Book review: Travelogue Bugis Nights exoticises South-east Asia with little insight
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Chris Stowers is the author of Bugis Nights, which follows his adventures exploring South-east Asia.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF EARNSHAW BOOKS, CHRIS STOWERS
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Bugis Nights
By Chris Stowers amzn.to/3ZjssQx
Travel memoir/Earnshaw Books/Paperback/208 pages/$29.97/Amazon SG (
2 stars
If you thought the age of Western travelogues exploring South-east Asia’s islands was confined to the literary output of the 19th century, think again.
Chris Stowers’ Bugis Nights is subtitled “the true story of an extraordinary voyage”. It tells of this young English backpacker’s adventures in the 1980s sailing the Kurnia Ilahi – the name of a traditional Bugis perahu or sailing boat – from Maumere on Indonesia’s Flores Island through the Java Sea to Singapore.
Interspersed throughout this adventurous tale on the high seas is a romantic thread, set in Tibet, with love interest Claudia at its core.
Stowers the Englishman writes: “It’s impossible to deny being descendants of a restless island tribe. The curious and the haunted amongst us have always gravitated like rivers to the sea, drawn by the gently warming haze beyond the horizon.”
He goes on to name the likes of naturalist Charles Darwin and novelist Rudyard Kipling as examples of this restlessness, and it is clear he places his adventures in the same tradition of these inveterate explorers.
It is a beautiful metaphor Stowers has set up – and much of the writing in the book is in this ornate vein. But there is a lack of self-consciousness as he does not reckon with the complicated fact that these were men of Britain’s imperial century.
Can a travelogue written today styled after these men avoid the trappings of exoticisation?
Alas, like many of the writers he considers predecessors, the author casts a strong if romanticised descriptive mist and never quite lifts the fog of the foreign.
On his journey, readers encounter abstruse phrases from a Chinese horoscope handbook, the unfamiliar gender systems of the Bugis people mapped onto modern sexual identities, and other curiosities of the archipelago.
Consider this description of a teenage bus conductor in Indonesia: “I was comforted by spontaneous smiles and ritual generosity, soothed by the symphony of a language as yet unintelligible but intimate as birdsong.”
When the crew of exhausted seamen arrive at Singapore, it is again the exotic which warrants description: “We discovered the paradise of Little India, and the piquant perfection of South Indian cuisine at the Sri Krishna restaurant; elongated masaldosas with their various curries and sauces, washed down by Horlicks, providing multicultural harmony for the tastebuds.”
A more serious issue for Bugis Nights is that while the voyage at its core occasionally offers interesting reflections on one’s relationship to travel, the book’s diaristic mode lacks strong narrative propulsion that convinces the reader to plough through its difficult waters day after day.
Some of the most interesting parts of the book are the photographs, taken by the writer himself during his voyage across the Java Sea.
They offer glimpses of the journey and encapsulate one of the writer’s pithy aphorisms: “We live in an age accustomed to miracles, our sense of wonder neutered by the ease and availability of long-distance travel.”
But it is now also an age accustomed to difference, and there is little that a book powered by the engine of the foreign can do to entice a reader from this modern time.
If you like this, read: Tales Of An Eastern Port: The Singapore Novellas Of Joseph Conrad by Joseph Conrad (NUS Press, 2023, $35, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3LnrbCC
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