A Double Gestation!

 Lasma br. Sitanggang, Ny. Damanik, Mak Sandi, has been busy with a great transition in her life. She has married and now she has two children. It has been a busy time for her and so she needed to place the matter of weaving on the back burner while she turned her attention to her role in her culture. Her son Sandi was born within a year after her marriage, so the changes that she went through were significant. 

About a year ago I learned that she was pregnant with a second son. And shortly afterwards, out of the blue, she sent me video clips of herself weaving a bulang. I just about fell off my chair! I hadn’t known that she had once again turned her focus to weaving! Being a perfectionist, she had been shy to divulge the news.

 

So she was having a double gestation! She was very anxious to get the cloth done first because she knew that after the birth there would be little time for weaving. It was slow going because her belly was swelling and because she was doing it entirely herself, although with her Mother’s expert guidance. “It is about counting and counting and counting,” she told me laughing. She had known that the bulang was complex numerically, but hadn’t realized quite the full extent of how extremely and meticulously arithmetic it was. “If you don’t get the count during warping right,” she said, “nothing after that works properly.” Each stage of weaving determines the success of the next stage, because each part of the cloth builds on the previous part. She is like her mother in being very careful and attentive to detail. I believe it shows in the cloth. I remember her father telling me that not everybody can weave a bulang. You have to have focus and precision and determination and patience. 

 

After the birth of her second son, I didn’t know whether to dare to ask her whether she had finished her bulang, but finally I did so with great trepidation. I knew that it would be hard on her if she hadn’t met her goal, and also how difficult it would be at a later stage for her to pick up where she had left off. To my surprise, pleasure and great relief, she didn’t hesitate for a moment and immediately sent me this video of her finished oeuvre. I was so proud of her the tears rolled down my cheeks.

 

Mak Sandi is critical of her work. I see skill and focus, while she sees every tiny error. Nevertheless, she is also ambitious. She wants to weave another and make it even better. What a steadfast and determined young woman. Congratulations, Mak Sandi. This is a major accomplishment. I think about how proud her late father would have been. He passed away during the gestation period and didn’t get to see either finished product. He had been the one to encourage his wife and his daughters to weave so that they would be proud keepers of their culture. 

Great Joy at the Simalungun Weaving Centre

Enter Sandra Sardjono. When she finished her PhD in 2017, she was quickly engaged by the China National Silk Museum to help with the preparations for their exhibition entitled,  'A World of Looms: Weaving Technology and Textile Arts in China and Beyond'. When she requested a Simalungun loom for the exhibition I said 'yes' on principle, little imagining the enormity of that to which I had committed myself. 

There is a long and convoluted story to be told here.  Suffice it to say that the Simalungun Weaving Centre filled the museum request. It included the loom made by Pak Sandi, Lasma's husband, and a half-woven bulang textile made by Ompu Elza, Lasma's mother, in addition to a completed bulang for visitor enjoyment.  We sent everything off, on time, to China where it passed inspection and was mounted in the exhibition. To my endless additional delight, the museum used a photograph of Ompu Elza's textile to grace the invitation to the event. 

Sandra sent me the images from China. By this time I was back in The Netherlands and I forwarded them to the Weaving Centre beside Lake Toba. 

Enter Agustina Sitanggang, Ompu Elza's third daughter. She responded by telling me that Ompu Elza had been so touched that the tears rolled down her cheeks. Agus had to wipe away her own tears as she wrote, and so did I when I received her words. The whole family was moved and so proud of Ompu Elza. Everyone was moved to tears. Ompu Elza is a dedicated, hard-working, modest and undemanding person with low expectations of life, who has dedicated her adult years to her   family. "This is the first time that I
have felt valued for my work," she said. She savoured a feeling that she had never known before and from which she will be able to derive sustenance for the rest of her life.

Enter Pamela Cross, my friend and loyal supporter of the Weaving Centre. She too was hugely moved. "Will it be possible to use the museum images on a t-shirt so that her accomplishment can be celebrated every time it is seen and worn?" 

