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MUHYIDDIN’S MISSION FINAL SARAWAK COLONISATION BY UMNO AND VISION OF “GHOSTS AND DEMONS” FROM PENINSULA IDRIS JALA THE NEW SARAWAK CHIEF MINISTER AND NEW WHITE RAJA HIS RICHNESS ABDUL TAIB MAHMUD
The White Rajah Brookes were an English dynasty which ruled over Sarawak from 1841 to 1946. The current Chief Minister of Sarawak, Taib Mahmud, is in his 30th year in power and like the Brookes, aims to start his own dynasty – the Muslim Melanau dynasty of the Rahman-Taib Family.
Kuala Lumpur helped Taib and his maternal uncle, Abdul Rahman Ya’kub, scupper Dayak plans to lead Sarawak. Now that allegations of fraud and corruption have surfaced, on the national and international arena, pressure is bearing down on Taib step down.
Before he leaves, a successor is needed to look after the interests of the dynasty and to make sure the state can be milked further. Until recently, Taib has been unwilling or unable to find someone capable enough, to step into his shoes.
The Penan call alcohol “Ba’ Setan”, or “Satan’s water”. The Penan have been heavily influenced by the Sidang Injil Borneo or Borneo Evangelical Mission, a Christian denomination that discourages followers from smoking or boozing.
But despite the prevalence of SIB in Sarawak, alcoholism is a growing nightmare, among all our diverse ethnic groups. It is a routine sight in any town, big or small, to see coffee-shop tables covered with empty cans of beer or stout – at breakfast.
It is also a common occurrence to come across see young people, mostly boys, but girls too, drunk and disorderly. For instance, in the quiet, charming town of Saratok, with its hospitable Iban and Chinese citizens, I was shocked to find several teenagers lurching around the town square, shouting slurred words at each other and trying to carry on a fistfight while struggling to remain upright.
Alcohol misuse is most common among the Iban, the largest ethnic group, but all Sarawakians including Muslim Malays and Melanaus, struggle with the demon in a bottle. Any visitor to villages from Padawan to Merapok would come across men drinking langkau, or local moonshine, during an evening, or gulping down smuggled beer – three tins for ten ringgit.
A crime-ridden industry
Smuggling and tax evasion are the cornerstones of the alcohol industry in Sarawak. The brewing companies, dominated by Anchor and Carlsberg, win. Both of the two top Malaysian breweries win, to the tune of over a billion ringgit of revenue a year apiece in Malaysia, a significant proportion of which comes from Sarawak. And the coffee-shop owners win.
But not everyone is a winner.
Alcohol is damaging the social fabric of various ethnic groups in Sarawak. Absenteeism from school or work, unemployment, domestic violence, as well as liver cirrhosis, high blood pressure, brain damage and a myriad other illnesses leading to premature death, are well-established consequences of alcohol misuse.
Many farming families lose the small amounts of cash they have, simply to support the drinking habit of one of the adults – usually a man.
Traditional alcohol use
Providing huge quantities of tuak, or rice wine, to guests has traditionally been considered a staple of hospitality in most Iban and Bidayuh villages. The Lun Bawang of northern Sarawak were described as being “drunk 180 days a year”, after every harvest, in the book “Drunk Before Dawn” by SIB missionary Shirley Lees. The SIB now takes pride in the fact that most Lun Bawang have found the faith, and have, by and large, embraced tee-totalism.
It is undeniable that the sobering influence of Christianity has certainly improved alcoholism rates among the Lun Bawang and other Orang Ulu groups. The resulting benefits in productivity increased rice harvests from once a year to twice, or even three times, annually (sober farmers plough straighter furrows).
But missionaries have also played some role in erasing some of the shared cultural memories of the Lun Bawang, and other Orang Ulu. I remember asking a Lun Bawang friend in his 40s, Sigar, whether he remembered Lun Bawang living in longhouses. He replied, dismissively, that they used to live in longhouses “during the pagan times”.
The rise of alcoholism
The rise of alcohol dependency has mirrored the growing availability of cheap spirits, costing a few ringgit a bottle, going under the nameslangkau or chap ah pek or pelayar emas.
