GEORGE BRILL

A HOME IN THE RAINFOREST

 

I spent all morning building myself a sleeping platform, and by midday the bamboo and rattan had cut my hands to shreds. Around me a small village had sprung up—a ramshackle shanty town of wooden platforms topped with hayak lean-tos, blue tarpaulin peeking through gaps in the thatch. Saplings were cut freely for building, and well-trodden paths soon developed between the shelters as surrounding brush was trampled down. The camp was split into three little islands of hayaks, my own simple shelter sitting alone in a central no-man’s land—the unfortunate product of my own lack of foresight and the apparently unpredictable nature of a very non-urban urban sprawl. Or perhaps they left me unclaimed intentionally.

 

As the evening drew in, thoughts turned to tomorrow’s activities. Men tended to their blowguns and darts, while the women fashioned fishing rods and fixed nets; all the while children charged around camp with an untamable energy, swinging on vines, backflipping into the shallow river, and cutting down small trees to build shelters of their own. Wood smoke rose from cooking fires and fish fried in the old metal woks that had been carried from the village slung on backs like shields. Soon night drew in and the Batek settled in to do what they do best—sit, talk, laugh, and drink copious amounts of sugared tea. And all around the jungle sang its chorus.

 

The next day I was awoken from deep sleep by the rapid scuttling of tiny paws across my back: the Batek fondness of pets never failed to take me by surprise. This particular visitor was Anol’s baby squirrel. Smaller and more tan than its European cousins it would spend its day in the jungle treetops, returning at night to sleep in a small satchel beside its young master. The boy had also brought a bird, dull-coloured and about the size of a fist, which he would feed by hand, bathe, and even retrieve from up in the trees as evening fell, often with considerable effort. 

 

The sound of firewood splitting punctuated the crisp air: fuel for tea and the customary breakfast of fish and rice. I lay in, listening to the sounds of the camp around me and watching as the sun rose through the trees above. Tendrils of smoke curled up into the canopy and, stirred by a gentle wind, the irregular rhythm of last night’s rainwater pattered from the trees. Anol, Aman and Cina soon tired of chasing one other and come to sit on the edge of my platform: no words, just quiet company. The smell of leaf-rolled tobacco permeated through the camp, and far in the distance a troupe of gibbons began their whooping chorus as they moved off to start their day. 

 

Later that morning we headed into the forest—as ever, fish were on the menu. The root of tobah, a viciously spiked shrub, dug up, sliced small, and beaten to a pulp was leached into a jungle stream, white tendrils of its toxic essence creeping through the water like an underwater smoke. Assailed unsuspecting by their subaquatic assassin, fish one-by-one dropped upwards to the surface to be plucked from the stream by adult and child alike. On the way back we cut to the ground a pair of giant palms, their trunks hacked open and peeled back to reveal hearts of chalky white flesh. It was impressive work: little effort for a massive quantity of food. Children gorged on the sweet white vegetable, crunching it where it fell, while the remainder was carried back to camp to be sliced and boiled. Even the cooking water was drunk: a pleasant (if vegetably) herbal tasting tea. Heart of palm and fried fish for lunch. 

 

Camp life ebbed and flowed with the heat of the day. Food was cooked and consumed at random, people squatting in circles around the steaming pots to eat. The stream that flowed in a wide meander around camp became the scene of clothes washing, bathing, and play. Children splashed each other in the clear water, standing naked or wrapped in faded sarongs. They swung from vines and chased each other up trees, while in camp their brothers and sisters absorbed themselves with machetes or baby animals. I stopped to watch little Cina dripping wax from a candle onto her hand, giggling with satisfaction as the hot liquid solidified on her skin.

 

Out here they were truly free: supervision from parents was lax as ever, and they played as they pleased, running all day and curling into corners when they crashed. Here there were no bedtimes, no health and safety, no washing requirements or curfews. And so was well, for their play was their schooling, and in it they learned the way of the jungle forager. Much of their game was in imitation of their elders: the use of their impervious bare feet as a backstop for machete carving; digging with digging sticks; the kindling of fires. I marvelled to watch a group of six-year olds catch and cook fish, before felling small trees to construct raised beds of canvas-sacking on which to digest their feast.

