Hüzün, Saudades, Kkenang

Now this is going to be tough to say the least. Hüzün is türkçe (Turkish), saudades is português, and kkenang is Trengganuspeak. This last is of course the language of Terengganu, a state and sultanate on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. It is different from what Awang Goneng calls standardspeak, that is the Malay of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the official language body which lays down the law in the land. To Goneng Trengganu is the place where he grew up, whereas the Malaysian state-cum-sultanate that is there nowadays is actually Terengganu. I find the distinction ominous and significant: one is the land of memory, the past, childhood, kampung (community), a city to which the writer is linked in subtle, complex and highly subjective ways as is clear from his book Growing Up in Trengganu. Now a journalist based in London, Goneng reminisces, recollects, and reconfigures a lost landscape with more than a twist of wistfulness as well as an incredible eye for detail and historical description. That landscape has been lost not only through the passage of time and the growing distance but also because today's Terengganu - an oil boom city - bears comparatively little resemblance to the tranquil East coast port in which the writer grew up. Trengganu, just as Kelantan immediately to the north, was a Siamese vassal state which enjoyed more than a modicum of autonomy from Bangkok. It was in fact one of the very last areas of present-day West Malaysia to be included in colonial Malaya after the British wrested it from Siam. Effectively that inclusion only happened around 1920, if I am not mistaken, as the reigning sultan at last had to give in to several British demands for control of his state, imposition of taxes, etc. The Malayan colony was by then a highly successful extractivist and militarised state and there was little local populations could do to resist.

The enmeshment of Goneng's text with Trengganuspeak is fairly high. He brings up again and again the characteristic words and terms of his mother tongue which is a far cry from standardspeak (and is generally not intelligible to people from other parts of the country except those in neighbouring Kuantan and Johor). In reality Trengganuspeak seems to have something in common with Sulawesi Malay across the seas. It is therefore a language rooted in a maritime geo-history which is not that of the postcolonial nation-state. Furthermore, Trengganu also had strong ties historically to both China and Siam to the north. Local Hokkien is full of Trengganuspeak, according to Goneng. In the author's childhood maritime trade with Siam was still going - singgora tiles for instance came from there. Singgora -   سيڠڬورا  - is the historical name of สงขลา  or Songkhla. Until the early twentieth century this was a kind of vice-royalty controlled by a local Chinese family on behalf of the Siamese crown. The reigning family - the Na Songkhla - minted coins that can be seen in their former residence, now a museum. They have inscriptions in Chinese, Jawi, and Thai. In fact, Trengganu historically belonged together with Kelantan to a constellation of Malay sultanates surviving at the periphery of the Siamese kingdom and British enclaves in the Peninsula, a constellation that included Pattani, now divided among four different Thai provinces across the border. This is of course putting matters from a centralist, postcolonial historiographical point of view. In fact Goneng's account is so powerful because it depicts a world belonging to but autonomous from the nation-state. It is therefore no periphery as such. The specificity of local culture actually comes out very strongly for instance in the description of Trengganuspeak words and their shades of meaning. The reader in fact feels that incorporation into Malaya and then the postcolonial state has not caused the erasure of local culture. However, all the same the destruction wrecked by time and (postcolonial) economic development on the cityscape - and I assume also on the culture of the local communities - has been enormous judging from what Goneng tells us. In reality, the original community of old Terengganu no longer inhabits its traditional grounds as they have been mostly removed to other, newer (and I assume soulless) parts of town. My Lonely Planet guidebook confirms Terangganu - as opposed to Trengganu - is not a particularly charming place nowadays though it is still commended for its strong local culture (and handicrafts). In fact, one of the paradoxical results of having read Goneng's appealing narrative is that I simply don't feel like visiting Terengganu. This is because it is very clear to me that the city he is describing is no longer extant and not only because of the passage of time. Trengganu has been more or less virtually razed down. It is therefore a place that is best visited through memoirs such as Goneng's. It is both sobering and scary to think that the fate of today's Melaka, very sad as it is, is actually not so bad when compared to what has happened elsewhere in this country.

Goneng's work therefore departs from the rich texture of a local perspective that founds his narrative at the same time that that texture is actually a subject of mourning as it is entangled in loss.

