Found myself in Wardah Books this morning attending a talk by my chum Tony (Jamal) Green on the publication of his very handsome tome Kapal Haji: Singapore and the Hajj Journey by Sea. The last time we spoke, in early August, Jamal told me quite a bit about the volume, which has been some years in the making and featured in even earlier conversations between us. Some of this was recapped in this morning's talk which, if anything, made it all the more enthralling as the various bits and pieces fell more easily into place for me, into more of a coherent whole.
Jamal had quoted to me something from a Brian Patten poem entitled The Betrayal back in August, as a way of explaining the obvious urgency he felt to capture something of the history of the pilgrims who endured so stoically, so heroically the journeys by sea he deals with in the book. When he read some of the poem again this morning, in his typically understated way, the lines floored me with their relevance to my own life, my own betrayals. It seemed somehow overwhelmingly important in that moment to acknowledge those whose fate it has been to be just the loose change of history.
There was another moment later in the talk, almost an off-hand one, when he paused to think of a word to describe how it felt to research the experiences of those undertaking the sea-borne hajj and came up with: humbling. Yes and I know it's going to be usefully, rightly, humbling to read of them.
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