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Hersarong: A Story of Labour and Legacy

By Shazlin Rahman

Over the next few months, we will be featuring the projects from our Behind the Dust Visual Series Mediamakers. Hersarong by Shazlin Rahman is the first in the series.

This is my maternal grandmother; I call her Mok. In this photo she is preparing a dish—the one called seri muka, I think—surrounded by my cousins and me, keenly observing. In other photos Mok can be seen holding one of my cousins when they were babies, bouncing my little brother on her knees, tending to the yard while my cousins and I played behind her, serving up some food or posing for a photo on Eid while we sat cross-legged obediently around her. More often than not, the faded sepia and yellowed Kodak prints usually show Mok tending to our surrounded by one or more of her grandchildren.

Mok surrounded by my cousins and I (front, second from the left). Photo courtesy of my aunty Hasiah Kadir.

For the last few months, I’ve been carefully digitizing old photos of Mok. These images show, in my mind, the strength and resilience with which Mok navigated her life—as a young girl in British-ruled Malay peninsular, as a teenager during the brutal WW2 Japanese occupation, as a young mother in newly-independent Malaya and, up until her death, as a grandmother to a predominantly female brood of grandchildren. I needed to preserve her legacy for posterity and to remind myself of what strength, beauty and resilience looked like for Malay women like my grandmother and me.

When I google women’s labour, the top three search results were the 1940s “Rosie the Riveter” poster, black-and-white images of predominantly white women working on assembly lines or marching with protest signs or white women who had just been in labour.

The Westinghouse Company’s “Rosie the Riveter” poster created by J. Howard Miller in 1942.

I find these images deeply unrelatable because, at the surface they depict mostly white women. They are also primarily framed from the feminist perspectives of the global West with women courageously demanding equal rights or taking their rightful place in the labour force. I feel the same way about images of women on the front covers of magazines and news spreads.

While these images are powerful and reflect, to some degree, increasing rights for a certain segment of the female workforce, they are not images that resonate with me as an immigrant Muslim woman of colour. This is why I’m driven to explore what labour looks like for women like my grandmother. I found them in my grandmother’s legacy and in present-day women batik-makers in East Coast Malaysia.

Unsurprisingly, a different image of labour emerged.

Mok’s was a quiet kind of strength, less muscle-flexing like Rosie the Riveter and more like gentle strokes on a child’s head. Her labour is imbued with beauty, most evident in her work making batik sarongs, a work-from-home cottage industry still in practice in east coast Malaysia today. Mok never marched in the streets—at least, not to my knowledge—but she did tread a well-worn path between her house and the local batik manufacturer’s workshop, carrying heavy bundles of fabric printed with wax batik motifs.

My mother’s hands holding one of Mok’s old sarongs. Photo by Shazlin Rahman

Mok would walk across Sultanah Zainab Road to the batik factory owned by Haji Wan Abdullah (Aji Wé Doloh in Kelantanese) near her mother’s house and next to a tributary of the Kelantan river. She would come home with one kodi—a bundle containing 20 pieces of fabric printed with motifs in wax—carefully balanced on her head. The weight of each of those cloths and all the wax would bear down on her head, her neck and down her spine.

Mok would never send her daughters to the factory; most of the workers were men and the girls wouldn’t be able to stand up to their teasing. Instead, they would help out at home, colouring in the shapes of curling leaves, creeping vines, blooming frangipani and roses, and stylized peacocks and roosters. The pre-mixed fabric dyes supplied by the factory came in little jars and the colour palette was limited, but the three girls’ creativity was limitless. Mok would sometimes help with the more intricate techniques, like shading in the creases of a flower petal or the deep crevices of a bud. One piece of properly coloured batik earned the family ten cents Malaysian. Sometimes there’s a break in the wax outlines and the colours would bleed, ruining the fabric. There are several tricks to correct that, mama told me, and sometimes Haji Wan Abdullah would excuse it since it wasn’t the girls’ fault. Sometimes the fabric wasn’t useable, and he would have no choice but to deduct a few cents from their pay.