 

It was different out there in the jungle with them. Most darker shadows of their quasi-forager identity were gone. Out there it was a simpler and more traditional existence: more to do with less, and fewer social politics. The smaller group felt more natural—true tribe and family—and I wondered how much of the gossip and social backstabbing I’d seen back in the village was mostly a byproduct of boredom and forced proximity. Families and individuals came and went throughout the week, staying with friends or settling in to build hayaks of their own. Some of the newcomers told me that another, larger camp had been built deeper in the jungle, far out into the forest corridor of Sungai Yu. At last, I began to see first-hand the nomadic heritage of the Batek.

 

Of course, free time to idle was still aplenty, and we spent much of the day sitting in the shade, drinking tea, laughing, and talking. In many ways our escapades were that of glorified (or perhaps humbled) camping, for most of the food we had brought with us: store-bought rice and onions, biscuits, sugar, and oil—staples supplemented by fishing and foraging. Yet unlike in the village where such additions at times felt contrived, out here they took centre, opportunities too economical to be ignored: fish, eel, palm heart, fiddleheads, and the rest. And all the while between the pots and the sleeping blankets the men applied and reapplied poison to their blowgun darts; it seemed more to be a nostalgic show of traditional masculine pride than for the practicality of actual use as they rarely seemed to hunt, yet at least a few times I noticed pairs slink off into the jungle at dark in search of mouse deer or civet. Only once did I see evidence of a kill.

 

Nominally they told me the reason we’d come was to collect ‘aweigh’, the rattan vine with which we built our shelters, but by now we’d been in camp four days and I had yet to see any move to do so. Perhaps the idea served mostly as an excuse to be out there, or maybe such immateriality of productive purpose was just the Batek way: it wouldn’t seem out of place. They certainlty seemed content.

 

For myself, I felt better out there too—more on equal terms. Even with my unfortunate location at the village’s centre, in the camp I had my own space to which I could withdraw, my own work to attend to. No longer was I a guest in somebodies’ home, eating at somebody else’s hearth, even if of the latter I usually still was. Out there it was different. Social effort was diminished, and interaction between them and I flowed more naturally. Even so, always it remained a fish tank, and I struggled to truly relax. A perpetual social anxiety for cultural correctness and the constant exertion of conversing in a strange language kept me ever in a state of mental overdrive. Twice I walked out to the Malay village of Merapoh, the twelve-mile round trip a chance to decompress and enjoy some time alone.

 

___________

 

 

I am sitting in Doi’s shelter. Her husband Kuhm squats in front of us, building a fire to cook our evening rice and fish. The atmosphere of the village permeates me like a physical entity, and I feel a solidity of present place and being, greater than I have ever felt before: a saturation and grounding that camera cannot capture, nor I can fully understand.

 

I feel it in the smooth wooden slats of split bamboo against my skin, in the warmth of the fire and the cool evening air that envelopes me. It is the smell of fresh fish roasting in the wok, and the sounds of the jungle that hems us in on all sides. But more so, it is the human presence and community that flows around me. Cina and Aman lie curled beside me in blankets, Cina’s little head against my lap, Anol with his baby squirrel tucked alongside him under the sheets. Around the camp are little groups, huddled around the orange glows of cooking fires as they enjoy a dinner of rice and eel. There is the low-octave hum of nasal Batek, laughter and the crackle of wood under flame. Throughout the night there will linger a constant murmur of human community to punctuate the jungle’s swelling symphony of nocturnal life. Someone is always up.

