JEWELLE TAN

This is the ninth year that I missed celebrating Kaamatan, the harvest festival for the Kadazandusuns of Sabah.

Sadly, I don’t really missed this much because for as long as I can remember - even from the times when my paternal grandparents still run a paddy field, Kaamatan has always been just a festival of merry-making - involving a lot of partying and drinking.

I have never witnessed any ceremony and the only bobolian (high priestess cum medicine woman) I knew only administered me when as a baby or little girl, I was spooked by something. Perhaps the villages of both my parents did not observe the rituals of this festival as some other villages do - or perhaps we, being town kids, were spared of these ceremonies by our parents as they would definitely bored us out of our young minds then.

Worse, as Eu told me indignantly today “How can you be a Kadazan yet you cannot speak Kadazan!”

But it is true - we have escaped from learning the language from the very convenient excuse of  having parents from different races - although, my mother to her credit, understood the language well, manipulated this ability to get discounts when she shopped (one of the few occasions when she’d speak Dusun) and no one in my father’s village speak to her in anything but Dusun.

It is a pity that as I kept increasing my knowledge of the Chinese culture (not the language though) and many other cultures, I realised that I do not know much about my own.

So in the spirit of the Kaamatan which had just passed, I made sure I get some doses of Sabahan cultures daily.

I was thrilled to catch this Kadazandusun telenovela (with excellent cinematography) titled Bambazon on TV last Friday, perfectly coincided with the Kaamatan weekend. And although I had to read the subtitles during the Kadazandusun dialogs, it made me homesick to hear them speak.

Then I started to find all those Kadazandusuns song which I grew up listening to - from the mouth of my father (who’d hummed them every so often) to family members who would belt various Kadazandusun songs during parties (and you would be surprised to know that our local music industry is thriving one).

I thought this “Proton Saga Kelabu” is one of the most famous Kadazandusun song - even though there are a lot of Malay lines. And you are not a proper Sabahan if you have never heard the never-recorded but much sang “Proton Saga Colour Grey”, the English version of this song.

Of course, most of us Sabahans are very easy going with a big sense of humour. And this is a video (Sabahan Malay) of what typical Sabahans  find hilarious. You might think that it’s incomprehensible or even silly. But a Sabahan like me could laugh like mad listening to lines such as this “...Kanapa? Kanapa kunun?…“.

I might be far from home but thanks to technology, my culture is never something I need to be at home to experience.

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