Enter Mas MJA Nashir, photographer/poet/filmer/writer, dedicated to the cultures of his beautiful archipelago. He designed and printed the t-shirts in Pekalongan, with Pamela's support.  Tonight they will be sent off to North Sumatra.

Ompu Elza t-shirts on the assembly-line

I wish I could be there to see Ompu Elza's delight when she sees them and pulls one on.

It takes a community to nurture a weaving tradition, a dedicated, loving, inventive, loyal community.

A Day to Gush

Today is a red-letter day. Better said, it is a day to gush. Today our well is being drilled. The first figurative spade is being thrust into the soil. Lasma and I are beginning on the next phase of our common dream to build a Weaving Centre. 

In a blog earlier this year I wrote:

'Saving Lasma Sitanggang' means saving the whole village. It means struggling to

Lasma 1 August 2016 With a water
bottle hanging from her neck.

answer the challenge of how to make a good life despite all the forces that slap down the little farmer in Indonesia. This past year alone, four people in her village committed suicide for reasons related to poverty. Lasma wants to honour her cultural heritage as well as find her way through this world that champions only the value of money. For me, traveling with Lasma Sitanggang means being willing to share the burden on her shoulders, to help construct strategies that fit with her local circumstances, to construct ways that will give everyone a chance to win and climb out of the hole together. What we undertake, the interventions we construct, must meet the criterion of serving the well being of the whole village.

I alluded to it, but I did not write about our plan directly. I am loath to write about plans until they are a sure thing, until the path is cleared. I don't want to write about pipe dreams and invite all the consequences. Today, however, our well is being drilled. We are taking the first step in building and there are real pipes. It is time to dare to share our dream and our plan. And celebrate.

Lasma and I are trying to build a Weaving Centre. Why? How? Where? When? With whom? All of these questions have been besieging us for the past couple of years and answers have gradually begun to emerge.

Let me start with the 'why'. Lasma and I need to do something that in the process of supporting her would help her make positive change in her village. Our common interest lies in the area of weaving. Lasma's village is a weaving village -- well, an ex-weaving village. The women have stopped weaving because the selling price no longer supports their work. So why make a weaving centre when people have stopped weaving and the market is so weak? Answer: because Lasma and I hope that when and if this world ever wakes up to realize that it is squandering its most valued assets, including craft traditions that have been constructed century upon century by human ingenuity, there may at least be a centre in the Simalungun Batak area of North Sumatra where women are continuing their bounteous and beautiful weaving heritage. Surely, if we work cleverly and carefully, we can find and construct a market that will allow it to survive. There are no guarantees in life, but this goal seems, to both Lasma and me, worth devoting ourselves to. Not necessarily from an economic point of view (although we need the Centre to at least survive on that front) but from a moral, aesthetic, and cultural point of view. If we are successful, not just the whole village, but all of Simalungun, all of Batak will gain. Why are we building this centre? Because the time is right and it is a good thing to do.

On to the 'how'. How to build a centre from which the entire village can gain, when the weaving craft is already on the verge of extinction and the women have turned their backs to it? There are two answers to this question; one answer relates to craft and culture and the other to physical environment, but it all boils down to one issue: well-being.

The women in Lasma's village have never found an alternative to weaving. Granted, they earn more from their farming activities and thus they invest in that, but they still miss the supplement and diversity that weaving gave them. Moreover, they have lost that special niche that their culture reserved for weaving women, a place of women's excellence and pride. The women have become mere impoverished labourers. Lasma and I believe -- and on occasion the women in the village have corroborated this -- they will be enlivened by the pride they can once again achieve from an opportunity to be excellent in their craft. The weaving centre will allow them to come together and work together. They also miss a place where they can share ideas and experiment together. ... Oh dear, I seem to have lapsed back into the 'why'. Clearly, the centre must not be just Lasma's Weaving Centre, rather a Centre where all the weavers in the village feel at home and can benefit. We want women to feel pride, empowerment, comfort, able to participate. And we would like young women, including orphans, to be able to come and stay, work in the garden and at their looms, find pleasure in the day-to-day. That is how and what and where we want the centre to be and with whom we want to build it.

