By Yvonne Tuah
In a house on stilts tucked into a corner of Kampung Sungai Ud, Dalat, by the banks of the Oya river, 78-year-old Ya bin Galau turns a piece of rumbia branch over in his hands. He chews on a betel nut and mutters under his breath, as if trading confidences with someone only he can see. His hands, weathered by decades of the same motion, settle on a decision. He reaches for his tools, for his trusted “kereban”, a carving knife as familiar to him as his own hands.
And he begins to carve.
Pak Ya, as he is fondly called, is one of the few known “dakan” makers, as the Mukah dialect calls it, or “belum” (pronounced bilum) in Dalat, and a traditional Melanau healer. As he carves, he pauses to listen, then continues, shaving away sliver after sliver of the stalk until a figure emerges: an effigy of a spirit, unmistakably anthropomorphic in its features.
The piece he carves is only a replica, a demonstrative piece, one he describes as ‘not perfect’ and not intended for spiritual use. Yet he handles it with the same care, ensuring the effigy reflects the spirit as he understands and sees it.
For Pak Ya, this is not simply a calling. It is an inheritance, a responsibility he has carried for seven decades as one of the last known practitioners of a craft passed down through his family. Since he was six, he was drawn into a world his grandfather and father had shaped before him, both healers renowned in their day, consulted in an era when hospitals and medical centres were scarce across Sarawak and people like them stood, quite literally, between pain and relief.
But the path there has not been gentle for a young Pak Ya. With a stern father and strict grandfather as his only teachers, his childhood unfurled beneath the weight of a legacy: long days bent over carving tools, longer nights committing spirits and incantations to memory, and years spent absorbing the animistic customs and practices of the old Melanau while perfecting the art of shaping a belum/dakan.
“I started learning how to make ‘belum’ when I was just six years old, from my grandfather and father.
“What my father has carved, I would follow and I would always refer to him when I carve a ‘belum’. He would tell me how the limbs are positioned,” he said. His voice stayed soft throughout, though every so often a memory catches him and his face brightens with unguarded delight. At moments, he seemed to drift somewhere else entirely, still speaking, but to anyone willing to listen.
He recalled days when, as a boy, he first learned to carve the belum/dakan under his father’s watchful eye at the farm. Whenever he completed a piece, he would often turn to his father for guidance and approval.
“My grandfather also used to draw completed ‘belum’ with its name and different body postures and I would learn from that,” he said. Those drawings and instructions became a treasured reference he returned to often, together with the words and guidance passed down by his father.
It took years before Pak Ya fully understood the intricate world of traditional healing. He began practising on his own in his 20s. Today he can name and carve over 244 types of belum/dakan, exceeding most of his recorded predecessors.
An egg-shaped universe and the spirits
To understand the traditional Melanau art of healing, we must first take a look at the world the Melanau Likow (old Melanau or pagan Melanau) believed in. Before the arrival of religions, like many other indigenous communities in Borneo, the Melanau practised animistic belief systems centred on unseen supernatural forces, spirits, ancestors and the natural environment. The world, in this older understanding, was a nebulous cosmos, where the boundaries between the seen and unseen were blurred, and the natural and spiritual existed alongside one another.
According to Melanau traditional beliefs, the universe was egg-shaped and consisted of three realms; “langit” (celestial), “tana” (earth), and “iyang” (water). Life on the earthly “tana” plane, where humans, flora, and fauna coexist, fell under the watch of the “Ipok”, guardians of sorts believed to watch over or inhabit all that lives and exists in the world, and with it are other unseen forces such as the “tow”, “jin”, and “duhig”, spirits that are sometimes malevolent or helpful, according to the circumstances.
Each realm demands a fragile equilibrium. To upset it, the old belief holds, is to invite catastrophe or sickness upon oneself. Healing, in this cosmology, becomes an act of negotiation with these forces; guiding them, or returning them, to their rightful place.
The healing
Traditional Melanau healing once offered the sick several options, depending on the nature and severity of the illness. In “bebayoh” ritual, for example, an “abayoh” (shaman), would ‘travel’ to the other realm to divine the source of an illness. That diagnosis might lead to “bejijik”, a cleansing with plants, or “baguda”, which pairs candlelight with recited incantations. At the more extensive end was “payun”, considered a last resort, involving seven consecutive nights of healing while the patient sat or laid on an “Ayun Asok Naga”, a large swing carved in the shape of a dragon. If the patient had not recovered within a month, it was believed that the illness was beyond cure.
