A Barbarian in Asia

A BARBARIAN WITH THE MALAYS

Malays, Javanese of Sumatra, Balinese, Malay Sundanese of Borneo, of Flores, mixed with, married to a hundred insular races, to the Bataka, to the Dyaks, to the Chinese, to the Arabs, and even to the Papus, converted in turn to the religion of India (Hinduism and Buddhism), then to Mohammedanism — here is enough to trip up anyone who attempts to generalize at every step. It is annoying.

THE BARBARIAN IN MALAYA

The Malay has something wholesome, noble, clean and human about him.

The Chinese, the Hindu, all those original races compare unfavorably with him. Besides, originality is a defect, the outward sign of defects.

He is precise, neat. Many of them remind one of the Basques.

Unfortunately, I shall hardly get to know the Malays… There is not a thing I do not like about them. Not a form. Not a color. Their houses, their trains, their boats, their hotels and their clothes, everything pleases me. They have the same taste as mine for oblique forms (straight towers are pretentious looking and at the same time rather silly).

The houses, with their concave roofs, look like waves, their boats look as if they were sailing along the sky. The comma is the keynote of everything.

The Malay kriss, the only really beautiful weapon, nonchalant like its master, but also firm, easy to hold, and looking for trouble, seems made for blows at random on the body of a crowd.

The Malay hates an outburst. When he gets angry, it is really because he cannot bear things any longer, he is out of patience. Then his anger makes havoc and ends by his own death.

The Malays are the only people whose constructions please me. It would disgust me to own a house. Making an exception, at Johore, I inquired the cost of buying a house: two hundred francs. The whole effect modest, but pleasant; on piles, three rooms, some corridors, a penthouse, all in wood so light that it cannot weigh more than three hundred kilos.

Batik, the only dress material that does not hurt one’s eyes, that does not snatch one’s attention.

Therefore, the Malay, who is lazy like a well-bred man, has, even if he is poor, a charming house, though with nothing pretty about it.

In Malaya there are no ugly houses for the common people.

If you see an ugly one, a European or a Chinaman lives in it.

The Malay is kind, open-armed, full of humor, a great mocker.

In their plays, where combined decorative and stylized movements abound, they often throw in one or two odd pauses while they busy themselves doing a mime without words, extremely soberly, as though it were not intended for the public, and this is quite comical.

The behavior of the Javanese is so sympathetic, while that of the Balinese I found distinctly less so when I perceived that they are particularly anxious to be proper. The Malay likes propriety.

Batik is very proper. This had never occurred to me. Their style of hairdressing even more so.

The Balinese woman is dressed in a mere trifle, but this trifle, dark-colored (violet-brown) is completely proper in design.

Neither sober, nor pure, nor eloquent, but proper.

They all have deportment. Malays, Javanese, Balinese; their deportment does not suggest excessive dignity or pride, nor is it transcendental. It is deportment.

A Javanese dancer never seems ridiculous, exaggerated or naive, as those elsewhere are so apt to be, for the thing that most resembles the dance is grandiloquence.

A Javanese dress material can be offered to anyone, to no matter whom, anywhere in the world; it is always ‘in good taste.’

The Balinese women leave their breasts bare. They are not all completely unapproachable. Nevertheless, if something has displeased them, it is not sorrow, nor anger, nor sulking that reveals the fact, but an offended look, the look that one knows so well, that belongs only to proper people; and if she does something wrong, she immediately has the impression not of wrong but of impropriety, and I could tell a personal anecdote about this the main theme of which makes me laugh heartily every time I think about it.

Nothing about the Malay is offensive. His face does not reveal abnormal appetites, vices, or defects in his character.

The Malay forgets many things. He forgets everything that is said to him. He will never forget to walk properly. He is proper to the depths of his soul. And the Javanese even more so.

The Javanese without his little scarf properly arranged on his head would not dare to go out.

And when he goes out, he swings his arms a great deal, dangling them. You will not see him playing the fool. No indeed.

The Javanese has something about him that does not go forward, but backward.

The Javanese face seems as though it had been wrought like the pebbles in torrents, polished by continual rubbing.

His face has suffered a setback.

Not only is his forehead rounded, but an eternal hand seems to be placed on him, pressing him down and holding back his personality.

Foreheads that do not fight, foreheads that escape and all they ask is to turn back.

His face is hollow like a saucer, not bellicose but submissive; the nose is turned up, yet wide and flat at the end; the head of an orang-outang, and often the head of a frog.

The face of the Javanese woman is marvelously obedient, restful, almost musical.

All Malayan things express a particular fondness for the cockspur form, almost an obsession with them (and joined to the stiff, upright prow, but a prow placed behind).

The cockspur is one of the few natural weapons in the animal world that is turned in a backward direction.

