Back to Guru Sinangga's Village

Suddenly there was no electricity in Hutabarat yesterday. We were there, in the Silindung Valley, to show our film in my older sister’s home (ibu Bonaria Hutabarat). I asked if we couldn’t perhaps go to Sait ni Huta in the meantime and at least see the church and place of origin of Guru Sinangga Matondang. A few moments later, we stood in Sait ni Huta where the huge, golden statue of Nommensen is erected. A large church there has the dates 1864 1933 painted above the door.  

Gereja Dane built in 1933. (Photo by Ojak Tampe Silaban)

Apparently that church was built in 1933, long after Nommensen had moved to Sigumpar. (He died in 1918.) The candidate minister who greeted us there in the village centre ushered us into the church, said that the original church built by Nommensen was no longer standing. A small monument had been erected to mark its place in the neighbouring cluster of homes.

The second church built, in 1864, was across the street from this big new church. 

The church built in 1864. Nommensen moved to Sait ni Huta in 1863, so this would have been the church that he built and used. (Photograph by Ojak Tampe Silaban)

It was now used as a Sunday School. Because the big church was so light, I asked if we could see the interior of the church built in 1864 and we were given this opportunity. Entering this building, the sense of history was much greater. The structure was older and darker. It was clear that this was the better building for a film showing. Ibu Hutabarat and I mused about what kind of seating there must have been in Nommensen’s day.

While Mas Nashir and some of the team were setting up, our big red bus went back to Hutabarat to pick up people who might like to come to see the film and Ibu Hutabarat, Lasma and Febrina and I went off to see the monument to the first church. As luck would have it a cluster of small children was twisting textile fringes and I filmed them as Lasma and Febrina talked with them. 

We brought a group of these children back with us for show time. Most of our audience was children.

And then there was the magical moment. There we were in Sait ni Huta, telling the inhabitants about the great Guru Sinangga Matondang, letting them know that through Nommensen’s intervention an oral text had been written down and was now stored in Europe and that we were ‘bringing it home’. While every screening has been an act of ‘pulang kampung’, this one in particular, was the real Pulang Kampung: back to the place of origins. Our first stop on our long trip was to Sianjur Mula2, the place of origin of the Bataks and now one of last stops is the place of origin of the text.

The woman sitting beside me during the screening mumbled some of her reactions. I could see that the language of the text was familiar to her. Not all of the weaving techniques were familiar, however, and I was reminded that our film really is a hodge-podge of reconstruction with a text from one place and weaving techniques from several other places in Toba. I explained to the audience the challenges that we had faced during the filming and how we had had to pluck skills from here and from there and that we had been lucky to find all that we had found.

I felt humbled by this Pulang Kampung act. It was so special to do it with the assistance of my ‘older sister’, Ibu Bonaria Hutabarat, deakonesse. It moved me to give her a copy of our film when we were done. She has known me since I was a scared 24-year-old coming to Tano Batak for the first time. And now she is elderly and I have established my own ‘style’ as an anthropologist. We faced each other yesterday as two women who have shared 35 years of our lives, grown and changed together.

Ibu Bonaria Hutabarat told some school girls about Nommensen after our
film had been shown.

We also gave a copy to the candidate Minister who told us that he wanted to erect a museum to Nommensen. It is likely that our film will enter the museum. Did Guru Sinangga become a Christian? Did he commit his knowledge to paper as ‘a heathen’? What was the nature of his relationship to Nommensen? Did he ever enter the church where we showed the filmed version of his text? The candidate minister was moved by our film and our devotion to Batak culture and said that he would like to see it many more times. There have been indications during Pulang Kampung III that many Batak believe that the church has been too strict and narrow in its acceptance of Batak culture. Will the presence of our film in the Nommensen museum in Sait ni Huta signify a re-unification of culture and religion? The fact is that the Rangsa ni Tonun text was among Nommensen’s papers. What did that mean in Nommensen’s day? Just language study? Admiration of the guru? We don’t know the answers to those questions, but the reception of the film in Sait ni Huta yesterday was a hopeful sign for the future.