Goneng quotes the opening line of a famous novel from my part of the world, namely Gabriel García Márquez's El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera: 'It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love'. This to Goneng is related to kkenang, a word and concept in Trengganuspeak. 'Melancholy grounded in memory' is a translation he proposes for the word. I find his translation almost eerie because it might also be a fairly good translation for saudades, a famously difficult to translate word in Portuguese. Kkenang is further related to longing for the past tinged with loss and can also mean affliction (saudades once more come to mind here). It is also related to remembering - and the need to remember. Goneng also associates it with hüzün, a related term in Turkish which he - just like me - came up against in Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City. I remember having read the book in São Paulo a couple of years ago. I have not read Pamuk's work extensively but that book remains my favourite work by him. Goneng sums up Pamuk's book in a nutshell: it is a narrative about melancholy. I find that summation appealing: the melancholy of loss, in this case of an Ottoman past that the Turkish Republic wanted to put behind it so badly that it closed down harems - whereby many women found themselves starving on the streets - and Sufi lodges, besides changing the script and the language and forbidding the use of traditional dress. In sum, it generally tried to remodel itself as a Western country with Turkic roots in Central Asia. It attempted therefore to grow away from its assumed past as an Oriental, Islamic and therefore backward empire. Part of this process of course meant the destruction of the cityscape of Istanbul. A part of Pamuk's memories is for instance concerned with the destruction of the yalas in Istanbul, the old traditional wooden villas on the margins of the Bosphorus. They usually burned down, often in fires stoked by the owners themselves. Just as with the destruction visited on Terengganu, here too it is a matter of a kind of complex self-inflicted obliteration.

The online dictionary on the Brasilturquia site translates hüzün as tristeza, which is in fact more properly sadness. I try saudade (in the singular though it is usually employed in the plural) and I get özlem, hasret. The Google Translator confirms those translations: both words are apparently synonyms. Craving, longing, nostalgia are possible English translations for them. Saudades also refer to a lack, an absence - say of someone who is dear to us. I remember reading in Carolina de Michaëlis's book on saudades - published over a hundred years ago in Portugal - that in the Middle Ages the word was used in the meaning of lack - say a given convent was said to have a soedade of water. So the lack of Trengganu and Istanbul's hüzün have led Goneng and Pamuk to write about their respective cities. Absence in fact runs through the otherwise very different narratives of both authors: Trengganu is no longer there but is in the past. Goneng is also not there any more (to the point that in a certain passage he confesses to not knowing whether a certain istana - palace - is still standing). Pamuk is still living in Istanbul, as far as I know, in spite of occasional persecution because of his views on the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, but the city he longs for and describes is also clearly a lost city (his views on the genocide are critical of today's Turkey's official position of disengagement from the mass killing). Interestingly, however, though there is of course a good deal of personal memories in Pamuk's account just as in Goneng's, the melancholy in his book is related to the Ottoman past, namely a past Pamuk could not have known from first hand experience as he was born under the Turkish Republic (which alternately sees itself and does not see itself - for instance in what concerns the Armenian genocide it does not - as a successor to that distant former empire). A good deal of his book is in fact about Ottoman and early Republican Istanbul, not about his own time as such. The cityscape of course allows him - even pushes him - to read the city through memories - his own and the city's - to the point that both become closely intertwined in his book.

It is peculiar to reminisce in Melaka about my recollections of reading Istanbul (rather than reading about Istanbul) through Pamuk's work in São Paulo. This last is a city which was founded back in the sixteenth century but that differently to Melaka barely has a single wall to show from the time of its appearance and even from much later times. Istanbul has seen earthquakes - related in Pamuk's account - as well as major refashioning of its urbanscape; however, it has not seen the incredible razing down and endless growth and expansion of São Paulo, which probably already has in its greater metropolitan area almost as many people as the whole of West Malaysia. It is also intriguing that Goneng was also much taken by Pamuk's work. I wonder whether hüzün/kkenang/saudade may not in fact be a kind of postcolonial malaise. I also remember in this regard Lim Huck Chin's and Fernando Jorge's work on Melaka (Voices from the Street). It is about history, architecture, and communities, though it is also a kind of personal memoir of the city, in spite of the fact that Melaka is not the birthplace of either author (Lim is from Penang and Fernando from somewhere in Portugal. Lim lives in Singapore). All three works - Goneng's, Pamuk's, and Chin's and Jorge's - touch upon memory, destruction, and the past. Moreover, they all have photographs of architecture, buildings, streets, and neighbourhoods. However, being the work of architects, Chin's and Jorge's book of course have many more photographs, and better ones too. By comparison, the photos in Pamuk's and Goneng's books are snapshots or old black and white photographs of destroyed buildings and cityscapes. Interestingly, though all three cities are located by the sea, only Pamuk and Goneng make use of images of seascapes (in the case of Istanbul that is almost inevitable: the Bosphorus belongs in the cityscape and vice-versa. However, in the case of Trengganu it also seems inevitable). In fact, one of the results of extensive reclamation in Melaka is that the historic centre now feels strangely landlocked. (The nearest strip of reclaimed seaside is also very unappealing. The buildings on it also seem cheaply done and ugly). They are all therefore works of longing even though they concern themselves with very different cities (even Melaka and Trengganu, in spite of being in the same country, are worlds apart). Of all the authors mentioned, only Pamuk still lives in the city he wrote about. Istanbul is also his birthplace as well as the city where he has spent most of his life so far. This however has not stopped him from looking at Istanbul through a perspective that is in fact more than a little reminiscent of that of Goneng, Chin, and Jorge. Engagement with the cityscape here entails therefore a sense of distancing, for paradoxically or not the city one is so intensely involved with is in fact a lost or at least fast disappearing urbanscape.

