“For me, Pulau Brani has always been more than geography—it’s memory held in salt air, in kampong kitchens, in the tides of lived experience. Once a home to navigators, tinworkers, and storytellers, the island now lives on in fragments: a faded photo, a family recipe, a name remembered. Stories rolling off my grandmother’s tongue…

The Pulau Brani Project began as a quiet offering to my grandmother, Khadijah Omar. A way to hold on to her stories before they slipped through. But like all living things, it grew—organically, unexpectedly—into a wider vessel. A cultural platform, still grassroots at heart, now carried by a growing community bound by memory, place, and the instinct to preserve what matters.

Today, our platform archives the island’s past, activates it in the present, and invites the public to imagine Brani’s future—not as a spectacle of development, but as a shared space of heritage, dialogue, and regeneration.

This is not nostalgia. It’s a form of resistance. A way of saying: the island was never empty. The stories were—and are—always here.”

Amira Karim,

Founder of The Pulau Brani Project