Some material below 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.
Much of Kristang philosophy and epistemology is derived from the Dreaming Ocean, which in Kristang is called Krismatra. Krismatra is derived from the combination of the same Greek root morpheme in the second etymology for the word Kristang, which is xρυσός (chrysos), meaning ‘gold’, and the Kristang word matra, meaning ‘ocean’: the Dreaming Ocean, or the Domain of Gaia, the sentient collective unconscious of all life on the entire planet.
In Kristang, Gaia is what we call an eleidi, or a personified collective of sentient life. All groups or collectives made up of sentient life, will thus have an unseen, intangible humaniform or personifiable form or eleidi, which in Kristang we use the fourth grammatical person, comprising of the pronouns ela and eletu (translated as He, She or They in English), to refer to; all gods, divinities, angels, demons and gestalts are also eleidi. The Dreaming Ocean appears to be analogous to the Dreaming or Dreamtime described in many of the cultures of Aboriginal Australia, as well as other equivalents described in speculative fiction such as the Domain in the Halo: Combat Evolved series, and possibly even Western new age approaches to the unconscious, such as the concept of the Akashic Records. In Kristang, the Dreaming Ocean or Domain of Gaia is hence the collected or accumulated knowledge of Gaia over Their entire existence on the planet and within the universe acquired through all sentient life that forms Gaia, stretching back to knowledge acquired through the first lifeforms that emerged out of the primordial soup of the early Earth some 4.1 billion years ago. Much of this knowledge is not accessible to human beings, however, as we have been disconnected as a species from Gaia for the last 77,000 years since an event in 75,010 BCE called the Konkizabida, or the Conquest of Life, where our previously Gaietic ancestors (i.e. humans who were fully connected to Gaia) made the decision to create non-gaietic humans as slave labour. This sparked off a chain of cyclical events known as the Roda Mundansa, or the Wheel of World Movement, that saw the destruction of our Gaietic ancestors, the Prumireru or the Progenitors, the fossilisation of many forms of very deep intergenerational and even interepochal trauma, and the engendering of deep species amnesia about our true history (Wong 2023l). Much of the information contained within the Dreaming Ocean is thus not consciously accessible to us, and appears in occluded or distorted fashion, especially in both traditional myths and legends in all cultures, and modern speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy, which use the context or backdrop of the future to safely negotiate trauma and elements of the distant past that species amnesia normally prevent us from working with more lucidly.
The core of the Kristang revitalisation effort since August 2022, therefore, has been to encourage the recovery of material from the Dreaming Ocean to facilitate the negotiation of all intergenerational trauma and abuse applying directly to the Kristang culture, language and identity primarily, and then on a wider level, gradually the whole planet and all of human civilisation. This thus brings us to the second meaning of Krismatra, where it indexes this particular variant approach to Kristang identity that in English is called Progenitor Kristang, Dreaming Kristang, or Kristang of the Deep. Taking on a progenitor Kristang identity involves accepting the existence of not just the intangible, but a structurable, rationalisable and analysable approach to the intangible that can be excavated, queried, revised and further organised in a fractal or evolving manner. It is an extremely creole approach to all of reality, and incorporates what is also called Lembransa Krismatra, or Kristang uncertainty thinking, where our approach to not just ourselves and our own identity, but our epistemological and ontological understanding of reality itself, is always under endless metacognitive examination, negotiation, problematisation and reconsolidation as a result of the fundamental and irresolvable differences in the belief systems of Christianity and Islam that still nonetheless serve as the twin main origin points for the Kristang sense of self. Lembransa Krismatra is therefore what allows our approach to our own reality to be more mutable and fluid compared to many other cultures, including how we know what we know about what it means to be Kristang.
Dreamfishing
Dreamfishing or sunyeskah is a particular form of Indigenous creolisation that in Kristang allows any speaker to add new words to the lexicon of Kristang in the moment by drawing from the Dreaming Ocean or the collective unconscious. Dreamfishing appears to have emerged organically out of Kristang performing culture, and is again a natural by-product of Kristang’s inherent status as a creole, with some notable practitioners of dreamfishing in modern times being Noel Felix, Martin Theseira, and the 9th, 12th and 13th Kabesa of the Kristang: Percival Frank Aroozoo, Valerie Scully and Kevin Martens Wong. Although outsiders often assume dreamfishing seemingly allows Kristang speakers to make unrestricted use of any material from any culture or domain to rejuvenate Kristang, it is actually a very structured and rule-based process that does not permit just any word to be regarded as Kristang, with speakers often rejecting proposed new words that do not fit particular previously unconscious principles, methods and morphophonological forms that do appear to be stringently adhered to. The assumptions that dreamfishing is founded on are that dreamfishing enables us to get at or reach the intangible structure within the Dreaming Ocean that in itself is also assumed to be defineable and describable as a common, universal entity with ontologically separate elements that exist universally for all speakers (and, more generally, all people); however, the ‘evidence’ that these elements leave behind emerges in terms of what informally Kristang speakers will call ‘vibes’ or energy.