The hilt of the kriss is in this well-known shape.

The roofs of the houses of the Minangkabau, in Sumatra, resemble waves fastened down. The wave starts, dashes on, there it is at its maximum, at its crest. It is going to break at the point where the roof ends. The roofs rolling away are a magnificent sight; they have as many as twenty crests.

The Javanese hat has two oblique points.

The Javanese actor is one of the few people in the world who wears his chief ornament in the back.

And this pointed ornament that he has on his shoulders, a sort of prow (no stern), a singular thrusting-out from the shoulders, rather makes one think of the exaggerated animation of the wagtail’s behind.

Balinese actors almost always turn their backs to each other; even if it is a prince courting a princess, progress is parallel, they never turn round.

The Javanese and the Balinese go along the road in single file (even where there is no danger whatever from traffic), talk to each other without moving their heads; nor will anybody who calls out to them in passing make them do so. If hailed, they always manage to avoid turning round, so odious would this lack of deportment appear to them.

They sit with faces turned toward their houses, their backs to the road, as if they had an eye in their shoulders. In many cases, indeed, in their shoulders, something is there that we lack.

In their music the pentatonic scale is used, the flat scale, the scale that does not get stuck.

Nowhere in the world is there music less catchy than the Balinese and Javanese gamelan. The gamelan utilizes only percussion instruments. Gongs, muffled drums (the tredang), metal kettles (trompong), metal disks (the gender).

Never do these instruments tell or take hold. But they are not so much percussion instruments as instruments of emerging sound; the sound emerges, a round sound that comes to pay a visit, floats around, then disappears. The resonance is stopped by the fingers, feeling their way, seriously, attentively, in the great carcass of sound.

Even the dancers who tell of the love of a prince and a princess tell nothing at all. This is the prince, this is the princess. And they push each other away instead of coming together.

The Balinese dance is a dance with the hand held flat, a dance with the palms open. It neither gives nor rejects, it gropes along the invisible walls of the atmosphere. It is spread out and blind.

The pupils seek the corner of the eye, go to the extreme end, change place in a lateral movement. The neck is dislocated laterally, nothing goes forward; everything aspires to the horizontal, to the immense, to the mural, to a sort of immense façade, for everything moves in a space that is absolute and mural. Most of the time the dancers are held by their knees to the ground, tortured there on the spot (by degrees, impatient movements on the spot, shudders like the ripples on a lake, hypnotism, delirium without frenzy, a sort of petrification, of stratification, of the inner self). A music that covers, that covers one in darkness, and in which one finds rest and support.

And who is responsible for this music? Men? No, in Bali, all that resounds, plays, lives, terrorizes, vibrates, comes from ‘the demons.’¹

BALI

The Dutch are perfectly delighted to possess an island where the women’s breasts are bare.² So once and for all they have forbidden the entrance of the island to missionaries, who would promptly have had the breasts hidden, destroying at the same time any interest the place might have had for the tourist. If a missionary does come, it has to be secretly, in the strictest incognito and with false passports, like a Russian Communist.

Are we so much in need of demons? When one arrives in Bali, from Koeboetambakan on, one is enchanted. There are demons everywhere, at the entrance of temples, of houses.

Men, animals, plants — no, decidedly that does not make a world; one must have demons. Carving a demon means adding something to the population of the island. But to carve women and men, what is the use? Just as if one did not know them, as if one had never seen such a thing. ..

And in the Javanese countryside, a woman with her breast quite naked is not an unheard-of sight.

Besides, their demons in Bali are not irritating and idiotic like those of Southern India, they are quite orderly and they hold a club in their hand, look more as if they were bluffing than really terrible; are not at all frightening, and take part, in spite of their grimaces, in a certain gaiety such as may be found in a pleasant tropical island. The Balinese people live with the demons. There is one at the door of every house. They could not do without it; it is their presence that makes a cremation so interesting. But I am not acquainted with the symbolism of the ceremony.

Some of them (represented by Balinese) catch hold of the coffin, the shroud, with a few bamboos around it; there are forty-odd of them and the struggle begins. The object of certain ones is to reach a platform where the corpse, when it gets there, will enjoy about half an hour’s quiet. (The object of the others is to prevent this.) But now the struggle is at its height, a scrimmage in which the coffin gets lost while at the same time the fighters’ heads go down, plunge as in football — scrimmage from which a drowned man’s head emerges from time to time, a head overcome by a pathetic and rather decorative fatigue, nearly a faint; out of which also arise suddenly proud faces! ‘Oh! no, you shan’t have it. No indeed. Just come and see…’ curt challenges follow, a certain lack of actual rage. Thereupon the steps leading to the platform are approached. Ha! none of that. It is too soon!

