Harna's Heritage

The consequences of the first Pulang Kampung journey, of distributing copies of Legacy in Cloth among Batak weavers and their families, have evidently not yet achieved completion. The pebbles that I threw into the water then are still creating rings.

In 2010 I gave a copy of Legacy in cloth to Ompu Sihol’s only child (a son) and his youngest son (i.e. Ompu Sihol’s grandson), Juni. Ompu Sihol was my weaving teacher in 1980, the one who so thoroughly taught me the basics of weaving that this knowledge served as the foundation for all my subsequent understandings and documentation of Batak weaving techniques. I described my emotional Pulang Kampung moment, back in her village in Harian Boho, in one of my blogs. It was confrontational to be back in the village where I began my anthropological career as a 24-year old. The lessons with Ompu Sihol had been challenging. She was strict and I was unsure of myself, suffering greatly from culture shock. We managed to muddle our way through our respective cultural misunderstandings and I gradually discovered her good and kind heart and she forgave my confusions. On the last day when we ate our ritual lunch together, we had chicken and I was given the wings (I had given up my vegetarian lifestyle in the village). Ompu Sihol flapped her arms and said that the wings were to help me weave back in my village. I hope that I have done those wings proud even though I have never really become a weaver. I recorded her singing a weaving song on that day. Little did I know that thirty years later it would become the theme song of my film, Rangsa ni Tonun. Her daughter-in-law repeatedly urged me to “not forget the family” and I gave her my promise. “How would I be able to forget you?” I asked in return. When in 2010, thirty-five years later, I gave a copy of Legacy in cloth to Ompu Sihol’s son, his wife was already deceased, he was blind and could not witness the book, and his granddaughter (son Juni’s daughter) had never seen a Batak weaving loom. Times had changed drastically. Ompu Sihol's son was the only one living in the dying village. There were no more weavers in the valley. When I handed over my book, I offered it to three generations that descended from Ompu Sihol, three generations that represented the end of weaving in Harian Boho.  I could not help but wonder how the book would be received, not just then, but on into the future. What would it mean to them? At least they would have a record of an ancestor who was a master weaver and she could be a source of pride for them.

After a few years, a young woman named Alph Kianna Harna contacted me through Facebook saying that she was one of Ompu Sihol’s great grandchildren. She had seen the copy of Legacy in cloth that I had left behind in Ompu Sihol's village and she had googled my name. Her father was one of the little boys living in the village when I was there, one of the sons of that daughter-in-law and that now blind man. I met Alph Kianna Harna briefly when she came to Taman Mini at the launch of Pulang Kampung III and we hugged each other. She felt like family. I liked her equanimity and presence. She said that she worked for Singapore Airlines. We stayed in touch.

Harna had her first meal in The Netherlands with us.

Wonder of wonders, when I last returned from Indonesia (29 September 2015), Harna landed at Schiphol during her first visit overseas. Our planes landed at the same time and we fetched our luggage in the same hall. We met as we were both exiting that hall and I brought her home with me to give her a cozy bed where she could get over her jetlag. Our plan was that I would show her Ompu Sihol’s weaving equipment and textiles.

Harna looked at the pictures of her great
grandmother in my book.

I showed Harna her great grandmother's loom.

Harna said that she didn't know about
Batak weaving.

And we did that. We thumbed through the many pages in Legacy where her great grandmother is depicted. I shared my stories with her and she shared her reactions -- also to my collection of pictures taken during those fateful months. 

It turned out that the grandson who had been given the task of
looking after the chicken for our lunch grew up to be Harna's father.

It felt so odd to be in the position of sharing information about Batak weaving to a descendant of my erstwhile weaving teacher. It must have felt just as odd for Harna. I experienced the need to point out that I had purchased the weaving equipment, that I had exhibited it on several occasions, that I hoped that I had sufficiently honoured it through my work, that I hoped that one day it would all go back to the Batak area. I was gratified when Harna said that she was pleased that I had looked after it all so well. I had been a good custodian but I felt also strangely guilty. It is Harna’s heritage! Our bond is therefore very strong. I care about her as though she is my own family because she is inextricably bound up with the most important heritage of my career. How remarkable to share that heritage with her in The Netherlands! I remembered carrying out the wooden implements on my head as I walked from Ompu Sihol’s village to the edge of the lake, then packing it in crates to be shipped out to The Netherlands: my “anthropological study collection”.

My “stuff” is not unlike collections in anthropological museums: material that can rekindle culture in the places where it was acquired. But it needs to be shared with the descendants. What will Harna’s path look like? I hope I attain a great age so that I can keep track of her and her future children.

And I hope that Ompu Sihol and her daughter-in-law, Harna’s great grandmother and grandmother, were smiling down on us, nodding in approval. How many times Ompu Sihol had shaken her head while watching me fumble my way through a weaving technique and shared her amazement and dismay with her ever-curious neighbour. I gave Harna my blown-up picture of the two of them sitting together. 

