Stories by DAPHNE LEE
From StarMag
A Briton encapsulates his love for the local landscape and the enchantment of rural living in a beautifully illustrated book.
IT all started more than 40 years ago, when, as a young man, Iain Buchanan came to Malaysia and Singapore to lecture on geography.
According to Buchanan, he was a "callow academic" with minimal local knowledge. He thinks his students must have found him annoying - "presuming to teach them about their own country". However, Buchanan fell in love with Malaysia, especially its landscape, the memory of which he took with him when he left for his land of birth, Britain.
"When I first came to Malaysia, it felt immediately familiar and I realised that I was recalling some parts of my boyhood in Africa - especially certain scents, like the smell after a tropical rainstorm."
Buchanan spent several years in South Africa, Nigeria and New Zealand thanks to his father accepting various lecturing posts. Buchanan Snr was also a a geographer and taught his son to appreciate the landscape and to be aware of the interconnectivity between the land and living things.
"You have to feel connected to the landscape before you can act in a responsible manner towards it," said Buchanan, 67, when StarMag interviewed him about his first book, Fatimah's Kampung. The picture book tells the tale of what happens when regard for the land is overtaken by so-called development and greed.
At the centre of the story is Fatimah, who, at the start of the book, is a little girl, and, by its end, a teenager. The kampung in question is Kampung Hidayah, where Fatimah lives. It is a village within a city, surrounded by lush green forests and protected by a fictional Sultan who owns the land and had pledged to preserve it as it is the site of a large and beautiful keramat.
Fatimah's family lives in a house, built by her great grandfather, in the very centre of the kampung. It is a traditional Malay kampung house, raised on stilts, with a roof made of hand-cut wooden tiles, a plank floor, fretwork on the verandah railings and an intricately carved tiang seri (main pillar) made from the very tree that provided the roof tiles.
Fatimah loves her home. She loves the forest which she finds fascinating and mysterious. She is also intrigued by the keramat and the family of doves that live in it. Her grandmother tells her exciting stories about the wise man who is buried in the keramat; and of Pak Belang, the tiger who guards the forest. The stories come with the recurring message to respect and honour the land and all living creatures. This is also Buchanan's message.
"I was once a preachy lecturer, but even after I stopped teaching, and preaching, I still felt strongly about the things, like disparate economic development, ecological collapse, overurbanization .... Fatimah's Kampung is a way of recasting those lectures in more digestible form, especially addressed to children."
Buchanan eventually married Maznoor Abd Hamid, one of the students he had taught all those years ago in Singapore, and this thrust him back into the landscape of Malaysia where many of his wife's extended family lived. It was a landscape that he had all but forgotten, but as he rediscovered it with Maznoor, Buchanan fell in love with it all over again.
Later, the couple settled in Britain (they now divide their time between Britain, Singapore and Malaysia), but Buchanan's disillusionment with academic life grew and he decided to take early retirement. "In the end, though, it was my experience of Maznoor and her family, and all the stories she told me (of her childhood, of her family, of her various houses and kampungs), that gave me the format for Fatimah's Kampung," he recalled. "A million little details eventually, and very slowly, came together: trips with Maznoor in Borneo forests and on the back roads around Selangor and Perak; visits to family graves; walks with my Batu Pahat brother-in-law, into the forest of Gunung Soga and around Johor kampungs; explorations of building sites with my little niece Hanna; a visit to a keramat, a family wedding, my sister-in-law's kitchen garden. Eventually, I found that I was celebrating Maznoor's family, celebrating all I loved about Malaysia, and paraphrasing my old lectures in a more presentable way, all at the same time."
The pictures came first and the words were composed later, almost in the same way as captions are composed to explain pictures. Thanks to the meticulous rendering of the kampung (keep your eyes peeled for the cats that appear in almost every picture spread) and the detailed recounting of Fatimah's life, this book can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. It is Buchanan's hope that parents will share the story with their children, and that the pictures and words will combine to awaken in readers the realisation of how the Earth is being threatened and how we are all involved in and affected by its preservation and its destruction.
A Labour of Love
THREE hundred meters of paper were used to create the story of Fatimah's Kampung. "A third of a km," according to Iain Buchanan, its author and illustrator. But this estimation is based on the finished product, with each of the original pictures for the book already shrunk to A3 size.
[Above] Iain Buchanan, with a print of one of his illustrations.
The original art work is up to 20 times the size of the book. ""I had to do it on a large scale in order to do justice to the perspectives, details and textures of the scenes I wanted to capture," said Buchanan.
An architect friend was able to shrink the drawings just once, using an industrial copy machine. If the shrinking had been done in stages, the quality of the pictures would have been affected - pen lines would be blurred and much of the fine detail lost.
Amazingly, Buchanan has had no formal art training, and started drawing and painting in earnest only when he started working on Fatimah's Kampung. "I taught myself and every thing in the book is done by hand - even the most repetitive tasks," says Buchanan, revealing that the only machine involved was the photocopier.
After the pictures were shrunk, Buchanan coloured them in using ink. He chose ink intead of water colour because, fortuitously, "A friend had a store of ink that he was not going to use again." Buchanan adds that his benefactor had told him that ink has a more transluscent effect than water colour.
The result are pictures that glow in varying shades of colours rich and delicate. The greens are especially breathtaking. Leaves, trees, bushes, grass are rendered in vibrant jewel tones - from emerald to jade to peridot, and all the greens in between. What makes these pictures especially stunning is their detail. Every leaf and leaf vein is delicately outlined and picked out in fine black ink; every blade of grass formed; every thorn on a bamboo shoot present and correct.
Buchanan studied every thing he drew closely - the "pedantic academic" in him determined to get the details right. The drawings are so fine and the process of creating them so painstaking and tedious that his eyesight suffered. Some pieces took up to two months to complete and the entire project took eight years.
During this time, his wife, Maznoor Abd Hamid, herself a retired university lecturer, paid the bills by working in three factories, a hospital, a warehouse and a tree nursery. "When he started the book I had no inkling as to what the project was about," she says now. "When I was first shown the drawing of the kampong on page one, it brought a lump to my throat for it reminded me so much of the kampung I grew up in a long time ago in Singapore." Maznoor recalls how she would tease her husband. pretending to peek at his work, only to be told, "Oh no, go away" or "Not yet".
When she finally saw the completed book she was "stunned". Maznoor says, "We have no children but Fatimah's Kampung is a deep and touching tribute to a loving life together. It took eight years to see the light of day but it will last to the end of our days and beyond".
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