Nearly all of these rites have vanished; no one in Mukah or the surrounding Melanau settlements is known to still perform them. Only the making of dakan/belum for healing endures, and even that survives through less than a handful of practitioners.
For Pak Ya, after decades of practicing the craft, sensing which spirit ails a patient has become as instinctive as talking. For traditional healers like him, the ability to carve a particular belum/dakan, and to determine which sickness it is meant to address, may be revealed through dreams or knowledge passed down through generations. It could also be divined through “pesiluk” or “pesagem”, a candlelit reading ritual performed by an abayoh to identify both the sickness and its cure.
A belum or dakan is carved from the branch or trunk of a rumbia tree or known as “balau”, though the sago tree’s sheath (“betuk balau”), nipah branch and soft wood may also be used, depending on the severity of the illness. The healer begins the carving at the feet and works upward, leaving the eyes for last, signifying that the belum or dakan has ‘awakened’.
Each carving mirrors the ailment it is meant to cure. The “Bu’aw Petireng”, for example, has its arms carved across the stomach, representing stomach pain; or the “Liseu Selayang”, an air spiral or tornado worked into the effigy, denotes headache or a sensation of the head spinning. A single carving takes roughly half an hour to complete.
Of the 244 types of belum/dakan Pak Ya knows, the carving itself spans a wider taxonomy of spirits that may be called into the carving. A jin, for instance, splits into five categories: “Jin Sahaja”, “Jin Jertabei”, “Jin Sepelangi”, “Jin Arieh”, and “Jin Putih Anak”. Bu’aw belum/dakan could come up to four which includes the “Bu’aw Tou”, “Bu’aw Pengelamou”, “Bu’aw Sahaja”, and “Bu’aw Guun”. Duhig spirits, the largest category, run into the hundreds. Deciding which spirit to summon takes Pak Ya only a glance at the patient, the result of a lifetime’s practice.
Once the carving is completed, Pak Ya sprays or “menyabih/tabih” betel nut juice onto the belum/dakan while saying the name of the sick person. He then recites an incantation that goes something like:
“Sibat kelat kaaw Belum (name of the belum/dakan) kaaw menak a pedih, padak diak lalu lah dana lah, mula kak menyukit kak menyuit a pedih ih ubat noe.” (Note: This is in Dalat dialect and incantation varies according to the healer and sickness)
Which roughly translates to asking the spirit in the belum/dakan to remove the sickness and the pain from the sick.
Sometimes the carving is bathed, and that water used to wash the patient’s body. For Pak Ya, he would place the patient’s clothes on the belum/dakan. Afterward comes the “pantang”, taboos the patient must observe for a certain period of time. The belum/dakan itself must be discarded somewhere remote, far from casual passersby, as touching it, superstition warns, condemns the toucher to the same illness, tripled in severity. Most often, it is set adrift in the river.
A call to duty
Seven decades on, Pak Ya still continues to offer his services. His eyesight has dimmed and his hearing has thinned, yet he continues to receive those who find no other remedy in this world.
When it comes to a successor, however, he said there is no one waiting in the wings. Most Melanau today, he explained, are people of faith, which casts this form of healing as incompatible with their religion. His own children and grandchildren feel no pull toward it either.
“My children and grandchildren are not interested in this, but I understand,” he said, a trace of melancholy in his voice. He also explained that he has tried teaching others, but the sheer intricacy of the practice has defeated every student before they could master it as he has.
He sits now among his tools, some new and modern like a power sander, and others like his trusted kereban worn smooth with age, and a scatter of belum replicas from carvings past, keeping him company like familiar faces. He no longer receives patients after dark, though he remembers years when people knocked at all hours, even at the first grey edge of dawn. And still, he answered.
Resigned to the likelihood that this tradition may end with him, he now also carves replicas for display, some of which, according to Pak Ya, have made their way into the hands of the Sarawak Museum Department, so a culture that once governed Melanau life is not entirely forgotten.
