His kampung calling

Daphne Lee, The Star 1 Mar 09;

A Briton encapsulates his love for the local landscape and the enchantment of rural living in a beautifully illustrated book.

IT all started more than 40 years ago when, as a young man, Iain Buchanan came to Malaysia and Singapore to lecture on geography.

According to Buchanan, he was a “callow academic” with minimal local knowledge. He thinks his students must have found him annoying – “presuming to teach them about their own country.” However, Buchanan fell in love with Malaysia, especially its landscape, the memory of which he took with him when he went home to Britain.

“When I first came to Malaysia, it felt immediately familiar and I realised that I was recalling some parts of my boyhood in Africa – especially certain scents, like the smell after a tropical rainstorm.”

Buchanan spent several years in South Africa, Nigeria and New Zealand, thanks to his father accepting various lecturing posts. Buchanan Senior was also a geographer and taught his son to appreciate landscapes and to be aware of the interconnectivity between the land and living things.

“You have to feel connected to the landscape before you can act in a responsible manner towards it,” said Buchanan, 67, about his first book, Fatimah’s Kampung (Fatimah’s village). The picture book tells the tale of what happens when regard for the land is overtaken by development and greed.

At the centre of the story is Fatimah, who, at the start of the book, is a little girl, and, by its end, a teenager. The kampung in question is Kampung Hidayah, where Fatimah lives. It is a village within a city, surrounded by lush green forests and protected by a fictional Sultan who owns the land and had pledged to preserve it as it is the site of a large and beautiful keramat (saint’s tomb).

Fatimah’s family lives in a house, built by her great-grandfather, in the very centre of the kampung. It is a traditional Malay kampung house, raised on stilts, with a roof made of hand-cut wooden tiles, a plank floor, fretwork on the verandah railings and an intricately carved tiang seri (main pillar) made from the very tree that provided the roof tiles.

Fatimah loves her home and the forest, which she finds fascinating and mysterious. She is also intrigued by the keramat and the family of doves that live in it. Her grandmother tells her exciting stories about the wise man who is buried in the keramat; and of Pak Belang, the tiger who guards the forest.

The stories come with the recurring message to respect and honour the land and all living creatures. This is also Buchanan’s message.

“I was once a preachy lecturer, but even after I stopped teaching, and preaching, I still felt strongly about things, like disparate economic development, ecological collapse, overurbanisation... Fatimah’s Kampung is a way of recasting those lectures in more digestible form, especially addressed to children.”

Buchanan eventually married Maznoor Abd Hamid, a student he had taught in Singapore, and this thrust him back into the landscape of Malaysia where much of his wife’s extended family lived. It was a landscape that he had all but forgotten, but as he rediscovered it with Maznoor, Buchanan fell in love with it all over again.

Later, the couple settled in Britain (they now divide their time between Britain, Singapore and Malaysia), but Buchanan’s disillusionment with academic life grew and he decided to take early retirement.

“In the end, though, it was my experience of Maznoor and her family, and all the stories she told me (of her childhood, of her family, of her various houses and kampungs), that gave me the format for Fatimah’s Kampung,” he recalled.

“A million little details eventually, and very slowly, came together: trips with Maznoor in Borneo forests and on the back roads around Selangor and Perak; visits to family graves; walks with my Batu Pahat brother-in-law into the forest of Gunung Soga and around Johor kampungs; explorations of building sites with my little niece Hanna; a visit to a keramat, a family wedding, my sister-in-law’s kitchen garden.

“Eventually, I found that I was celebrating Maznoor’s family, celebrating all I loved about Malaysia, and paraphrasing my old lectures in a more presentable way, all at the same time.”

The pictures came first and the words were composed later, almost in the same way as captions are composed to explain pictures. Thanks to the meticulous rendering of the kampung (keep your eyes peeled for the cats that appear in almost every picture spread) and the detailed recounting of Fatimah’s life, this book can be enjoyed by readers of all ages.

It is Buchanan’s hope that parents will share the story with their children, and that the pictures and words will combine to awaken in readers the realisation of how the Earth is being threatened and how we are all involved in and affected by its preservation and its destruction.