Recent violent clashes between poor Malay villagers in Bintawa Hilir and the police were fueled by heavy drinking by the boys and young men. The entirely predictable knee-jerk response of dull politicians like Daud Abdul Rahman was to attempt to reduce alcohol sales in Muslim-majority areas by imposing new fines on shops – a pointless and stupid exercise.
Little effort has been made to understand the social currents that have supported the growth of alcoholism. Unemployment and poverty are major causes among the disenfranchised Malays and Dayaks of Sarawak.
Our lack of meaningful jobs throughout Sarawak is caused by the weak economy. Our wealthy state has bled dry by the rich, powerful and shamelessly corrupt politicians and their parasitic families.
The lack of parental guidance in huge families (thanks in part to lacklustre efforts in family planning by the authorities) has also alienated the urban and suburban young. Low education standards and the near absence of cheap communal sports and recreation activities for the young have also played their part.
Alcohol misuse is common among all other native peoples confronted with a rapidly shifting culture, and subjugation by a colonial power. Native Americans, the Inuit, Aboriginal and Maori peoples have some of the worst alcohol abuse problems in their new colonised ‘nations’ of the United States, Canada, Australia and new Zealand.
The high rates of alcoholism and diabetes among the Aborigines has been mirrored by an abrupt exposure to alcohol, fast food and sugar, previously not a part of their daily lives. The spread of these diseases has been mirrored among our own indigenous people.
It’s hard to imagine 20 years have passed since we sat together with our friend Fred, who died of AIDS about fifteen years ago, discussing the television news coverage of ILGO’s (Irish Gay and Lesbian Organization) attempt to join New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. “What’s with those people talking to press on camera?” he asked. “Aren’t they afraid? Aren’t they afraid people will find out? That they’re –
Irish?”
Fred, an Irish-American gay guy, could say that.
Twenty years later, the Ancient Order of Hibernians perseveres in this bigotry, but I find I wish to keep on fighting (like the Irish) to make or keep St. Patrick’s Day somehow holy.
My memories of St. Patrick’s Day in New York do not revolve whoozily around Guinness and Jameson, although both have been on hand. The day conjures the stinking cruciferous vegetable, boiled meat, damp Aran wool, bagpipes keening on Channel 11, sharp-looking firemen in dress uniforms with black hair and pink cheeks congregating, flirtatious, post-parade, in 2nd Avenue gin-mill doorways. One never knows, on St. Patrick’s Day, what the season will seem to be when the day falls. Whether snow or sunburn.
My grandmother, Mary Madigan, born in 1900 in County Mayo, lived the second half of her life in a 4th floor railroad flat on East 73rd in Manhattan not far from the parade route. For more than four decades, her New York kith and kin would drop by on St. Patrick’s Day after checking out the over-long parade. My Irish twin, Scott, and I used to go together. Each wore green but he was more stylish in this; he wore a Donegal cap and fisherman’s sweater, whereas I, favoring sawed-off T-shirt with epithets relating to the pontiff or British queen thereupon emblazoned, adopted a more pogue ma thóin approach. One year our brother Gregg appeared with shamrock shaved out of his buzz-cut hair. Our grandmother greeted him not with the usual “Erin Go Bragh” but with “Did ye lose yer bloody job?” but he was boss enough, by then, to keep his job, even with the saint’s symbol for the trinity carved into his coif.
Mary Madigan worked as a lace-maker before coming to New York, at the age of 25 in 1925. Once here, she worked as a maid, fell in love with a Limerick lad from the dance halls, and raised a brood in St. Rose of Lima (which the Irish pronounced like the bean) parish uptown. Every year, on March 17th, I wear the Kelly green beret she crocheted for me 35 years ago.
I’ll wear it to morning mass on St. Patrick’s Day, and maybe to the tea party at the rectory after, where, if “the luck of the Irish” is mine, I’ll enjoy cracking wise (in keeping with decade-old custom) for a spell with the 80-something McCann girls, who descend, as do I, from Mayo. Our former pastor, a foodie, used to bake soda bread for this gathering — Begorrah! How the church ladies would go on about the bread (“himself”) “Fhahther” had made. You’d think the Lord and Savior had slid down a rainbow to toss in the caraway seeds.