It sounds like a negligible amount today, but Mok and her three daughters—of which my mother is the youngest—were so industrious that they managed to make surplus income and broke the family’s generations-long cycle of poverty.

The batik sarong is one of the most common pieces of clothing for Malay women and can be found in different variations all across the Malay archipelago. A typical sarong measures between 100-110 centimetres wide, 180–220 centimetres long and is sewn together at both ends into a tube. Batik sarongs are commonly worn as a bottom for both everyday wear and special occasions.

Mok (left) and my paternal grandmother whom I call Nani, dressed in an identical ensemble of batik sarongs and traditional kebaya blouses on my parents’ wedding day.

This type of individually-made batik sarongs are difficult to find today. The ones I found in the markets of Kota Bharu were made cheaply in factories, mass produced in big quantities and sold by the bolt to retailers. The more profitable hand-drawn batik, or batik tulis, are now more popular. It can be made quickly and customized according to trends in colours, varying qualities of fabric, and a variety of motifs. Nevertheless, I found many things haven’t changed about women’s labour in the batik industry.

Gendered division of labour in the industry: men draw and women colour, just as they did during Mok’s time in the ’50s and ’60s. The same was the case at Zainab Hassan’s workshop, which seems to grow out of either sides of her house located along the touristy Pantai Cahaya Bulan road in Kelantan. To the left of her house was an area where Akmal, a quiet young man of 21 was quietly drawing batik motifs in wax on yards of plain white cloth. To the right was the colouring area where Juliza (30), Ruhaya (34), and Suzana (39), were busy colouring their own pieces of batik, each stretched taut over wooden frames. Each piece measured approximately 10 feet long and 4 feet wide. At Zainab’s workshop, the women are paid RM6 (about $2CAD) for each completed piece, which retails at about RM100 or more. I was told that there are women who work in drawing batik motifs, but they tend to be the the exception rather than the norm. Women also work in selling, tailoring and embellishing batik fabrics.

Ruhaya, 34, colouring a piece of batik at Zainab Hassan’s workshop on Pantai Cahaya Bulan Road in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia. Photo by Asad Chishti.

The arrangement of labour within the industry is largely informal. There are larger, more prominent batik companies whose employees are on a regular payroll. Nevertheless, there is also a cottage industry of small batik workshops across east coast Malaysia offering less stable and informal employment arrangements.

Most of the workshops I visited employed women who easily leave work to attend to affairs at home and come back without disrupting their work. Juliza lives right next to Zainab’s workshop and her children go to a local primary school just up the street. Suzana’s four-year-old Nurzawanah kept herself busy playing while her mother’s hand moved deftly back and forth between her paint jar and the fabric she was colouring. Zainab also helps some of her workers work from home (as Mok did) when they’re unable to be at her workshop. At Mohammad Nawawi Mat Arifin’s workshop Nur BB Batik—where all the colourists were women—seventeen-year-old Nur Farisa Mohamad Ghani left on a small motorbike to fetch her siblings from school in the middle of working on her piece. Siti Kasim, 41, has been working as a batik colourist for several years at several different workshops, indicating the entry and exit from the workforce to be quite fluid.

Nurul Asma Zakaria, 22, working at Nur BB Batik in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia. Photo by Asad Chishti.

On the flip side of this flexibility is the absence of the usual benefits afforded by formal employment. Although the relationship amongst the women batik makers and workshop owners were collegial and relaxed, it’s hard to imagine any of the women I interviewed receiving healthcare benefits, childcare support or paid time off. This is most critical during the monsoon season when east coast Malaysia is besieged with heavy rains and flooding, which slows the traffic of tourists down to a trickle and hampers batik production.

