I had been perusing a set of newspaper archives when I saw a brief article, wedged between a few others, disappearing amidst a sea of ink-blocked print, smudged on the screen. In sparse, terse language, it detailed a raid at a church. The priest at Paroki St. Peter’s in Kuala Penyu had been arrested. The year was 1972, on the second day of December. Kuala Penyu is a district in rural Sabah, which encompasses the northern third of the island of Borneo. It became part of the newly-formed nation of Malaysia in September 1963. In the December of 1972, Sabah’s Chief Minister—Mustapha Harun—ordered the arrests and expulsion of a set of foreign clergy, missionaries, and priests. They had been mostly serving Sabah’s rural indigenous populations: Kadazans, Dusuns, Rungus, Muruts, Lundayehs. To Mustapha, and the Malaysian-state which operates on Malay-Muslim ethnic supremacy, they were a threat. The existence of Sabah’s indigenous Christian population was a source of frustration to the Malaysian state, resisting the nativist ideal that Malaysia belonged to the Malay-Muslim majority. And so the priests had to be removed.
In the early morning of 2 December 1972, government convoys were sent to three districts in Sabah to remove the priests: Tambunan, Papar, and Kuala Penyu. In Tambunan and Papar, they cut the church bells so that no one could be alerted of their presence, and they carted the priests away before anyone awoke. In Kuala Penyu, however, they met with hundreds of villagers that had gathered to prevent the arrest of the priest, Father Freidricks. Such was the strength of this resistance that the convoy retreated, only to return with 'the field force, the mobile force, the riot squad, fifteen Land Rovers, two trucks and a helicopter’.i The villagers wept as Father Friedricks was finally carted away.ii
I was born in Sabah, where my work and research is based. On my mother’s side, I am from Kuala Penyu, where our family converted to Catholicism. There is a small church up the hill where my grandparents live, with a crucifix that rises into the sky which at sunset is rent by colour and birdsong. Hymns echo down the hill every Mass. Yet, I had never heard this story. Months later, back in Kuala Penyu, I brought it up to my grandmother. What did she remember of this? Asap, she replied—smoke. Most likely the tear gas the government convoy used on the villagers who were defending their priest.
There is a book written about these events that remains today banned by the Malaysian government. It is The Golden Son of the Kadazan, a biography written by Bernard Sta Maria about Peter Mojuntin, the late Kadazan politician who was alive during Mustapha’s tenure, and who was a fierce advocate against Mustapha’s—with the blessing of actors from the Malaysian state government—suppression of Christian indigenous communities. The book details how rural, indigenous Christians and those who still practised ancestral worship were threatened with the confiscation of their ancestral lands if they did not convert, how they were threatened and denied from worshipping publicly, how they were made to be ashamed of their faith and their language. Today, you can still hear stories: about how state actors during this period went into rural villages and gave residents a bit of cooking oil, some rice, and tricked or bribed them into converting to Islam. How they threatened people’s livelihoods, promised jobs and promotions for those who would convert. Yet, these state efforts are not confined to the past. This year, for instance, it was found that members of the Murut community in rural Nabawan had been listed as Muslims on their identification documents despite being practising Christians.
Being a Muslim in Malaysia is not something one can ‘opt’ out of—it is something that one’s children must legally inherit, and it determines who one can marry, how one is buried. A Muslim husband can remove a child from a mother and still receive government aid while the mother has not seen the child for 16 years. All Malays in Malaysia must—according to Article 160 of the Malaysian Constitution—be Muslim. This imbrication also has a fraught history, with the ‘Malay’ identity in Malaysia being curated so that a history of religious fluidity and anticolonial activity has been excised from the official record and public memory of what it means to be ‘Malay’.iii With this established, the Malaysian government has since the nation’s inception used the idea of Malay nativism to suppress and assimilate indigenous communities in Malaysia—those in Borneo, and the Orang Asli of the peninsula—to Islam, and therefore, ‘Malayness’.iv In turn, Chinese and Indian communities in Malaysia are classed as eternal foreigners, treated as second-class citizens.v
Malaysia is a nation whose history has been constructed through excision—the excision of indigenous and immigrant narratives, of anticolonial and leftist histories, and of the multiplicity of faith and language.