Reviving a Text

Rangsa ni Tonun is a Batak text that I am using as the basis for the film about Batak weaving techniques to premiere at the Fiber Face 3 event in Yogyakarta in February 2011 (see blog The Merapi has Spoken).

It is an oral text, but it was committed to paper, presumably at the behest of Ludwig Ingwer Nommensen (6 February 1834 – 23 May 1918), the German Lutheran missionary who is renowned and revered for establishing the Christian church in the Batak world. Such texts were spoken by datu or traditional knowledge specialists. I found the text in Nommensen’s archive.

Since Nommensen’s day, the works of the datu are considered by the Christianized Batak to be just a little too close to the spirit world that they have been taught is the work of the devil. The art of the datu (hadatuon) went into sharp decline, therefore, during the twentieth century. During my travels, I did not meet a single Batak who knew what “rangsa” means.

Looking up the word in my Batak dictionaries, reading other rangsa texts, finding descriptions of rangsa texts in early publications, and speaking about the word with the great Batak poet, Sitor Situmorang, I have been reminded of the power of words in Batak indigenous thought. The datu was a magician with words. He manipulated them in many ways to influence the spirit world, all the while amazing his audiences, often striking fear in their hearts. His use of words (just part of his large arsenal of trappings) set him apart from “the average person”. Rangsa ni tonun is perhaps best translated as “description of weaving”. However, the word ‘description’ does not do the Batak word 'rangsa' justice. The Batak word is special because it captures the magical, spiritual essence of something, the sacred power of origins. Origins, in indigenous Batak thought, are a font of power. All acts of weaving are descendants, as it were, of the original act, performed by a daughter of the gods as described in this 'description of weaving'.

Before setting off to 'translate' the text using filmic images, I made photocopies of my typed-out version. It is not that I wished to undo the work of Nommensen, but I am a great admirer of indigenous Batak literature, and I feel that the Batak who grow up in the villages today miss out when they do not learn about the rich tradition that is their birthright. It seemed only fair to me to hand out copies of the text to the villagers who clustered around as we worked on the film so that they could see what we were up to. I was thankful that I could tell them that I had found the text in Nommensen’s archives; it gave it a rather ironic stamp of approval.

In Tarutung, I visited the village of Sait ni Huta in the hopes of finding descendants of Guru Sinangga ni Aji, the datu who wrote out the text for Nommensen. I was unsuccessful and the text attracted little interest. It was immediately apparent that the language was difficult for most people, even if Batak (and not Indonesian) was the language in which they operated most easily.
 



Nobody remembered Guru Sinangga ni Aji
in his village of Sait ni Huta (foto MJA Nashir)

   





Statue of LI Nommensen in Sait ni Huta (foto MJA Nashir)



  Not altogether unexpected for me was that weavers understood the text better than most other people. This is because of the many weaving terms in the text. One would learn these words only if one had some close association with weaving, e.g. if one’s mother or wife was a weaver or if one wove oneself. Young people had little or no interest in the text while elderly people enjoyed the words that they had not heard for a long time. Many of them pored over the text with rapt attention.

An elderly woman (Ny Pakpahan) in Muara read the text with rapt attention

Her neighbour looked on



The neighbour was pleased when I gave her a copy, too

 We needed a narrator, someone who would read the text for the camera, and it made sense to look for a male narrator because literature, in indigenous Batak life, is part of the male world and the writer of the text was also male. Amongst ritual specialists and those familiar with Batak opera, we did not find a suitable candidate because they stumbled over the words and could not orient themselves to their meaning. We met with success in the village, however. Ompu Okta doli was the husband of one of the weavers who did demonstrations for Nashir’s camera. He was a natural. He remembered the technical words from his youth and from his association with his wife. When I asked him where he learned to orate so well, he revealed that he was often called upon to use the microphone as the Master of Ceremonies at rituals and that he also frequently read in church. He was immediately so taken by the text that he worked on it enthusiastically on his own, adding comma’s, developing cadence, and even catching errors in the transcription. He was a diamond in the rough.

Ompu Okta doli studied the text carefully before he read it in front of the camera



Ompu Okta, husband and wife, "stars" of our film.
(foto MJA Nashir)

When we returned to his village some weeks later, we found the villagers still citing words and phrases from the text with much merriment. The text had begun to live for them.
I can hardly wait to see how people react to the finished film.