Without infrastructure like indoor drying rooms with temperature control, these informal workshops remain dependent on the day’s weather, even when the monsoon seasons are over. This is why most batik colouring work starts in the morning. By late afternoon, most workshops will be winding down and the beautifully coloured fabrics are on outdoor clotheslines and drying racks, making the most of the day’s sunlight. Zainab told me that a hot, sunny day is the ideal condition for completing batik pieces; an overcast day can still get the dyed fabrics to dry, but work stops altogether on rainy days.

When I first arrived at Zainab’s workshop early in the morning, Juliza, Suzana and Ruhaya were sitting around a small coffee table at the corner of the workshop; I was worried that they might close that day but they told me that they were waiting to see if it will be hot and sunny enough to work. When I returned about an hour later, each woman was busy colouring their own piece of fabric.

Completed batik pieces which had been soaked overnight in a silicate bath are put up to dry in the sun. Photo by Asad Chishti.

I wasn’t surprised to find Hasmah Ismail’s workshop to be quiet and empty by the time I arrived at around two o’clock in the afternoon. She had around 40 completed batik pieces—with motifs drawn by her brother Ramli Ismail—drying on wires and racks around her workshop. Right next to it was her house, originally built by her grandparents, on four-foot-high stilts. Hasmah recalled one monsoon season when the entire village was flooded and she had to do her batik work in waist-high flood waters.

Hasmah Ismail, 60, at her workshop in Kota Bharu. Photo by Asad Chishti.

I shudder at the thought of what could be in the murky flood waters while Hasmah worked on her batik pieces. Given the small remuneration women batik makers generally receive for their intricate work, I was even more impressed by her dedication to the work. Although batik is one of the state of Kelantan and Malaysia’s most popular cultural export, this is not reflected in the women’s working conditions.

I grew up hearing about Malay women described as gentle, demure and unassuming. To a large degree I still see that reflected in my grandmother’s legacy and in the women batik makers I met, but that’s just one part of the story. Mok’s work colouring batik from home while teaching her three daughters to do the same was what helped the family break their cycle of poverty. In much the same way, in many small batik workshops in Kelantan, the gentle swoosh of the paintbrush on stretched silk and little taps of brush handles against cans of fabric dyes is what’s keeping Malaysia’s batik industry alive.

These women’s labour is gentle, quietly resilient and intricately woven with beauty.

This is what labour looks like for women like me.

Shazlin Rahman is a Malaysian-born, Toronto-based freelance writer and artist. She has six years of architectural education from Malaysia and Australia, a degree in Journalism from Wilfrid Laurier University and M.A. in Communication and Culture from the interdisciplinary joint program at Ryerson/York. Shazlin uses photography, abstract art and creative nonfiction to engage her audience in conversations about the resilience of women of colour.

Labour and Beauty: Looking Back on My Grandmother’s Life

By Shazlin Rahman

Over the next few months, we will be featuring articles and conversations from our Behind the Dust Visual Series Mediamakers. This is the second in the series.

In my ten years of living in Canada as an immigrant, a woman of colour and a Muslim, I’ve experienced various forms of discrimination. I’ve had someone tell me I don’t have to wear the hijab because I’m “in Canada now.” I’ve had to start my university studies all over again because my five years of postsecondary education from outside of Canada weren’t recognized. I’ve had people curse and toss a cigarette butt at me when I was out walking with my visibly Muslim friends. I now work at a nonprofit that addresses issues of race and inclusion, where I vicariously experience the trauma of others on a daily basis.

All of this took an emotional, mental and physical toll on me. I began searching for representations of strong, trailblazing women as role models as a source of strength and healing early in 2017. Little did I know that I’d find it in someone close to me: my late grandmother, Mok.

Mok died of old age in 2012. Given the distance between here and Malaysia, returning for her funeral was out of the question and I never got the closure I needed. In grappling with my fear of forgetting her altogether, I began asking my mom about Mok—about her childhood, her marriage to my grandfather, and what she was like as a young mother. That was when I became fascinated with the collection Mok’s old batik sarongs my mom had brought back with her from Malaysia. The sarongs were valuable artefacts of Malay culture—my culture—in general and of Mok’s life in particular.

