Rivers of Dayak Dreams: The Aporia of Knowledge and the Melancholia of Race in Three Memoirs about Borneo

Abstract

The space and people of Borneo have long been subject to colonial curiosity and exoticism. In and after the age of high imperialism, knowing Borneo’s “secrets” and seeing through the mist of its jungles had been the ambition of many an adventurer and ethnographer. This article challenges the dominating power dynamics between the actively observing outsider and the passively observed indigenous by looking at specifically failures in historical endeavors to “know” the island. My data is drawn from two semi-autobiographical novels each by the Chinese Sarawakian author Li Yongping, the Dutch author Michael Perelaer, and a memoir by the indigenous Dayak autobiographer Riska. Their juxtaposition allows an experimental attempt at bringing the fields of Sinophone studies, Dutch colonial literature, and Southeast Asian history in conversation with each other. The result shows that an active field of language and cultural barrier, for which I use the term "aporia", is continuously and consciously maintained by the indigenous communities, resisting imperialist efforts to epistemologically take possession of the island's traditionally secretive and introvert knowledge.