At around fourteen years of age, like most teens, I started to question the beliefs and values that I had swallowed without chewing. Blind faith was the first casualty. Now, over fifty years on, though I endorse Christian ethics and morality, I remain a committed atheist and so I was skeptical when Joyce, an ex-pat from the UK whom I got to know when I was living in Borneo, told me that she was living in fear of a malevolent bomah. A bomah is the Malaysian term for a medicine man or witch doctor, the equivalent of a tribal shaman. Like shamans, bomahs are supposedly blessed with the gift to communicate with the spirits of the deceased and to intercede on behalf of the living.
In times gone by Dayaks, the Indigenous tribes of Borneo were ancestor worshipers who lived in fear of offending the vengeful spirits that surrounded them. Headhunting, the taking a human head, was the chief way of appeasing and gaining the goodwill of ancient spirits but they also consulted bomahs when their gifts failed to satisfy their ancestors' insatiable appetite for human sacrifice.
Today, while many Dayaks have abandoned their longhouses in favour of city life, they continue to consult Bomahs. Revered because of their affiliation with the supernatural and the occult, bomahs allegedly possess the gifts of prophecy and healing but are feared because, sometimes they use their supernatural powers to harm individuals who have injured or offended them.
I was absolutely certain that paranormal or supernatural phenomena didn't exist and said as much
when Joyce told me that a bomah had warned her that if she didn't give him a thousand ringgit, (a ringgit is a Malaysian dollar), he would put an evil spell on her. I couldn't believe that she could take such rubbish seriously. "Tell him that you'll curse him back," I told her jokingly, like Roger, one of the characters in The White Amah. who refused to give his amah, Rubiah money to pay a bomah to release her from a spell. Mocking her beliefs, he called her an ignorant little jungle bunny. His arrogant response mirrored my own dismissive attitude to non-western doctrine.
Writing gives one the opportunity to reflect on personal experiences and when I constructed Roger as indifferent and unresponsive to unfamiliar ideas, I was having a dig at my own closed attitude. Maybe ... just maybe, there's more in heaven and on earth than we can ever know, as someone considerably wiser than I remarked around five hundred years ago.
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In times gone by Dayaks, the Indigenous tribes of Borneo were ancestor worshipers who lived in fear of offending the vengeful spirits that surrounded them. Headhunting, the taking a human head, was the chief way of appeasing and gaining the goodwill of ancient spirits but they also consulted bomahs when their gifts failed to satisfy their ancestors' insatiable appetite for human sacrifice.
Today, while many Dayaks have abandoned their longhouses in favour of city life, they continue to consult Bomahs. Revered because of their affiliation with the supernatural and the occult, bomahs allegedly possess the gifts of prophecy and healing but are feared because, sometimes they use their supernatural powers to harm individuals who have injured or offended them.
I was absolutely certain that paranormal or supernatural phenomena didn't exist and said as much
when Joyce told me that a bomah had warned her that if she didn't give him a thousand ringgit, (a ringgit is a Malaysian dollar), he would put an evil spell on her. I couldn't believe that she could take such rubbish seriously. "Tell him that you'll curse him back," I told her jokingly, like Roger, one of the characters in The White Amah. who refused to give his amah, Rubiah money to pay a bomah to release her from a spell. Mocking her beliefs, he called her an ignorant little jungle bunny. His arrogant response mirrored my own dismissive attitude to non-western doctrine.
Writing gives one the opportunity to reflect on personal experiences and when I constructed Roger as indifferent and unresponsive to unfamiliar ideas, I was having a dig at my own closed attitude. Maybe ... just maybe, there's more in heaven and on earth than we can ever know, as someone considerably wiser than I remarked around five hundred years ago.
Ann Massey
http://www.annmasseyauthor.net/
Author of:
The White Amah, a mystery set against the backdrop of the timber logging industry in Malaysia. Sample or purchase: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456578065
The Biocide Conspiracy, a Young Adult thriller that sweeps readers into the world of biowarfare. Sample or purchase; http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456503367