A little over a year ago I began reflecting on Mok’s resilience and ingenuity in the face of poverty through short stories; I also created artwork and sketches based on her collecting of batik sarongs. The more I explored what she meant to me, the more I discovered there were lessons hidden among different moments of her life that are deeply relevant to who I am today.

There are no records kept of her birth—which is common at the time— but Mok must have been born sometime in the early to mid-1920s. The fifth child of fourteen, she was born into crippling poverty, in one of the poorest parts of British-occupied Malaya. With a husband who was largely absent, her mother was kept busy providing for the family and Mok had to learn to fend for herself from an early age. She married my grandfather in her late teens, had three daughters and fostered multiple children despite being very poor. Working from home, she took on different jobs to make ends meet, including making batik sarongs.

I discovered that the adversities Mok overcame in her life–starting almost a century ago–are now sources of strength for me as a millennial Muslim woman of colour living in Canada today. Aspects of her life illustrate what resilience looks like for women like me. Here are three of them:

Mok’s House

Both my grandparents had very little when they met each other, and they brought even less into their marriage. My grandfather was a rickshaw driver and Mok helped out at her mother’s food stall at the city market in Kota Bharu, Kelantan on the east coast of Malaysia. Their first house was a simple wooden platform with rattan-woven walls and a thatched roof, built on stilts about four feet off the ground to protect against the monsoon floods. There was no electricity, no indoor plumbing and housed a single space that was sectioned off into areas for sleeping, cooking and dining. My grandparents and my aunt, the eldest of Mok’s three daughters, gradually saved up and expanded the house to include more rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. After my grandfather passed away in 1989, Mok kept the house in pristine condition for decades after, often making necessary repairs herself. “Mok’s house” as my cousins and I called it, was our favourite refuge from the city during school holidays.

The “People’s School”

Although Mok never learned to read or write, all three of her daughters went onto become university educated. This is an incredible achievement, considering how poor the family was and how so many families did not educate girls beyond the primary (grade school) level.

This Sekolah Rakyat or “People’s School” was built in 1949 and it was the first school in the village where Mok lived. It was a community effort spearheaded by activists who would later become part of the fight for the country’s independence from the British in 1957. The first school building was a simple wooden rectangular building with a thatched roof, and it was divided into sections for different grades. A terrible storm later destroyed it, and the school was rebuilt in 1950 as two buildings—one for classrooms and the other as a canteen—not far from Mok’s house. There were no fees, and everyone in the village was encouraged to attend. The teachers included those who had been educated up to the second or third grade, were able to read and write and were therefore qualified to teach. My aunt, the eldest of Mok’s three daughters, remembers standing in the corner of a classroom listening to the lessons before she was old enough to attend. She was always welcomed by the teachers and was never told to go away. Following Malaysia’s independence, the school was absorbed into the public school system, rebuilt and renamed Kampung Sireh Primary School. The original school buildings, rebuilt in 1950, still stand there today.

Close up of one of the two original school buildings of the “People’s school”. (Photo by Asad Chishti)

Batik Sarongs

Batik sarongs are the quintessential clothing item for women in the Malay archipelago. Batik is a technique where motifs are drawn or printed on fabric in wax and later filled in with fabric dye. Parts of the fabric that is covered in wax will resist the dye, thus creating a clear outline of the motifs. My curiosity about Mok’s life was sparked by the collection of batik sarongs she left behind. I learned about Mok’s work in colouring batik sarongs at home when she was a young mother, like many women like herself at the time, and later involved her three daughters to supplement the family income. Batik manufacturers would typically employ men to draw or print the motifs, and women like Mok would do the work of colouring the motifs in the comfort of their own homes. According to my aunt, it was this work that generated the surplus income that helped them slowly break out of the cycle of poverty. On my recent visit to Mok’s and my hometown of Kota Bharu, Kelantan in east Malaysia, I discovered the industry has remained largely unchanged: batik-making still came out of small, home-based operations, men were still primarily hired to draw the motifs and the colouring was done by women, often those who lived close by and were therefore able to care for their children and their homes while working.