Iraniran: Symbolism and Song

Working on the film, Rangsa ni Tonun, while simultaneously preparing for the exhibition ‘Fiber Face 3’ has yielded some satisfying, serendipitous overlap. The looms that we are bringing, the Ompus Okta, their heirloom textiles, the heirloom textiles from Muara – all will lend coherence to the opening of Fiber Face 3 because they also appear in the film. When they enter the “spotlight” section of the exhibition where the Batak textiles will be hanging, observant people will feel like they have walked into the ambience of the film.

The object of central symbolic importance is Ompu Sihol’s iraniran or reel. I brought it with me from The Netherlands because we hadn’t been able to find one in the Batak area (the one that we tried to make was big and clumsy). Ompu Sihol (my weaving teacher in Harian Boho in 1980) had shown me, more than 30 years ago, how to use it and the yarn that she had wrapped was still on it. We used it to re-shoot the iraniran component of the film. Ompu Okta said she had never used one before. (She told me that in Uluan the warp winder without a central peg had been used to wind newly-spun yarn. Such are the regional variations in Batak weaving techniques and equipment.) It took her awhile to get the hang of it, but eventually she could wrap flawlessly, though more carefully and slowly than Ompu Sihol who had mastered it and could do it quickly and without thinking.

Pak Jerry congratulates a satisfied Ompu Okta on her new yarn wrapping skill.

When Ompu Sihol demonstrated it for me, she had sung a weaving song and I had recorded it. At my request, Joop Bal in Oosterbeek had digitized the old cassette and I passed it on to Nashir. It had been my hope that we would find more such songs in the Batak area, but we did not. They have also disappeared. Nashir, in turn, played Ompu Sihol’s song for the ethnomusicologists in Medan, Irwansyah Harahap and Rithaony Hutajulu who are collecting old melodies. He hoped that Ritha would be willing to learn the song and sing it while wrapping yarn for the film. What actually transpired was far more exciting.

We used Ompu Sihol’s old, crackly voice in the film while Ompu Okta winds yarn...and it leads into the Suarasama version. Irwansyah worked Ompu Sihol’s song into a new composition. It will be the theme song of the film. We are calling it The Weaving Song and it is dedicated to the memory of Ompu Sihol. Nashir is fond of pointing out that the iraniran symbolizes the essence of the film: it belonged to Ompu Sihol and it is used by Ompu Okta who plays the first Batak weaver. It represents the passage of knowledge from one generation to the next and it celebrates the vast weaving knowledge of the two most important weavers in the film.


The symbolic heart of the film: Ompu Okta using Ompu Sihol's iraniran.

On the last day of January, Irwansyah invited members of Suarasama to his home and, playing by ear, listening to Ritha sing the song and also listening to the recording of Ompu Sihol, they completed the joyful melody with its teasing words and added complex original Batak instrumentation (percussion, wind and strings). I watched and listened as the musicians presented different alternatives, discussed amongst themselves which would be better and why, settled on one, and then rehearsed it until it seemed to be part of their flesh and blood and they could play it with heart and soul. Another member of Suarasama recorded it professionally. Then Mas Nashir did a video recording of it. I hope that it becomes an add-on at the end of the film. The film, Rangsa ni Tonun, has revived not just an ancient text and some weaving techniques, but also some forgotten music.

Postscript: All of the players dressed up in Batak textiles for Nashir’s video recording of the song. I noticed that the shoulder cloth that Ritha was wearing had precisely the ikat that I had been trying, unsuccessfully, to find for the exhibition. She was willing to allow me to include it in the exhibition, yet another overlap with the film.

Sulphur

On Samosir, the spirits are etched in the landscape. It is one of the most spectacular places in the world, a place of magic, myth, poetry and power. Waringin trees. Monoliths (the Batak have stories about them flying through the air to their destinations). Stone walls that defy physics. A spring with seven different flavours. Waterfalls. Scarred hills that tell of ancient cultivation. A lake so deep that it can only be described as bottomless, the highest and largest in all of Asia. 75,000 years ago, one of the biggest explosions in the history of the world occurred here. Lake Toba is the crater. The violence of the eruption has softened with time. Great, bald hills encircle the lake like gentle protective arms. The highest peak is Navel Mountain, the umbilical of Batak origins. The apical ancestress was a weaver who lowered herself from the realm of the gods on her handspun yarn. Weaving has traditionally occurred all around the shores of the lake.

I write, now, from the gash in Navel Mountain where hot water gushes and the air smells like sulphur. I feel that the spirits, today, have guided my journey. The meetings have all been precious. They have collapsed all time, from the first weaver, Si Boru Deak Parujar, to my first visit 30 years ago, to the realization of this Back to the Villages project.

Today I gave away five books. Each is a complete story in itself. Each was photographed extensively by MJA Nashir who, I could tell, feels in every fibre of his being exactly what this project is about. How wonderful to have him along and to have no concerns about this amazing journey being recorded.