In recent years, we’ve thrown a few good house parties, with Irish poetry, music, Guinness, stir-fried cabbage, soda bread, lamb stew, boiled meat, salmon on black bread and — last time around — a green cake in the shape of a shamrock. With the help of green confections (and, one year, shamrock-shaped macaroni) I’ve passed a wee bit of St. Patrick’s Day on to my children. I’m not sure when my Ashkenazi Jewish husband informed me early in our relationship that he’d been dubbed an “honorary Irishman” by lads with the surnames “Gallagher” and “Clifford” whether he was warning me or pitching me — but marriage did make it official. However, a thousand Irish wives more persuasive than I could never shake his belief that boiling a perfectly good brisket is not a sin.
Even in the wake (so to speak) of Order of Ancient Hibernian homophobia, I’ve taken my children to the parade thinking it (in all its splendor and hideousness) part of their heritage as New York Irish Jews. Nine years ago the pastor of a Brooklyn church I had just begun to attend invited a local Gay and Lesbian Catholic group (which had been shunned by the parade’s marshal) to march with our parish. I never imagined my husband might consent to walk in any parade, much less behind a Catholic banner in St. Patrick’s honor. But there I saw him, crossing Union with our trinity of toddlers in tow, just ahead of the lavender and rainbow banner.
Last night I made soda bread using Mary Madigan’s recipe. As I worked alone in the kitchen, I found myself singing the grim and exquisite lyrics to The Minstrel Boy as Joe Strummer’s epic instrumental version played: ambient strains suitable for luxuriating in Irish sorrow.
It may be resolutely Irish to point out that with my grandmother, mother, and brother Scott all “gone home” as the Irish sometimes call it, St. Patrick’s Day is bittersweet.
To the Irish, “home” means two things: the beloved place we leave, and the Heaven for which we wait.
This St. Patrick’s day, all my Irish dead will line up behind my friend Maureen the artist.
Last year, smack in the middle of a cruelly vernal St. Patrick’s Day, Maureen, a brilliant painter and master teacher, died at the age of 48 after fighting, like the Irish, the cancer that fuelled her valor and claimed her body. We were friends for 25 years. She was my sister in culture, faith and art. She’s gone (“home”) but she’s here too, “homing” in those she loves. The two of us spent much of her last year together enjoying what the Irish call great craick (great times) in hospital waiting rooms and chemo suites.
Though not ethnic Irish, Maureen was as Irish as anyone I’ve ever known. She was adopted as an infant and raised by powerfully honorable and loving Irish-American parents just outside of Boston. She was a stubborn Catholic believer. In her last year, she claimed to have found healing (this, as a cure eluded her) while sitting at her dying mother’s kitchen table with her sister and the others she described as “the Irish ladies.” (They weren’t all “technically” Irish, but they shared a dark, light way of looking at suffering that lent Maureen a sustaining boost.) A progressive and intellectual, Maureen had her grievances with “the Church” and the American Irish politic, but she loved us, and was on board with some true version of heading “home.”
As I helped with her “arrangements” last St. Patrick’s Day, working side by side with the heroic sister whose name day it was, I was dogged by a sense that the timing of Maureen’s death was some kind of Irish joke on her part, perhaps designed to take the edge off. I had the feeling Maureen was snickering devilishly, defiantly — I had to smile in the face of this. I rushed from her wake to host an annual spoken word, Irish-themed event called“Blarneypalooza” the next day. Never had lyricism so comforted me.
Blarneypalooza takes place each March in the historic Old Stone House, in Brooklyn. For the first time, Blarneypalooza will take place on St. Patrick’s Day. Non-Irish, non-poet futurist and situationist Larry Honig will unleash God only knows what gifts of genius gab. Playwright and poet Pat Smith will recite his elegant, sophisticated verse on his saint’s day. Poet, writer, editor Barbara O’Dair — a Molly with a pinch of Bridget thrown in — will read salty verse. Poet Lynn McGee will read about an Irish love, an Irish bar, and an Irish death. Poet and professor Mike Sweeney, author of In Memory of the Fast Break will come out fighting (Irish) to land syllabic crosses via a gorgeous epic poem about fighting clean in a dirty arena, Octagon:
Once you fall in the octagon they strike up a serenade of Come On Up to the HouseOnce you fall in the octagon they dangle your bleeding scalp over the padded rail… Once you fall in the octagon they hose off your DNA Once you fall in the octagon you’re done with cartilage grafts & tracheotomies Once you fall in the octagon they throw a green funeral & air out your gunny sack
A major celebrity appears to be destroying himself with alcohol before the eyes of a nation, and his antics become comic fodder, fueling an endless thirst for celebrity voyeurism.