Which is why we return, now, to Sabah. We return to Kuala Penyu.
Whenever I return to my grandparents’ home, we will drive past St. Peter’s. Today the church grounds are sprawling; there is an adjacent school. On Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings, during Christmas, the street outside is thronged by cars—worshippers coming for Mass. I myself have sat in the pews of that church, have opened a missal in which the prayers were listed in Tatana, the language of my mother and her mother. Half a century ago, the church was a site of a violent raid, yet here, the faithful still gather to pray. I think of a helicopter descending upon the villagers, of tear gas clouding the air. Asap, my grandmother had said. Dissolving and leaving no trace but memory. But even memory, even when secondhand, is strong enough to rewrite history.
---
Below is an excerpt from a novel that I am writing titled The Prodigal that details this period of history.
‘I know what you want to hear, Father.’
After hours of confessions, the knotting and unknotting of history whose pulse remains so resonant that it can feel it against his tongue—this do in memory of me—after the multitude of gods and names and the peeling of skins in which one can hide—Thou in me dwelling and I with Thee one—after the wretchedness of homecoming—for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you—the Priest is tired. There is nothing, he thinks, that he wants to hear. Two in the morning and he feels he has lost all sensation; the world around him seems to be veiled in a strange glow that robs the corners of the room of its contours, makes the face of the old man in front of him ageless. He looks towards the window again. Raindrops on the glass; in one of them the lights from the party boat collapse—it is a single, haloed bead gleaming with colour.
‘I’m hungry,’ the Priest says. His voice anchors him to the scene, reminds him of his physicality. But he is not hungry, has no urge for actual sustenance—instead what this is is the urge to take something within himself: an urge he recognises as sacramental. He would have no vocabulary, he understands then, had not those books been written in the desert hundreds of years ago.
‘I can call Iedil,’ the old man says. ‘Or you can go into the kitchen and take what you need.’
‘No. I want to hear your story.’
‘Are you sure, Father?’
Is that a paternal instinct in the old man that he senses? That he cleaves to? Or is this, again, the persistence of his faith—that which clings to him despite his unbelief. The true mark of Cain—the desire for the favour of a father that can never be quenched even by the spilling of blood.
‘I am sure.’
‘Because I want to tell you very simply,’ the old man says. ‘Why I did what I did.’
‘What did you do?’
‘You know all I have done—but you don’t know why.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we were losing, Father. And I did not want to lose.’
*
He hears Elijah’s voice repeating the old refrain. We went down to the fields with them we called on our ancestors we danced sumazau we ate sinalau we promised them…—The Jesselton sun is hot on his skin. Seaside heat. He raises his face towards it, but puts a hand over his eyes. The space between his fingers gleaming red. We danced sumazau we went down with the fields we drank tapai…—He hears the Omputeh’s decision, the announcement that he had just made in that shophouse room: it is time to dissolve our party. We must know when we are finished. Our exit must be graceful and without eye-er. What was that word? Eye-er. English strikes him then as an incredibly funny language with cartoon words. Eye-er, he mutters to himself. We must accept the Malays of Kuala Lumpur as our leaders. On and on Elijah goes—we slaughtered the buffalo we beat the gongs…—
‘We slaughtered the buffalo,’ he repeated. ‘We beat the gongs. Bah.’
‘We have failed, Gabriel.’
Gabriel. What had made him choose his name? He had liked how it sounded. Something beckoning about it. Reaching beyond time, beyond geography. It had a musicality. When Paderi Bauer had told all of them—those boys gathered in the small, hot chapel—about the host of saints and archangels, none of the other names had piqued him. But Gabriel he had wanted with a desire that was almost feverish. He was baptised in the river in which _______________. The cool water with its earthy taste. He hears his sister laughing at him. Look how high I can go. Look at how big you are. That means you cannot do anything anymore. You cannot do what I can do.