A continuation in an echo
For many Melanau today, talks of the dakan/belum may evoke a sense of dread and unease, associated with fear and the superstitions surrounding the carvings. Yet beyond that apprehension lies a window, a glimpse of what life was for the Melanau people.
In Mukah, a younger generation is doing the deliberate work of capturing memory, recording oral histories, safeguarding physical relics, and relearning the traditions of the Melanau people before they fade with time.
It is not preservation for its own sake but an act of self-recognition: to know what shaped the Melanau community of today, you have to hold onto what came before.
For 46-year-old traditional Melanau arts and craft enthusiast, Benedict Peter of Kampung Teh, Mukah, capturing the art of dakan/belum is akin to preserving both an old practice and a part of the Melanau identity. Known locally as Encik Beliau, he sees the practice as more than superstition, but a window into the past.
As a person of faith, rather than completely disassociating himself from the old animistic belief system, he has chosen to approach it with respect, replicating the practice of making dakan/belum without reproducing its spiritual essence.
He first points to a common misconception surrounding dakan/ belum: that the carvings bring adversity, when in fact, within the traditional Melanau belief, they were made to heal and protect.
“For me, this is an old belief – that’s true – but we need to learn, understand, and realise that it is precisely these kinds of things that teach us why people in the past believed in them. Back then, things weren’t like they are today. From a psychological perspective, shamans (abayoh) or traditional healers would perform a ritual as if to transfer the illness to something or somewhere else (like to a dakan/belum), and tell it to go far away.
“Psychologically, the person would then believe that the illness had been discarded. As a result, their will to live and maintain their health would return. That is from my understanding, the belief of old,” he said.
Since his teenage years, Melanau traditional arts have anchored his interests, shaped by teachers across Mukah and by figures from an earlier generation, among them the late Petran Lebai, a renowned abayoh from Kampung Tellian, Mukah. His interest in traditional Melanau arts and crafts have also piqued his curiosity of the rituals that surround them, of why they exist, why belief clings to them, and where does this belief originate.
He makes traditional Melanau arts and crafts, whether faithful replicas or works inspired by originals once used in traditional ceremonies. His aim is simple: to inspire people to ask, to inquire, to send people looking for answers the way he still does, and in doing so, learn something himself from the generations before him.
History, he believes, can sometimes be easier to imagine when it can be seen and touched. Through these objects, stories passed down through generations acquire a physical form, allowing people to picture an earlier Mukah and the lives lived there.
Besides making replicas of dakan/belum, he also crafts other pieces of traditional Melanau art such as the Ipok mask for Kaul, and others.
His work can be seen across Mukah and during Melanau festivals such as the annual Kaul Festival where once, he carved an outsized replica of a dakan/belum meant to guard the doors of houses.
For him, each piece serves a profound purpose: to keep the old Melanau stories alive.
For the next generation
Artifacts rest behind glass at institutions like the Borneo Cultures Museum, while custodians like Encik Beliau keep the tradition visible through replicas paraded at festivals such as Kaul. Others choose to gather the originals themselves.
At Sapan Puloh, a modest mini museum in Kampung Tellian, Mukah, curator Tommy Black has built an enviable collection of dakan/belum replicas displayed prominently near the entrance. Amid his broader trove of Melanau relics sits a life-sized replica of the Ayun Asok Naga, the seven-tiered “Dakan Sebulang Langit”, and photographs, some the only surviving record of healing ceremonies once performed in Mukah.
“Today, these are not really practiced anymore because most Melanau have religion. But this reminds us, lets us know what this was for,” he explained.
Over the years, Tommy has welcomed visitors from near and far, including people from across the globe, drawn by artifacts that were once an ordinary part of life for the Melanau of old. Having learned these traditions from earlier generations, he is able to explain what a dakan/belum is and what it meant to the old Melanau people.
Together, these artifacts offer a glimpse into an earlier Melanau worldview, when the natural world and the unseen were not neatly separated. What all of this offers, in the end, is a glimpse of a world the old Melanau built before outside influence reshaped their beliefs, and a reminder that this is, in some measure, how they survived it.
And perhaps that is how a culture survives: not by keeping the past untouched, but by remembering enough of it to tell the next generation where it came from. – DayakDaily
