Klieng’s war-raid in the skies: a Dyak myth
J. Perham, a British official in colonial Sarawak, published this translation and adaptation of a Sea Dyak Kana (sung narrative) in 1885, presenting the myth of Klieng’s war-raid to the heavens as one of the most genuine specimens of the race’s oral literature. The article serves both as a literary rendering of a complex heroic cycle and as an ethnographic commentary on the structure, performance context, and historical value of Dyak folk-lore.
Summary
Perham opens by situating the myth within the broader taxonomy of Sea Dyak oral tradition, distinguishing between Ensera (prose tales) and Kana (sung narratives), and identifying the Pelandok and Kekura animal fables and the Apai Samumang/Apai Saloi intrigue stories as parallel genres. He positions Klieng as the supreme figure of Dyak mythical heroism—a being without pedigree, found in a tree-knot, possessed of unlimited metamorphic power, and occupying a liminal status between hero and tutelary spirit who receives offerings and is invoked as a helper of men (pp. 265–266).
The myth itself narrates Klieng’s appearance in disguise as “Bungkok Arok Papong Engkiyong” (the Sooty Crooked One, the Charred End of Bambu) at the house of Ngelai, where he proposes to lead a war-raid to the halved deep heavens to rescue Tutong’s parents from the sky-dweller Tedai. The narrative follows the assembly of the army through wind-spirits summoned to strike at distant longhouses, the march through a series of mythic landscapes, encounters with grandmother Manang (whose impossibly small house and food demonstrate her supernatural nature), the reconnaissance of Tedai’s territory, the climactic battle in which Klieng’s disguise is torn away by Tedai’s spear, and the return journey in which the entire army is lowered to earth in a three-fathom tub provided by Manang (pp. 266–286).
Perham closes with a frank assessment of the myth’s historiographical value: setting aside its prodigies, it describes Dyak life and habits as they then existed, and the only “gleam into a different past” is the reference to human sacrifice as an element of religious rite in remoter ages. He acknowledges that his literal translation cannot reproduce the “perpetual play of alliteration and rhyme” and rhythmical flow essential to the original, and appends short passages of the Dyak text to illustrate its sound and measure (pp. 286–288).
Key Findings
- The Sea Dyak oral corpus is divided into Ensera (prose) and Kana (sung); the Klieng myth belongs to the latter class and, if performed in full by a skilled rhymist with extemporal amplifications, would take nearly a whole night to sing (pp. 265, 286).
- Klieng is described as having no pedigree, having been found in a hard knot of a tree by Ngelai; he possesses unlimited metamorphic power (monkey, man, tiger, orang-utan, fragment of broken water-gourd) and holds the position of a tutelary spirit receiving offerings, though he is not called Petara (pp. 265–266).
- The marriage ceremony among the Sea Dyaks is termed Melah Pinang (splitting the betel-nut), which forms its central act; in the myth, Klieng’s proposal to marry Kumang is framed through this ritual formula (p. 268).
- The spirit encountered at the hill of Perugan Bulan offers Klieng three gifts in sequence—an invulnerability charm the size of a hearth-stone, infallible courage in war, and a tooth that becomes an eighteen-step ironwood ladder to the house of grandmother Manang; Klieng refuses the first two and accepts only the third (p. 275).
- At grandmother Manang’s house, the entire army enters a dwelling of a single door and single row of medang posts; she serves rice and meat from pots the size of a chestnut and a bird’s egg, which multiply to fill the company, and the glutton Lualimban consumes ten pasus of rice, a chest of paddy, and all the gongs and jars before being satisfied (pp. 277–279).
- Perham identifies the reference to the sacrifice of human victims (Tedai killing Tutong’s parents to raise the Pandong of the rhinoceros hornbill and to make war-plumes) as the sole element in the myth suggesting a different, earlier religious practice (pp. 283, 286).
Conclusion
Perham’s definitive historical takeaway is deliberately modest: the Klieng myth, for all its supernatural prodigies, is essentially a mirror of contemporary Sea Dyak social life and material culture, and its only genuine window onto a deeper past is the vestigial reference to human sacrifice in ritual context. He presents the text not as evidence of a lost civilisation but as a living performance tradition whose value lies in its literary qualities—rhythm, alliteration, and the “region of ideas” it opens—rather than in recoverable historical fact.
Context
- Perham served in the Sarawak civil service under the White Rajahs; this article represents the colonial-era practice of collecting, translating, and publishing indigenous oral literature for a European scholarly readership, with the implicit assumption that such traditions required preservation by an outside agent.
- The article draws on no archival collection but on direct fieldwork among the Sea Dyaks; its historiographical contribution is as one of the earliest published renderings of a Sea Dyak Kana in English, providing a benchmark against which later collections (notably those of Crocker and later anthropologists) can be compared for textual variation and performance context.