You can disappear, Gabriel thinks, very simply. You can take on another name. Be immersed in the water a sinner and be pulled up a saint. You can decide one day to walk away. To get on a train and pull through miles of jungle and padi field and come out on the other side sheathed in grit and smoke. To be someone new.
You cannot do what I can do.
He looks at Elijah next to him, who is quiet now, although his face is still stricken. He knows already what the other man is thinking. How will I go home to Moyog? How will I tell this to Elizabeth? How will I tell this to my son? Do I need to make a speech at church this Saturday? What can I do now? How can I make this right? It is a long ride back to Penampang. They will all know by the time I have returned. How I have failed them. How I will make it right. I must make it right.
Gabriel thinks of three things right then; three things rise to him very sharply. There is the sting of the buffalo whip. There is the stench of arak. There is his sister, hiding behind a tree and laughing.
You follow the river, he thinks to himself. The water will tell you what to do.
*
‘I refused to go back.’ The old man says.
‘Go back where?’
‘Home. To kampung. To the fallow fields and the stink of the grass where the buffalo have crossed. To the tempurong that are scattered across the beach that all our Shantung ancestors had landed onto, crossing an endless sea only to die in some foreign country, with no one to understand them on their deathbed. I refused to go home to a house that let the rainwater in. To all the shrines reminding us of the dead. Turn away from the dead! You go mad like that, with all that talk of ancestors. Oo bah, the Muslims had the right idea what they put them in the graves, when they pin them in with the headstones. None of our nonsense, our insistence on calling them home. Throwing out the rice. Putting out a feast for them as if they will eat when their flesh rots in the earth. A people who refuse to leave the past behind.’
*
He is standing at the bottom of the stairwell. He knows who now occupies the shophouse, the Tun sitting in the place once held by the Omputeh. If I close my eyes, he hears his sister say, you are gone. I can see you still, you know, he had replied.
But I don’t see you.
But I’m still here.
But I don’t see you.
But I’m still here.
She shakes her head, her hands still over her eyes.
No, she says, you’re not.
He puts his foot on the lowest stair. He hesitates only a moment before he begins his ascent.
*
‘Do you know how I know I am dying, Father?’
‘No. Are you dying?’
‘I am dying.’
This back-and-forth. Why this old man cannot think simply; why he must speak in riddle and idiom—the Priest cannot fathom. And then he understands. It is why the reading at Mass is responsive, even though everyone knows the words already. Even though everyone knows all the stories; knows what will happen next.
‘I began having dreams.’
‘What dreams?’
I was back. In Kuala Penyu. On the old land. The padi was ready for harvest. There is no green like that. I have never seen a green like that. And it was raining. The fields endless, the sky as endless above them. You know how it looks—with the mountains in the distance, but obscured in the rain. Heavy, heavy rain. Swilling the earth. Turning everything white. No sound aside from the rain. It erases everything. Oo bah, everything in the world is rice and rain. For seven nights straight I had this dream. And on the eighth morning—today—I knew that there would not be an eighth night for me. That is why you are here.
i: John Rooney, Khabar Gembira: a history of the Catholic church in East Malaysia and Brunei, 1880-1976 (London: Burns & Oats, 1981), 215.
ii: Why We Defied Quit Order.’ The Straits Times, 4 December 1972.
iii: For more see Armand Azra Azlira’s ‘Producing the subaltern: epistemic violence against the Malay left, c.1945-1957’ in Indonesia and the Malay World 51.151 (2024).
iv: See this article, for instance, about a Bateq Mayah community’s forced conversion thirty years ago—which they are still seeking justice for. Members of these community were threatened with eviction from their land and destruction of their crops if they did not convert.
v: This article, meanwhile, lists how president of Parti Islam se-Malaysia, the Malay-Muslim supremacist party in Malaysia, appropriates the language of indigeneity to discriminate against Chinese and Indians in Malaysia
