Thailand, for instance. The Portuguese married their women. Then when the Portuguese left, now according to Noel, the Dutch married the Portuguese women issuing from those marriages. In fact Dutch men and Portuguese women inter-married fairly often during Dutch times just as in the case of yet another colonial settlement of Portuguese origin turned Dutch, namely, Colombo. This last however has no extant Portuguese community today, though there are many people there with Portuguese surnames. On being introduced to me they would often apologise for not being able to speak any Portuguese. I always found the apologies quite remarkable (I would never expect to find people who could speak Portuguese in Lanka, though in fact there are still a few people around who speak Sri Lankan Creole Portuguese. They are however nowadays often of African ancestry, though the language used to be spoken also by other groups in former times. In Melaka in contrast there is never any talk of Africans, unless they are students at the local universities of media and technology). Melakans are dimly aware of the fact, but in fact Portuguese Melakans also make sense in terms of a much wider Portuguese Creole world. In terms of language, if you take both Papiamentu/o in the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao near Venezuela, as well as the Creole of the Cabo Verde Islands, that world stretches all the way from the Caribbean to Timor Leste and therefore goes well beyond former Portuguese colonial territories.

I find it interesting that so far nobody has mentioned two groups of people: namely, slaves and Indians. Slaves are probably not part of the official desimentu; as for Indians, I wonder what may be the reason. In fact 'Indian' and 'slave' here could be one and the same, as in Dutch colonial Batavia, though of course Melaka also had its free Indians. There were also Africans. No mention of these either, even though both Noel and Jorge recite to me the name of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa as well as in Asia. Another intriguing omission is that of the English themselves. They are certainly among at least some of the ancestors of this incredibly complex community. I find the emphases as well as the omissions in the story about ancestry quite significant. Another ominous absence is in fact that of the Malays. Maybe as they are officially all Muslims in the postcolonial era (sic) they cannot be ancestors of the Portuguese. Another group that does not figure in the identity narratives is the Chinese, either Peranakan or not. Considering that Melaka is nowadays clearly a Chinese-majority city, that is another intriguing absence.

At least part of the community is poor, though for Brazilian standards it is far from destitute. It strikes me that they are very much like similar fishing communities dotted along the extremely long coast of Brasil. There are thousands of such communities over there. Here the Melaka Portuguese are however rather unique. The whole of Malaysia - and beyond - knows them. Noel says he is in charge of the community's cultural affairs. He regrets that they are losing their language and also slowly their culture. I have the feeling theirs is actually a losing battle. Especially when not even the local school has Portuguese as a subject. I find it distressing to say the least that Cátia has to work virtually unaided in a small room next to the community stage where children jogá bola - play ball or soccer (it is the very same phrase we use in Brasil). Meanwhile the school right in front obviously has quite a few facilities. I call this postcolonial perversity. Cátia and Miguel however go over this local disability quite well through their youthful creativity: my last glimpse of them is Miguel carrying an enormous film camera on his shoulders while he and Cátia talk to the children very animatedly. The young playing with the very young. I decided not to stay as I am a total stranger and the children might feel shy. I just pass a couple of cool drinks to Cátia through the window bars and then cycle back to town through Melaka's unappealing car-clogged streets.

I am not a particularly religious person at all. I therefore find the apparently enormous stress on religion somewhat unappealing. Then I remember this is a minority community. Someone tells me that Hinduism, Buddhism or even other forms of Christianity are fine. Islam however is not. I understand why. It is more than just possible historical Islamophobia. The problem is that the Portuguese and the Malays are naturally close in more ways than one, except in religion. Everybody in the community is also bilingual, namely, they speak Malay (and quite often English too which means they are in fact multilingual). Attachments must be formed quite easily. But then comes conversion and marriage. And with them of course the community boundaries are threatened. Just as with Copts in Egypt, a community member who has converted to Islam is a permanently lost member. Reverting to the previous religion is not only religiously complicated, it is also thoroughly illegal in terms of Malaysian law. I wonder whether the stress on Catholicism as part of Melaka Portuguese identity is not to some extent a postcolonial reactive construct. Of course nothing of the kind happens when other religions come into play. In fact, I heard the church willingly performs inter-religious marriages in such cases. I believe its tolerance however must be ascribed to its conviction that both the spouse and the children will be kept somehow within the fold.

Noel tells me the dances are under his supervision. I then remember the photographs in the museum (surrounded by seafood restaurants. The settlement actually dates from the 1980s when it was placed here on reclaimed land. Places like Tranquerah were historically the seat of the community though nowadays hardly anyone lives there). The photographs show dancers in traditional costume. It is a very folksy Portuguese-looking costume. In Brasil such costumes would only be worn by folklore groups with strong ties to Portuguese associations and historically recent immigrant communities. Namely, there is as far as I know hardly any Brazilian community as such who would dress - and dance - like that. The same goes for 'Lusophone' Africa (i.e. the countries in Africa where Portuguese is the official language even though usually the majority of the population cannot speak it). Then a photograph of a visiting dance group from Macau sheds light on the whole story: just as in Macau, Portuguese dances were actually introduced in historically fairly recent times, namely the 1950s (and in Macau the 1960s I guess) when both communities seem to have undergone a process of (re-) Lusitanisation (the dances were also introduced with Portuguese metropolitan help). Actually, I remember reading a paper by Margaret Sirkassian, an anthropologist specialised in the community, to the effect that the community only started styling itself Portuguese after the Second World War and with imminent decolonisation. In fact, the museum provides yet another piece of evidence here: the Eurasian Club and association are mentioned somewhere in the exhibit. They are now both long gone. 'Eurasian' is of course a colonial (in this case British) category. Therefore, Portuguese was adopted as the community designation when both Noel and Jorge were children. It was thought to be better than Eurasian and also better than associating with the former British coloniser. Portuguese as the local Creole language however of course goes back much further in time, though I wonder when the denomination Papia Kristang (now shunned by people like Noel) actually came up. There is therefore a desimentu here that goes beyond social identity as it is deeply-rooted in the language itself.

