Postscript 1

Postscript 2

In the past few days, I was shocked by blog posts of the Administrator of the Residency I attended several years ago . While these blog posts purported to be in support of my co-artist (deceased) in that Residency, they turned out in the end to be attempts at assassinating my character and invalidating my work. One’s work is the product of one’s mind. Still reeling, I take refuge in the words of one of my favourite Sufi mystic poets Saadi of Shiraz :

‘No one throws a stone at a barren tree.’

I would really love to hear from anyone who wants to write to me about whatever I have said in my blog posts concerning my time at Rimbun Dahan. I would love to hear something positive which will balance my experience there. I must be allowed the self-respect to state my case, and to tell my story honestly, without being abused.

Renee, my co-artist was not a close friend; but she was not an enemy either. She was my student when she was 17. And to me, she was by that time, already a mature artist; everything seemed to have gone downhill from there. I kept two of her drawings for the 30 odd years we were apart and returned them to her when the Residency was over.

During that Residency, Renee’s personal struggles were exacerbated by menopause (Renee was 51) and her deteriorating health. This affected her performance and her confidence. She lost ground and she left the Residency. Unfortunately, the physical and mental state she was struggling with was exploited by others, in support of their own domestic and social conflicts. The Administrator of the Residency used Renee’s vulnerability to prove her point: that Malaysian women don’t get on. Once Renee left the Residency, every request I made to the Administrator for us to meet, to talk; every request for contact with Renee was denied.

In retrospect, I regret the intensity with which I plunged into painting, and if I could go back in time I would try harder to be there for her. But the excitement of painting outbid everything for me. Although the conditions were inadequate, I was, for the first time in my life free to paint non-stop and I did just that. I was the oldest of the three women at the Rimbun Dahan Artists Residency and I should have paid more attention to the problems under my very nose of two women who were going through the most difficult time in women’s lives: the menopause. I went there to paint; and I never considered expending my energy elsewhere than on painting. .The terrible accusations and unexpected behaviours I witnessed, came as a shock, plunging me further into painting.

We can only see the whole at a distance; sometimes we can only assess hurt and the harm done to us in time. It might help if we understood the source of hurtful behaviour, even if there’s nothing we can do about it.

Mimosa Pudica

ART IN A TIME OF MADNESSI

Mimosa Pudica: The sensitive plant, which closes up at the touch.

How do I describe the feelings which overcame me at the news of her passing? There is no single word for it. Emptiness? It was an experience which bruised, scarred, scooped out my soul.

Voided.

As time processes the information of her death —which I only received two years after the event— I struggle to prevent that void, now sealed, from re-opening and filling with old hurts and regrets.

In Malaysia, with its superstitions concerning death and the afterlife, anyone who dies or contracts a disease and dies of it, is beatified, regardless of her past crimes. So, what I am about to reveal in these blogs about my time at the Rimbun Dahan Artists Residency in Malaysia which I shared with Renee Kraal, might be unwelcome to Malaysians who would prefer to forget. But it is only in remembering that we can learn lessons and bring meaning to past experience. And a story as racialised and politicised as this one needs to be told. It is twenty-five years since the Residency. That I have only now, picked up the courage to raise my voice and tell my story, testifies to its traumatic nature.

When I chose to apply for the Rimbun Dahan Artists Residency programme in '95/'96 on Renee's invitation, to work with her, I took it up in all sincerity and good faith. It took years before I could make up for the losses I incurred through that choice: personal, in terms of my reputation —those who do wrong are tireless in their efforts to discredit their victims— in Malaysia and here in Australia; financial, in terms of job prospects and the poor sales at the end of the Residency through foul play; and domestic, in terms of the sacrifices I put my Australian family through, and the breakdown I suffered at the end of that Residency.

Renee was a guru. Gurus are street angels. Behind closed doors, they can be dangerous when denied the superior status they believe is their due. She preached healing; wore her spirituality on her sleeve. She was into Chakras, crystals and Bach Flower Therapies —not Art. So, in applying for the Artists Residency, she had simply knocked on the wrong door. As her co-artist, I was the potential for dominance, within her reach; until I chose to be unreachable. My refusal of her efforts to ‘heal’ me, my concentration on studio work, threw her into a tail spin. That was the crux of the ruin of what might have been an artistically and spiritually rewarding nine-month Residency.

            An insecure spirituality flounders at the smallest obstacle. In the face of that insecurity in the very person who preached healing and peaceful inner states, I went into a virtual locked-in syndrome. Like the Mimosa pudica, I closed up when the subject of the Residency or Renee was thrown at me, and no amount of bullying by anyone on her behalf —and there was bullying, mental abuse, and on one occasion, physical abuse—could make me talk about what I was experiencing at the time. Traumatic experiences are best kept private, because the slightest nuance of disbelief can be hurtful. There is strength in silence, resilience in endurance.

For the first 5 months of the nine-month Residency —which were stretched to ten, to satisfy Renee— I was alone in fourteen and a half acres of old orchard, beautiful by day but wild and sinister at night; with no means of communication or transport in the event of an emergency, and no one to talk to, or to trust. Because I believed that Artists in Residence have to separate the professional from the personal, I made no complaint about what was happening to me to the Administrator of the Residency who became increasingly hostile. I feared her as much as I feared Renee's friends who were easily roused to anger on her behalf and quick to fight her battles. Whereas I knew that the mental stability of those who are quick to take sides rather than mitigate ill feelings with rationality, was questionable, I still turned things back on myself and examined the image I was projecting which might have caused antagonism. I came to the conclusion that having been away for so long, I was a Malaysian in a foreign country —Malaysia. There had been no time for mutual adjustment. I had accepted to take a trip on this rocky road and I would have to keep going to the end.

Throughout that Residency I kept a close diary. These blogs are from that diary. I loved the cottage. It was close to an old rambutan orchard, dark and brooding. Only now do I appreciate the strength and inspiration I derived from the flora and fauna surrounding this cottage and my studio; the lotus flowers and their dried centres; fallen fruit decaying into profound blackness; dried and skeleton leaves. These, and the events, both ordinary and extraordinary which took place at Rimbun Dahan were the esoterica which became my points of contemplation; the motifs which were the catalysts to my paintings; the elements which transformed loneliness into solitude, silence into strength, and fear into meditation. The sum total of prayer. Nature became the ballast I needed to keep me grounded through physical and metaphorical storms and blackouts.

So, without mincing words, I will say that on learning of her death, all the memories of deprivation, isolation, unfairnesses and fear returned, and I wish I could go back on that time when I worked alone in what was meant to be a joint- Artists Residency, and do things differently, or tear it all to bits like a piece of waste paper.

Art in a Time of Madness

The line is drawn

The Rimbun Dahan Residency was politicised and racialised from the very beginning.

On the first morning of my arrival Renee and I sit together outside the cottage having tea. It’s my first day. The air is fresh and warm with a clean smell after the rain, a true Malaysian kampong morning, roosters crowing and the noise of birds and animals around, and the sun picking up heat by the minute. The grassy lawn just beyond the small concrete drain, meant to channel excess water to the bigger drains in the rainy season, is lush green against the dark orchard.

 Renee whips out a cigarette. She did that the night before. I didn’t expect it. She smoked while she ate and later as we sat in the lounge room after dinner regardless of my discomfort. To have said anything about this smoking would be to start on a negative note. My discomfort may have seeped into her consciousness as most people’s internal states tend to do. Not everything needs to be said. I never bargained for this, I thought, but I applied for this residency and I must find a way around this or put up with it until the appropriate time when, having got to know each other better, I might say something about the health benefits for both of us of not smoking indoors. That time never came. I didn’t realise until in retrospect, it became clear that this was a ploy.

And then she threw her bombshell: I only mix with Caucasians, she said. My mind spun. Was she blind? Did she possess a mirror? I a dark-skinned person was facing a dark-skinned Eurasian woman who saw herself as white on account of her Dutch surname, Kraal. Almost in the same breath, she said, I hate this place. We’re an afterthought. They had this space and they stuck us here. That unhappy note did not correspond to the excitement she expressed in her letters to me before I came. Looking back at those letters, I realised that she had expected to occupy the Guest House where all the orang putih were housed. This cottage, adjacent to the Indian Driver’s cottage, was a reminder of the colour of her skin. Her bitterness explained the filthy state of that cottage, reeking of cigarette smoke and cat excrement.

That day, the line was drawn. That day the gap between us was so widened as to prevent all prospects of our ever, becoming friends. That day something died within me.

III

Colourism.

Malaysians associate light skin with beauty, a greater potential for achievement and superiority. A skin tone one shade lighter or darker than someone else’s determines where you will stand on the social ladder for the rest of your life. It requires a certain degree of sophistication to bypass pigmentation; to have the grace to go beyond the incidentals of appearance and to look for value in character and personality. That grace is non-existent in Malaysia.

 There, there is no ‘brown paper bag test’ as there is in America where a person —especially a woman’s— social standing and career prospects are determined by how much lighter or darker she is than a brown paper bag. In Malaysia, judgement by the tonal scale exists from the time you are born. It begins in families.

 The first question which forms in the minds of the most unsophisticated and least educated of Malaysians, is not whether a new born is perfectly formed or healthy and beautiful but, ‘Fair or dark?’ It is even acceptable in families for a mother to point out the dark-skinned child in the family and, insensitively, associate her darkness with a future of low achievement and limited opportunity. This is not racism; this is colourism, and this colourism is prevalent in Eurasian families or families where one parent is Eurasian. It is where disunity in families begins. And this disunity creeps into society. Malaysians are quick to discredit their own especially in the face of Westerners. They are unsupportive of each other.

 Colourism is the beginning of low self-esteem especially in girls. The early awareness of being unloved: you are not loved for who you are; you are not loved because you exist; you are not valued for what you are, because you do not fit into the world’s expectations of who you ought to be. This is the internalised racism which is global. This is ironic in a country where the majority of the people you meet are dark. This obsession with skin colour and shades of darkness shows how early in our lives, identities are formed. The Structural Racism we see in the world is simply a perpetuation of the policies and practices of colourism.

Racism in Malaysia has been going on unchecked for decades. Whiteness is valued around the world but nowhere more so than in Malaysia where three different races each with more than three different shades of skin colour, existed side by side for centuries. Malaysians were not unaware of these differences; but they were more accepting of each other’s differences in earlier times than they are today.

In my import —the Catholic system— every Bishop and cleric down to the very last nun who stepped off the boat from France and Ireland to teach, was White. These are the people who dictated right from wrong to us. Is it any wonder Malaysians associate whiteness with perfection?

 As if this religious aberration was not enough, the British descended on us and in WW II, through their inadequacy and arrogance opened the doors to that epitome of racist minds —the Japanese— allowing them free reign over us. That over, the Brits came back and compensated for their World War II silliness by carting Malaysian youths to England and Australia to educate them; whereupon the majority returned with a white spouse and a new generation of white supremacists sprung up. It looks as if wherever you turn in Malaysia today there is a white woman married to a Malaysian in high places. Any Australian check-out chick or Czechoslovakian peasant could end up a Puan Sri or a Datin or a Tungku. These are the titled women to whom Malaysians give unquestioning allegiance today, beginning again the cycle of whiteness and the shades of whiteness to darkness-equals-value-equals-superiority. The Serani, who can look anything from a Chinese to a Malay to an Indian, sees herself/himself as Caucasian: : hence, Renee’s I only mix with Caucasians.

To blend in with that superior white cloud whose company she so valued, Renee avoided the sunlight. It kept her skin light. She slept during the day until darkness fell. Then, fully made up, she walked over to the studio in the dark to work. Consideration of skin colour preceded and replaced health concerns. Something was bound to go wrong —and not only with a Vitamin ‘D’ deficiency and its consequences for a woman’s physical and mental health.

Diary Entry (DE) 30/6/95. Renee speaks of healing. She’s a vegetarian. She talks to plants.  She’s a heavy smoker…Pollution…She sleeps all day. The Victorians had a proverb on sleep: Six hours for a man, seven for a woman, eight for a fool. Saadi of Shiraz the Sufi mystic was no less unkind: ‘When a man’s sleep is better than his waking— It is better that he should die.’

I wake when she enters the cottage in the early hours of the morning. I lie awake for a few hours. I rise at 6 am. The sky is always dark at that time... I sit outside the cottage to look at the morning star. A diamond solitaire in the black sky progressively turning Saxe blue. The trees in the old orchard are silhouetted against the swiftly brightening sky…Gate of Heaven…Morning Star…Health of the sick…Comforter of the afflicted. The fresh air is comforting.

 DE. 1/07/95: Cloud formation at 7 am over the old orchard; grey with silver lining. The sound of cars and motorbikes all heading south towards Sungei Buloh and KL. (I cannot see them. I am deep in this orchard. It is like a protecting womb; I hear them). Workmen, going to work. I love the quiet of the kampong morning. The light comes on suddenly. There is no long twilight here. I love the light between the trees; the sudden shafts of light through dense leaves...Sometimes, patches of light come through between the trees and the darkness makes them sharper, more intense. I love this place.

In ’95, the Rimbun Dahan Artists Residency was still unplanned. The idea was to bring Artists from Australia and Malaysia to work together. The real idea was to show the West the family’s wealth. The cringe still existed. Hence, there were no regulations put in place to create a reasonably comfortable place for both artists to live and work in close proximity.  Heavy smoking was, even in ’95, socially unacceptable globally. Renee smoked even in the Administrators’ dining room, their lounge room, the gallery and the studios. They said nothing. She was the Malaysian artist. There were political reasons for their silence.

IV

Concerning the Political

I said in my first blog that this Residency was…politicised from the beginning… In July I met the entire family of the Millionaire, M, who had given us that Residency. We were invited to dinner at their mansion. Renee, Kevin, the artist from New Zealand, Jason an architect from Manchester and I. The family was warm and gracious. Their lifestyle, elegant and simple, the food delicious. For a man of international standing, I found M to be accessible, no airs and graces.

The surrounding landscape had already become inspirational and I had made several sketches of the leaves and lotus centres, the flora, fresh and dry. I couldn’t wait to get into the studio and begin painting. And despite everything that happened later, my admiration for M and my love for that place created by his wife Alice* has remained.

 After-dinner there was coffee in the new underground gallery. That’s when the interrogation started. Alice asked, point blank, if my sister had married the Belgian after her husband, a Muslim, had long died. I had no idea. I had been estranged from my large and largely disunited family for nearly forty years: eighteen years in the convent and the last twenty in Australia. I had come to Malaysia, naively thinking that I could to work as an artist with Renee who had invited me to apply for this Residency. But of course, this is Malaysia and you will always be connected to your family. Then, Alice said that my nephew, Rehman, a famous Malaysian author, had snubbed her at his book launch. She never forgot it. Hell-fury ensued. M said that Rehman had been un-cooperative and churlish about a project of his. Perhaps, they expected me to apologise for my family’s misdemeanours. I didn’t even know when I applied for this Residency that they knew my family. Apologising on behalf of someone else was not my style. I would hate anyone to apologise on my behalf. That she was still smarting from the snubbing episode rendered Alice’s intentions questionable; but any speculation on that matter would be inappropriate here.