There is also the language issue which is strongly foregrounded in Goneng's book when he constantly tackles back and forth between his Trengganuspeak and English (and some times standardspeak i.e. official Malay). He seems to feel equally at home in both languages. However, Trengganuspeak is not a recognized language, not even in Terengganu. There is a sense in the book therefore that Trengganuspeak is a language that inhabits memory and longing rather than any official space. A language of the past is also present in Pamuk's account, namely Ottoman Turkish. That is now a dead language. Today's Turkish is famously a fabrication of the 1920s and beyond, and not only because in 1928 there was a change of script (from Arabic script to Latin script) dictated by Atatürk's modernising policies for the new state. It turns out that Turkish was also 'purified' from many of its Arabic and Persian loanwords and instead suffused with more 'purely' Turkic words some of which were in fact new coinages rather than retrievals from a long lost past. The change in language was so sweeping that merely learning the old script does not necessarily enable anyone to read Ottoman Turkish nowadays. There was therefore a major rupture here with the past as centuries of written tradition were left behind at one fell stroke and are in this way no longer immediately accessible except to specialists. Pamuk has a brother who is an economic historian and therefore, I assume, knows Ottoman Turkish. He himself however can only read Western accounts of the Ottoman Empire as well as the post-1928 literary heritage (about which he expatiates at some length in his memories) or else works that may have been transliterated/translated into modern Turkish (or studies about such works). In a way, therefore, as a child of Kemalist Turkey's modernisation drive, Pamuk is even more distant from his roots than Goneng, a London-based journalist, is from his Trengganu past. Namely, the language of the ancestors is still Goneng's language (though perhaps barely so), whereas when he was born Pamuk found himself already largely disconnected from his ancestors' language paradoxically through his very acquisition and use of his mother's tongue. Goneng was by comparison fortunate as he speaks a language that, in spite of not usually being a written medium, nonetheless furnishes him with a direct link to the present and past (and we hope future) of T(e)rengganu.

In Lim Huck Chin's case as a speaker of Hokkien - and English and Malay - he has a foothold in Melaka, just as Fernando Jorge as a speaker of Portuguese, even though Penang's Hokkien and Melaka's are supposedly different (nonetheless, they are mutually intelligible. Portugal's Portuguese and Melaka Portuguese are somewhat more distant cousins, however). Their book is a work where architecture is foregrounded far more often than languages. It is however important to note here that they were not disconnected from the local languages while doing their work. This last required in fact years of acquaintance with Melaka. Theirs remains still a major and unsurpassed reference work on the city. It is a work where personal, architectural, and historical memories are interwoven together though the personal side is in the background differently to what happens in both Pamuk's and Goneng's narratives.

I wonder about the distancing - distanciamento in my own Trengganuspeak. If distancing is the result/process of engagement, then why engage in the first place? If the inhabitants of the cities concerned engage in self-obliteration - and they certainly do as they destroy their own heritage with incredible speed and nonchalance - then what does it mean to rescue memory from the debris of that self-obliteration? It seems quite a lonely occupation to say the least.

I also wonder about my role in all this. After all, I am bringing together here - in this very modest space - Istanbul, Melaka, and Trengganu. I have never visited the first (there are however direct flights from here to there) and I have said above I will probably never visit Terengganu. As I write this I'm listening to an old rock'n roll song from Brasil about tomar café or drink coffee so as not to cry (I happen to be sipping a cup of local coffee). The song is not part of my laptop's repertoire; on the contrary, it is being broadcast in a café in one of Melaka's side streets. The singer - his name is on the tip of my tongue - ends the song by saying that he is a canceriano (his sign is Cancer). Well, I'm not.

Kerala, 2009    Source: ബരഗുല്‍