A batik colourist at work at one of the many small batik workshops along Pantai Cahaya Bulan road, a popular tourist attraction in Kelantan, Malaysia. (Photo by Asad Chishti)

Although batik is one of the state of Kelantan as well as Malaysia’s most popular cultural exports, this value is not reflected in the remuneration given to the women in the batik industry, nor in the conditions in which they work. I explore this gap in the relationship between Malay women’s labour, beauty and the batik industry through my upcoming photo essay with photographer Asad Chishti. You can see more of my reflections on Mok’s life, batik sarongs and the batik industry at surat.hersarong.com and @hersarong.

When I began my journey over a year ago to reconnect with my late grandmother and, by extension, to my Malay culture, my connection to those two aspects of my identity felt tenuous at best. Now, I’ve found a reservoir of beauty and life lessons that will remain relevant regardless of whether I’m in Canada or Malaysia.

Imagined Britain: Remembering our past to get to the present

By Sadia Ahmad

It’s been eleven months since the referendum for Britain to leave the EU took place. The one which left me waking morning after morning for weeks, numbed by shock, stomach knotted, wondering what on earth my country had done. We are never as explicitly aware of so-called ‘national’ identity than at voting time. But a nation is made whole only by its constituent parts — voting is merely individual people deciding in synchronicity. National decisions reflect our localised struggles, those of our cities, communities, families, and finally, ourselves. It’s in examining the micro, personal struggle we find the macro, national struggle. We recognize in both the destructive consequences of stubbornness, pride, blind spots, the pain wrought of turning away from ugly truths, and lack of willingness to embrace change. And like any personal narrative built on unstable foundations, the false narrative of ‘Great’ Britain is threatening to come undone.

As time has passed I’ve wondered, now more than ever, not of Britain’s uncertain future – bleak as it looks – but its past. The way we tell stories matters, and dictates our response. We see the heightened, panic-inducing coverage of London’s brutal attacks just this weekend, the ‘us vs them’ rhetoric, a PM declaring Muslim communities ‘too tolerant’ of extremism. All this overlooks a more complicated reality: of a government’s systematic, repeated cuts to police budgets, armed forces, emergency and border agency services. It speaks of arms sales to an ISIS-backing Saudi Arabia, and of a country limiting social mobility along lines of race and religion as well as class.

Post-Empire, post-war Britain has been characterised largely by stability, a certain pragmatism – governed with a stern, but earnest, temperament. Overwrought displays of drama, extremist ideological and fantastical thinking? No, no, not here, dear, we’re British. We are proud, sensibly middle of the road, we do what’s rational, what’s fair. No wonder the Tories are fighting this election with the empty slogan ‘strong and stable’ – it resonates in the national psyche. But this is to grossly misrepresent our history, of a brutal, prolonged colonial rule, underpinned by extremist beliefs of our own superiority. And post-referendum, our glaring blind spots are coming forcefully into view.

British-born Indian MP Shashi Tharoor recently spoke of Britain’s ‘historical amnesia’ — of a nation unable to come to terms with its colonial history (further explored in the acerbically titled, Inglorious Empire). Former British Museum director Neil MacGregor agreed:

In Britain, we use our history in order to comfort us to make us feel stronger, to remind ourselves that we were always, always deep down, good people…. Maybe we mention a little bit of slave trade, a few wars here and there, but the chapters we insist on are the sunny ones.

