Tanah Tujuh, literally “Earth #7,” is an engaging and humble account of the life and beliefs of Temuan people who live in the same community, Kampung Pertak, as the author.
The author, Kit Leee – writing under his spiritual name Antares – is a poet, musician, mystic and humorist who more or less stumbled across the remnants of Temuan tradition while trying unsuccessfully to defend his home and theirs from the inundation that resulted from a new dam.
Relocated after a prolonged but ineffectual campaign against the Selangor Dam, Antares and his Temuan wife Anoora now live in suburban bungalows in the gorgeous Pertak Valley, which on weekends is inundated in its turn by urbanites seeking escape from Kuala Lumpur and its satellites.
Anyone who has sat in on jam sessions on Antares’s front porch with young Temuan children can see how close his relationship with the people has become.
The book’s ventures into comparative mythopoesis may put more pedestrian anthropologists and political scientists off-stride. But, although this is an intensely personal document, Antares is too careful a reporter to confuse his own responses with Temuan narrative.
The book closes with a sobering account of the Temuan’s ongoing struggle against systematic ethnocide.
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