 

But right now, beyond the circles of fire glow, the jungle cries its dusk chorus. The camp is a haven amidst a darkening green ocean of living shadows, and suddenly the great unknown wilderness seems welcoming and protective, cradling our little space of home within mighty arms. Around us great buttresses of trees stretch in the firelight to the moonlit sky, and beyond the borders of our clearing the night-wild of tropical life writhes untamed. And inside it all, our small collection of open-sided hayaks feels as homely as any house I’ve ever lived in.

 

I feel a wildness out here—not of adventure, but of homecoming, normality not exception. This belongingness out here in the forest, it is another life, one of living in and in part, not of the visitor. To know the rest of the world carries on outside our forest microcosm, back home in England, in the many communities I know and love elsewhere, is strange somehow. Somehow it would make more sense for it all to have paused in time. For here we are so far removed: an experience of being so difficult to explain and convey. I am living another world.

 

And yet, it has been this way for all but a blink of human history, and somewhere, deep down and instinctual, far beneath my western programming, I feel it resonate still—like the stirrings of a memory long forgotten, a dream from a distant past. Surrealism and familiarity swirl in confused symmetry inside me: dancers of the extraordinary and of the mundane, each emotion as strong and visceral as the other.

 

I turn to Ming beside me and ask in faltering Batek, “Do you prefer living in the jungle or the village more?”. His eyes take on a glassy sheen, as if remembering some distant childhood amid the great forests of his youth. “Ba heughb” he replies—‘In the jungle’. There is emotion in his gaze.

 

___________

 

 

On the sixth evening the sky grew dark long before dusk with the threat of storm. Heat and humidity became close and oppressive, and the camp a flurry of activity. Shelter tarps were tightened, palm thatch fixed, and hayaks closed in tight. I headed to the river to wash, anxious to shed the day’s mud and stickiness before the rains came. It was cold, and I lay face down in the flowing water enjoying the stimulation on my skin. My thoughts wandered: the Batek never washed at dusk—perhaps they don’t like the cold? Or maybe its taboo: a time of spirits? Or perhaps they’re much the same thing.

 

While I washed, the blood sacrifice was called—a desperate attempt to appease the spirits of the jungle for our encroachments of the day. But the spirits weren’t happy. I sensed no small storm was coming.

 

Thunder cracked across the sky and lightning illuminated the village—blasts of startling white light in diffuse pulses through the clouds. Then the wind came, gusting and aggressive, leading the assault for the rains that follow. Trees swayed and threatened to fall while the Batek clustered under the shelters they deemed best placed, barely scrambling to cover before the skies above opened. Fast and thick, fat drops of drenching wetness. Fires burnt low and the village settled in for the night.

 

I slept little: heavy rain threatened to collapse my tarp, and I quickly learned that my shelter was not suited to such deluge. I’d tied my corners too high and my feet were drenched within the hour. The Batek too slept uneasily. They know only too well the dangers of flash floods and strong winds. It is the legend of ‘olof’, the ‘broken ground’, and of ‘chilan’, the spirit taboos and blood sacrifice.

 

Twice I woke to crashes nearby as giant trees bludgeoned a path to the ground, Batek shouts and calls echoing the reverberation of their mighty impacts. That night there was a sense of power far beyond humankind: the power of nature in all her ancient might. To be subject to such primordial indifference and awe is humbling—a palpable insight to the paradoxical fragility and wild freedom of human life.

 

When morning finally broke, bright and clear, other than the sodden ground there was barely a tale of the night’s drama. Refreshed and sun-charged, the jungle began its vibrant chorus while our little village emerged from hiding. Intensifying warmth sent steam billowing from thatched rooves and the rainforest canopy, and life amid the great green city began again as normal.

 

Yet two days later, to another dusk of darkening cloud the decision was made to head back to the village. They may still be wild, these people of the forest, but also they know the comforts of enclosed houses, the sanctuary of permanent bamboo walls. That evening we made a last-minute rush to cover the miles home as thunder rolled ominously overhead. In the darkness I slipped and fell, plastering myself in slick, cloying clay. It was the jungle toying with me, a pointed reminder that it will always have the upper hand.

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