Gratifying look

My friend and webmaster, Pamela Cross, asked me upon my return whether I look differently at Legacy in cloth now that I have taken it to Indonesia. The answer is an unequivocal “yes”.

I remember how anxiously I lived towards the first presentation of the book to a Batak weaver. I had talked up my Back to the Villages project for so long and had received so many donations. I felt that alot was at stake. To many people the project seemed a bit strange given that the book is in English and not yet translated (I brazenly write “yet” because I am immodestly convinced that it will only be a matter of time). I believed that the book would be of use to weavers because they can read the photos better than anybody else, and because they need and deserve a pictorial record of their repertory. Anything I could write or say would, relatively speaking, be of less importance. How relieved and gratified I was when the book was received by the weavers with such intense interest and appreciation.

One of my favourite illustrations of this happened in the Silindung Valley, in the twining village of Sait ni Huta. When we pulled up, there were several women of all ages twisting fringes and twining edges in front of their homes. I selected one person to sit with and gradually more and more villagers clustered around us. Because of their weaving speciality, I opened the book to the pages of twined patterning (pp. 526 - 528) and watched them react. They immediately pointed out the patterns that they were familiar with, fetched textiles out of their homes to show me modern edges that are not represented in the book, enquired whether I had illustrations of beadwork as well (luckily, I did - p. 530 – taken in their village!) and discussed the differences between their work and that of their colleagues in Laguboti (near Lake Toba) and Kaban Jahe (Karo Batak area). The discussion was animated and enthusiastic.

On a whim, I showed them the twined bag on page 406. I was so curious how they would react to this rare and old bag. None of them had ever seen one and at first they doubted that it could have been twined. Then they started offering suggestions as to how it had been made. If the conversation had been lively, it was now almost a brawl with alternate, competing suggestions but nobody had the courage to take me up on my offer to pay for a replica of the bag. When I left, they still had not yet come to a conclusion about how it had been made. I realized that they needed more detailed photographs of the bottom of the bag and visual proof that it had not been made flat and then stitched up the side. But I didn’t leave discouraged. I thought, “They invented this bag once in the past and they are clever and skilled, so they can re-invent it or devise something entirely new.” I left them with the book and in the knowledge that they had enjoyed the puzzle.

What I don’t know, however, is whether their pride was bolstered by the book. For the most part, they don’t know much about books and what a major undertaking Legacy represents. It could be the implications of this book won’t sink in until later when they have had the time to ponder the celebration of their art that the book represents.

My next step that day was the village of Parbubu where Ompu SiTohap used to live (p. 61). She was no longer alive and so her son and daughter-in-law received the book. I witnessed their happiness at seeing her in the book showing off her favourite textile (now in Jakarta, inherited by her daughter). Whether there was pride in her weaving skills and her being a representative of Batak weavers, I don’t know.

Time may provide the answer to this question: will weavers show off the book to prove their technical excellence? Will it inspire young women to take up the art and older women to once again try their hand at it? Will it spark the development of an exhibition or two? Will local politicians heed a new urge to acknowledge and display the works of weavers within their jurisdictions? Before I left The Netherlands to return to the Batak villages, an employee at the Indonesian Embassy paused for a moment while looking through the book, “I have grown up seeing weavers and textiles for sale at the markets; I just always took it for granted, but now I see that it has potential for tourism...”

I do not think that I made a wrong decision to give copies of Legacy to weavers and villagers who could never afford to buy it (even imaging they were ever able to find it on the publisher’s (KITLV) website!). The hunger for information in the villages alone means that the gift was useful. Will there be concrete outcomes to the Back to the Villages project? (No funding agency would support me in my project because I couldn’t demonstrate this.) I have to sit back and be patient, allow the books to develop their own life in the villages....Maybe the effects will never be measurable.

..............

In Medan, when the project was completed, I received a text message on my mobile phone from Ompu Okta (see blog “Dilepaskan”). She wanted to know what the title of the book was in Indonesian....Obviously, she was still preoccupied with her gift....

See Back to the Villages - the map!