 I loved both my sister and Rehman; but I have always disapproved of their conduct and distanced myself from them. In my opinion, Rehman was arrogant and disrespectful of women, especially strong women. To me, loving people and approving of their behaviour are mutually exclusive: you can love a person and still disapprove of her/his behaviour.

 I sat alone in my black silk dress as if on stage, fielding Alice’s questions regarding my family’s private affairs, in front of strangers. The seating arrangements in the gallery assumed a subconscious strategy: M sat to my right; Renee and Alice sat close together on my left.  The two girls, M’s daughters, Kevin and Jason sat somewhere beyond, listening in silence. I never expected this indiscretion.

At the end of the night, Renee and I walked across the moon-drenched courtyard in silence to the Artists’ cottage. I knew of Renee’s off and on friendship with my sister and with Rehman. She was still at that time very close to Rehman, but she said nothing in his defence, nor did she try to diffuse the situation in any way. This was the first but not the last time Renee would throw me to the lions. The moon, bright and full, illuminated not just the courtyard but also what might have been the true purpose of my selection to this Residency: that perhaps I was brought here, not only because of my achievements and qualifications, but because there was a backlog of grievances against my family of which I had been unaware but for which I was going to pay.

(Diary Entry) 11/07/95 I must be careful of Renee. She and Alice have grudges. They want me to take sides in their quarrels. I am here to paint, to produce a body of work and that is what I am going to do. Nothing that happens here will go out of here. I will not enter into other people’s quarrels. I will not say a word to anyone in my family about the Residency or what happened tonight. Quarrels are unproductive, and we are creative people. And so, I will not enter into any discussion with M and Alice or Renee about my family.

 As it turned out, I was lucky to have been ignorant of my sister’s affairs. I could have caused disaster if I had ventured the wrong information. Marriage to a non-Muslim (the Belgian) would have jeopardised a person’s position with the Syariah court in this Islamic country. A non-Muslim cannot own land in Malaysia. Alice later said in passing that she envied my sister. The land she was on was on a hill; wild, exotic, bound by a river source and dam on one side and surrounded by forest. Was it possible that someone could, in conscience, calculate to deprive another of her home and property? The simple-minded nature of these revelations only reflected the inherent corruption behind such intentions. I am reminded of the Gina/Rose Hancock affair: the relentless pursuit, the uncontrolled hate-attacks, the bullying; the continuous bashing until one woman wears another down and is none the happier for it. I hoped this would all end there and that I would be left alone to work in peace from then on, not jeopardised by family.

 I never referred to that night in the Gallery until now. My sister met me later and said that I was not to speak to M or Alice about her. I didn’t need to ask for reasons. I knew why. The probing ended. But not quite. The indiscretions continued, revealing another political scenario.

Renee and I were the second duo of artists to take up the Rimbun Dahan Residency. Renee had told me that the Malaysian Artist, of the first two artists before us, had been troublesome. According to the servants, he had been treated with scant respect —in fact, downright rudeness. I met him later and he confirmed this. You don’t have to ask for information in Malaysia, it comes to you on a platter.

That night Alice told us that the two artists before us did not get on, so she had titled their Exhibition: Mind the Gap in jest. I found this information disconcerting. Would we too be talked about when our backs were turned? I resolved that no one was going to ridicule us. We were going to be respected as Professional Artists. There would be no disagreements for public consumption; if there were disagreements, we would settle them between us.

 Unfortunately, despite no serious disagreements, Renee became more and more agitated and stayed away from the studios, claiming in tears that she couldn’t work at Rimbun Dahan because I was constantly peering over her shoulder. As there was nothing to see but an empty studio, that was a joke. I requested Alice for meetings in which we could all talk together in a civilised manner, find out what could be done and address the problems if there were any. She turned down my requests for a meeting and aborted every positive suggestion for the strangest reasons which I will come to later.

 I came to the conclusion that some people prefer conflict to peace. It is the kind of disorder that gives them the excitement of seeing someone get hurt; because in every conflict, someone gets hurt. It is the kind of disorder lodged in the hearts of those who derive pleasure from witnessing cock-fights and boxing matches. But this being a public Residency, Alice had to do everything in her power to rectify the mistakes which had been made with the treatment of the Malaysian artist the year before: it was political.

 Stories will be told in paintings

Of love for an ancient place

 And the things that happened there

steeped in unlove

 Blackened branches

Of rambutan trees

Soaked in tears of rain

And wind and storm

 Fall, and falling, fell

In the darkest hour of the night

One heavy thud to the ground

Before daybreak. 

* Not her real name

V

Fin

Fin picks up my diary and reads: …The VQ stormed out again. Left her cat for a week. I have to feed him. Milo-san. He hates me…sicked-up all over the kitchen floor… shits in the flower pots she brought into the cottage with some cordyline… she talks to plants…she thinks they answer with music…. The cottage stinks of cat-piss and cigarette smoke.

Ew! Fin says, Say something. Tell them. VQ. What’s VQ?

Virgin Queen, I say. Throughout my diary I refer to Renee as VQ

Virgin? Fin asks. Which one? Our Lady of Fatima? Our Lady of Lourdes? She looks at me. Oh, that one? She says. She laughs loudly. What about M--o, K-t, David, Allan, Hashim, Hassan, Nabil, Kupusamy, Leng…She rattles off names real and fictitious. One or two are names of gay men. And…, not to mention the odd orang putih who drops in —in more ways than one. She looks at me directly. Enid, Renee’s a Sixties Malaysian artist, OK? And, for your information —since you’ve been locked away for so long, hooded up and stuck in that convent and then in that down-under place— they’re a clique who buy each other’s work and jump into each other’s beds. Ok? She sweeps her hand in the air miming the jump into bed. Virgin? She sneers.

Shh, keep your voice down. She asked me here. I owe this to her. And you shouldn’t read other people’s diary. I take the diary from her.

So? You going to be grateful for the rest of your life? Gratefulness puts you on your knees.

I know, but it’s more difficult than you think. I’m afraid of the consequences. I can’t stand fights. Wasted energy.

Diary Entry 6/7/95: I just wish Fin would stay away. She’s loud. Familiar with the servants in easy, loose Malay which they pretend to find amusing. She’ll say anything. But she’s all I’ve got. I don’t have transport. I don’t have a telephone; I don’t know my way around. Renee takes the car…and Fin is leaving for the US soon…

*

I am washing the kitchen floor of cat-sick, sweeping the water towards the back door of the cottage with the penyapu lidi when Renee walks in after a week’s absence. She has her hair pulled back severely from her forehead and controlled at the back with a banana clip. She has been taxiing her German friend all over Kuala Lumpur in the residency car. She looks happy.

 Just in time, I sing out, I hand her the broom. Your turn, I say, taking advantage of her cheerfulness. But I should have been sensitive to her fragility. She has been through a bad relationship break-up and her father has died. The elderly Chinese lady next door to her place broke Milo-san’s legs a year ago, through spite. So, I stop trying to be funny. Milo-san has been sick, I say.

 She stops short, throws the half-smoked cigarette onto the food and hairball sludge on the floor. Look, she says, it’s not that difficult since you are already washing the floor. I look at her in consternation. Her lower lip quivers and pushes up her upper lip, her mouth forms a L’Oreal 216 Red Hot, upside-down ‘U’.  I can’t face this, she says. She turns and leaves the cottage. From the half-open blue glass pane of the kitchen window I see her stamping her feet as she walks up the two steps which lead to the dog kennels and the garages and then to the courtyard leading to the main house. Each stamping step the disappointed sulk of a fifty-one-year-old child.

To think I took care of her cat and she didn’t even thank me. I finish the clean-up and try not to be angry. An empty tin of cat food lies near the dustbin. I tear off the label, threw out the tin and created a collage with the two Whiskas images from the paper label. One becomes a black mask and another an image I titled Cat Queen.

Further down the track I will see a repeat of today’s performance which will be far more severe and have more serious consequences for me.

 Diary Entry (7/7/95: I never seem to have answers to anything: Only images, useless images. I’ve upset the VQ. I’ll need to get provisions. Will have to walk the Kuang road to the Simpang.

 The Kuang Road meets the Kuala Selangor Road at the Simpang. It’s a nightmare of a road. Narrow. Poorly maintained. A dirt track, haphazardly topped with bitumen and subsequently upgraded to simulate a main road going from Kuang to Kuala Selangor. Chunks of bitumen break away from the sides after heavy rain. I have to jump off the soft edges when a lorry or the village bus swerves to avoid oncoming traffic, tilting and threatening to topple. There are accidents on this road. On my way I find fragments of plastic number plates from motor cycles which have been hit at Lorong Atap. I take the pieces back to the studio. I’ve brought a roller and some ink with me and I make prints on joss paper of the numbers on the fragments.

*

First Day. The day I arrived at Subang International Airport, the Residency car was supposed to meet me, but only Fin is there. That’s what big sisters are like. They remember your dithering, even forty years from childhood. I have a bad reputation for losing my way. Fin knows. She wants to drive me to her place first and send me to Rimbun Dahan later. She’s a great cook and I want to go with her. But as we talk, I see Renee emerging from behind a pillar. She comes forward, finger on her lip like a shy child. Renee, I say, I didn’t see you there. She approaches smiling, wordless. Fin steps back behind her, puts her index fingers to her temples like two pistols and mouths the words, Spaced out, man! Then she waves and says I leave you to it, then. She leaves, and my heart sinks a little.

Renee drives me back to Rimbun Dahan in a semi-rundown beige Volkswagen. My dream car, she says, a chuckle in her voice. I’m so excited. A high squeak on the ‘ci’ syllable, like a child with a new toy at Christmas. I’m surprised at this ‘dream car’. As long as a vehicle can take me from A to B, as long as I keep it clean and serviced, it’s a vehicle; not a dream. Alice gave it to me, she says. Alice is the Administrator of the Residency.  These people must be rolling in money, to give away a car and a ten-thousand-ringgit Residency to each of us. The long driveway into the grounds of their mansion confirms my calculations. This car must be a gift to her.

 I will discover very soon that this is the Residency car which we are supposed to share. But how do you prise a toy from the clutches of a child without inflicting pain? That deception —although I doubt it was deliberate: Renee had simply made herself believe the car was hers — concerned me.

 Flashback, 1963: A convent school in Perak. I was a young teacher of twenty-three preparing students for the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate exams. A seventeen-year-old appeared one day in my Fifth Form Art class. Her drawings were artworks, not the works of a schoolgirl. But the Nature Drawing Paper required closely observed botanical renderings. I sat her beside the best girl in class. At the next Art Class Renee told me in confidence that she suffered from claustrophobia. I had a small inkling that this girl was the patient, psychiatrist and couch all in one. As I was ‘the only person who understood’ her, I felt obliged to allow her to leave the class for a bit.   The Headmistress, having referred to the master timetable, sent for me. The new girl had been seen wandering during class hours, and would I, and the two other teachers who were there before me, explain why we had allowed this to happen? All three of us, ‘her only confidants’, had been sympathetic to the claustrophobia story. Renee didn’t stay long in that school.

I kept two small drawings of bones she made during that Fifth Form year for many years. They were drawings done in perfect proportion with an artistic flair I found engaging. The work of a true artist. [I returned them to her in 1996 when the Residency was over]

Revelations. After dinner on the first night of my arrival, Renee asks if I’m on HRT. No. Why not? She gives me a run-down on the benefits of HRT for women: younger looks, brighter skin. I could do with some help from HRT. Insolence. But this is Malaysia, get used to it again. It’s where people play fast and loose with the whole idea of discretion. Why beat about the bush? Just be direct, lah.  I know about HRT. A big thing that year in Australia too. And I know of its pitfalls.

 I ask what she’s working on. Too soon to tell. I deduce from that answer —'artists block’. She has not been working consistently— I know she is into batik, but she thinks she might paint. Painting is not new to either of us. All artists are versatile.

 She tells me she has just been through a difficult relationship, recently broken up. I know. She wrote to me about it. What a swine he was, ‘slippery’, ‘not to be trusted’. His vices surpass those of her chief enemy, who happens to be one of my sisters who, she believes, is ‘damaged’, ‘binges’, ‘has mood swings’ and ‘is in need of healing’.

 I refrain from judgement or advice. This gut-spill of confusion and anger needs no advice, just a listening ear. Only a naive mind spiralling into the vortex of an impossible oneiric underworld would give credence to everything she’s saying. Let her speak. In retrospect, I should have shown some sympathy. But jetlagged and wishing to go to bed, I said nothing.

 Renee lights another cigarette. I shift uncomfortably to the edge of the armchair in which I am sitting. It feels damp. Malaysia’s seventy percent humidity, I think. And yet the room is comfortable enough. She takes a drag and then points to the armchair and says, Milo-san is afraid of the cats in this place. He can’t go outside so he does his business on the armchairs. Stunned, wordless stare from me. She is amused at how knowing her cat is. Hers is the only armchair in which he never pisses. The stain on my skirt is yellow. I wish she had warned me.

I want to start studio work. I am hungry for solitude and for work. Our studios are adjacent to each other and as she is the host artist, it would be presumptuous of me to have gone into the studios and set up for work before she was prepared. I waited. She went home to KKB for days and I had nothing much to do, so I gathered whatever I could find from around the place and made drawings. I found a fruit I had never seen before outside the main gate. Only in the kampongs can one find exotic fruits, mushrooms and orchids. The fruit was yellow to mustard in colour and about 10cm in diameter and 6cm high. I didn’t know what it was. I asked the Malay servants about it. They told me it was an Assam; used in Chinese funeral rites. Later I thought of including it in one of my paintings.

*

Following the cat-sick clean-up incident that day, Renee went across the courtyard to the main house.  She returned to the cottage looking distraught, as if she had been crying a lot. She locked the cat in her room and left for her home in KKB. He scratched and cried all night until she returned the following evening. I had by that time become adept at escaping another dose of mumbo-jumbo concerning healing. I would come across the courtyard from the studio and look out for the car. When I see it in the garage, I go for a long walk to avoid her. But this time, I see the car and go straight to the cottage and I confront her. That was cruel, Renee, I say. You shouldn’t have locked him up. He cried all night and I couldn’t feed him.

I thought that’s what you wanted; she said. 