He contrasts this with Germany’s honest and painful reappraisal of its violent past, suggesting this honesty has played a role in rebuilding the country, now thriving, a leader within its continent. As anyone educated in the UK can tell you, the history curriculum is somewhat lacking in balance and objectivity. Rarely are British schoolchildren invited to think about why English is one of the most widely spoken languages, or why we’re the only country to have the word ‘Great’ in our official name. In eighteen years of British schooling, I learned nothing of the 300 years of British rule in India, land violently split into India and (my parents’ homeland) Pakistan, of various colonies around the world, and the pain wrought of wrenching themselves free of British rule. The appeal of Brexit lay in nostalgia for this former empire. A superiority internalised, deeply rooted, reinforced by our educational, cultural, and institutional structures. And so, 17 million voted for British exceptionalism, believing a small island of under 70 million could thrive outside the world’s largest trading bloc, because we, of course, are a great trading nation, aren’t we? What we misunderstand of ourselves stretches back to our earliest past.

I spend a good portion of my time volunteering with vulnerable, emotionally distressed adults. It has proved to be a healing act in a time I feel the most anxious of division. Reaching out across social, economic and cultural divides – mental health issues disproportionately affect the socioeconomically disadvantaged, minorities, and other marginalised groups – is uncomfortable, and whatever your differences or similarities, sitting with another’s deepest hurts is painful. The grinding work of honest self-reflection can feel tedious and wincing. As anyone who has been in therapy, or rehabilitation, will attest, only through this can there be some healthy re-emergence. It’s also a meeting of worlds, of different trajectories. It forces you to confront your advantages, the turns your life took and didn’t, and the privilege you were afforded. It makes you think about things you are grateful for and relieved you never had to think about. Doing this in the name of human connection is restorative, for all involved. But what many who do such work would be perhaps reluctant to say, is the arising guilt, grateful distance, and relief, in this space where advantage meets disadvantage, where health meets illness, where comfort meets alienation. It’s deeply uncomfortable and deeply humbling. It requires a loss of ego, pride, and stretches your world until it takes on new and unfamiliar dimensions. And it’s in this work, I cannot help but draw parallels between the journey of a person, afflicted with depression, or addiction, or suicidal ideation, or shame, and a nation. The more we build our lives on untruths, the messier the fallout when these come up against reality.

This will be more apparent than ever in upcoming Brexit negotiations, with Brussels already being warned ‘Britain is no longer the rational, stable country that we are used to’, and is these days more prone to fantasy. We need to pay attention to our stories in order to heal (even Churchill said it – ‘the only way out is through’). Until we can do this as individuals, and facilitate it in others, we may well continue to fall short as a collective. Joan Didion said that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’; just as a person comes to believe the story they’ve been told over and over about themselves, finding themselves in a kind of cognitive crisis, a nation comes to believe it’s own narrative, too. But our national story has lost resonance because it does not speak truthfully about our past or present. Coming to terms with Britain’s imperial history will be grimacing, entail a painful reconfiguration of the communal self, and it will take energy, as does any clearing of toxicity built up over time. But if we do not, much like the individual who cannot break free of false beliefs, the nation will continue to lose itself.

British-Pakistani actor and musician Riz Ahmed spoke of such issues in a recent address of Parliament, calling out the shared responsibility of actors and politicians to fairly represent society. He expressed the urgency with which our national story needs updating from the one we’ve been sold for too long: a story ‘so narrow, about who we are, and who we’ve been, and who we should be’. If we cannot reimagine the narrative, we risk rupturing our communities altogether. He notes in particular, that if young ethnic minorities are to find a healthy place in this society, they need to be seen, heard, and represented. The cost is losing them to another, more malignant narrative. Reckoning honestly with the part we’ve played in fostering the current climate makes a good starting point. The Guardian echoed these sentiments, declaring a need for the British to ‘drain our sense of nationhood – and our relationships with others – of the toxins passed down from the days of empire’.

We ignore histories – be they personal, communal, social, or political – at our own peril. Only with reflection and commitment to honesty can we move forward, and find out who we next become.