Descendants of Singapore's 'sea people' keep Orang Laut way of life alive through food, stories

Despite spending most of his formative years surrounded by the glittering lights and glamorous skyscrapers of Singapore, Firdaus Sani, 35, still has fond childhood memories of Pulau Semakau, the southern island where his grandparents used to live.

"We would fish and I would stay on the island for weeks, especially during the school holidays. Sometimes, we would even do weekend trips," he said. "My grandparents really relied on the sea for sustenance, they would catch these fish [for work] but it was a lot of fun for me."

Pulau Semakau was once home to hundreds of Orang Laut - a Malay phrase for several seafaring ethnic groups that translates as "sea people" - before the island was acquired by the Singapore government in the 1980s, its population relocated and the area eventually turned into a landfill.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

Most who lived there earned a living by catching seafood and selling it to merchants in mainland Singapore.

To keep his memories of that way of life alive, Firdaus turned to something all Singaporeans love: food. Alongside members of his family, he began selling Orang Laut cuisine through the Instagram page Orang Laut SG, which now has more than 9,700 followers.

"Food became a tangible way to share our narrative," he said, citing dishes that include traditional Malay specialities such as sotong hitam (squid in black ink sauce) and ketam lemak (crab in spicy coconut milk), but cooked in a style unique to the Orang Laut.

Since its inception during the pandemic, Firdaus has grown what started out as a social media account into a fully fledged non-profit organisation, which holds talks and events to spread awareness of the Orang Laut community.

While Firdaus was lucky enough to have experienced a small slice of what island life was like, others in the Orang Laut community - who are believed to be some of Singapore's earliest inhabitants - have lost touch with their heritage.

In the latter half of the 20th century as Singapore industrialised, one Orang Laut village after another fell to the developers' wrecking ball and their inhabitants were resettled in public housing on the main island. Many assimilated into the Chinese-majority society as ethnic Malays, who make up about 15 per cent of the population.

Efforts were initially made to keep the communities intact, with land allocated in coastal areas near the sea such as Singapore's West Coast, but "this is no longer the case", said Hamzah Muzaini, an associate professor of Southeast Asian studies at the National University of Singapore.

"Many of them would have, over the years, moved to different parts of Singapore," he said. "This also does not include those who chose not to move to the mainland but to other parts of the region, such as the Riau Islands in Indonesia."

However, Muzaini said the loss of a collective Orang Laut culture had already begun even before their resettlement.

"Following their transition from being Orang Laut to Orang Pulau ('island people'), there was already some deculturalisation taking place, such as when they were no longer nomadic and living on boats, instead choosing to settle semi-permanently, if not permanently, on land," he said, adding that this loss of culture was even more "severe" for those who had to settle far away from the coast and were not able to live near the sea.

But the visibility of these communities has grown in recent years, Muzaini said, thanks to academic research, the release of personal archives and other documents, and several ground-up initiatives like Orang Laut SG.

Most recently, the team gave out around 400 bowls of bubur lambuk ikan tenggiri - a mackerel fish porridge that is a popular dish among members of the community - to mark Ramadan, the holy fasting month in Islam.

"This initiative started about four years ago because Ramadan is a time of giving back to the community," he said. "Bubur lambuk is not something that is unfamiliar to the Malay community but what makes it different for us [Orang Laut] is we use fish which is a staple."

Younger generations previously unaware of their Orang Laut heritage have also started getting in touch with their roots.

Zuhaira Syaza Amir Khaled told This Week in Asia she only discovered her connections to the community while researching her final-year project for a design communication degree at the Laselle College of the Arts.

While watching a performance by an Orang Laut descendant, it struck her that the dialect used was similar to the one her late grandmother had spoken.

"That reminded me of how my grandmother used to sing to me when I was younger, I had a realisation that my grandmother was one of the islanders," she said.

Zuhaira reached out to family and friends to find out more about her heritage, learning that she had relatives who used to stay on the islands of Bukom Kechil, Pulau Semakau and Pulau Seking.

"Every weekend or holiday, they would take a boat and travel to these islands and when looking through archives, I found pictures of my great-grandmother at the entry of a kampung," she said.

Even though her final-year project on the islanders' way of life is now complete, the 25-year-old said she had since been on a journey of discovery to find out more about her family's history.

"Ever since I did the project last year, I would ask people who lived on any of the islands if they knew who my grandmother was because the community is very small and tight-knit," she said.

However, her grandmother's passing has made it hard to put the pieces of the story together.

"Even if I asked my direct relatives, they have no recollection of island life because they moved out to the mainland when they were quite young," she said. "It's really unfortunate that a lot of the practices and culture is gone as soon as one islander passes away."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.