VI

The Price of Avoidance

At the end of 1994, I received a letter from Renee. She had fond memories of me, she said, as her Art teacher and the only person who understood her. I hardly knew her. Sentimentality aside, her letters urged me to apply for a Residency in Malaysia. I had never heard of it. There would be a shared cottage, individual studios and a car at our disposal, and all expenses paid. A phantom was opening the doors of the dark room where I resided with disappointing political and personal migrant experiences. This Residency seemed too good to be true. Her letters described the place in euphoric terms confirming its reality. The doors creaked open wider to admit the fresh air and sunlight of a new dawn. I saw this invitation as a godsend and applied for the Residency, recklessly breaking two self-imposed rules: Rule One, never have an Exhibition or agree to work with an ex-student on her or his request. There is always a catch. If you do well, you’ll be accused of crushing a tender flower; if you do poorly, you’ll be seen as a loser. Two, be sceptical of sentimentality. It goes hand in hand with cruelty. But, too eager for the sights, smells and sounds of home, I ignored the alarm bells even when they became louder with Renee’s subsequent letters. In these letters, she hinted of possible conflicts, outlining strategies for taking cover ‘in the event of our not getting on’. This was not a joke. A damper fell on my enthusiasm. Nine months of Art and discovery; of working with Renee and meeting with Malaysian artists; of collusion in valuable ideas and of perhaps making a contribution to the family for its generosity to artists, all took a back seat to the fear of conflict. But my application had been accepted and I had taken leave of my job. It was too late to pull out. As I was confident that I would be able to overcome any obstacles maturely, I never thought of unfairness. And what I saw from afar as small stumbling blocks, in close-up were insurmountable phantom mountains.

*

I arrived in late June. By August, Renee, citing intimidation, came to an agreement with Alice that she work at her home in Kuala Kubu Baru, KKB, virtually making a farce of that joint Residency. Alice agreed to Renee’s whims. She had to. Her track record with the Malaysian artist the year before was not edifying, to put it mildly. Renee was the Malaysian artist this year. Like rodents in a bush waiting to pounce, the Malaysian public had its eyes on her, or so she thought.

From time to time, Renee made token appearances by returning to the cottage. On these rare occasions, if she was not asleep in her room, she sat on the veranda smoking. I sat with her occasionally and listened to her monotonous sermons in judgement of her enemies delivered between drags on her cigarette. In the absence of grace, every setback becomes self-referential. One creates negatives where negatives never existed and uses them like a razor-wire fence in self-protection against the world; picking up every word and turning it against oneself. Renee was inarticulate except in complaints.

 Her friends dropped by to let me know how sensitive she was; advised me how to show compassion and with each advice I became less sympathetic and more dispassionate. One day Rehman, the writer, my nephew, rang me to say Renee needed a little manja. She was, in his words ‘A manja girl.’ Maybe I should have been less cool; exposed her machinations. But I couldn’t bring myself to descend to uncivil conduct. And a fifty-year-old needed no manja, no mollycoddling.

 There are two great evils in the world, said Cecil Beaton: boredom and being a bore and the latter is the worse of the two. I should have understood Renee’s anguish and commiserated. But she was such a bore. If you told her a joke, she repeated the punch line in a flat tone of voice and killed it.. As I listened to her one day, a drizzle fell in a slanting fall against the banana grove a few metres from where we were sitting. Where the raindrops caught the evening light like running stitches in white thread, I was reminded of a Hiroshige print Rain at Shono (1833). I used this image in my next painting Hujan Liris. (It was sold at the James Harvey Gallery here in Sydney after the Residency.)  Sensing my boredom, Renee stubbed out her cigarette in her saucer with such force, the saucer danced about screaming against the glass-topped table like an insect which had just been stabbed. She went into the kitchen. and I followed her later. She lit another cigarette. You intimidate me, she said, shoving cat food into the fridge uncovered. You are aggressive. I was shocked but not silent this time.  In what way? I asked. How could I be aggressive and intimidate you when you are not here? You are never here, Renee, I said as calmly as I could. I sensed that she was spoiling for a fight.

 Your paintings…she gestured —too big —aggressive. You are abnormal. You work too much. Maybe you are anxious about the exhibition. The put-down didn’t escape me. My CV was impressive. I had done many painting exhibitions and had recently been selected for the 21st Alice Prize Exhibition for a very large triptych. I was enjoying that uninterrupted time to paint. My prints were small; my paintings large. I needed that spacial experience, and this Residency was giving it to me. Renee turned around from the fridge and exhaled smoke in my face. I pulled back at that rudeness. How crude, I thought. She waved her hand in front of my face to clear the air, impressing on me that it was not accidental, it was deliberate. That’s when I realised that she was disturbed. Nevertheless, I was stung. Renee wanted to be in the Guest House, not in this cottage, and she preferred to goad me into some kind of confrontation, so that she could move out without being blamed for it. The innocent party, she was always the innocent party.

I loved what I was doing; absorbing the landscape and weaving it into my paintings; wallowing in my freedom to be solitary; enjoying that uninterrupted time to think and to work. These reasons had to be kept away from her present state of artists block like salt from an open wound. Negative thoughts, poor diet and lack of exercise can work havoc in one’s mind; cause a blockage; the parameters which staunch creative fluidity and disallow new Artistic conversations. Many things disturbed her, my studio practice for one, and whatever disturbs someone causes inexplicable reactions, elicits insolence and unfair remarks. These encounters with her made me want to leave the Residency but they paled into insignificance in the face of my love for the place and for my work.. For the first time I had the experience of an uninterrupted flow of work. I wrote letters home and told of my inability to sleep as I moved from one panel to the next in the triptych which had become a trademark as it were. Triptych based on the Gothic concept of the number three; this religious aspect of the significance of the number coupled with my intimate and internalised knowledge of the number three which characterised my date of birth: 13/3/39. So many threes. Divide 39 by three and one gets the number 13. I have worked in the threes for a very long time.

I wanted to leave, but what to, after giving up my job? I couldn’t. I had fallen in love with the place. I should have said something to someone, but there was no one to turn to.  In the years away from family and home, I had become self-reliant; forgotten how to solicit sympathy; how to complain; how to ingratiate myself with other women, and so, I bore her disrespect and insults rather than cause trouble, and like Proust’s Swann in the face of Odette’s lies, my soul bore them along, cast them aside, cradled them like dead bodies…and was poisoned by them. It disturbed my work. I had to avoid her.

 I took long walks and stayed in the studio writing and painting until she left the cottage. Tired and hungry from walking and working one evening as I waited for the car to leave so that I could be alone in the cottage, I headed there to have my dinner and a rest. Renee had cleaned out the entire fridge and pantry. It was too late and too far to walk the Kuang Road alone to the Simpang to get some food. I went to bed hungry.

Surprisingly, she appeared the next day in the studio. I made no mention of the empty fridge. With a calm face, like a mask —the large red mouth, the hair pulled back from the brown forehead and the eyebrows completely plucked, replaced by single drawn lines— she said, I thought you were here just to paint, so I cleaned out the fridge for you yesterday.

*

Fast forward to October 1995. Ian was visiting. Alice suggested that we take a holiday. She even offered us the use of the Rimbun Dahan van. We took a road trip to Penang. Light Street convent, the chapel, the smell of the sea and memories of childhood holidays were consoling until our return. Entering the cottage, I saw the bookshelf empty of all Renee’s books except for the recently published monograph on Brett Whitely which I had given her. The kitchen had been cleared of every utensil. The fridge empty. There was not even a knife. It was surreal. Sinister. There were bits and pieces of paper and spilt food on the kitchen floor. The phantom of a thief hovered around.  A large Nescafe bottle with some rice in it was in the pantry, nothing else. I opened it to discover broken rice, with grit, chaff and mouse droppings, like the third quality rice we had to have in the War when the Japanese took all the first quality white rice. Where did this come from? I had not seen it before. You would have to use a tapis to separate the chaff from the grain and dirt. It was horrible.

Despite the lateness of the hour and fatigue, we drove out to Sungei Buloh in search of dinner. I was too upset to eat. No one had said a word about Renee’s departure. The next day, Ian went to return the van keys to Alice. Rather than ask about our holiday, Alice asked him how I was. Did she want to relish the news that I was hurt? Ian said I was in shock. Things had gone missing. Alice seemed surprised. She suggested we re-equip the cottage kitchen and the Residency would reimburse us. We shopped the next day, shortly before Ian left for Australia. I wanted to leave with him but it was too late and I needed to get over this and to go the distance. I am not a quitter. Heavy-hearted for days, I became worse when the workers told me that in our absence, Alice and Renee spent a day removing all Renee’s belongings from the cottage.

Civility, the hallmark of a moral code from which all goodness radiates, had died in Malaysia. I grit my teeth and continued alone. I was in the pincer grip of insanity and its ally. I had to stay grounded, or float, like a figure in a Chagall painting.  Both women later declared themselves feminists. That they found pleasure in injustice and victimisation of a woman alone, makes them other than feminists, just people knotted up inside with self-loathing.

 There was a tallboy left in Renee’s bedroom. I opened the drawers. A fine dust of black soot remained in the corners of each drawer. The stale cigarette smell lingering in the room was sickening. I feared for her lungs as much as I feared for her soul.

VII

The Residency is extended

 October 1995. Shortly before Renee moved out. Renee had been away in Kuala Kubu Baru (KKB) for the week. I woke with my heart pounding in unfounded fear when someone entered the cottage at 2.30am. I knew it was her. She had the keys., so I couldn’t process my discomfort. and the sensation that I didn’t know what exactly I was afraid of. Maybe it was conflict. There had been so much continuing conflict in my family that I ended up trying too hard to please, as if in being a people pleaser, you could make the arguments go away. After an intermittent sleep that morning, I woke again at 6.30am. Our rooms adjoined the kitchen and I was afraid to wake her before midday which was her rising time. I went to the studio without breakfast. There were tea making facilities there.

            From the walkway of the main house, concrete slopes plunged into two fish ponds between the M’s mansion and my studio. Sitting outside my studio on the edge of the fish ponds in the morning and watching the cascade of water booming open by an underground mechanism and plunging into the fish ponds down the concrete slopes, was a peaceful yet exhilarating sensation. The fish, some of them rather large, frolicked in energetic leaps. M’s genius as an architect combined with Alice’s talent as a landscape artist made what might have been a wilderness, an amazing oasis. I watched as Alice stood on the walkway, hands on hips, looking into the distance. I thought of Jane Austen, painting with her words on a wide canvas. Alice was painting that wide landscape with her mind’s eye. Very soon some changes would occur and a tree or some element in that landscape would be shifted and positioned as a jeweller would set precious stones to their best advantage in a bracelet. This was an evolving landscape, balanced by control where verdant lawns met and melded into the browns and emeralds of the wilderness.

It was a pity, in retrospect, that this place should have been torn apart by heavy-hearted byways of negatives. I wish there was something I could have done at that time to alleviate Renee’s unhappiness. She was needy. Needing approval as much as she believed she was in need of healing. The remedy lay at her doorstep: exercise, healthy eating; the appreciation of nature and art. Instead, she drove several times to healing classes, commuting between KKB, Kuang and Kuala Lumpur (KL). She wanted me to join her. I couldn’t. I didn’t believe in Crystal clutching. To me, sleeping through the fresh beauty of a morning is like living in regions of long Nordic winters; courting sadness and depression. I refused to believe in Vitamins and Supplements. I knew where her unhappiness was coming from, but I seemed powerless to help, and I blamed myself for the large canvases I chose to work on —as much a desire to enter and be absorbed by technique and landscape as they were an attempt at resolving the darkening situation that was enveloping us. I desperately wanted to be immersed in all that surrounding beauty, and desperately wanted to escape.

I returned to the cottage earlier than usual that afternoon to rest and found Alice and Renee in quiet conversation on the patio, two glasses and a jug of lime juice between them. Meetings like this usually took place in the M’s dining room which was right opposite my studio, so perhaps they had come to the cottage for privacy. I had been asking Alice for the three of us to meet, if only to talk to each other in a friendly manner over a cup of coffee.

 Renee had told me with some delight about an exhibition with a French artist: Renee who found it difficult to meet deadlines was a few hours late to set up their exhibition, so the Frenchwoman began to set hers up. She was ready to leave when Renee arrived with a friend. When they saw the Frenchwoman’s work in situ, Renee was distressed. Her friend went up to the woman and, pointing to each of her installed works said, What is this? You, you, you. What about poor Renee? The Frenchwoman took all her works down and the Gallery division began. That eventuality was disturbing when I thought about my very large canvases. So, I kept asking Alice for a meeting to clarify, dates, times and space allocation in a civilised manner, before the exhibition. The meeting, was finally secured. for the 19 January 1996 and this was the scenario:.

We met in the dining room. Alice was busy walking about locking and unlocking the glass doors between the dining room and the kitchen. She was obviously ignoring me. It’s so hard to talk to someone who will not look at you. You feel invisible, and an invisible person cannot have a voice. ‘ Alice,’ I said, ‘Could we have a meeting sometime with Renee to talk about the exhibition?’

Alice: I don’t see the point in it. Relationships being so strained as they are. She refuses to sit down. She keeps locking and unlocking the glass doors. I feel a hollowness in my chest where there would have been a feeling of patient acceptance if I had been dealing with a child..

Me: It would be good, just to talk to each other

A: I’m telling you there’s no point in a meeting. You are not speaking to Renee. So there! It’s too late. Why ask for a meeting now. You don’t believe this Residency is working. To quote you, ‘things are not going well.’ She was misquoting me. Workmen had dumped some stuff on one of Renee’s paintings in the storeroom. I didn’t want Renee to think that I had been neglectful. The store room was adjacent to my studio. I had told Alice that ‘things were not going too well as it was, and I didn’t want Renee to think I allowed them to do that. I didn’t tell Alice that I had called Renee to tell her and she had hung up on me. I wanted to keep conflict out of the picture.

Me: Alice, we must separate the personal from the professional. I’m asking for a meeting so we can discuss space, invitations, interviews etc.  

A: We’re thinking of separating you. One in The Star, one in The Straits Times.

I suspected she was going to create another ‘Mind the Gap’ story. Me: Why are we being separated? The public doesn’t need to know Renee has left.’ I was determined to stall that kind of petty story: ‘Oo these two artists couldn’t get on so we are separating them etc.’ Spectator sport; blood sport.

She was still fiddling with the glass doors. I sighed. Am I dealing with primary school kids here? I’ve never been a Primary school teacher. Alice: The Straits Times will not touch whatever was in the other papers. And you are adults, so don’t expect me to be sniffing around your quarrels.

I really didn’t know how she arrived at that illogical conclusion. The crudity of sniffing like a dog; comparing herself to a dog was revolting. I hated it when she mentioned ‘quarrels’. It sounded degrading. ‘All this is so childish.’ I said. ‘I mean, nobody even told me that Renee was leaving the cottage. It was upsetting.’

It was such a strain talking to a moving person who wouldn’t look at me. Something would happen later on and I would finally say something to one of the well-known artists I knew and she would mouth the very words I was now thinking: Alice is terrified of you. She doesn’t think the way you do. She doesn’t think straight. She never thought she would meet with an intelligent Malaysian woman. Further down the track, something would happen to one of the children on the property. A sadistic teacher beat his palms with a ruler so that he couldn’t hold a spoon or eat his dinner. When his mother told me that, I said that I didn’t belong there and couldn’t intervene. I wish I could confront that teacher. I suggested she approach Alice with the problem. She would have had more clout than I. She looked away, saying, ‘Kadang kadang, dia tak fikir berberapa baik.’ And I understood. There are times when she doesn’t think straight.