Building a centre that aids the village from the point of view of physical environment is an issue that plays a greater role in my mind than in Lasma's, although she is really excited by organic farming and herself farms organically. Nevertheless, I don't think she has ever seen a park and experienced land that is maintained purely for pleasure and not directly for profit. I would like to rectify this gap in her experience. I live in The Netherlands where parks are plentiful, and brilliantly conceived and looked after, and I would like someday to show some to her. Together with her I would like to build a green, lush oasis where the fruit and nuts hang for the picking from the trees, where the people can relax in a beautiful environment and eat an organically farmed meal. Green does wonders for the spirit and the health. Even if our weaving centre fails, let us at least have constructed a village park where the children can eat their fill of organic fruit. And where the people can be introduced to a healthy vision for the future. We want to show how textile production belongs to a better future and not just the past.

This is why, in the end, I purchased land in Lasma's village for our weaving centre. It is not on a major tourist route. Really, there is not a whole lot going for this village and some have argued that I have therefore not selected a good location for the centre. I, however, have made a point of locating it in a village that has nothing going for it. Such villages are always left out. I am using the same rationale for investing in this village as I used for giving my luxurious edition of Legacy in Cloth to poor rural weavers: they are the ones who will benefit from it the most. And that is what it is all about. The Centre will be where the weavers are.

There, this is enough for one blog. There is too much to tell all at once. Suffice it to say that our well is being drilled, down, down through soil and rock to underground streams. It is giving me the opportunity to gush. And I will gush more on this topic in a future blog. On and on.

Ma Tika: Portrait of a Weaver

Ma Tika at work in her loom

During my last journey to Indonesia, I met Lasma's weaving teacher, Ma Tika, Nesli br. Saragih, a Simalungun woman. I invited her to travel with us as we were at the beginning of a journey that would take us to various weavers in different Batak regions. She had other plans, but she cancelled them and seized this new opportunity with both hands. She was quiet and modest in the extreme (a bit intimidated), but as the days went by, I got to know her a little bit. I loved watching her single-mindedly take every single opportunity that presented itself to expand her weaving knowledge and skill. For her the journey must have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance.  For me it was an affirmation of how important it is for weavers to have a network that inspires and teaches them. If that network was once available in a weaver's village, now a weaver has to travel far and wide to construct it. Such is the consequence of the decline and disappearance of the weaving tradition.

Ma Tika (the mother of Tika; in the Batak area you reference people by the names of their children or grandchildren if they have them) started to weave at the turn of this 21st century. She is now 48 years old, so she must have been around 30 years old when she began. She had watched her mother weave the bulang as a child and did the things that children do, like winding the weft. Her weaving spirit expressed itself very early; she longed to work in the loom rather than in the fields and so at one point she insisted on learning to weave. For various reasons her mother refused to teach her; undaunted, she taught herself. This is remarkable. She had watched her mother weave, and she had an example of the bulang in her possession. She simply went to work by trial and error learning how to replicate the textile in her possession. She explained that this important textile  -- afterall, it is worn on the head !!! -- cannot have flaws. As she struggled to learn she unravelled her work every time she made an error. Wove and un-wove, wove and un-wove. This is the most difficult textile in the Siimalungun repertory! When I met her, she showed me her work and asked me to critique it. I didn't understand the significance of her request at first as I thought: you are a weaver, you know better than I how to weave!

Weaving supplementary weft is all about counting the warp yarns to
make the correct shed

Gradually, however,  I came to understand what she wanted from me. She needs colleagues and also technical insights into how to produce a high quality textile. She learned to weave when the marketplace was already enforcing shortcuts on the weavers, demanding that they weave more loosely to use less yarn and more quickly in order to have another cloth ready for the next market. She never learned in the 'traditional way' that emphasized quality. When she was learning, meeting the parameters of the market meant being able to eat, so she learned how to make a textile fast, using shortcuts. Since those days, the bottom has fallen out of even that very poor market  because mechanized producers have started to make a version of the bulang -- certainly a version of lower quality, but also a cheaper version that the market has welcomed. Almost every backstrap weaver was forced by these new circumstances to stop weaving the bulang. Ma Tika has been able to continue because she obtains orders from the Church where there are some people willing to pay the higher price. Ma Tika does not know how much one of her textiles fetches; she only knows how much she is paid for her labour. One cannot claim that it is a living wage, far from it; the amount she earns is painfully, heart-stoppingly low. But Ma Tika continues to weave. She is a weaver at heart, not a gardener. She loves the bulang.

