Guy Jenkins

Sleeping Dictionary

Gesehen: 2005

In the video rental shop, my eyes caught the picture of a young woman rowing in a dug-out through some beautiful Borneo scenery on a DVD cover. So I read the teaser text on the jacket, and decided to rent that DVD.

British colonial rule, especially in South-East Asia, is a subject that fascinates me. On one side, it appears that the British have been quite reasonable rulers - they somehow instilled a sense for democracy and justice in the people they ruled, and when they left, though the locals were happy to see them go, there rarely was that enmity and hatred that Indonesians had against the Dutch, or Indo-Chinese against the French. And economically, the most successful developing nations in Asia - and the most stable democracies - are former british colonies (and independent Thailand, which had modelled itself mostly on a british role model).

But on the other hand, the British were the worst racists. Not racists in a "hate" way, but in a condescending and teacherly way, they let their subjects feel their superiority in every way. They really seem to have believed that "white man's burden" crap, until 1945 at least. Marriage, for example, between British and "natives" was unacceptable. It was legal, but society did everything to prevent it, including transferring young officers before they would do something stupid. In Vietnam, on the other hand, many French officials were married to Vietnamese women. British felt it was wrong to socialise with the locals, even when they were Oxford-educated Indian professionals or scholars. This seeming contradiction always fascinates me.

The movie could have been a collection of W. Somerset Maugham stories. It appears to be a collection of situations and personalities taken from the "Far Eastern Tales". Or maybe it is because both Maugham's stories and the movie are close to historic reality. Speaking of historic reality, I would consider Maugham's "Tales" still to be more accurate than a modern time movie, so here are some flaws:

Selima (Jessica Alba) certainly looks like an exotic beauty, but definitely not like an Iban woman. But then, who would know?
Sarawak had not been part of the British empire until after World War II. Rather, it was an independent nation which happened to be ruled by an Englishman, and therefore was somehow aligned with Britain.
In 1936, the Iban did no longer regularly go a-headhunting.
I'm certain that "sleeping dictionaries" would not have been enforced on the British representatives, and not everybody actually had a local girlfriend. Rather, those who had, invited them in themselves.
The Iban I've met also were not as open about unmarried couples spending nights together as the movie seems to imply.

About the story: Englishman John Truscott arrives in Sarawak in 1936 with plans to educate the Iban, the largest native people of Sarawak. On arrival, he is equipped with a "sleeping dictionary", a woman from a nearby Iban longhouse, who should perform "wifely duties" while teaching him Iban. (Her Iban actually sounds pretty much like Malay, but that may be correct - the two languages are closely related.) At first he objects on reasons of religion, but after some time, he falls in love with her. When she almost dies on an expedition, he decides against all conventions of society to marry her. This attempt fails, and he is sent back to England while she is married to the chieftain-to-be of her longhouse.

In England, John marries the daughter of his former boss, and they return to Sarawak. In Sarawak, John tries to stay away from his former love, but then discovers she has a child from him. They secretly meet again, and finally decide to run away to the Dutch part of Borneo. But John's mother in law sends the local villain after them.

The story is a pretty simple love story, but it contains a lot of the sad and crazy stories you also have in W. Somerset Maughams short stories - basically, the tragic fates of the men who have to separate from local women they love (and their own children by local women) to satisfy British social standards, and the fates of those women and children. But with Maugham, I never understood whether he really saw the folly and idiocy in this society and it's rules, or whether he himself perceived this as part of the "white man's burden". Perhaps because in Maugham's time, you couldn't write as openly about it. In the movie, it is clear: those British are idiots.

You will also find a lot of typical Maugham characters: the eager young Englishman who learns how to enjoy life in Borneo, the eager young Englishman who doesn't, the old Englishman who had sent his local lover away and ignored his local half-caste daughter all her life - tragic characters who give away so much of their lifes to hollow ideas and hollow ideals, and empty values.

It is amazing, how this largest empire of human history, could have been so right on so many things, and so wrong on so many others. Did it help those countries more than it harmed them? Or the other way round? I don't really know.

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