To my remark that Renee had left without anyone saying anything to me, Alice said,: I assumed you knew. Renee was devastated by it all, she added.

Me: By what? She shrugged. She didn’t know. Since I arrived,’ I said, I’ve had no means of communication or transport because Renee had the car and refused a phone because she had a phone at home in KKB. I have a family at home in Australia.

A: Well if things were so difficult why didn’t you say so earlier and go!

Me: Artists don’t take up a Residency and leave because of problems which can be fixed…

A: Well it’s too late now. You should have said something earlier and gone...

Me: That would be unprofessional. If I take on a project, I take it to the bitter end.

A: Turning back to the glass doors, shouts, If the end is bitter, then quit NOW. We don’t want bitter people around. You’ve got the car now, you’ve got the telephone, what more do you want?

‘What more do you want’. I couldn’t understand why she was saying this. She repeated it every time she had an opportunity. It took years after the Residency was over for me to realise the import of these words

Me: I’ve got them now, but for the first 4 months of this 9-month Residency I had no car. For the first 7 months I had no telephone. And this is a remote place. I have a husband and son at home and I need to be in touch and to have some privacy. My brother-in-law suicided and my sister rang and you said it was a private phone and you didn’t relay the message to me. I didn’t get in touch with my family until a week after the funeral, and they are just in Petaling Jaya.

I bit back my hurt. Renee knew my family. She knew what happened, she knew I had no phone and she never got in touch. Her personal misgivings overrode compassion. When and why do women become this way?

A: I’m sorry about that. I cannot be held responsible for other people’s problems. We’ve all had our problems this year.

She had had a death/ suicide? in her family as well.

Me: Perhaps Renee should have thought about me when she refused the phone line and when she equipped the cottage with her belongings. Artists come from afar and they cannot be expected to furnish a kitchen in the live-in quarters provided. If Ian had not been here, what would I have done?

A: Don’t blame Renee, M doesn’t want you to have a phone. She had forgotten that I was there when M insisted that I have the hand phone from the van and she had argued against it. The entire interview unnerved me. The fact that she didn’t sit down to talk. She seemed to be shouting, thrashing about as if under a spell.

*

Back to Alice and Renee drinking lime juice on the patio. They didn’t offer me a drink, but I sat down. This was my chance to be with the two of them. I asked if we could agree to have the exhibition earlier, say at the end of February as I wanted to be home for Andrew’s first day at University in March. Alice turned to Renee and asked what she thought. It was clear who was the boss here. Renee took a drag on her cigarette and whispered; I am not prepared. The conversation ended there. The residency was extended by another month to become a ten-month Residency. I went to my room and shed a few tears.

VIII

Of Giving and Taking

 Renee had said that Ian and our son Andrew were welcome to visit and stay for a while with me if I chose to take up the Residency. Andrew arrived in October, thin and strained. I had been away from home for four months and although I loved the place, I regretted having taken up Renee’s invitation.   I tried to keep everything that was happening with Renee from him. I cooked dinner on the night of his arrival and set the table on the patio with flowers and candles and got him to go to the studio and invite Renee to dine with us. She was sitting by the pool in the dark with a candle and her sketchbook. He returned from that mission looking as if he had climbed out of the burning pit nearby. We had dinner together, just the two of us in silence.

 I had been alone for months, and a CD player /radio would have been some solace in the intense blackouts which were common in Kuang, and which remained unattended to for days. In these blackouts I could do nothing but sit alone in the dark. The darkness was so intense that if I lit a candle, the flame illuminated a small circle just below it and I couldn’t read. Andrew brought me a radio. As well, he got to work on the ruined Residency radio which one of the previous artists had left in the rain. Now we had two radios. I was listening to O mio bambino caro---in my studio when I heard Renee on the staircase. I called out to her and suggested we could have one radio in the cottage and one in the studio. I hadn’t seen her for days. I gave her a hug.

I can see, she said, that I will have to get used to your mood swings. Damper number one. She had told me about my ‘mood swings’ This too was something I worked out later. Renee had been a close friend of my sister Rosna, a compulsive and incessant talker. She once drove me from Klang to Rimbun Dahan and never stopped talking all the way. It’s impossible to describe how exhausting travelling with a compulsive talker is. You become the captive audience they need

Instead of going down to her studio, she turned and went upstairs. There was a door at the foot of the stairs which separated the studios from the staircase. I followed her. Please stop sulking, Renee, I said, Andrew is here. She slammed the door in my face. I went back to my studio and my upper arms felt weak with hurt. I decided to confront her. I followed her to the cottage and just as I was entering the back door, she grabbed her bunch of keys and was getting ready to leave. It was a Saturday. Andrew had gone to KL. The trains and buses were not co-ordinated as they were in Sydney and I had no means of contacting him. If she left, he would have been stranded at Kuang station.

 In retrospect, I should not have worried. The people in that village were kind and friendly. They were accustomed to strangers who came to Rimbun Dahan. Andrew would have been cared for, and perhaps, even taken home to dinner at someone’s place and brought back to Rimbun Dahan on the back of a motor scooter. That’s the way true Malaysians are. When my friend Barbara came from Sydney to be with me later, she was stranded at Sungei Buloh station one evening. She arrived back late at Rimbun Dahan with a carload of teenagers who were absolutely delighted to have made her acquaintance and to drive her there. There was nothing to worry about but I was too tense to have made sense of anything.

Me: Before you take the car Renee, Andrew is in town and I will have to meet him at Kuang station. Can you wait a little?

R: I need to be in KKB before dark.

Me: There’s still a lot of time and the car…When I mentioned the car, she wrenched the keys from the bunch of her personal keys and flung them on the bar fridge,

 R: Take the car, she shouted.

 I had encroached on her dream; tried to wrench the one thing she loved from her hands. Why had Alice not clarified things? The keys slid off the fridge top and fell onto the sideboard near me. I was standing between the sideboard and the back door. The daughter of one of the servants, coming home from school, hearing the shout, peered through the kitchen window at us. This girl was the abridgement of pre-pubescent interfering inquisitiveness, continuously peering into any open window. I knew that her next move would be to come in by the back door for the excitement of a fight. I held on to the door knob to prevent it.

R: Yelling.  How dare you sh..sh..stop me from going out. She could hardly say the words. Her face became black with rage. I could see the white froth at the corners of her mouth. I should have let her leave, but I put my finger to my lips and pointed to the face at the window. The girl left the window and was off, presumably with tales to tell.

Me. Trying to keep my cool. My heart racing; my hands trembling. I’m not trying to stop you. I just want us to talk. Have you given people the impression that I was a bully, intimidating you? I asked

R: I didn’t say those words! I don’t want to talk about it.

Me: You don’t have to shout. It was hard to prevent myself from trembling, but I had to say what I needed to say. We need to talk. She began to twist and turn, writhing like a bird trying to extricate its tied foot. I said as calmly as I could; my heart beating fast: I have been left here alone in blackouts night after night and you come in the next day to say what a good time you had at dinner with your friends in KL the night before.

R: You have your sisters.

Me: Yes, miles away up in Ulu Langat and Petaling Jaya. I didn’t come here to work with them. And, what are these notes you leave around whenever you come and go?

 I found notes stuck to the fridge. One said: ‘In power over others is energy begot.  Aloof people create interrogators…Poor me, aloof, INTIMIDATORS!!’ Alice in one of her snarling, defensive moments which corresponded with Renee’s weeping, flapping, flailing performances, had said that I was the cause of Renee’s leaving the Residency; that I had intimidated her by peering over her shoulder to look at her work. That was a joke. Her studio was empty. She was working at home. Perhaps, verbally challenged as they both were, what they meant but couldn’t articulate was that she had felt intimidated by my studio practice which was different from that of the salon painters of her circle. And as for energy, perhaps some people derive energy, not from investigative and energetic artworks, but from fights, directly or by proxy.

Me: Look, Renee, I’m sorry if I have upset you, but what I want to say is that these people might be millionaires but they have given us this Residency and we need to make it work. You cannot take so much and give so little in return. M has given us a lot. All he wants to see is that his artists are working peacefully and…

She turned around, and went out by the front door, stamping her feet and weeping audibly as if she had learned to cry from some method acting class. In that state of distress, she went to Alice to complain, and the smear campaign against me began.

What I had forgotten in my forty years away, was that in Malaysia, it is inappropriate —for a woman especially— to ask a direct question as I did. That was to be garang, confrontational. I should have found a shoulder to cry on. That person would then settle my opponent. I had no friends there and no memory of having resorted to these niceties.

            What I didn’t know about Renee was to come.

That night I left a note for her which said something about her anger; about taking a lot and giving very little in return. When my sister heard of what I had done she said,

            ‘You fool, you played into her hands. She has taken words out of context from private letters, done a cut and paste and photocopied and distributed them. I knew it. I knew it. I knew she was going to make mince-meat out of you.’

 But I had judged her by myself. That was something I would never have done. 

IX

The Prisoner and The Friend

I was ten when my best friend since our first day in Primary School, disappeared. Her family had moved on. I cried myself to sleep; kept thinking of the fine crease in her forearm and her creamy skin and her loveliness and didn’t want to go back to the Convent Bukit Mertajam Primary School. I cried myself to sleep for about a week; and then, only the occasional thought of the fine crease in her forearms and her creamy skin remained, and I forgot her. When I was twenty-seven, and a nun, at the Convent Bukit Nanas, I was called down to the parlour one day, and there she was, elegant, twenty-seven and lovelier than ever with her perfectly beautiful newborn son in his bassinet. He was to become an Australian and International artist whose untimely death of a heart attack in 2009, shocked and grieved us all.

*

After Renee’s theatrics with keys and tears, Alice’s etiquette took a plunge and sank way below unacceptable levels. Her mascara-outlined blue eyes looked fierce with frightening frowns. Her words slurred in a sludge of guttural-nasal commands as one would have heard in an outback pub or ejected from the mouth of a truck driver or workman on a building site. She watched my every move. from an invisible panopticon across the courtyard.

Shortly before the Residency Exhibition, Ramli Ibrahim, the dancer called. He came in a beautiful blue car and parked in the driveway. Everything about him was close to perfection, from the way he carried himself to his every accoutrement. He came into the cottage and remarked on how well kept it was, and how I, like the rest of my family was house proud. I had found a genuine ikat fabric rolled up and thrown under the billiards table in one of the studios, dusted it off and hung it on the wall in the sitting room. I used the subtle cobalt blue tints within its design against the russet hues in my painting, Hujan Liris, light rain. I rubbed red earth from the burning pit near my studio into the weave of the canvas and with a mixture of oil paint and linseed, painted it over in Venetian red to create the russet hues as in the fabric. Ramli leaned against the kitchen bench, folded his arms and asked about Renee. I was more interested in the gracefulness of his movements than in talking about Renee. I thought of the Sufi Mystic Haykali’s poem: Thou art there.

The movement in response to another movement —thou art there

The grace of the graceful, not the mind of the graceful —thou art there…

I said she was finding life in the cottage difficult and didn’t say more. She had left by then.

We went to my studio. There had been a storm and one of my paintings had flown across the doorway. Ramli lifted the large canvas with one arm and shifted it easily. He is the master of the Odissi, the Indian classical dance and very fit. We went down to the Gallery and Alice came down to join us. I left her to talk to Ramli alone and went back to the cottage. All that had happened so far had diminished me and I was uncomfortable in her presence. Before he left, Ramli expressed his admiration of Alice who —only that morning, unnerved me by sneering: You’re only putting on a brave face…why don’t you go— I accepted what Ramli said without comment.

The next morning, Alice stopped me on my way to my studio and asked: Why did Ramli come? Did you ring him or did he ring you?

Me: He rang and asked to visit. He knows my family from way back. I walked away regally; as regally as any prisoner can pretend to be.

Alice appointed Frances Cummings, an accomplished Queensland Arts Administrator as Organiser and Director of our Exhibition. I was afraid when I saw her. A white woman. Was I going to become the meat in another sandwich? She turned out to be a blessing. Calm and totally impartial. With her around, I felt safe. We talked from time to time and she asked to visit. I bought a pair of traditional metal, hand-forged Chinese scissors at the Simpang for Mal, her husband who had seen a pair I had, and liked it; the type of scissors my mother used in the War. I said they had to pay me a token ten cents for it because my mother deemed it bad luck to give anyone sharp instruments, they signalled break-ups. Frances had been one of the Organisers of the National Women’s Art Award Exhibition in Queensland for which I had been considered. Mal was related to the well-known artist Elizabeth Cummings whose work I admired, so we had much to talk about. As soon as Frances and her husband left, Alice sent for me. The interrogation which I so resented began: Why did you send for Frances?

Me: I didn’t, she asked to visit me and Mal came as well.

A: Did you say anything to prejudice her against Renee? I looked at her the way one looks at a well-groomed white poodle who had taken to rolling himself in the mud.

Me: I don’t need to do things like that. I do NOT do things like that.

A: It’s important not to do that.

Me: Well I DON’T! OK?

Members of my family dropped in occasionally, unannounced, and I was subjected to more interrogation. Who called whom? It seemed she was on the lookout for Rehman and one day my sister visited with her youngest son who was also tall. She went berserk. Was it Rehman’s Pajero she saw parked in the driveway? She walked about in the vegetable garden near the cottage. All she needed to do was to come over to the cottage and say hello. Just as all she and M needed to do, was to call the Residency quits, something which, day after day, I hoped would happen. I had tried my best, by my silence, not to perpetrate ill feelings and pettiness; to make that Residency work. I never complained. I found solace in the landscape and every painting of mine was connected in some way to the flora, fauna and events which took place at Rimbun Dahan, from the launch of the Restu Festival to the performance of the Jazz Club. And yet, nine years later, the journalist Kamina Lyall was paid to lie. She wrote:

‘One artist, Malaysian-born Australian Enid Ratnam-Keese, left the Residency early to return home to the Blue Mountains, in NSW, but still contributed to the exhibition, describing it in her programme notes as: “out of the nine-month midnight’ [Kamina Lyall, The Fertile Garden Review. The Australian, March 6-7, 2004]

I loved painting, I loved my solitude but there was a lot of time on my hands and the silence became deafening and the sight of Alice’s hostility instilled a blinding fear in me; and I became dumb. Years after the Residency, Alice continued to discredit me, to assassinate my character for refusing to play her game. Refusing to entertain her by fighting with Renee.

I went from cottage to studio and back, longing for a break in the monotony; for contact with some other artists in Kuala Lumpur. So, I decided one day to take the train to KL and walk to the National Gallery. Someone had told me about an exhibition Opening there. It was the best thing I did for myself. I met some artists at last: the late Redza Piyadasa, Wira Mazuki the Director of the National Gallery; she had once been one of my students; Eric Peris the famous photographer, Hani, who was working there at the National Gallery. Another world was opening up. I was in the company of artists at last. I was looking around to see if I might meet the man whose work I really admired from when I was in Teachers College, Sayed Ahmed Jamal, but I didn’t know what he looked like.