What is obscured among the ridicule being heaped upon Charlie Sheen is our own discomfort in confronting alcohol addiction.
The star of the hit TV show Two and a Half Men elicits laughter for attacking those who seek professional treatment as “trolls” lacking the “tiger blood” to beat the disease themselves. But he also points up powerful contradictory attitudes about alcoholism that scholars say can prevent alcoholics and their loved ones from seeking help.
Shame lies at the heart of addiction, said Robert H. Albers, a professor of pastoral care at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and the author of Shame: A Faith Perspective.
“The pervasive resistance to help on the part of those affected and afflicted is due in part to the ingrained belief that if we were strong enough, we could overcome this malady. … Deep down inside, many of us do not believe that addiction is an illness,” Albers wrote in an article in the Journal of Ministry in Addiction & Recovery. “Denial and the conspiracy of silence are no mystery when it comes to addiction. The power of shame shackles all of the people who are adversely affected by addiction.”
Religion can be both help and hindrance in the battle against alcoholism, research suggests.
Fewer problem drinkers
Religious institutions have differing perspectives on alcohol use, from general prohibitions among some evangelical denominations and groups such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the use of wine in the Eucharist by groups such as the Catholic Church.
There is, however, almost a universal teaching against alcohol abuse, and research tends to consistently show people who are active in their faith are much less likely to be problem drinkers.
Some 100 studies have suggested religion has a positive effect on preventing alcohol-related problems, researchers Christopher Ellison, Jennifer Barrett and Benjamin Moulton noted in an article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion on “Gender, Marital Status, and Alcohol Behavior: The Neglected Role of Religion.”
In perhaps the most consistent finding, the researchers said, individuals from conservative Protestant and sectarian religious communities, along with people from all groups who worship regularly, are less likely to use or abuse alcohol. In their analysis of 15,424 respondents to the General Social Survey from 1977 to 1994, Ellison, Barrett and Moulton found a particularly strong relationship among religious conservatives married to one another.
Compared to unmarried nonconservatives, men in conservative unions were nearly 80 percent less likely to be problem drinkers than abstainers, the study found. Women in conservative marriages were 86 percent less likely than single, nonconservative women to be potential problem drinkers.
For all individuals, people who attended services regularly were much less likely to abuse alcohol, the study found.
A study involving a telephone survey in 1995, 1997 and 1999 of more than 5,000 Hispanics also indicated positive effects from frequent attendance and being a member of a denomination that objects to alcohol use.
Among Catholic respondents, for example, 16 percent who attended services weekly or more — compared to 42 percent of those who did not attend services — were likely to have reported binge drinking in the past month. Sociologist Julie Ford of the State University of New York-Brockport, reported the findings in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
When it comes to dealing with the disease, however, many religious communities are less successful.
Overcoming shame
The role of religion in addressing alcohol abuse “may be sort of a double-edged sword,” said Ellison, a sociologist at The University of Texas at San Antonio.
The strong norms against alcohol abuse, particularly in conservative congregations, might deter a lot of people from admitting they have a problem and seeking help.
“It’s very difficult to talk about. If you do have a problem, who are you going to?” Ellison said.
It is especially difficult to seek help from groups that emphasize alcoholism as a problem of human sinfulness that can be overcome by free will, he said. Religious groups that are more understanding of genetic and social factors that contribute to the disease may be more open in confronting alcoholism.
In his journal article, Albers noted that the belief that addiction is a weakness is a powerful contributor to the conspiracy of silence on alcoholism: “In a society that idolizes the strong, the tough, the independent, and the self-made and self-saved person, succumbing to the power of addiction is an obvious manifestation of weakness.”
Even family members of alcoholics often isolate themselves out of fear of what people will think. “So the family gradually disappears from the social arena of community and church,” Albers wrote.
Yet research indicates being part of caring communities can help both alcoholics come to terms with their addiction and provide family members and friends with critical support.
So what are we to make of all the snickering attention devoted to Charlie Sheen, the piling on of shame and ridicule that only reinforces the fears and silence of millions of Americans dealing with alcoholism?
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