She knew from Lasma that I had an old bulang textile in my possession and she begged me to bring it to show to her. I did this and her reaction was remarkable. She pulled out a needle-like instrument and immediately started counting the yarns in the supplementary weft section.  Her own textiles are loosely woven; she wanted to know how to make a more densely woven cloth and the impact that would have on the patterning. By examining the old cloth, she obtained her answer.

Ma Tika, Lasma and I examining the old bulang.
In my hand is a blown-up, laminated image of a pattern in one of
Pamela's bulang textiles
(Photo by MJA Nashir)

From my friend, Pamela Cross, a bulang aficionado, I had received detailed photographs of several bulang end fields (where the supplementary weft is located). I printed them larger than life, laminated them, and gave them to Ma Tika to refer to. She latched onto them with the same alacrity and started to count yarns. Her findings yielded all kind of insights about different time periods, availability of various kinds of yarn, the ways of working of weavers in the past and variety in patterning.

I was able to contribute from my knowledge of museum collections and Batak textile history. I pointed out that machine-like perfection is not a characteristic of the textiles made long ago, that there is in fact charm in the hand of the weaver and in the imperfections. I told her that each region once had its own specialty expressed through technique, design and colour, that different yarns have come onto the market at different times, that the tradition is dynamic and has never been stable, that there is also room for her to experiment and build on the past. All of these were new insights to her. She works in a time when a single template is replicated and the standard of weaving has become extremely narrow. Initially Ma Tika was inclined to judge the textile that was closest to what is made today as the "correct" textile. Exploring the images and discussing them gave birth to a new goal for her. Now she wants to replicate the one that is most 'foreign' to her and thus represents the greatest challenge. In fact, she is up for replicating them all. I reminded her that she also has a creative spirit that could express itself in the cloth.

 

Comparing the old with the new in Ma Tika's home
(Photo by MJA Nashir)

As our journey proceeded, we met Batak women who plant cotton. Ma Tika collected cotton seeds. We met a natural dyer. There, Ma Tika collected the seeds for the indigo plant and the bark of the roots of the morinda citrifolia that yields red dye. She also collected the recipes for the dyes. In addition, we ordered enough yarn to be dyed with these colours that she will be able to make many bulang with natural dyes even while she is learning the dye technique herself.

We met twiners, the specialists who make the patterned edgings in Batak textiles. Ma Tika watched their work and learned the technique but decided that she would rather stay with her own regional specialty for her bulang textile.

She saw weft holders used in the Toba Batak region and brought one home to Simalungun, only to discover that it did not function properly for her because her weft is wound differently. She learned that her region was not 'lacking' in a weft holder, but that even the way weft is wound is a regional specialty in its own right.

Ma Tika has been using a loom passed down from her mother. She claims that it is too small for her. During the journey she met a weaver who was willing to pass on parts of the loom that she needed to be able to make a wider textile.

And our sponsor, Bank Indonesia, agreed to purchase a new pair of glasses for her so that she can see better as she weaves.

All in all, our journey may well have supplied Ma Tika with all of her basic needs to be able to revive a bulang textile of former glory: sumptuous, beautiful, densely woven.

I love to work with self-motivated, enthusiastic weavers. In fact, I say over and over again that there is no point trying to work with a weaver who does not have these characteristics. Ma Tika's road to the future will not be an easy one. She will only be able to conduct her experiments in her 'free time' and she has little of that because she weaves for a living and earns so desperately little. She is a widow and still has dependent children. Moreover, she only has one loom and can't have two textiles on the go at one time. But she has will and determination. She learned to weave by herself, she loves the bulang tradition, and she loves a challenge. She is clever, strong and determined. She will give it her best shot -- and she will share her work with Lasma every step of the way. If a bulang revival happens in Simalungun, it will be due to her. May she remain healthy and spared from disasters!