Instead, the very best thing of all happened. I turned around and saw my school friend; she of the creamy skin. Elegant as ever. She had become one of Malaysia’s top artists without even going to Art School. The writer and artist J. Anurendra, described her aptly as ‘A member of that almost extinct, rare breed of self-taught artists…’ Finding her again after so many years and in such a difficult time, was finding a living treasure, and that treasure led me to the very best of a group of unforgettable Malaysian Women artists.

Title: Threatened Species. Portrait of an artist as an exotic Bird. January 2008. I did this painting freely, with no preconceived ideas except to paint my friend’s portrait. The ghostly figure floating above her became a prediction of what was to follow the very next year with her great loss.

.

X

Conspiracies, Deceptions and Revelations.

September. Fin is back from the US. She comes into the studio unannounced with Eugene Jenkins, retired Emeritus Professor of Music. He must be at least eighty. Fin has a way of inviting Academics and strays from the US to Malaysia, only to taxi them around KL until she’s exhausted, whereupon she imposes them on the next available person.

Where’s Misery? She shouts. Not tied you to the kitchen table yet? You know… brought her old teacher here to lock her up. You’ve been stuck in here for months, No car, no telephone. Filthy cottage. Squatting toilet. What the heck!

The Professor has spied the grand piano upstairs in the M’s living room directly opposite my studio and has eyes for nothing else. The doors are locked. The M’s have gone away on holidays. I’m relieved. Fin won’t notice Alice’s hostility. Alice is blaming me for Renee’s departure.

Me: I like it here. She’s gone home to KKB.

Fin: Why? Got tired of playing Picasso; take a line for a walk and colour in?

Me: That’s Paul Klee, not Picasso. What she’s doing is what the Surrealists did. It’s about chance. Like Hans Arp and Jean Arp. She shuts her eyes and draws.

Fin: Why? Got no ideas of your own, ah? She goes down into Renee’s studio. There’s a token half-finished painting of a figure with one big cliché of an eye on its forehead. Not a realist eye. What is this? A cyclops?

Me: It’s something to do with the Third Eye.

Fin: Oh, got two eyes not enough? Cannot see properly. Now one big eye, ah? Aiyah!

My two older sisters Rita and Fin are not fans of Renee. Neither are they fans of each other or an asset to me. In this place, if anything, they are a liability. I found it difficult to keep track of the endless quarrels and make-ups between and among these women. I have lived away for years. Now that I am here, Rita and Fin have taken to visiting and I’m on edge, seeing animosity on close-up. What I’m not telling Fin, for fear of repercussions, is what happened on September 8.

*

From Diary Entry. Sept 8 ’95. Renee bounces into my studio, euphoric. She has driven from KKB specially to invite me to dinner at her place. She gives me a bouquet of flowers. Some Malaysian artists and Arts personnel will be there tonight. Mano and Hani from the National Gallery who live close to her, Wong Hoy Cheong, a well-known Contemporary artist, and a few others. I’m reluctant to go. I’m in the middle of a large painting. She’s insistent. You’ve been here alone and have not met anyone You can’t paint all the time. She wants to make up for it. Still not keen, but I might meet some interesting artists. I get ready while Renee raids the vegetable garden. She stuffs the pockets of her shorts with chillies, limau and even terong. Snapping off asparagus spears, pulling up serai, bayam and anything she could carry away in an armful. We set off in the Residency car —her ‘dream car’. The old Morris advances like a sleepwalker because she doesn’t want to exert it. Cars behind us on the narrow road beep and say things as they pass. A man on a rickety bicycle with a load of sheet rubber on the carrier, sensing our presence close behind as Renee doesn’t want to rev up the engine and overtake him, moves over, gets off his bike and lets us pass.  I tell her that I need to ring a friend who is coming home from Sydney. She’s arriving the next day. Renee says I can use her phone.

We get to her place and the elderly Chinese lady next door who broke Milo-san’s legs is watching us. She seems too frail to have run after a cat to break its legs. I’m still wondering how she did it as Renee opens the grate and the front door. She says she wants me to see her recent painting. It’s against the wall on the right as we enter the sitting room. She unveils it and goes back to unload the car as I stand there looking at it.

 I am seeing things. I must be seeing things. It is one of my paintings. The composition; the colours: Van Dyck Browns, Burnt Umber, Prussian Blue and Spectrum Red, Ultramarine, cobalt blues and russet hues, all slapped on without beginning or end; the semblance of hues which I have arrived at through layering, minus the journey there. It’s a triptych and she never paints in triptychs. I don’t know what to say, where to look. Imitation is not the highest form of flattery; it’s the shortest cut to irritation.

 She justifies her deed with a back-handed half-apology. She tells me this is only a commission she’s working on. This painting will not be in the Exhibition. So, I don’t have to worry? The thief, having stolen your jewellery, has placed them on an altar and calls you in to see how he honoured your good taste in jewellery, he stole them. And you want to call the police! Pick from the weak, said Picasso. I felt weak. This painting has not been seen. Nobody will know who’s picked from whom. This is madness, and people are coming here tonight.

            Renee had taken lately to imitating my every move, arranging the studio space exactly as I arranged mine; repeating my words. There was starvation here. Both Alice and Renee were vocabulary impoverished. They parroted words out of context: ‘throwing tantrums’, ‘taking a lot and giving little in return’. They used outmoded phrases and clichés: ‘flummoxed and flabbergasted’; ‘what more do you want’, ‘these will sell like hot cakes. All frustration has to do with poor communication, and all paucity of communication has to do with the limitations of language. I watched them drown in the morass of their vocabulary-challenged silliness, conscious that I myself was experiencing a communications breakdown. The locked-in syndrome.

            I turned from the painting. Crestfallen. She suggested a drive to the river and we walked a bit. She pointed out the homes of various artists she knew. KKB is an artists’ colony. No one came to dinner. No vegetables were cooked. I have little recollection of what we talked about that night and what we had for dinner. I worried about my painting. A mad rooster woke me, crowing at one-hour intervals all night. I realised what a luxury it was to live as I did in the Blue Mountains in Australia where there was peace and silence all night.

            Awake at six am, I was hungry by eight. I thought I’d go to town and find a coffee shop. But I couldn’t get out of the house. All the doors were double locked. I mooched around looking for the keys and found them hanging behind the fridge. The next problem was finding the right keys to the front door, grate and garden gate and then to replace the keys inside the grate. The elderly lady next door showed me a short cut to town by a bridle path through undergrowth nearby. She shook her head when she heard that I, a visitor, was going out for breakfast while my host slept.

            I found a coffee shop and had copi susu, thick with condensed milk. I drank it Renee style. Renee had told me that the best way to drink copi susu was the orang putih way. You drink the thick black local coffee first and then scoop up the condensed milk from the bottom of the cup which has some of the coffee still in it. It was delicious. They didn’t have pau which I would have liked, either because I was in the wrong shop or because they saw me as a little different, so I had some toast and made my way back.

 Renee was still in her room when I returned, making phone calls. I understood then why she didn’t want a phone in the cottage. Needy people make constant phone calls. This was the reason why she had to leave the Residency and the cottage. After midday, she emerged. I didn’t call my friend at ten as promised. I hadn’t even brought my diary and sketchbook with me. I roamed around the house, and discovered ego-boosting self-help and self-assurance notes stuck here and there: ‘When people attack me, I move further back against the wall’ said the note on the fridge. Another said. ‘Aggressive people…Poor me’. The Christian Fremont words: ‘I believe in your work’ which she carried everywhere and which were pinned to her easel in the studio at Rimbun Dahan were fixed above her work space. The door jambs were splashed in gaudy colours as if all the life and colour had ejaculated from her body in one forceful regurgitation onto the doors and walls, leaving behind, the shell of a body, empty, colourless and dry. We had a cup of tea together. I dreaded another day in her company and said my paints were drying in the studio and I had to be back. Renee drove me to the bus station. The bus, like the ones in post-war Bukit Mertajam where I grew up, was a crowded, wooden contraption which stank with food and animal smells. Someone farted. I couldn’t open the windows which were stuck and barred to prevent men from jumping through them at the terminus to get in first for the best seats.

When I got to Rawang, I asked around and was advised to take the light rail to Kuang station. No bus awaited the train’s arrival. The connections were un-coordinated. I sat at the bus stop wondering what to do when a young teacher from the village school joined me at the bus stop. Some hope, until her boyfriend arrived on his motor scooter and that being Saturday evening, they went off together. An hour and a half later, a bus appeared and I was back in Rimbun Dahan by six pm exhausted and hungry.

M saw me the next day in the studio and asked where I was. I told him I had gone to Renee’s place. He looked puzzled, and then annoyed. He had taken pictures of my work and had arranged for Berita Harian, the Malay newspaper, to do an interview. Alice was supposed to let me know. Although I was on the premises, she rang Renee, and Renee invited me to KKB instead. I needed all the publicity I could get. I was the unknown, and I missed out on a major opportunity.

 Later, a friend told me that I should take my diary and my letters from home with me every time I went out. The cottage was not entirely private.

*

Fast forward to post-Exhibition-Opening days: The Star newspaper was coming to interview us. Alice told Renee. Renee didn’t pass the message on to me. The photographers and the Interviewer arrived. Alice sent one of the servants to say I had to come ‘at once’. I wasn’t dressed for the interview and I wasn’t the type to appear like a dead musang in a free, promotional T-shirt from a motorcycle shop. I didn’t even possess an article of that nature. Also, the interviewer was Renee’s close friend. Later down the track, both he and Renee secured an exhibition in a little country-town outback gallery in Adelaide.

  Frances, Alice’s appointed Curator came to the cottage to ferret me out. I stayed put. She sat out on the veranda and wrote me a letter advising me ‘not to see things in a divisive way’. She couldn’t see that she and Alice by succumbing to Renee’s whims and taking trips to Renee’s place in KKB to see her work when the work should have been there in Renee’s studio at Rimbun Dahan, were being divisive in the way she was advising against.

 My protest was a dangerous move. The Star Interviewer, feeling slighted, lashed out at me in his article, calling me ‘a hybrid of sorts who turned to painting only during the Residency.’ If I could produce works on that scale and handle paint with that ease in nine months, that would have made me a genius ‘of sorts’. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so petty.

Another snubbing was yet to come. This time from Men’s Review, and it will spin Alice into an ill-tempered mess from which she could only regain her credibility with me through an apology — which never came.

XI

What happened on Monday?

In conjunction with the display of my series of small prints ‘Lost’ —which is now in the Australian War Memorial Contemporary Collection— at Picture This and That, a gallery run by two beautiful Chelsea-trained women artists, Belinda and her partner, I was scheduled to give a talk there.

Renee, who still had possession of the Residency car had returned to her studio that day but had decided not to attend my talk. I packed my prints to carry on the train to get to Central Market. Suddenly, Renee announced that she was going back home to KKB to feed her cat. Panic. How will I get to Kuang station to take the train to KL? Will I be in time for my talk? I needed to say something but I needed to be careful. She could fly into a paroxysm of tears; she could make a drama out of this. Neither Alice nor M were at home, so there would be no transport.

            Me: Could you drive me to the station before you leave?

R (hesitating): I have to be home by five to feed Milo.

            Me: Renee, I think you should come. This is a Residency occasion. M might be there and it would be good if we could be there together as his artists this year. He’d like that.

            R: My cat is pining for me. I hated that word, ‘pining’, so Serani, so like my aunts. A Eurasian cliché. I thought, I have to insist patiently.

            Me: This Residency is something wonderful for us as artists and it’s a pity that a cat has come in the way. I wish you would come; and if you can’t, at least drive me to the station, please. It’s on your way to KKB.

            R: I’m already ready to leave. That pleading manner of hers.

            Me: No, I’m sorry, Renee, you have to wait for me. I’ll only be a few minutes. She looked both stunned and hurt that this mouse who tries so hard to keep the peace is finally asserting herself. She began to be agitated. The single towchang at the back of her head went this way and that like a tail with every move of her head. Ignoring her sighs, I gathered my things as calmly as I could. I knew there was going to be trouble, but this is the Residency car, I thought, and I need to be stronger about what is happening. She keeps it in KKB and when she’s here she has the keys on her personal keyring in her room while she sleeps. And the M’s have not said a word. Alice, who saw me walking to the Simpang asked, knowing full well that Renee had the car in KKB, why I wasn’t driving. We could both see that the car was not in the garage. ‘Ask for it,’ she said with some impatience. That was her duty and prerogative, not mine.

 I would, as I mentioned before, ask for the car to pick up my son from Kuang station one day soon, and I would have the keys flung at me and quantities of bile spilt, further unsettling whatever there was of equilibrium in that place and precipitating the Residency’s downfall.

            We drove to the station in silence.

Just before I unloaded my bag of prints and other things for my talk, to get to the ticket office, Renee, looking solemnly at the steering wheel, said, What happened on Monday? My mind is ticking back to Monday. I had no idea.

Me: I don’t know.

R: You were avoiding me.

Well, she got it right this time. I was avoiding her. I had come to the cottage for a rest and lunch and caught a glimpse of her, smoking on the veranda. I sneaked back and took a long walk into the orchard, through some lallang and past the tennis courts and the cempedak trees. I looked a long time at the cempedak, large, fragrant in their ripeness, some of them, golden yellow having burst open and the flies feasting on the insides. Then I walked between the lime trees and looked at limau perut, limau kasturi, and varieties of lime I couldn’t name. I looked at the old rambutan trees. Near a disused well I found a huge quaint mushroom which turned out to be a toadstool. Later I came back to do a drawing of it. Then, I headed towards the cottage. When I came within two yards of where she was, still smoking on the veranda, she got up, gathered her cigarettes, and went to her room. So, I did know what happened on Monday. I was avoiding her.

R: I know you think I’m unsupportive of you for not going to your talk.

Me: You are unsupportive of this Residency, Renee. They are giving us a lot. Give something in return. It’s a wonderful experience and it’s a pity a cat has come in the way.

R: It’s not the cat. I just have to get used to your pettiness and mood swings. I almost laughed. She had picked up these phrases from some self-help book she uses in her healing class.

Me: What mood swings have you noticed when you are not here!? The blackouts are frequent and intense. I’ve had no transport. I don’t have a telephone. You refused their offer of one and I have a family back home in Australia I haven’t contacted for months except by letters. It’s months... and I am alone here sitting in a blackout for hours —Kuang has intense blackouts which remain unattended for days. Alice came down once and asked me whether I had candles. I had no idea what that darkness was like. You could light a candle and not be able to read because the ten centimetre circle of light thrown by the candle flame was useless against the cloak of impenetrable darkness— and you come in the next day and tell me what a great time you had at dinner at your friends’ place.

R: Why are you always complaining?

