A Grain of Rice

Sharmini Aphrodite on migration, memory and a travelling faith

Rice Picking, Gihachiro Okuyama

I arrived in London at the start of the year, still in winter. It was miles away from the wet heat from which I had come, the blistering afternoons and regular sunlight. When I first conceived of my current research project years ago, it had been because of this landscape: tropical humidity is the optimal climate for rice-growing. I had originally intended to trace the development of rice rituals in Sabah in the latter half of the 20th century – how conversions had diminished the role of ritual specialists like my great - grandmothers who had once overseen the rice-growing process. How the regularity of tractor ploughing and imported pesticides had impacted the need for ritual prayers. How rice-growing itself was back-breaking work, thought of as better left in the past.

I had first gone into the archives years ago with these ideas in mind. I came out, instead, steeped in the language of my childhood: Christianity. The period I had set aside for my original research coincided with the formation of the Malaysian state and, with it, the suppression of ethnic and religious minorities, labourers, and Indigenous Peoples – all of whom challenged state hegemony. In the archives, I read about how Indigenous Sabahans during this time began to sculpt their identities around Christianity as a means of resisting state suppression and exploitation. These were things I had taken for granted growing up. The presence of crucifixes rising into the sky venturing into rural Sabah, my ancestral village cluttered with churches, wedges of crosses cut into the earth denoting the resting places of the dead. My grandparents converted to Catholicism in the wake of this in the 1980s; there is a tiny church in the vicinity named after an Italian mystic. All of this made sense now, as did the rumours of state suppression heard during childhood and tucked away—simply part of the landscape. Central to my ancestors’ religion had been the story of a sacrificed daughter, whose body was turned to rice to feed the hungry. You can imagine it didn’t take much to hear about Christ holding up a loaf of bread, saying this is my body, and understand it. It is the story of an open table, an offer to sit and eat.

At some point, I visited the Mill Hill Mission archives, just off Liverpool. From this port city, in 1881, the Mill Hill missionaries first arrived in Sabah. They were separate from the colonial project, even helping locals advocate for land rights against the colonial administration ’s land grabbing. The missionaries found that to properly minister to people they had to, quite literally, learn the language: they had to work with them and learn from them, too. Through negotiation, the missionaries became an integral part of these communities, such that when the state declared in the 1970s that they were to be deported and expelled, in its efforts to stamp out both Indigenous identity and Christianity, these communities rallied around them. Against state violence – tear gas, helicopters, police – they tried to protect these priests from being sent away.

In Liverpool, I met one such missionary. I sat at his side and listened to his stories of first coming to Sabah, in the midst of the Christmas season. I knew the district where he had been first sent; could see in my mind ’s eye the rice fields, the distant mountains. I told him that the faith was still going strong in Sabah; that I was here was proof of that. No matter how imperfectly I have practised, no matter what personal gripes I have had with the church (or churches), I was still here. It was a strange journey to make; over a century ago missionaries would have left this place for Sabah, now I had made the journey in reverse.

Uncooked rice, Jenie Gao, 2021

When I first arrived at Giuseppe Conlon House to help out, I met people from all over the world; saw the myriad other ways states enact violence. Christianity has always been a travelling religion, from missionaries to migrants. The churches I have known were filled with other Borneans who had to leave to cari makan (find food), as we say; with Timorese and Filipinos doing the same. A room filled with different languages. The story of Christ is a migrant story – we are familiar with the journey to Bethlehem, of the Holy Family to Egypt, of the travelling of disciples and saints, of the violence that the state can do to those who trespass its borders in all forms. Without recognition of this, without a sustained effort to understand and challenge the structures of power that demand obedience to unjust practices, that leave some hungry while others are fed, that tell us there is only one way to be and act, what is this faith for? It is worth little if we forget that Christ was a child in the arms of a weary mother fleeing oppression, if we forget the sanctity of a grain of rice. In the few months I was here, these lessons returned to me. In the singing during the Stations of the Cross walking through London, in washing vegetables for dinner and sweeping the floors, in the house church seeing the face of Christ behind barbed wire.

The end of May is Kaamatan (Harvest Festival) in Sabah; during it, a Mass is said where rice stalks are blessed in remembrance of ancestral practices. Fifty years ago, a few days after the year’s Kaamatan celebrations, a man named Peter Mojuntin was killed in a plane crash. He had been instrumental at the height of state repression; founding the Persatuan Katolik for religious freedoms,standing up for peasants who were being threatened by the state, advocating for the missionaries to remain with the communities who had grown to love them and who they, too, loved. My research will soon continue; I will head to rice fields and churches, to ask people what fuelled their resistance to state domination. To ask what crafted people like Mojuntin and remains with us fifty years later. A few months ago, sitting with someone who had been part of a student movement, still advocating decades later for environmental justice and the rural poor, I received a surprising answer to this question. They said it was Liberation theology: the words of Gutiérrez and Freire, received decades ago, from Peru and Brazil. The life of Christ translated across continents. A travelling faith, making unexpected journeys to meet us where we need it most. So that we may be for others what they, too, in their own journeys, need most.

Sharmini Aphrodite