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2015
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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24
K ETUPONG
JANE SHLENSKY taught English for thirty-nine years in high schools, universities, and community colleges in the US and the People’s Republic of China, and after retiring, worked as academic director for the North Carolina Teaching Asia Network’s teacher seminars. A national board-certified educator, she served as a board member, conference director, and president of the North Carolina English Teachers Association, and has been a recipient of the North Carolina Outstanding English Teacher award. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UNC Greensboro, publishing mostly poetry in recent years. Her work appears in a number of anthologies and magazines, including The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Emerge Literary Magazine, Writer’s Digest, KAKALAK, 2015 Poet’s Market, and Southern Poetry Anthology, volume VII: North Carolina. Teaching Asian Studies at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics led to the author’s travel throughout Asia on study grants, such as American Fulbright and Japanese Fulbright Memorial seminars. The trip mentioned in this story was a Fulbright-Hayes seminar to Singapore and Malaysia for six weeks in the summer of 1999 with sixteen teachers from high schools and colleges across America.
The Iban living up the Batang Rejang near the southern tip of Borneo have rituals that guide them. Still, they tell us American teachers on a Fulbright-Hayes seminar to Malaysia, that they have changed in vital ways, adapted. Headhunting has been outlawed since the late nineteenth century, prompting the end of using skulls in the opening ceremony for new longhouses (dwellings for multiple families beneath one roof). Their blowdart guns, cock fights, amulets, and wine-inspired dances are directed toward hunting tourists now, from whom they get much-needed revenue.
by Jane Shlensky
COURTESY OF JANE SHLENSKY
32
Once hunters, they have become farmers. Those too old for hard labor care for longhouse children who are too young for schooling in the residential schools located far from tribal pepper fields and pineapple plantations. The old people have only a few short years to teach these children who they are before the government schools orphan these tribal children from villages and offer them the world instead of home. We have already seen one such boarding school, barebones housing and uninspired teaching. We ask if we may see the homes from which the children come and are immediately invited to the Iban longhouse, an honor for us. We joke that teachers are headhunters, too, after a fashion, interested in developing the life of the mind within our students. ABOVE LEFT A chief in native costume with Jane Shlensky ABOVE RIGHT Jane Shlensky with members of the longhouse posing in
native costume after performing the Ngajat, a sword dance, for visitors