Kevin Martens Wong is the Merlionsman and Dreamtiger of the Republic of Singapore, the gay, non-binary, atheist, polyamorous and neurodivergent (auDHD) Kabesa or leader of the Kristang people of Southeast Asia, and the Makaravedra Hierosa or Dragon Reborn of the Holocene in the Roda Mundansa or Kristang cosmological cycle. He is a 2023 Next Generation Foresight Practitioner (NGFP) Fellow for indigenous futures methods via the Kristang practice of dreamfishing, the developer of the Osura Pesuasang, the Kristang theory of human psychoemotional development, and also publishes new plays, poetry and prose in English and Kristang at Tigri sa Chang.
My entry is written from the fourth-person point-of-view in Kristang, a point-of-view which necessarily expresses the voice of an eleidi or personified collective of sentient beings that I belong to. In this case, I chose to write from the point of view of the Kristang collective itself, and its own appreciation of the events unfolding in relation to it and its revitalisation and regeneration that have been occurring since February 2016 spearheaded by myself, the Kabesa or Leader of the Kristang community worldwide.
Kristang is both my creole and indigenous ethnicity and my critically endangered mother tongue, historically conflated with Christianity and at times even erased by the governments and institutions our people found ourselves ruled by since our inception in 1511 after the Portuguese conquest of Melaka led to our genesis as the mixed descendants of colonisation. The entry thus approaches Regeneration from a range of multifaceted and metacognitive levels, inviting the reader to consider what Regeneration means in the context of past, present, future and timeless approaches to revitalisation and reinvigoration, and from the perspective of both myself as an individual and from the community at large.
