FOR a second year in a row, I had a quiet and solitary Gawai Dayak celebration at home. Well, technically it wasn’t all that solitary since my wife, kids, mother-in-law, and I live together in my parents’ house in Selangor, but it was certainly solitary compared to the usual Dayak harvest festivities at my in-laws’ longhouse in the outskirts of Bintulu in Sarawak

Our household in the Klang Valley is merry as it is and I fully embrace the support system that comes with moving in again with your parents which our Asian culture and values espouse.

Yet, I’ve never missed a Gawai trip back to the longhouse since the mid-2000s. As a Klang Valley Malay middle-class fellow, I’ll forever cherish the first one I attended. It was quite a culture shock but a “syiok” one, if you get my drift. For those who don’t get my drift, I’ll sum it up in one word: intense.

We just had a small barbeque on the porch on the weekend –.the barbeque is a major Dayak tradition if you didn’t already know – while my Malay neighbours are probably oblivious that Gawai is just around the corner even as the smoky goodness wafted across the fence in the breeze.

The humble barbeque is an integral part of not only Gawai Dayak but also any Dayak event, official or formal. It’s almost compulsory that every Dayak household has a barbeque pit and it isn’t a genuine Dayak household unless it’s a DIY barbeque pit and not of those fancy ones you find at Home Pro and the like.

DIY is a way of life for the Dayak and as much as the DIY culture is my way of life in the music subculture in which I am immersed, when it comes to life skills that the Dayak embody, I was pretty useless as a middle-class peninsula Malay male.

But being a skill-less outsider is not problem as nothing can quite match Borneo hospitality and I echo the common Sarawakian pride that you find on t-shirts and stickers in the region: “Sarawak for Sarawakians” – the idea that being Sarawakian supersede above all other race or ethnic categories. They were “1Malaysia” decades before us in the West bandied it around. 

To put it simply, we don’t know how to let loose and have fun in West Malaysia, even more so in the urban centres – the idea of “fun” and “festivities” are often exported ideas and rituals from the West.

“‘Fun” is a bad word marketed by demagogues over here and a facetious political capital. We fail to realize that our ancestors knew how to really party, in our own ways. To party is to reclaim the Nusantara way.

For West Malaysians who’ve never experienced Gawai Dayak and only know about it from school textbooks, from television (or any screen-based medium) or word of mouth, well, discard all those at the door as swiftly as you discard your shoes or sandals once entering an Asian home.

If you get my drift, then you probably know why the merrymaking and festivities often don’t make it Westward.

Most of the fare and let’s say “fun” are alien to pious peninsula Malay sensibilities and “culture” although chances are were commonplace generations ago before the Golden Age of Malay conservatism and Arabization trend (which I still find ironic since a lot of the Arabs I’ve met in my journey know how to throw a happening party) gained foothold in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.  

It still perplexes me that Gawai Dayak and Kaamatan – the Kadazan-Dusun harvest festival in Sabah – are not national holidays. We see how Borneo Malaysia is exploited in our tourism propaganda. Edward Said would have had a field day if he were to unpack our national attitude and our tourism advertising and marketing since I find tourism a site of internalising Orientalist ideology and “othering” ourselves internally as a nation.

The fact that I had a class scheduled on May 31 – eve of the Gawai partying – and was teaching from home to a virtual class of students comprising none from Borneo Malaysia meant I carried on with my duties without much fuss since, well, there was a general lack of any real festivity at home anyway.

No relatives from the longhouse popped up randomly to ask you to join ngabang early in the morning; nor did you stroll up and down the tanju to reorient yourself and find your bearings while also visiting other neighbouring or relatives’ rooms to ngirup and makai.

The practice of drinking from “one-cup” could also be a thing of the past in the post-Covid world out.

Anyway, just like the sober Hari Raya gastronomical celebration which is in actuality month-long, Gawai is from my estimate a two-month long festivity – one month pre-celebration and one-month post-celebration.

No public holidays be damned, to be merry and party is a state of mind and if one frees oneself from imposed ideas of what “fun” denotes, you can still have a jolly good time with the right company in real time – and more company is just a video call anyway. And for that I’m blessed. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

So, let’s raise a toast to good behaviour and SOP-compliance for the sake of all of us. Stay safe and sane.

A toast is always for health. Oohaa! – June 4, 2021.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.