Kodrah Kristang is the core of the grassroots non-profit Kristang revitalisation effort that seeks to restore the language, culture, identity and ways of being of the Kristang people of Melaka, Singapore and Perth back to full, flourishing and healthy decolonised and creole/Indigenous life, celebrating its queer, neurodivergent and critically independent and decolonial roots and foundations. It is an independent grassroots initiative that has no ties, overt or covert, to any government, external agency, organisation or religious association or institution, and is proudly led by Singapore’s first and so far only openly gay, non-binary, neurodivergent, polyamorous and atheist ethnic community leader, Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang.
In January 2015, while doing research for a magazine article, Kevin discovered that the critically endangered language Kristang was still likely spoken in Singapore. Bringing together a group of friends interested in the language, Kevin resolved to find the remaining speakers of the language, learn the language from them, and begin the long, multi-generational process of language revitalization: working with the community to reawaken the language and bring it back to a healthy level of use. Our initiative came to be known as Kodrah Kristang: Awaken, Kristang, and along the way, Kevin, a survivor of very intense sexual and psychoemotional abuse throughout his life, also came to discover just how Kristang he actually had been all along, uncovering a wealth of his own occluded history and trauma, including the fact that he was a native speaker of the language himself, and new paths forward for the language, culture, community and identity as the 13th Kabesa or Leader of the Kristang people, descended directly from previous Kabesa Adriaan Koek, Edwin Tessensohn and Mabel Martens. Since August 2022 when Kevin began to excavate this, Kodrah Kristang has grown far beyond just the original aims of language revitalisation to also bringing back Kristang culture, identity, epistemology and ways of being both in Singapore and worldwide.
The reclamation of Kristang has thus far taken place outside of academia and institutional oversight that in the past has proven to either be inadequate or in several other notable cases beyond the scope of this paper outright intentionally destructive and malevolent. It has also taken place with an eye toward providing not just alternate sites for meaning-making, decolonisation and the renegotiation of what it means to be Kristang, but with the honouring and privileging of a Kristang point-of-view that is reindigenising, reclaiming and rejuvenative, as much of prior scholarly work on Kristang, even by Kristang people themselves, still reinforced abusive and unwelcome colonial stereotypes, beliefs and schema that dehumanised or demeaned the community and encouraged us to devalue our own unique characteristics, traits, values, beliefs and ways of being, especially when it came to concepts like self-respect, mental health, queerness, neurodivergence and psychoemotional wholeness.
Interested in learning more about Kristang in its true creole and Indigenous form, therefore? You’ve come to the right place! Kevin and Kodrah Kristang are one of only two places in the world you can learn the Kristang language, the other being with our dear kambradu Sara Frederica Santa Maria in the Portuguese Settlement of Malacca. Beng prendeh Kristang — beng prendeh klai bibeh kung alegria, speransa kung fortidang juntah kung nus 🙂
Some material above also appears in Wong, Kevin Martens (2024). Kultura Krismatra: Excavating the Progenitor Kristang Creole/Indigenous Way of Being in Singapore. In Mǎdǎlina Pantea (ed.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World, pp. 114-128. University of Oradea.