Me: Complaining? Always? I have never said a word. I want this Residency to work. I get up in the morning and I go to the studio and I work. I don’t just take the money and run.

R: You terrify me. Living with you is like living with one of those old nuns in the convent. That hurt. I had been a teaching nun for many years. [In February, I would go to Bukit Nanas convent for a break. There I will learn something about her past from one of the nuns.]

Me: You are not living with me. We are sharing a cottage and you have left it. No one frightens a woman of 52, Renee. Women our age have guts. So, stop living in the past. Keep your head down and work.

R: Why don’t you put ‘I’ in front of all those sentences? Another band-aid solution from a self-help book? I gave up. I took my things. No offer of help from her. With a sinking heart, trying to ignore that conversation, I went to get my train ticket to KL. 

This talk at Picture-This-and-That was the highlight of my time at the Rimbun Dahan Residency. I showed slides of my studio in the Blue Mountains and of some of my other works. I wanted to begin my talk on the War images in my work with the Antonin Artaud quotation: ‘Reality is far superior to all fictions; all you need to know is how to interpret it.’ But I forgot where the quotation had come from; and the second part of the quote eluded me. I thought that Renee had succeeded in upsetting me, but thinking of the words of Thomas a Kempis:

He who is well disposed and orderly in his interior, is not concerned about the strange and perverse doings of men. ..Just so much is a man hindered and distracted in proportion as he draws things to himself. [The Imitation of Christ]

I looked back to myself and calmed down. The talk went well. More people attended than expected. M himself came and brought quite a few of his architects to it. The work was well displayed and there was media coverage. At the end of the night M gave us all a banquet of fish head curries and Indian Muslim food. People were still asking me questions at the dinner until someone called out, ‘Let her eat!’

That was the first ever dinner of fish head curry I had. I had never seen fish heads that big cooked and served on large platters. Rimbun Dahan certainly gave me a lot of firsts in my life: my first experience of living so simply in solitude; my first taste of freedom; the very first time I ever danced as I would, on New Year’s Eve 1995, and I loved it. This was the first time I came in contact with the wild beauty of the Malaysian flora and fauna at such close quarters and on that scale, and so conscientiously controlled; and other firsts which I will cherish. And I owed it all to Renee. I would not have applied for this Residency if she had not told me about it.  

XII

 the heavenless hell and the homeless home

[What happened to me at Rimbun Dahan was not unprecedented. It has happened to black women all over the world at the hands of white mistresses. Alice, a white woman, was the symbol of White Supremacy until I came along. As the Malaysian-Australian artist in Residence, I never depended on her to speak for me at interviews as Renee did. I never played the dumb black woman, and she resented that. In all my years as a migrant in Australia, I have never experienced anything like what happened to me on the night of February 7 1996.]

Twenty-five years on, and the wounds I thought had healed, have not quite healed. In writing this blog I still recall the events of that night with a mixture of confusion and anger as if it all happened yesterday. The greatest fear facing anyone who has been abused is disbelief. The humiliated don’t speak of their humiliation because a humiliation repeated is a double humiliation, and the slightest shadow of scepticism increases the hurt. So, the only path to recovery was silence. And that is how I chose to be for these many years, until the realisation that it serves no purpose to forgive and forget in a world where black women are still at a disadvantage. And so, I am going to tell my story whatever the consequences, as a warning to those who might accept generous offers of Artists Residencies in Malaysia in the future.

 As the days went on, Alice visited Renee frequently in KKB and returned more unstable than ever, her hostility increasing in bizarre ways. I became an object of her derision. Much as M appreciated my work ethic and my contribution to his Residency, Alice was his wife, and the Administrator of that Residency. His hands were tied. I had no one. As for the people who noticed Alice’s rudeness —and all immorality begins with discourtesy— the white women who saw and who could have said something to her about her behaviour, they remained silent. Civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless. [James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time]

With the stipend and the Residency car, Renee had a good time in KL and KKB with bad friends. They were not immoral. They were bad friends because they fought her battles but they never kept her grounded with the truth about herself. This was the only way I could make any sense of what happened to me on the night of February 7 1996.

*

Seven months into the Residency, in January, a phone was installed in the cottage. It became Alice’s vehicle for monitoring and questioning my every move. On the night of the 7 February, she called. I was to report at the main house at 8pm. I hoped M would be there. She was different when he was there. I had not had a civil word with either of them for months and the resentment Alice exuded since Renee left was debilitating. I had written Alice a note asking for this interview. Obviously, something about me was bothering her and I wanted to know what it was

            The courtyard leading to the main house was in darkness. The ring of tiny fragrant gardenias which crowned the top of the spiral staircase leading to the underground gallery, a delight, like stars in the darkness, had, like the staircase itself, gone. As if a phantom hammer thrower had gone on a mad spiral of random destruction, the staircase had been demolished, leaving concrete fragments and metal rods strewn about. There was a light in the house. I could see Alice reading the Herald Tribune in the smaller sitting room. I knocked but she didn’t answer. Then she came to the door and, without greeting, asked if I wanted a coffee or tea. Coffee. She left me and went into the kitchen downstairs. I regretted asking for coffee. It took a long time. When she came up with one cup of coffee which she put in front of me she didn’t sit. I noticed with some regret that we were alone. I wished M had been there.

A: I asked you here, one, because of your note. I don’t like letters. They are hurtful, she said. [Illiterates resent the written word…I thought].

Me: Well, I’m sorry but…

A: Two, because of Men’s Review. Where were you? Frances and Renee were here. Where were you? [Swallow hard, keep cool. Don’t antagonise].

There had been an interview scheduled about the coming Exhibition with the magazine Men’s Review. She had told Renee to let me know. She could have told me herself. My studio was just across the way from her dining room. But she had stopped speaking to me directly.

Renee did not relay the message.

 Exhausted from all that was happening: Renee’s long silences; the worry of her entering the cottage when I was in the studio, removing things, leaving the cottage door wide open. My passport, money and personal effects were in my unlocked room. I decided to go to Bukit Nanas convent. It was like going home; back to a home where there were no broken marriages and no bitterness. I spent the night there with the nuns, we sat around after dinner and reminisced on the quirks of Mothers Superior we knew. Sr Brede, my College lecturer and mentor; Sr Stanislaus who had gone to college with me, the lively Sr Anne Marie with whom I shared many a laugh in my time as a nun, and Sr Maureen, the writer, were there. Without my mentioning her, Sr Brede said ‘I know that girl you’re working with’ —Renee. She was sent to the convent when she was six. A very pretty child, but spoilt.’ This was something. I didn’t know she had been sent to a convent. Why?  Was there a domestic problem? Renee looked very different from her sister. And was that why she said, ‘living with you is like living with those old nuns in the convent…’? —because she had really been living in a convent?

When I returned to Rimbun Dahan on Feb 3. Fin rang. She tore into me: Where had I been? Why ever did I come back home to Malaysia to cause trouble and to get people like Alice to harass her time and again about my whereabouts. Alice was keeping tabs on me? She must have broken Fin’s siesta. When we were teenagers, disrupting Fin’s siesta was like standing under a ton of rocks raining down from a tip truck. Fin had a thyroid problem and she was volatile. She needed rest. I hated to think what she might have said to Alice. And how did she get my number? Fin yelled. I didn’t give it to her, I said. And then I recalled someone at the National Gallery saying that Alice kept information about persons of interest in a notebook. And if offended, she could make them regret it for the rest of their days

I would come to know the truth of that when in 2004,Alice released my full name and address and lied about the fact that I had left the Residency early, in Review, the lift-out in The Australian, a right-wing newspaper here in Australia. She had contacts, both in Malaysia and in Australia. Australian Artists who went to Rimbun Dahan after 1996 were entertained to the assassination of my character. Some Australian women were given continuing stipends after the Residency to help them in their Arts Practice, resulting in Alice being awarded the OAM for her services to Art and Artists.

Me: I didn’t know about Men’s Review. No one told me.

Alice: Are you blaming Renee?

Me: No. Why? Why would I blame her?  I didn’t know at that stage that Renee had kept the information from me. I said, You asked me here tonight to tell me about Men’s Review, so…I opened my notebook.

A: They didn’t come. She looked stupefied, like a child whose toy had disappeared in the current of a flowing stream. I got the picture. Men’s Review had snubbed her. She expected they would have come running at the snap of her white fingers and they didn’t. Your sister says that you’re ‘desperately unhappy’. We have done everything we can to make you happy. What more do you want? Fin had said something. I had avoided telling Rita and Fin anything about Rimbun Dahan. Their volatility and hysteria disturbed me. I braved it all alone. I wasn’t going to help push their barrows. So, they made things up to discredit Renee, and as they were my sisters, there was no way I could remain entirely blameless.  You expect too much, demand a lot from other people and you give very little in return. Always carping. You see everything wrong with other people. It was because of you that Renee left the Residency…

I cannot describe how unpleasant I found that whole scene: the horrid, nasal twang; the mop of mousy hair, the deep frown, the raised shoulders and caved-in chest as one sees in birds circling in a fight. That harsh-voiced berating unnerved me. The coffee getting cold in front of me. She was not sitting down for a chat, just walking up and down, making uncalled for and unfounded accusations. I was alone in that Residency and all I did was work.

 Perhaps I’m too driven for credibility, and that unnerved these two women. Abnormal, as Renee once said. You are abnormal, you work all the time. But I love nothing more than work: the paint on the canvas; the ink on the printing matrix, the charcoal on paper. The words in diaries and hand-written letters. My mind and hands working together; transposing material into ideas and ideas into material; reagents in the alchemical process of the magical language of silence. I needed people around me who were driven. I give the sluggish a wide berth.

Me: A deep sigh. I never said that I was unhappy.  But there were certain discourtesies… Renee’s departure and the empty cottage and nothing said to me...I was unhappy about that..

A: Oh! So now it’s me. I’m discourteous! We have given you so much. What more do you want? And if you are unhappy why didn’t you say so and leave. Go now!

I learned from Kevin about Renee’s departure for good at lunch at the Malay stall across the road from Kevin rather than from Alice secrecy surrounding her departure from the Residency cottage was hurtful.  I panicked. I couldn’t eat. Was I going to do the exhibition alone? Was I going to be told to leave? No one knows how difficult this has been, I said. Kevin said, As in butter wouldn’t melt..? I could have kissed him for that. At last someone knows what Renee was like. Just a little understanding set me off. By October no one was speaking to me. I walked up and down the empty cottage at night muttering, someone speak to me…someone please speak to me. I tried to talk to Alice and she walked away. There was no reason for her to behave that way.

Alone in the cottage one night I had my arms folded so tight I couldn’t breathe. I counted the windows. 22 windows, 132 glass panes and I paced the kitchen floor. I had chest pains and asked to see a doctor. M arranged for me to see Dr Shanta Oomen a beautiful looking, young Indian doctor at his workplace. I burst into uncontrollable weeping as soon as I sat in front of her. She put me on Xanax which I didn’t take. To this day I never take pills and medication; but it was good to have poured it all out without a word. I was no good at complaining. I had become un-Malaysian. The sour after-taste of deceit, getting people on side, gossip and drawing conclusions was never going to be my experience. M was solicitous. He paid for my doctor’s visit. That was all I needed. Someone to understand that I was caught in the pincer grip of two very disturbed women, and only I knew it, and I blamed myself for it; for coming across as cold-hearted, indifferent, work-oriented.

A: Rene was devastated. She says you have changed. Not the person she wanted. She cannot work with you peering over her shoulder. We have given you…

It was repetitive, tedious if not irrational. The taunt that I had given nothing and taken a lot was unfair. I was the only one there to see to the piano tuning before the Jazz concert while they were on holiday; I worked consistently; I was on call when photographers, journalists, visitors arrived,; when the Duke of Gloucester came and for the Opening of the Restu Festival, my schedule, disrupted. Hari Raya would come and they would open their doors, offer to feed the kampong children with satay and a gift of a gold coin each. Bus-loads of teenagers descended on us from as far as Ampang on the other side of KL. The family went to Langkawi and left two servants to manage the crowds and the mess in both our studios and I had to help out. My studio was always open to view. There was no privacy. I was their performing monkey. Renee was never around.

Me: All I want is a little respect and to be allowed to do my work in peace …

A: Hah!  I respect you!? The way she said it, it was clear she had no understanding of the concept involved. I couldn’t take the grand-standing anymore. I was breaking down. I got up.  

A: Sit! Do you want to resolve this or not? I sat down.

Me: What do you want to resolve? You called me here to make all kinds of accusations and you’ve made them. I got up, the coffee untouched, went to the door to get my slippers on to leave. There is something sinister here and there’s nothing much I can do about it. It was very dark outside. She came up behind me. She grabbed me by the shoulders. Come back in here and talk about it! she shouted. I pulled away, but she grabbed my arm and my clothes, pushing shoving me. I struggled to extricate myself from her grasp. Terrified and in shock. I had never been assaulted before. I could have fallen down the concrete slope near the front door where, every morning, the cascade of water plunged into the deep and black artificial fish ponds below,. Had it happened, there would have been no witnesses. And the white wife of a Malay millionaire would have been exonerated. In Malaysia, the voiceless and un-represented simply disappear. No questions asked.

I cut across the dark courtyard, trying to avoid tripping over the rubble and lumps of concrete and metal in a state of shock, got into the cottage and locked the door. I couldn’t breathe. My hands were shaking. Not in a fit state to contact anyone, I sat at my desk and wrote it all down as it happened. The writing calmed me. The phone rang again and again but I didn’t pick up the receiver. It was past nine pm. I thought it might be her. I made sure the doors were locked. I didn’t want her to come in. She had the keys. Finally, when the phone rang again, I picked it up. It was Ian ringing from Australia. Immediately after I left the main house, Alice, had rung him citing difficulty: I was difficult; I had gone behind her back and spoken to Frances the Curator; I took a lot and gave little in return... It must have been close to midnight in Australia and he had to work the next day. I wouldn’t have disturbed him; but that is how things work in Malaysia. The wrongdoer jumps in first, exaggerates, condemns, weeps. The people she speaks to say, ‘Ya-ka?’ Is that so? Is she that bad? They put four fingers to their lips and spread the news immediately.

He was ringing to see how I was. I was a mess.

*

I shut the studio and stayed in the cottage for a few days. On an afternoon of gentle rain there was a knock on the cottage door. Four of the servants were standing outside looking embarrassed. They had thrown all I had gathered for an installation into the burning pit nearby on orders from Alice. I rushed out of the cottage to the burning pit in the rain to save the dried leaves, lotus centres, fallen fruit and objects connected to Rimbun Dahan which I had installed in a series of boxes to photograph as references to my paintings. Despite my protest —I didn’t want any of them losing jobs and homes on my account— one of the men accompanied me to the deep and slippery pit of red earth. They had saved my paintings, paints and brushes for which I was grateful. I stood for a long time looking at my boxes of objects connected to the paintings I had been working on for that year, burning slowly. The boxes had been made for me by a young artist in KL out of recycled wood from packing cases. I was standing beside an open grave.