And the priest throws water on their shoulders.

Immediately the demons begin to wake up. We shall see what we see. And in fact, the scuffle is getting farther away from the platform.

After a quarter of an hour of renewed fighting and fresh buckets of water, the group is clinging to the bottom of the steps. Once more for and against. The people on the steps and on the platform show they are determined to repel every attack. Nothing, as far as one can see, has been gained, when all of a sudden, in one second, the coffin is passed like a cigar. It is there on the platform. But alone.

The demons have been pushed back. One has fainted. A half-dozen are stretched out, their backs on the grass, unable henceforth to aid a dead man to go in one direction or another. However, after a half-hour’s rest, the corpse, escorted anew, must again be delivered up to the assault of the demons, and transported to the place of cremation.

However, at the supreme moment of the incineration, nine-tenths of the people have left.

Balinese women have more breast than expression. After a time at Bali, one ends by looking at the men.

The European who sees bare breasts cannot help thinking that something is going to happen. But nothing does happen. So he gets accustomed to it.

I am deeply convinced that I would accustom myself very rapidly to seeing these women completely nude.

A breast hardly expresses anything. It is the face that one consults to know the kind of character one is dealing with. The women, in fact, among themselves look each other in the eye, but they do not look at each other’s body.

The breasts of the Balinese women are beautiful, well, that is all. And very much in harmony with their pleasant, not very expressive faces.

I remember having been struck and disillusioned many a time in France by the fact that a woman’s breasts, when I happened to see them uncovered, were only beautiful, while the face was so wrought by intelligence, by a soul so odd and so exceptional, that I had been persuaded somehow that the breasts too would be exceptional and original. But a breast is not a face.

Although I know these things very well, nevertheless every time I saw the breasts of an intelligent woman they bestialized and transformed her for me so much, so much. Young girls with such touching expressions became, though they did not themselves suspect it perhaps, good for nothing but to be enjoyed by and to belong to everybody.

One of the things one is most struck by in Bali is the women who have ceased to be women. They have got over it. In some cases where the breasts had been too distended they were shriveled up and lay almost flat on the chest, which was now shaped like that of a man.

The face had reverted long ago to the male type and had lost all trace of femininity. The Malayan bones are visible. The woman is not frail, but she is transitory. In some cases she retains but few traces of the feminine character, like souvenirs of a journey. The woman makes the man. She makes a few of them. Then goes to pieces.

What the Americans like so much about the Balinese is that ‘they are friendly,’ a thing that is very much appreciated and that one finds among Americans also.

The Balinese like festivals; not a day is without one. There are plays and dancing. And where there is one going on, everybody comes in, everybody is invited, relatives, friends, strangers, foreigners.

One evening, I was late setting about it, I arranged for a performance of Wayang Koelit to be given at the house of a native. When I got there we were absolutely alone, the orchestra, my three guests and myself.

Two hours later, we were lost in a crowd of six hundred persons. The smell of Malayan bodies surrounded us like smoke, vendors of cakes had installed themselves at the door. Laughter came from all sides at the proper time, one had difficulty getting out, and then (we left before the end) many people were still coming in.

The Malayan, like the Japanese, has nothing of the transcendental, no philosophy — other people’s religion (but only as an ornament), and a certain taste.

The resemblance between the Malayan and the Japanese (mind you, it is the Japanese who is the probable borrower, if borrowing there has been, and not merely a relationship between races) that struck me the most, was at the shadow-theater in Bali.

The puppets do not particularly resemble the puppets of Osaka (though the Malay like the Japanese is ‘proper’). (What Japanese would go without an umbrella?) But it was the shrieking, horror-play voice of the Japanese actor, the same behavior, the same voice production, the same manner of expression, though in Balinese, a tongue that is quite remote from the Japanese. And this accompanies every manifestation of Japanese and Balinese art. (But the Balinese actor is naturally not so unpleasant.)

The Wayang Koelit (shadow-play) of Java is really the same as the Wayang Koelit of Bali, but the style is quite different.

The Balinese is still close to the demons.

His music is full of impatience, of trembling, of fever.

It is satanic. The marionettes (cut out of leather) fight each other with unheard-of violence, fast and excitedly. The actor shrieks. The light flickers constantly, making the characters tremble on the screen with a strange life, palpitating, trepidating and electric.

Once the light is cast on the screen it passes through the perforations, outlines and at the same time illuminates them with the clearness of evidence or of stern reality, or rather of a super reality sliced with a knife and taken out of the sky.

Then, when their act is ended, they withdraw, blurred and at the same time vibrating (the actor’s hand shakes them constantly), coming back soon afterward, sudden and refulgent on the canvas, giving a tremendous impression of magical petrifaction and of violence that no film could convey.

