[Si Tenggang's Homecoming]

While I wait for the video of my poem recitation, took during the RITMySA Annual Dinner. Let me post the poem byt Muhammad Haji Salleh:

Si Tenggang's Homecoming

The physical journey that I traversed
Is a journey of a soul
Transport of a self from a fatherland
To a country collected by sights and mind
The knowledge its sweats
Are a stranger’s experience
From one who has learned to see, reflect
And chose between changing actualities

I know I have growled at my mother and grandmother
But only after having told them my predicament
That they never brought into consideration:
The wife that I began to love in my lonelines,
In country that alienated me,
They enveloped in their prejudgement.
I have not entirely returned I know
Having been changed by time and place
Coarsened by problems
Estranged by absence.

But look
I have brought myself home,
Seasoned by faith ,
Broadened by land languages,
I have no longer afraid of the oceans
Of the difference between people.
No longer easily snared
By words or ideas.

The journey was a loyal teacher
Who was never tardy
In explaining cultures or variousness.
Look,
I am just like you,
Still Malay,
Sensitive what I believe is good,
And more ready to understand
Than my brothers.
The contents of the boat are yours too,
Because I have returned.

Travel makes me a seeker
Who does not take
What is given without sincerity
Or which demand payments from beliefs.
The years at sea and coastal states
Have thought me to choose,
To accept only those tested by comparisons
Or which matches the words of my ancestors,
Which brings me to my village
And its completeness.

I’ve learnt the ways of the rude,
To hold actualities in a new logic,
Debate with hard and loud facts,
But I too
Have humility, respecting
Man and life.

I am not a new man
Not very different from you
The people and cities
Have taught me not to brood
Over foreign countries,
Suffer difficulties
Or fear possibilities.

I am you
Freed from the village
It’s soils and ways
Independent
Because
I have found myself.