*

At the end of that week, I was asked if I would help Lia Grambihler the French delegate of the Triennale Mondiale D’Estampes Petit Format —to set up the World Triennial of Prints at Petronas Gallery. There I met an established Malaysian artist who knew Alice well. I told her what had happened to me on the night of Feb 7. I wanted someone to look out for me. She asked me if Alice had been drinking. I didn’t think so. She said that perhaps, Alice never expected an intelligent Malaysian artist and felt threatened by me. And besides, she said, ‘M likes you.’

So, that was the crux of the matter. He must have had to defend me occasionally because of her strong affiliation with Renee, and she might have taken that defence for inappropriate affection and wanted me to leave the Residency. It was too ridiculous to contemplate. I thought of the poem by e e cummings:

                                                unlove’s the heavenless hell and homeless home

                                                            of knowledgeable shadows (quick to seize

                                                            each nothing which all soulless wraiths proclaim

                                                           substance; all heartless spectres, happiness) 

                                                           lovers alone wear sunlight…

And much later, I thought of New Years Eve.

New Year’s Eve 1995. Barbara, a friend from Sydney and I have been invited to see in the New Year at M’s Yacht Club. There was dancing. I had never danced before. Barbara wanted us to dance together. I disliked women dancing together and refused, so M went and got two young, good-looking architects, an Indian and a Chinese to dance with us. I got the gorgeous Chinese guy. I thought he would drop me halfway through the dance but that wouldn’t matter. It turned out that I loved it. Dancing is so relaxing I could have danced all night. On the stroke of midnight, I gave Barbara a kiss and went across the room to wish M and Alice. I gave M a kiss, forgetting that people don’t do that in Malaysia. He hugged me close and tight and returned the kiss. In those few seconds I felt appreciated as the artist who stayed; the one who tried to make his Residency work despite the setbacks I had encountered.  

The day of my arrival, Renee took me to the main house to meet him. lice and the girls were then still in Melbourne. From the polished granite walk-way I could see into their dining room below on the level of the fish ponds. There was a large, exquisite Ibrahim Hussein painting on the wall. We entered and said hello to him. He was in a small sitting room adjoining the main hallway. I was a bit nervous but soon relaxed. He was open and kind. I felt very comfortable with him. He was reading a book on a controversial Chinese journalist whom Lee Kuan Yew had jailed.

 Renee wanted to ‘unfold’ the place in stages for me. She wanted me so much to show some visible signs of appreciation, but nothing in the landscape or the old town of Sungei Buloh was new to me. I’m an observer; I don’t enthuse. I think she was disappointed. Her sisters, on holidays from Europe, she said, were in awe of everything she showed them. I asked where they were brought up. Like me, they were brought up in Malaysia but unlike me they seemed to have forgotten so much of it, while I remembered everything. Malaysia was my home after all.

After we had set up our studios, M came down once or twice in the evenings to see what we were doing. He stood in my studio with his back against the grille which separated my studio from the fish ponds, arms outstretched and one foot against the grille like a crucifix and talked about art and the famous artists like Rothko whose works he had seen, and the MOMA in New York. Sometimes Kevin joined us and they would have a drink and talk in the studio while I painted. I loved that rapport. The Surrealists were a ‘family’. Why couldn’t artists in Australia be a ‘family’? Perhaps they were, and perhaps I was just not a part of it. I liked the spontaneity of the way it happened here at Rimbun Dahan; talking about works. In one painting on family, I had a hand holding a large container in which there were seven partly visible figures. Kevin told me about an ancient stone boat which was on an Irish stamp which he showed me. The boat was black and resembled the container I was painting.

When Alice returned with her daughters, her eldest came by the studio and stopped to see the work. She lent me a white Kebaya to draw and I made several sketches and drawings of it. On another occasion Jason, Kevin, Mulaika and I were talking about books. We sat on the steps between Renee’s studio and mine.  Mulaika was very well read and on her way to Harvard to do Literature. She would later become a published author. I had time enough to enrich my work with their conversation. I found I worked better after a break with a good exchange of ideas.  Once, I thought I would give M a canvas and some paint because he seemed to like being with us and with the smell of paint. But he was dressed in a cream silk baju in the evenings and that might not have been a good idea. Renee never joined us. She walked away.

One afternoon, as I rested, a soft knock on my door and Renee entered. She sat at the foot of my bed; hands folded in her lap. You know Enid, she said, Maybe you have forgotten; but in Malaysia if you don’t respect yourself, the servants won’t respect you. It was like a blow to the head.

She and the cook, a huge Indian spinster were the best of friends and were on the lookout for who came into my studio which was so open there could not have been anything happening there that this cook did not see from her kitchen. All my phone calls in the early days went to the main house. The phone was between the kitchen and the stairs leading upstairs to the M’s living room. My conversations were never private, even if Ian called from home. I knew I had an audience; she was within earshot.

Me: In what way don’t I respect myself?

Renee: You see, M likes you; he comes down to the studios, so you must...

Me: What’s the matter with you? I found it difficult not to raise my voice. You kill everything. I like them coming into my studio and I don’t need you to tell me how to behave. Kevin is young and he’s an artist. M likes my work, not me. And, for that matter, I’m not young; I’m not blond and blue-eyed; I haven’t got a white skin. And a guy like that doesn’t give a woman like me —and you, a second look, OK?... I’m not a dried up old… I nearly said it. Too late. She sensed it. Hurt, she left the room. I was going to cop it from a supportive friend. I didn’t care. A week later one of her friends dropped in to tell me that Renee was well read but shy and modest.

M never came down to the studio again. And for the rest of the Residency, I never saw him except at my talk at Picture This and That and on New Year’s Eve.

When I turned around to give Alice a kiss on that New Year’s Eve, she stuck out her hand like a knife. So, we shook hands and I walked away. I was so sad, that people were suspicious of shows of affection in public when the more one remained in KL the more one learned of what had been and was going on behind the scenes. When relationships are fragile, it is unwise to throw open one’s heavenless hell and homeless home to public scrutiny. Perhaps they should not have offered a Residency at all during those stormy years. I should have been more careful.

The dance on New Year’s Eve was my very first and only dance. There was never any dancing again after that.

Title: A Letter to my friend in Sydney concerning Alice’s screaming in the vegetable garden on the night of 4 Feb.            

XIII

Re-leaf and Comic relief

In the days following the burning of my artworks, the workers went around the grounds looking for leaves and lotus centres to match the ones they had burnt. One of the gardeners was standing in front of my painting, ‘Lament for a Solo Performer’ one morning with some rocks in his hand. In the painting, a piece of granite hung by a thread over an egg held in a hand. He was trying to match the piece of granite I had used in the painting. The lotus centres, the large fig leaf I had used as a motif in the major work and the black and decayed guava fruit I had drawn in acrylic, charcoal and graphite to get the densest black in the drawings, had all come back and were on my studio table. I was moved to tears by their concern. That’s what Malaysia was for me. A hospitable place of welcoming and generous people, always a smile for you; always a meal for you; not a place of imported and home-grown racism. The thought of the kindness of strangers like the woman next door to Renee’s place in KKB, concerned about my having to go into town for breakfast, offering coffee. These are the kind of people who kept me going in what was the most difficult time of my life when I was alone and knew there was no one on my side; a stranger in my own country.

I had come from a large, light-filled private studio in the Blue Mountains to a small, open studio at Rimbun Dahan and adapted to it easily. It was difficult at times to be watched while I was working. People could come in anytime and talk to me, but they were very discreet. I cannot say I was disturbed or inconvenienced at any time. Nevertheless, I often felt like a performing monkey. But I had to keep in mind that I was Artist in Residence, and it didn’t take long for me to adapt to that situation: people questioning or making comments on my work. And despite accepting and even enjoying the fact that this was Art as involvement, made in front of all and for all; Art, performing its function of starting new conversations, I sometimes felt overwhelmed and stopped when I saw a group of visitors and went to work in the artists’ cottage.

 One of the gardeners, passing by, asked me why I used the egg in my work ‘Lament for a Solo Performer’.  The entire painting was about vulnerability; the disembodied kebaya; the frangipani held in a position of feminine vulnerability. Frangipani —in my upbringing, was the flower of the graveyard. I couldn’t explain the concept of ‘vulnerability’ in Malay. He said that he was interested because when he was in Primary school, their teacher brought a chicken in one day and asked them all to write down which part of the chicken they liked best. Those who said they liked the egg were deemed to be loud and boastful because there was a lot of crowing when the egg is laid; but I wasn’t that way. It puzzled him why I used the egg in my painting. By that time, I realised that perhaps I was crying aloud on the inside. Every painting is a self-portrait. Look long and closely and it will tell you more and more about yourself and about the world.

When Mulaika, M’s daughter, left for Harvard, she let me have her calendar with the Botticelli Birth of Venus on the cover. I created the painting Kebaya Venus. It had the Botticelli Venus shaped Kebaya and was surrounded by water and lotus flowers; it expressed the freshness of water and youth. I created it for her and would have liked her to have it, but she had gone and there was so much ill feeling against me by that stage, resulting in my breakdown, for me to find a way of giving it to her without the fear that it might be destroyed in anger.

My studio was surrounded by water: the fish ponds, the water lily ponds and occasionally the dampness from the adjoining, humidity-controlled store room which created mould on my newly primed canvases. I began to paint more water than I ever painted before. At the end of the exhibition, Nabil from NN Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, asked for the kebaya paintings but he never exhibited them. The smear campaign against me had taken off and he had opted to exhibit Renee’s work instead. My work remained in his store room, neglected for three years —without a word from him, of thanks or regret—. I dismantled them and brought them home to Australia. I finally destroyed them in my move from the Blue Mountains to live in Melbourne in a bid to wipe out all reminders of Rimbun Dahan —which, of course, was unsuccessful.

            Renee had by this time been given her heart’s desire —a room in the Guest House where she could play the Caucasian. She stayed away in KKB, only making token appearances. When I offered a lift on her way home, she refused. I had asked to use the car and that was the end; sharing was out of the question for her. Maznah who cleaned our studios also cleaned Renee’s room as if she was a guest; a service I, would have been embarrassed to accept. Maznah couldn’t read English but she knew what my name looked like. She told me she had seen it written on the wall. My name written on the wall? Where? Upstairs, in Renee’s room. I followed her up to clean the room. Festooned with self-help notices, only the Third Eye painting was there on the easel under Christian Fremont’s words: I believe in your work which she carried everywhere. On a large sheet of cartridge paper stuck to the side of the cupboard, a notice saying when people approach me to hurt me, I move further back…and a long spiel about her paintings as god given masterpieces of light and beauty. I stood there, folded my arms and read aloud about divine light emanating from those absent paintings. I felt a chill go down my back and upper arms reading all that self-boosting stuff. At the end, in small letters: Enid and I are in harmony with the spheres. So, there’s my name. Fat lot of good that does me, Renee, I said aloud. You’ve ruined this Residency.’ Maznah wanted to know what all the words were about; especially what Renee had written about me. My Malay wasn’t good enough and I couldn’t translate ‘in harmony with the spheres’ so I turned to the ‘God-given masterpieces of light and beauty’ and said, Dia kata, painting ini, Allah bagi dia. Painting ini bagus sekali dalam dunia. Roughly translated: She says, God gave her this painting. It’s the best in the world.

            Maznah, jaw-dropping, peered at the painting she had seen downstairs. Cerulean blue dots had been added —for which I was to blame. I had got Renee a 250ml tube of Cerulean Blue Winsor and Newton oil paint from Australia, knowing she used that colour— and that Third Eye (which should have been at the glabella according to the chakras) stuck in the middle of the forehead. Maznah turned the handle of the penyapu and pointed to it, Yang ini? She asked, puzzled at God’s gift. We cracked up and clattered down the stairs laughing. I mean, with that God-given painting, one would have to re-define the entire concepts of light and beauty. If I hadn’t known her, I would have thought that Renee was poking fun at herself. I realised I hadn’t laughed since the end of June 1995. Laughing was such a relief from the fear of speaking out. My mouth seemed clamped shut in discretion for fear of being misunderstood and mis-represented and of being the cause of everyone’s unhappiness in a place where discretion is taken as smug arrogance guaranteeing unpopularity; a place where gossip is valued.

*

Every unwelcome intrusion into your personal space is abuse. On the following Monday, Alice rang me at 8pm. I froze when I heard her voice.  She asked if Ian had rung me. She had called him in Australia on the night of Feb 7 with complaints to justify her abusive behaviour towards me. Alice: May I ask what he said?

 Me: No, that’s between us. Ian had suggested we cut our losses and that I return to Australia, but I would not give those two women the satisfaction of seeing me quit. I had done nothing to justify my quitting the Residency. I had no idea what the relationship was between these two women; but it was pretty strong and very close. They were intertwined like an india-rubber ball bouncing as one. I lived in fear, in the shadow of that ball, precisely because it was so irrational and seemed to grow bigger every day. As I became more afraid, I withdrew so far as to become inaccessible. It annoyed them both.

 Alice: Did you send for Frances? I saw her car.

 Me: No.

 A: Did you tell her what was happening here? This is insane, I thought. They accepted me as Artist in Residence and I’m now their prisoner, and she’s virtually admitting that she has done something wrong and is afraid that I might have ratted on her.

 Me. So, what is happening? I wanted it to come from her. She slid off the subject.

 A: I saw the studio cleaned out; are you intending to leave?

 Me: That was my intention. I’ve changed my mind

 A: May I ask what caused you to change your mind? Don’t feel obliged to us to stay.

 Me: I’m obliged to myself to finish this Residency. I said this while thinking: This is a year of my life down the drain, but I’ll have to have the strength to see it through.

 A: How do you expect to solve any problems if you cut yourself away? That’s why Renee left, because you cut yourself away and…

Me: Where did you get that? Renee cut herself away. I’m still here. What proof do you have that I was responsible for her leaving? Bring her here and we’ll find out the truth if that’s at all possible.

A: Oh, I take that back… A back-handed apology? She was blaming me, knowing full well that they were using me to deflect attention from the real reason for Renee removing herself from the cottage with Alice’s help. I had seen too much. They would have been more comfortable together in the privacy of Renee’s home in KKB… You see, you cut yourself away…. She scratched on like a broken record… I’ve apologised…

Me: Wait. You have not apologised.

A: And I will apologise, but you’re a difficult person to talk to. She kept saying that I was difficult to talk to, when she knew that she had difficulty talking to me. To her, someone like me was to be shouted at; given orders, never ‘talked to’ rationally. It was not that she had forgotten how to talk to someone like me. It was just that I didn’t fit into that mould of the ‘non-person’ that she had carried in her mind and heart since childhood. Like Renee, she was out of her depth with me. They were afraid of me.

Me: If you have anything to say to me from now on, please write to me.

