Christina Yin, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo
In the forest, a woman is straining to give birth. She and her husband are walking to their fruit trees, when she is gripped with birthing pains. It happens suddenly and they are not ready. The husband runs back to the longhouse. But while he is gone, an orang-utan comes down from a tree and carries the woman up to her nest high in the forest canopy. It is cool there in the shelter of the branches and leaves. The orang-utan massages the woman’s belly. She soothes her with crushed ginger.
Below on the forest floor, the woman’s husband returns with a parang, but cannot find his wife. It is said that in the old days, the people had to cut open a woman’s womb to deliver a child. The mother would die; that is how the story goes. It is not logical. You cannot ask how the longhouse people survived such harsh conditions. If every woman who gave birth had to die, how did communities survive with longhouses that numbered 40 or 50 doors, with each door housing a family of many children and close relatives within it?
Nevertheless, the story is that the orang-utan sees the woman in labour in the forest, far from the longhouse. So, the orang-utan takes the woman up to the tree tops and calms her. When the husband returns, the orang-utan gestures to him to put away his parang. She takes him up to the nest so that he might learn how to help his wife deliver a child naturally, the orang-utan way. The baby is born and the mother lives. Both are healthy. When they are recovered and ready to move, the orang-utan takes the mother and child down to the forest floor, and then the new father, who is now a midwife who will teach his relatives and friends how to safely deliver a child without endangering the mother’s life.
It is believed that the orang-utan saved generations of humans. And for this reason, the longhouse people believe that they should never hunt or kill an orang-utan.
Others believe a different story. This one was told to me by the Iban forest guard Enggoh anak Glak whose Muslim name is Mohammad Irwan Abdullah. Enggoh’s work with the National Parks and Wildlife Office in the early 1990s took him with a conservation education team to longhouse communities near the Batang Ai National Park in Sri Aman Division. These areas are known orang-utan habitats and the conservation education team worked to find out what the longhouse people believed and how they could help them understand why it was important to conserve the protected wildlife; the orangutan, in particular.
Enggoh was told this story by an old man at the Nanga Delok longhouse.
They said they cannot kill an orang-utan because that is their grandfather. I cannot tell you if this is just a nonsense story, but if you go to this longhouse, this Nanga Delok, they have a story about this one man, I think from this longhouse, quite a long time ago, maybe a hundred years ago.
He was walking in the forest when he met somebody, a stranger. So that man gave him a parang. They exchanged parangs and both of them introduced themselves. Then the stranger said he is an orang-utan. He’s human, he said, but he is originally an orang-utan. “So now we’ve become brothers and sisters. I give you this parang, so next time, please tell your people not to kill an orang-utan because we are one family.”
Because of that, these longhouse people never want to kill an orang-utan because they think they are their grandfathers. So, when this man is dying, he says, “Don’t bury me. Just take me to this mountain and put me there.” When he died, his relatives did what he asked. But when they laid him down where he had told them to, suddenly the body gone. Gone, gone, gone, gone... then after a few minutes, they heard the call of an orang-utan. So, they believe that this man died and became an orang-utan. But whether that story is true or not, that is what the old man told me. And the parang that is given to that man by the orang-utan is still kept by the people in this longhouse… Still, until today.
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Have you seen the eyes of an orang-utan? Have you seen how he watches us and follows our movements? I’ve seen the orang-utan on the feeding platform at Semenggoh Wildlife Centre. He reaches to pluck a banana from the bunch or a yellow-orange papaya lying on the platform. He seems gentle and even lazy in his movements, but he is a wild animal, and not a pet. Those eyes are human, yet not human. Do generations of grandfathers come back in the form of orang-utans?
I asked Enggoh who told me the story of the orang-utan and the parang, and the grandfather who became an orang-utan, “Did you see the parang in the longhouse?”
This is Enggoh’s reply:
“I never saw that parang, but the people don’t want to kill an orang-utan. Maybe if they kill an orang-utan, they will get bad thing, maybe they will get a storm or something like that, rain for so many months, or maybe people died or something like that. So, they don’t want to go against their promises.”
I think about the story that Enggoh told me. Whether I’m at the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre watching the orang-utans feeding or taking a walk at an urban nature reserve, in a classroom with students or having dinner at home with my family, I think it’s a good idea to keep our promises.
The people of Nanga Delok have kept theirs.
And today, the orang-utans still live freely in the Batang Ai area. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can hear their call.
Christina Yin lives in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo with her husband, children and two mixed-breed dogs.
