Chukop

My culture Is the outermost layer that will never touch my skin

[Gua mia adat sama luair lapis, dia tak kena gua mia kulit]

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Where do I begin? I have nothing. That’s it, that is exactly where I shall begin, the position of lack - lacking connection with my cultural  materials/objects, the lacking the knowledge of their cultural significance, and the lacking possession of these materials/objects that were often meant to be passed down within the family and sometimes for generations. Having possession of such materials/objects are often thought of as an indication of belonging to the culture/organisation/system/place/society where these things belong. Thus, simply not having any of them in the family suggests the opposite. Yet a faint recollection of seeing such an item intrigued me. It was a piece of my grandmother’s embroidery that featured a few small clusters of flowers sewn using embroidery threads. Unlike those elaborated intricate embroidery works commonly shown on expensive kebayas [traditional Peranakan blouse], my grandmother’s work paled in comparison. Sewn on a coarse and thick dull blue fabric using moderately colourful embroidery threads, there was a sense of honesty to it. It reminded me of her invariably gentle persona, although admittedly I did not know her well enough to say otherwise. My grandmother was always dressed in her sarong [wrapped skirt] and always spoke only Baba Malay, with occasional smatterings of English during our brief interactions. The embroidery work was my only material reminder of her. Many years passed and for some reason, it was never to be found again, lost, or at least I was told that its disappearance probably had something to do with us moving house, clearing space, and getting rid of old things. The item had long gone, leaving only remnants of threads and yarns etched in my memory. Performance artist Janine Antoni said something interesting, about how her grandmother had left behind a half-finished doily with a crochet needle stuck to it, carefully folded and still fixed to a spool, as her grandmother had died before completing it; she calls the doily an “open object” (Janine Antoni’s interview with Heathfield, 2012: 519). Unlike her, I no longer have an open object like hers that would remind me of its incompleteness, or the nagging need to get it finished. In my case, my grandmother’s lost embroidery work was to me an ‘open object’ in a different way. It was an object that was left open to interpretation, open to the imagination, a condition made possible by its very absence.