A: Letters are no good. I was hurt by your letter…

Me: My note, you mean? It was explanatory. You appointed Frances as the Curator and I spoke with her. You walked away when I tried to talk to you. So, how can I explain myself other than in writing; and how can a note to explain what I was doing be hurtful?

Like Basil Fawlty, compounding his lies with further lies, Alice tripped over herself, covering up one mistake with another in a St Vitus’s dance of contradictions. And I wasn’t enjoying her performance.

XIV

Paranoid structures[1]

In Sophocles’s drama, the Archer, Philoctetes is bitten by a snake on the island of Lemnos. The wound festers and becomes unpleasant and his fellow warriors abandon him. He lives on the island for many years in bitterness and pain from a wound that would not heal. It is only when he overcomes his bitterness that the wound begins to heal and he is prepared to do something for his fellowmen.

*

Just before the end of the Residency, I learned that Rene’s break-up with her partner had occurred a few years prior to the Residency. After it happened, I was told, she spat at him in the street and on one occasion gate-crashed a New Year’s Eve party he was at, pointed to him in front of everybody, and said ‘I will destroy you.’ Dancing and celebrations stopped.

 I felt like a fool, thinking it was recent, I was treading on eggshells, minding her fragility. The information shocked me at first before filling me with profound guilt, sadness and dread: guilt that I had lacked the intuition to recognise and address the paranoid structure before my very eyes; sadness for them both, since they still bore the corrosiveness of that break-up all these years; and dread for myself. Will I too be destroyed?

 Eventually, as more of my work was destroyed after Opening night and the character assassination and the smear campaigns against me continued for the next nine years and I found myself disturbed and struggling for credibility, I thought of those words: ‘I will destroy you’. But I was never destroyed.

By endeavour, diligence, discipline and self-mastery, let the wise man make of himself an island that no flood can overwhelm [Dhamapada. 25]

Opening Night. So as not to create another Book of Job out of this Memoir, I will keep what occurred on and after Opening Night as far as possible to a minimum. The Exhibition Opening night was a crushing blow for me. Alice and M stood at the entrance of the courtyard and presented only Renee to the guests as the Resident Artist. Renee, who worked at home for nine months —smuggling her works in under wraps when she needed to bring them into the gallery for the show— and made a farce out of this joint Residency accepted the untruth.

Not knowing what was happening, I walked among the guests in the courtyard before we went down into the underground gallery for the speeches. Somebody from the Myer Foundation in Melbourne recognised me as one of the artists. I had met him when he visited Rimbun Dahan. I sensed his embarrassment at the obvious discrimination. The guests had been told at the entrance that I had left the Residency early and returned to Australia. I couldn’t believe that M had allowed that to happen to me.

 We moved downstairs into the Gallery. Both Renee and I stood on either side of the speakers —The Sarawak Chief Minister, Tan Sri Patinggi Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud, and M, and Alice. Unashamed about the untruth which had been told upstairs, Alice mentioned me as the other Resident Artist. So, what happened to the other Resident Artist who had left the Residency?

Lying is disrespect of the other; lying shows contempt of the other. That night, Alice showed her contempt of the guests to the Exhibition; as if they were too stupid to understand that what she had said upstairs did not correspond to whatever was happening now downstairs.

 My demeaning was part of the co-lateral damage from the fallout of Renee’s paranoid structure.

At the end of the speeches —of which I cannot remember a word— both Renee and I were presented with bouquets before we went to dinner in the courtyard. Alice had reserved a long table for Renee and her friends. There was no table reserved for me; as if I had committed some crime. The two women didn’t even have the grace to put aside their pettiness for one night. On another note, I felt triumphant, as if I had defeated Alice’s intention: to see that Residency fail and to blame me for it, for leaving.

Ian and I, one of my sisters who came to support me and three other women who felt for me and courageously stayed by me that night, shared a table. Some of those whose names I had given to Alice as I didn’t know their addresses and even some, whose addresses I knew, were not invited.

Had I been in Renee’s place, I would have put aside all grudges, and insisted that my co-artist be presented as well. I would not have allowed her to be humiliated and left alone.  Had I done wrong she would perhaps have shown compassion; because compassion towards those who wrong you presupposes dominance. But I had done her no wrong; and she knew it, so it was better to pretend that she had been wronged. Sentimentality and cruelty go hand in hand.

After a sleepless night, I walked over to the M’s mansion and flung their bouquet of orchids into the fish pond; my gesture of protest against the hypocrisy of those who give with one hand and think they have the right to slap the receiver with the other. And then I came back to the cottage and fell into a deep sleep.

In a sadistic navigation towards the satisfaction of seeing me hurt, Alice cornered Ian as he took his morning walk and asked how I was. Ian had no idea what I had done that morning. He had seen how badly I felt about what they had done to me the night before, but he never mentioned it. I was accustomed to this kind of reserve which always involved white people. I could not, that night, face the way he would pull back as if I was accusing him of wrongdoing if I so much as mentioned Alice in unfavourable light, because she is white. That she rang him to tell her side of the story after she assaulted me in February, was indication that she knew, in Australia, where credibility lay.

White privilege is one of the reasons why I stopped talking to white people about race, says Reni Eddo-Lodge. Trying to convince stony faces of disbelief has never appealed to me. The idea of White privilege, forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence.[4]

Taken by surprise, Ian tried to soften the situation by saying that I had perhaps been devastated by their having taken two of my largest works. I reeled in shock when he told me what he had done. Had I been a wax doll, my face would have melted into my chest cavity. In one sentence, he had let them off the hook; exonerated them of their gross misconduct and turned the tables on to me. I was now the churlish one who reneged on the initial agreement that they provide an extremely generous, fully-paid Residency in exchange for two works for their collection. It gave them licence to refuse both works and to exact repayment for the entire Residency. That didn’t happen. Instead, a dam-burst of madness ensued. Alice rushed down to the gallery and tore off the red sticker from the painting Kebaya Leda which they had chosen, taking only one work from me, as part of their collection. I would have been happy for them to have taken as many works as they liked, especially Kebaya Venus, which I would have liked their daughter to have.

 I felt empty, as if all my insides had been scooped out. I never expected things to go so wrong. Once again, I was jeopardised by family. The M’s had placed the blame for whatever their conflict with my two older sisters and my nephew had been, on me. And now, in a bid to smooth things over, my husband had proffered his version of events. And all this because in Alice’s import, a woman like me should have no voice: she required others to speak for me. Infantilised by white privilege, I was unable to save myself from worse which was yet to come.

[1] Paranoid structure: Elias Canetti: the state of those who want punishment; inability to forgive. 

[4] Reni Eddo-Lodge Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race Bloomsbury 2017  

XV

Heartcries

 In January, three months before the Exhibition, a burung Bubut, the Malayan pheasant, about 15cm from beak to tail, black, with white streaks on his face and wings lurked outside the Artist’s cottage, emitting soft, guttural hoots. I made twenty drawings of the bird until it evolved into a hybrid creature, half-human half-bird. These drawings became the subject of three large paintings titled Heartcries I, II and III. which became part of the exhibition.

            Post Exhibition Opening. Frances arrives early one morning to say that there had been a storm the night before and one of my paintings had fallen. There had been no storm that night at Rimbun Dahan and Frances lived in town. She confirmed my suspicion that this was a cover-up of some kind when she said that one of Renee’s paintings had also fallen in the storm. Too much information? Unless it had been a Tsunami, nothing could have shifted the works from the walls of an underground gallery. I rushed down to see what had happened. Everything was in place except the large painting, Heartcries III. It lay face down on the gallery floor. A phantom Rumpelstiltskin had danced a corroboree on the back of it and destroyed it. A metaphorical storm? I picked it up, released the canvas from its stretcher and removed it from the Exhibition.  

Visitors to the Exhibition were told that I had never painted before; that Renee was the painter. By the time I took up that Residency, I had been a Finalist with my paintings in the Blake Prize for Religious Art more than once; The Portia Geach Portrait Prize twice and in 1990 a Finalist in the Twenty-First Alice Prize NT with another very large painting. I had done full painting Exhibitions at the Wagner Gallery in Paddington and Solo Painting Exhibitions in galleries in Sydney and The Blue Mountains. Looking at her work again, I understood their eagerness to promote Renee. She was running from pillar to post; every work different from the other and replete with disturbance; no peace, no fluidity and full of contradiction. As the Residency progressed, I wished I could have worked with someone more professional, more confident.

Visitors who knew me or wanted to meet me were told that I had left the Residency. A group of nuns came in one day to see the exhibition. Alice directed them to Renee’s work and began to promote her. One of the nuns said, ‘But we came to see Enid’s work.’ Alice left them and went upstairs. They wanted to talk to me about my work but she said I had left. I was just there, in the cottage.

            To a certain extent, I take the blame for not manning the exhibition. I had been so accustomed to Galleries in Australia fully manned by paid Staff. I never had to appear. Secondly, I had developed an uncanny fear of Alice and Renee and Renee’s friends who were often in the gallery being entertained with drinks and food. Not invited to join them, I felt slighted and stayed away.

 I went down to the gallery one day and saw the surprise on the face of a woman who was interviewing Renee. This woman had seen me at an exhibition and asked for an interview for a women’s magazine. She was told that I had gone and so she interviewed Renee for the magazine.  

The cat-and-mouse game. The Exhibition was not yet over when Alice, shouting at Ian in front of the servants, told him we were to get out immediately. We decided to leave, but once we said we were leaving, she sent word that if I left, the Residency driver would not deliver my sold works as he would for Renee. The hold Renee had on Alice was as sinister as the claims of the bomoh at the Simpang. So, I had to deliver the works myself. I had no transport and I didn’t know my way around KL. I didn’t even know who had bought my works. We decided to get a courier, but Alice sent word that we had to be out next day. That being a Friday, Mosque Day in Malaysia, transport was scarce. Also, we had no time to contact couriers.

 We sent word that we were leaving and we would be prepared to contact a courier to deliver the sold works at the end of the exhibition. Alice decided she would not release the addresses of the buyers. So, what’s the point in getting a courier when we didn’t know where we were going? It was impossible to have a decent, face to face conversation with her. She shut the doors against us. If I approached her, she turned and walked away so quickly she almost ran; anything to avoid civilised communication; fearful that a rational conversation might reveal ‘knowledgeable shadows’? Then she sent word that Frances would see to the packing up of my unsold works after the exhibition, to be sent to Australia. She wanted me out of Rimbun Dahan and out of the country. Did she think I had seen more than I had of what was going on between her and Renee?

I couldn’t ask that of Frances. She was not well, so, I decided to abandon all my work —strong reminders of a time when caught in the tail end of a cyclone of irrationality, I had no one but these works to turn to; but as soon as I had made that decision, I felt a pang of loss. Those works had been my sole companions in a time when I was in grave danger from jealousy and racism —both home-grown and imported. I found I couldn’t do it and burst into uncontrollable sobbing.

 How could things have gone so wrong? We couldn’t speak to or say goodbye to anyone. M had gone silent. Even he, it seemed to me, feared the two women. We were so happy in the beginning until they decided to create suspicion and destroy peace and Art.

So many possibilities come to me now. I could have booked into a hotel and stayed till the end of the exhibition and packed the work myself, but I was by that time so zombied by shouting madness that I was moving about in a daze, too confused and terribly sad. I had lost weight and my hands shook. I had stored all my paintings in the cottage and was tired from having to remove large paintings from the cottage to the gallery myself. The evening before the setting up of the exhibition I must have walked twenty times up and down the Gallery steps lugging paintings on my own until dark. One evening, like an angel, a young man with a slight limp who had seen me walking up and down with those huge canvases came to help me.

I just wanted to be out of there and out of Malaysia forever. It had become for me a place of cruel and indifferent women. This is what I didn’t want: to leave things unfinished like this; to leave on a bad note. This is why I stayed so long and this is what happened in the end. And yet, every time I stepped out of the cottage, a flood of tears descended and I had difficulty facing anyone and had to go back inside. The cottage was like the comforting arms of a mother.

Ian walked the length of the Kuang road and was unsuccessful in getting a taxi that Friday to take us to Fin’s place. One of the servants saw him walking in the sun and got a relative of his to drive us.  I dismantled the telephone and put it outside the M’s door with a note to say we had left.

*

Years after the Residency, Alice and her sycophants dragged my name through the mud. Surrounded by money and luxury, she was still living in the heavenless hell and the homeless home of unlove. How else can one explain all that happened at Rimbun Dahan? After I left the Residency, Alice published my name and my details on the net, regardless of my privacy and that of my family. Any crank could get to me, and nine years later, in 2004 one did.

She had been my student in 1974 when she was fourteen. She was, by then, a full-blown alcoholic. B fantasised about certain women, beginning with the Head Girl of the school who she stalked and terrorised the year before. The girls lived in fear of her. If the women she stalked rejected her attentions, she spread inappropriate stories about them. Teaching nuns, cooped up in a convent, were no longer equipped in this age to deal with students like B with complex difficulties.

 Unwashed, drunk and wearing her father’s shirts, B lurked around the convent after school hours, taking photographs of the nuns on whom she had a fixation. Because I was her class mistress, Sister Brede, who was my Mother Superior, sent me to speak to her parents. What I learned about their domestic arrangements was a shocking eye-opener and will remain confidential.

 By 2004, B, already a drug-addicted woman in her forties and suffering from a terminal disease, published her memoirs with the financial backing of a Publisher in KL. In the book she related her fantasies about some women, including me, as if they really happened. I was a nun, I was her teacher, and sad to say, I found her unpleasant and avoided her. She was found under the staircase at CBN in a bad state one evening, drunk and having slit her arms. Sr Brede arranged for me to accompany her to the hospital. I stayed the night Assunta with her. None of her family cared. In her book, the publisher arranged for my full name to be published. The way I was presented, showed that the publisher was working on someone else’s behalf.

This book was a timely deflection from the clandestine goings on in the cottage. I had seen too much and I was paying the price.

 When I contacted the publisher —who, B called ‘a crook’— he threatened B with litigation. She collapsed and she died shortly after. That’s what her oncologist told me. But I believe in my heart that B, realising she had been used to get at me, chose to die. Unpleasant and troublesome as she was, she was my student; she was my responsibility, and I had failed her. Because of me, she was thrown to the dogs. What that Publisher — someone’s sycophant— did, was unforgiveable.

 In 2004, The Australian, published the Article A Fertile Garden on the Rimbun Dahan Residency, by Kimina Lyall. In it, Alice, again mentioning my full name and where I lived, cited me as Rimbun Dahan’s negative experience. To this day I don’t know if people received the works they bought at the exhibition, or whether they were given the impression that I had absconded with the work and the money. That devastating thought haunts me with its possibility from my experience of that Residency. In all, with freight discounted, I made a total of AUD $2000.

In that same year, Alice (a convert to Islam) was awarded the Order of Australia Medal, OAM, for her services to the Arts and to Artists.  

Title: Preliminary drawings for Heartcries I, II, III. Pastel, charcoal, water colour.