The history of the community is actually complex because there is also Portuguese (i.e. metropolitan Portuguese) enmeshment in it. The Dutch were hostile to Portugal's Portuguese - and the Catholic church - more or less throughout the colonial era. However, in the nineteenth century with the switchover to British colonial domination as from 1825 things changed. In the first half of the twentieth century, for intance, as the museum exhibit shows, Portuguese priests (in one case thickly bearded and with a strangely Indian look to him), were very important figures in the community until the end of the colonial era (when of course the postcolonial government started applying the screws on all missions in the country). Therefore, what I call the narrative of disconnection - namely, of lost contact as from 1641 when the Dutch took over the city - is actually not reliable except for the Dutch period itself. All kinds of Portuguese people have drifted here from Portugal and from Macau (there must be other more obscure connections as well. Timor for instance is too close by not to have had any connections whatever to Melaka even after the Portuguese left. Goa in India is another case in point). In fact, the very idea of a Portuguese settlement itself is unsurprisingly of clerical origin and was apparently first broached in the 1920s by a Frenchman. There is a photograph of the old settlement by the water: it shows neatly arranged wooden houses that have been newly built. The houses look simple but, from this distance in time, spacious and quite charming. Jorge tells me they have all been pulled down. The Portuguese now inhabit houses around the settlement that are mostly nondescript. Another piece in the historical jigsaw puzzle of Melakan heritage destruction.

In this way, it is not impossible that the Portuguese have never been so Portuguese as in the past seventy-odd years. It would be interesting to see what an even smaller community such as the Chetties have experienced in the same period: India is too close for total disconnection to have obtained, especially in postcolonial times. Now everyone who is middle-class in Malaysia (and even occasionally people who are not) can fly to more than half a dozen Indian destinations on cheap daily flights. It may take as little as three hours to get there from here (and the airport is just one hour and a half away by bus from Melaka Sentral, the city's central bus station). 

One local claim is to have their own church. The old St Peter's church (1710) which is traditionally the community church is too far away. There is a chapel, but no permission has ever been given to build a church. The government in fact is quite strict when it comes to building churches. The more church-minded members of the community therefore find themselves in a tight corner. The Portuguese are officially recognised as a kind of local - and somehow indigenous - community but they are also a colonial product. Indigenous Catholic somehow does not sound right in Malaysia. It is impossible not to think this is in some way colonial reasoning operating in the postcolonial era.

I also suspect that in the postcolonial era the reason for the existence of a separate Portuguese community has withered away. Part of the community used to enjoy a few privileges in the colonial era (they could become for instance petty and not so petty government officials), though many were just poor people. As through the centuries they were more or less closely associated with the various colonial powers, in the postcolonial era their raison d'être has ceased to exist (the contrast with the Chetties is again interesting: these are actually a community of pre-colonial origin). Also the larger society must seem quite attractive to youngsters. After all it is not all young people nowadays who are into religious conservatism, no matter what religion they may profess. Also, the larger society may seem to have many more venues open to them than a small community of somewhat meager resources. This is another reason perhaps why the local culture and the local language are slowly withering away: young people find them uncool. Also, they don't seem to open doors to the wider world, whether Malaysian or international. In fact, not even the way to Portugal seems to be wide open to Portuguese Melakans. Cátia is in this sense a welcome presence though she may have come a little too late in time. Portuguese Melakans have therefore both an ancestral/putative and actual homelands but somehow they are not entirely at home in either.

No wonder Noel is disappointed. He is in his late seventies, just like Jorge. They are therefore from the colonial time. They were in their teens when Malaysia attained independence in 1957 (together with Singapore; then in 1963 came both Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo/Kalimantan; and in 1965 Singapore went its own way and Malaysia was reshaped once more in less than a decade). In fact the independence was announced in Melaka itself to great fanfarre in 1956. In Banda Hilir. Yet the postcolonial state has not been kind to them. And Portugal is too distant and too indifferent in what really counts (namely hard cash). When Noel mentions desimentu in fact I believe he means not ancestry in the sense of a bloodline, much less nationality, but ancestry as in the sementi of the language - namely, common conceptual and linguistic roots. In fact these are nothing short of impressive. We could say Noel is an Asian man. Yet I, a white Brazilian man with some Orang Asli ancestry, am talking to him in the language of my mother. This is a powerful kind of desimentu. In fact, no postcolonial border can successfully do away with such desimentu at one fell stroke. That is why the Melaka Portuguese are still hanging on.

Their children and grandchildren however are another matter altogether. They are after all not children of the colonial era. I am also afraid that neither Brasil nor Portugal (or tiny Macau or Timor) can now successfully step into the gap between the colonial and postcolonial eras so as to make a difference. One never knows, however. Who would have said that Brasil would be now hailed as an economically successful economy (together with Angola, by the way) only ten years ago, or that Portugal's accession to the European Union would be at bottom somewhat meaningless in terms of really changing the economic fortunes of the country? Or that an attractive and dynamic young woman such as Cátia would be sent to Melaka, even though she is here on a shoestring budget only?