THE MAN THEY CALLED PANGLIMA AWANG
I recently came across the story of Panglima
Awang who later became Enrique or Henrich the translator. Admittedly, I have
never actually heard of this man before or perhaps I had not noticed him before
because I have been to Melaka’s Maritime Museum and must have walked past the
statue with his likeness.
From my cursory reading, I surmise that
Panglima Awang was a warrior of Acheh or the Peninsular, who captured after a battle. As a prisoner of war, he was taken all over
the place and made to serve as a translator because he spoke Malay which was
the lingua franca of the region at the time. It is interesting that the
writings say that he was baptized: to my understanding, one can be baptized without
or without one’s consent or agreement. In the writings (see below), it was Magellan
who had him baptized so that Enrique / Henrich could pray for his soul. So,
Awang became Enrique until he found himself back in the region and
escaped. Today, his likeness stands in
the maritime museum in Melaka but his adventures goes unnoticed by Malaysian,
even Malays.
His travels, or travails, brings to mind another
traveler Ibn Battutta whose travels also remain mostly unknown by us. Why is this so? Simple, by and large, our
vision of our past is still shrouded by the veil of colonialism: that time when
we were divorced from our past and given the colonizers’ heroes to admire and
their exploits to learn. Yes, we gained
our independence but we are now shrouded by the parameters of the nation that
we have constructed out of the legacies the colonialists left us. While we are
a nation of multitudes today, we are still colonized by the fact that we often
cannot embrace what is ours because it does not fit into the narrow confines
that define our perception of who we are: we cannot see ourselves for who we
really are because we are too focused on who we want to be, by who we think we
ought to be.
I wonder if we hesitate to accept Awang / Enrique
as one of our heroes because he was baptized as a Christian by his captors? I
wonder also if Ibn Battutta, who was a Muslim, is not so well known as he
should be because he was Caucasian?
Look around us today, how many times have
we ignored someone’s creativity, ingenuity, insight and much more because he or
she is a fellow Malaysian but of a different religion, creed and / or ethnic
background? How many times have we also suddenly found admiration for that
person after he or she went to the West and made a name for himself or herself
there?
In many ways,
today, we are still a colony. Perhaps not one of the English Empire but of the
West in general.
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