The five books:

1. Simanindo Museum at the northern tip of Samosir Island. I gave this book in the name of the Volkenkunde Museum in Leiden to the daughter-in-law of the now long-deceased Sidauruk couple who so kindly helped me with my research. They allowed me to stay in their home and introduced me to Amang Adir, the village guru knowledgeable in esoteric Batak matters. I commissioned the spinning wheel (sorha), yarn pitter (pipisan) and bow (bosur) in my collection from him. The daughter-in-law, now widowed, looks after the vision created by her father-in-law whom she never met. She was pleased to receive the book and wanted to share it with the other family members (in Jakarta and Medan).

2. As we were leaving the village, we spoke to Lemar Sidauruk, a villager. He wanted to know what our business had been. When I described it, he said he badly needed a book because it would assist the village when it puts on dances and ritual re-enactments for tourists. Sensing that his interest was sincere, and realizing that if I gave him a book many more people would have the opportunity to see it (that, after all, being the goal of Back to the Villages project), I gave him one in the name of Andrew and Lily Wang whose message specifically thanks the recipient for perpetuating tradition. As we left, he had already been joined by a few men and they were thumbing their way through the tome.

3. Further along the road, approaching Pangururan, we stopped at the same village where I had been a few weeks earlier and had promised to return. One of the weavers was present. Her mother and neighbour were also weavers. 

We sat together on a mat in the mother’s house while she demonstrated how she winds yarn using a spinning wheel. 

I gave them the second donation from Andrew and Lily Wang. They were very enthusiastic about the book but decried current market circumstances. Weaving has become an almost worthless activity, they said. How could they keep the tradition alive?

4. After lunch at Navel Mountain, we continued over a very rough road to Harian Boho. My weaving teacher, Ompu Sihol, had lived there. She died many years ago but I hoped to find her descendants. It was as though her son was waiting for us. He was sitting in a make-shift coffee hut. He had gone blind. Fifteen years ago, he said.  My heart sank as this book was being given in the name of the book’s designer, Marie-Cécile Pulles. It was such a bitter moment because Cécile’s task had been to care for the appearance of the book. This bitter moment had a silver lining, however, because the blindness of the son meant that the grandson had to be sent for.  

He was 6 years old when I had taken my weaving lessons from Ompu Si Sihol and he still remembered me. Cécile had seen the children lurking in the background of my photos with Ompu Si Sihol and she had specifically asked for the book to be given to them, the future of the Batak tradition. From a bitter moment, it became a very emotional moment combining my memories of Ompu Sihol with the bond forged with Cécile as we made the book together. The recipient, Juni (from Juninto) Malau immediately recognized his grandmother in the photographs in the book and also her dye pots. He was a nice young man and his little daughter was with him. I asked him if she would learn to weave. He led me and his blind father to Ompu Sihol’s village which I had visited every day, walking along a babbling stream and through the rice fields.  

I visited the spot where she had cached her indigo pots.  It was close to where her grave is now. Much had changed and much had remained the same. I recalled my last meal in her son’s house. They had served me chicken wings to help me weave “in my country” (this was said with much flapping of arms and merriment). This time, I departed with a strong sense of a history that the future would bring.

 5. I left one book behind in SiHotang (valley and bay south of Harian Boho) with a family member of Ompu Borsak depicted on page 73 of Legacy. He was a farmer threshing his rice while we drove by. We stopped the car to ask him if he recognized the women in the picture and he responded without hesitation. They were family members. He said that the older one was still alive, but lived some 20 km. further down the tortuous road that we had managed only with the great skill, patience and willingness of our driver. The clouds were closing in over our heads and we knew the road would be impassable if the rains were heavy and it might be difficult to get back. I decided on the spot to request his help in giving the book to Ompu Borsak and her daughter.  We sat down in his lean-to shed amidst the threshed grains of rice and I explained the project. He listened attentively, periodically asking a question. When I was done, he said that he didn’t feel that he should receive the book, but that I should give it to Ompu Borsak’s son in Pangururan. Now, I liked this farmer a lot. His eyes were as bright as his occasional brilliant smile. He was clearly dependable, honest and sincere and was certainly in some awe of the gift. I told him that I would take a copy to Ompu Borsak’s son, but that I also wanted to, through him, give one to the valley of Si Hotang if he would be so good as to show the book to as many people as possible. He was pleased to assume this responsibility and the transfer was able to proceed.  I gave the book in the name of Jan Hofstede, a person who lives close to the earth, is a farmer at heart, and would have felt great affinity with this rice farmer.

As we left this remarkable valley, we caught a glimpse of the great stone walls depicted on page 106 of Legacy. I could not resist, despite the risks involved in further delay, clambering over the boulders marking the boundaries of the rice fields, and down to the gap in the fortress wall. I stepped once again, just as I had 30 years before, inside the great village of Simarmata. The magic was almost palpable.

fig. SR 1.1 Samosir village surrounded by a stone wall topped with thorny bamboo.  1986. Batak built walls around their villages to protect themselves from internecine warfare.

See Back to the Villages - the map!