Towards the end of our journey we visited the T.B. Silalahi museum in Balige. Ma Tika was disappointed with the Simalungun textiles she saw there on display. Now she has an additional goal: to make a textile that will one day be displayed in the museum and become a source of pride for all Simalungun visitors.

Go Ma Tika, go!

Weaving Reflects the Soul

Batak weavers know, at some fundamental level, that their craft is sophisticated -- despite the poor returns they get on their work and their low social position. They have an awareness of the intricacy and level of difficulty of their work.

I shudder when I recall the tall tales told to aspiring young weavers by those former Batak weavers who have been deeply disappointed by the reception of their work, things like "Don't learn to weave or you will go blind," and the well-meant advice, "Weaving will condemn you to poverty; it is best to not begin." Of course these are reflections of, and reactions to, the drop in prices and lack of appreciation that weavers have been experiencing.

Lasma's first bulang ready for the complex technique
called warp exchange

In Lasma's village the women had all stopped weaving and none was willing to teach her the craft. Slowly Lasma has been making a difference. Some can't stop themselves from giving a word or two of instruction as they pass by her window and see her at work at her loom. Lasma's enthusiasm is unflagging and appears to be infectious. She is convinced there is a future for these textiles -- especially now that weaving has become a rarity. Some are willing to take up the sword and shuttle again because they are convinced that there may be a market. Weaving may have stopped but suffering from poverty has not.

Lasma has reached that stage in her learning curve when she wants to seriously work on a textile for ritual purposes. She has selected the bulang, as consistent with the tradition in her village. I was touched deeply when she told me her neighbours' reactions. Their story has changed. They are acknowledging the nobility of the work once again and they are encouraging her in wise ways.

"Weaving is a highly complex craft," they confide to Lasma. "We can see and sense the spirit and characteristics of a weaver through her finished textile. Weaving is not just about practising complicated techniques, it is about learning patience."

Postscript

I am writing this blog in Thailand. For a brief two weeks I have joined a team in Bangkok that is studying the collection of batiks collected by King Rama V in 1871, 1896 and 1901 in Java. Some of the works are truly extraordinary but there is next to no information available about the makers; they have been left out of the annals of written history. They are present only in the cloths they decorated. This presence is reminding me of the words of Lasma's neighbours. I detect from these cloths that the makers were patient to an almost incredible degree. Applying the wax on those detailed, precise cloths can only have been an endless, meditative, spiritual exercise.

Everyday I emerge from the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles where I have undergone an intensive encounter with those batiks and I return to my hotel and an intensive encounter with the buzzing Khao San district of Bangkok, famous for its confection sales and entertainment scene. I reel from the dissonance between the two worlds. I wonder how Lasma will fare in her self-imposed challenge to enter the cognitive space of the master weaver.  We will talk about that when I see her in a few weeks. 

Saving Lasma Sitanggang

I have never seen the harrowing war film, 'Saving Private Ryan' but the title has always intrigued me. It points to the story, the complications, of following one's heart to do good for another.

When I met Lasma, she was in a state of desperation. The purchase of medicine for her chronically ill mother used up all of the family's resources and Lasma had not been able to qualify for a grant to go to university. The spectre of perpetuating the poverty into which she had been born stared her in the face. She would have to kiss goodbye to her youth. Her friends had gone off to school and she was left behind to work in the fields. With tears in her eyes she defiantly claimed that she had honest hands that could do an honest day's work, that she would follow in the footsteps of her ancestors and there was no reason to feel shame.

Thoughtful Lasma

I couldn't bear to see the unhappiness in this young woman who was so articulate and clearly so intelligent and deserving. I took her under my wing. It was a gradual process that took a few years, but now she is firmly lodged there, under my wing. I have committed to walk with her on her path and to confront the devil of poverty with her. Lasma and I are on a journey together. Where it will end we do not know. Where we want it to go is clear to both of us.

