The long house at Annah Rais

Sometimes, there are connections made that just couldn’t happen any other way. Example: Contacting a complete stranger, the stranger inviting you to stay, and then commenting over breakfast, “You guys are interested in music? You should go out and see my friend Arthur…” and the rest is history.

Little did we know that we were being delivered into the hands of a master craftsman and musician who is working with his whole heart to preserve the art, culture and musical history of his people.

Arthur Bordman Kanying met us in a white t-shirt and blue jeans, long grey hair flowing down his back and a wide smile. For the next three hours, he talked, and we listened, as the story of the Bidayuh people unfolded along the wide bamboo walkways of their long houses. He explained how the tribal people make sugar, grow rice and harvest their fruit from the lush jungle that grows up into the sky on the mountainsides flanking their valley. He grew up in the village and told us the stories of the arrival of electricity, and the road and what life was like before that.

He took us into their “head house” and showed us a macabre basket of skulls hanging next to their war drum.

There was a glint of pride in his eyes as he explained the Bidayuh’s past as head hunters and that there were three more big baskets full buried under the head house. “Our people were mighty warriors! We helped the Brooks in putting down the uprising around Kuching, and we were rewarded from the Sultan of Brunei with this cannon.” Sure enough, there is a Dutch canon next to the door with both Dutch and Arabic script engraved on it.

We sat in a house that the village has set aside to show outsiders and he told us stories about the arrival of the white man in the mid 1800’s and the decline of head hunting after that, and the arrival of the Japanese during World War Two and the evils perpetrated on his people. “They forced the villagers to give up everything they needed, especially their food. But what the Japanese don’t know is that we keep most of our rice hidden in baskets up in the dark, hot, top part of the long houses, so they didn’t find it all!” Again his eyes lit up and his pride in his people’s history shone clearly.

We all laughed as we walked beneath a cocoa tree and heard “Gangam Style” blaring loudly from some neighbour’s speakers. The juxtaposition of old and new, the blend of traditional living with modern overtones was an interesting reality. We passed women in traditional skirts coming out of the jungle with baskets on their backs, carried by a strap across their foreheads, full of fruit from the day’s gathering, and we passed children in Angry Birds t-shirts and cheap plastic sandals playing on the elevated bamboo decks.

Chickens roosted in the trees, chicks huddled beneath hens in the dirt, a cat with a bent tail picked her way along a railing, women sifted rice in handwoven rattan baskets, old men with three teeth and long stretches of pink gums between them laughed and greeted us from their front porch seats. We bought a bag of mangosteen for 1 RM (about thirty cents) the ladies threw in a second bag for free, since we have so many kids.

The bridge over the river from the lower long house to the upper long house creaked as we leaned over to examine the clear water below. “Are there any crocodiles in there?” I asked Arthur, having seen some at the wildlife center earlier in the day. “No, our stretch of river is very safe,” he said. “Our water is clear and crocodiles need murky, muddy water. I’ve lived here since I was a boy and I’ve never encountered any dangerous animals around the village.” He told us how, when he was a boy, the water was never shallower than a man’s waist, now it is only about knee deep. “The river is changing,” he observed. “Years ago, it was a 12 hour boat ride into Kuching, on a good day, with a good river… coming back took 3 or 4 nights camped by the side of the river. Now, since they put in the road, it’s not even an hour into town! It’s crazy!”

He woke Rambo up before he came to collect us, we heard later. Rambo had been out trekking in the jungle that morning and was napping his afternoon away. By the time we arrived at his front door he had benches and a woven mat laid over the bamboo to welcome us. Rambo is Arthur’s music buddy. Together, they work on learning the old music from the one remaining old man of the previous generation. They play on pratuon’k, zithers made of chunks of giant bamboo that are only cut on the full moon.

Arthur hand makes these instruments in the old style, “But I use some modern tools, like  knives and sandpaper. In the old days, our people didn’t have metal.” They are beautiful, to say the least. The “strings” are cut carefully in a v-shape from the outer peel of the bamboo and then a hole is cut and a drum board, also bamboo, is inserted on the opposite side. The instrument is tuned using little bamboo bridges beneath each string, and each instrument needs to be tuned and re-tuned to the pentatonic scale for fully 18 months after it is made. By that time, it will be fully dry and the tuning should be permanent. Arthur, perhaps the premiere craftsman and artist on these instruments in the world, tinkers incessantly with design and tuning. He’s discovered that iron wood bridges produce a “brighter” sound and so now he’s working on creating instruments with ironwood instead of bamboo bridges.

The two men sat down on the mat and lay their instruments in their laps. They picked up sticks, maybe six inches long, wrapped at one end with black string and began to strike the strings in chorus, drumming with their opposite hands. The sound was haunting and captivating. They played us a song that has existed in their cultural consciousness for untold generations, the old man in the village taught it to them.

Rambo and Arthur spent a long hour with the children, teaching them the beginning song and patiently laughing with them as they tried to coordinate striking the strings with drumming at the same time. It is harder than it looks! “I tried to play ‘Rolling In The Deep’ on here the other day,” Arthur smiled, “It came out okay. I asked the old man, our teacher, if he would be upset with us or stop teaching us if we started playing other things, experimenting and expanding the sounds of the instrument. He thought about it a long time and then he said, “No, I think it is good. In the old days we knew only this valley. We couldn’t have any outside contact, so we didn’t know that there were other sounds, other things to do with it.” So now I am working on making an instrument with nine strings so that I can get two full octaves of tones out of it and play different things.”

I think that was the thing that most struck me about our visit to Annah Rais, the blending of old and new.

The villagers are modern people, who enjoy the modern conveniences that have come to their village within their lifetimes: electricity, running water, the road. But they are also people with an old collective soul and they are working to preserve their heritage as Bidayuh, for themselves, their children and as a gift to the world. It’s not a contrived place, or an “experience” created for outsiders; rather it is their life, which they generously make a point of sharing. Arthur talked about the difficulty for indigenous populations everywhere of finding the balance between preservation and forward motion, between looking back and looking forward, between an inward focus and an outward expansion. These are struggles that continue to play out in the day-to-day, between bamboo construction and rice cultivation by the light of the TV and with Gangam Style as the soundtrack, beneath the rhythmic beat of their zithars.

Arthur talking about his instrument:

Arthur & Rambo playing a traditional piece:

Google Arthur Bordman Kanying, you’ll find loads of fascinating articles and performances to watch!

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