In the Wayang Koelit, the light is motionless. The characters, most of the time, are stuck by their base in the stump of a bamboo that is parallel with the stage. They move the arms rather than the body, arms that are limp and dangling. Even their fighting is not terribly fierce. But the action being accompanied by a continuous noise like pistol shots, the inner tension is achieved.

Their voices (the voices of those reciting) are soft, melodious, low and reflective, and as though merciful; the words, polite, deeply felt, ornate, dreamy voices, almost absent, church voices, a singing that often recalls the Bengali songs, their meditative songs.

The Bengali language is too contemplative. (It can only say â, â, â, ô; the other vowels are always treated like poor relations). The Javanese language is full of meaning, of the meaning of life, grave, good and lazy.

Who has not been moved by the Tabe Touan, in Bali (Good day, Sir) said so sweetly; by their way of saying orang — not in the French manner, to be sure, stumbling along, ou, au, like scaring away the wolves, but a light and quite lively a, and the u, that surrounds it like a pond, and a gentle good g, that picks up and tucks in, and carries away the whole thing, a whole thing quite lively like an eel? Wayang orang.

Now the Chinese language is good, but it is dull and washed-out.

A friend said to me at a dance performance in Bali: They look like hens in a hen-coop.

It is quite true. Like hens in a hen-coop; the neck is all that works.

In the modern Bali plays, rows of squatting men, playing sparrows on a branch, in rows of eight or nine, dislocating their necks, rolling their eyes and grumbling but not flying away, and aside from that, bluffing it out as much as to say: ‘Hold onto me, fellows, back there. Or I might make trouble.’

What I was able to see of the Malayan theater of the present day in Singapore (one of them was called the Grand Opera of Borneo) was not unpleasant, but it did not amount to much. Dancers with horrible short dresses, oscillating from one leg to the other, in one spot, glued by who knows what ‘chewing gum,’ tunes that were slow, sentimental, muddy, variety-show, themes for a primary school; masters and servants, nobleman and prince, mother and son, self-sacrifice, the great dramatic scene, entreaty, getting down on one’s knees, great operatic airs, headdress of warriors or rather of noblemen, a kind of Egyptian eureus forty centimeters high; idiotic effects, the fondness for great ceremonies, raised seats, bowing down, and also gross farces right in the middle of the show, kicks on the bottoms of minor characters, bad jokes and something that smelled all over the place of the scourge of the sentimental.

Someone who knew fish only through the aquarium of Batavia would have a singular notion of them, but on the whole rather correct. He would know that neither the color, nor the shapes, nor the aspect are what characterize a fish. A toothbrush, a cab, a rabbit may be a fish; it all depends on the insides.

I saw a young example (old ones are quite different) of Ostracium cornutum, which is nothing but a little calf’s head. This head navigates. A block with a tiny mustache that vibrates. One must look closely to perceive it. Is that all? Not absolutely. This head has a tail, not a body, but a tail; cut a match in two, well, half of the match, but suppose it to be rather flexible, and there it is.

Take it all in all, it is possible that the colonials may have done less harm to the colonies than they seemed fated to do.

Look at a little Dutch boy. It is an inharmonious creature, apt to shout, roar, break, destroy, and to assert the weight of his dangerous imagination.

As an adult, the Dutchman will be considerably more phlegmatic. But perhaps he may destroy and alter more coldly, more scientifically the things around him.

There are everywhere such invasions of different races, Huns, Tartars, Mongolians, Normans, etc., and such an afflux of religions, Islamic, Buddhistic, Animist, Nestorian, Christian, etc., that no one is pure; each one is composed of a horrid mixture, not counting the prejudices that he has acquired in his own country.

Therefore, when one retires into oneself, flees from the world, and when one succeeds in getting rid of that enormous superstructure and that multiple controversy, one attains to a peace, on a plane so unheard of that one might ask oneself if this is not the ‘supernatural.’

What is a civilization? A blind alley.

No, Confucius is not great.

No, Tsi Hoang Ti is not great, nor Gautama Buddha, but since then nothing better has been done.

A people should be ashamed to have a history.

And the European just as much as the Asiatic, naturally.

It is in the future that they must see their history.

¹The finest theatrical performance that I saw was at a Malay theater in Singapore. Fishermen armed with knives and faggots of reeds fought against a kind of saw-fish. The struggle was formidable. Yet so unbelievably stressed, that the infinitely diverse movements seemed woven in some mechanism and to belong to another world.

²The Balinese women go bare-breasted. Already the Javanese women’s dress is exceedingly low-cut, leaving as much of the breasts exposed as possible, stopping just at the nipple, entirely uncovering the place where the breast is separated into two hemispheres, that hollow which disturbs schoolboys so much.