Lasma is a kind-hearted soul. She is bright and capable. Perhaps her only fault is her boundless sense of her own capacities. But this is also her greatest strength. It is the source of her positive 'can do' approach to everything. She shoulders every challenge thoughtfully and enthusiastically with both feet solidly on the ground. I know that this kind of drive in an individual can change the course of history. I don't try to correct her. I try to facilitate her dreams. I approve of them. Time will tell how far she will be able to run with the ball.

Thoughtful and critical

I try to put myself in her shoes. What would/could I do in her position? I dialogue with her, challenge her, think with her. What kind of course is strategic and effective? What is wise? I ask myself and her, what can I do as an outsider to clear away obstacles and facilitate her marching to her own drum? What are the needed interventions? I want to save her from that breaking point that I have seen far too often in the lives of young poverty-stricken Batak adults: that moment when they concede to poverty, when they know that they are defeated and are fated to never get ahead or achieve their dreams or realize their capacities and ambitions. This is the spectre that terrifies Lasma. It is what brought us together and continues to bind us: this need to present some opposition to the needless, senseless waste of talent and life!

The question that Lasma and I share is huge. Where is the path that will give her a good, fulfilling existence? What does it mean to have a 'good' life? What does it mean to be fulfilled? These are existential, political, social, historical, cultural and environmental questions; the soul-searching is not just psychological and individual. The answer does not lie in tearing her away from her family and village and turning her into a relatively wealthy Westerner. The answer is so much more complex. It lies in negotiating a path that is appropriate for her within her culture, situation and environment. It would break her heart to become alienated from her home in any sense. She would not be able to live with herself. She cannot rest until her parents are secure in their old age and her neighbours are no longer suffering. She is not the kind of person who coûte que coûte will run off to seek gain for herself leaving the rest to face hardship. The path to her goal is not lying there waiting to be trod; it will have to be constructed while walking on it.

'Saving Lasma Sitanggang' means saving the whole village. It means struggling to answer the challenge of how to make a good life despite all the forces that slap down the little farmer in Indonesia. This past year alone, four people in her village have committed suicide for reasons related to poverty. Lasma wants to honour her cultural heritage as well as find her way through this world that champions only the value of money. For me, traveling with Lasma Sitanggang means being willing to share the burden on her shoulders, to help construct strategies that fit with her local circumstances, to construct ways that will give everyone a chance to win and climb out of the hole together. What we undertake, the interventions that we construct, must meet the criterion of serving the well being of the whole village.

This must be possible because the alternative is not bearable to consider.

Lasma is not the same as all the other people in her situation because I am there beside her making sure that she does not drown. That lightens her load a little, but it does not render her challenge easier. And I also must not flag.

Life in the city is not what Lasma wants

We ask ourselves, "What is well being?" Lasma is not interested in an urban existence. She disparages of the dirt and buzz of a city. She loves to work with the soil and enjoys the beauty of a farmer's field, the breathability of the air in the countryside. That makes it easier for us to work on a program of well being that takes into account the health of the air, soil and water. We do not seek monetary wealth. We seek cultural, physical, environmental and community health. We focus consciously on the lasting, important values and the needs of this poor, beleaguered earth. Money is but one of the resources that we can deploy to make this happen. I often refer to the beauty of a tree and suggest that we should be like a tree. It gives abundantly. It gives and gives. It makes the soil richer and the air cleaner; it provides a home for every kind of creature; blossoms infinitely and so much more plentifully than what is needed just to reproduce itself. It offers shade and anchors the water and soil. It does not ask what it will get in return; it does not count beans and has no ledgers. It is simply generous. Even when it is old and falls over it continues to provide a home for species and the opportunity for new life. "Lasma, our job in this world is to be like trees. How can we do that?"

In future blogs I will write about our choices and selections. Saving Lasma Sitanggang is about a different kind of war, the everyday kind that we really have no choice but to fight.