The longest day...

The plan was to head out from Pusuk Buhit to find Ompu Borsak’s son in Pangururan and gradually make our way south to Nainggolan at the southern tip of Samosir Island (across from Balige) and then to return to Pangururan and the land bridge to the mainland and head south to arrive in Muara, a bay west of Balige.

We accomplished that. However, the route was different than expected. From Nainggolan we drove back to Tomok (taking the long route over Pangururan because the road on the shorter trek is apparently bad) and from Tomok, taking the ferry back to Parapat and heading to Muara on the trans-Sumatra highway – again because the road from Pangururan to Muara is apparently bad. In both cases, we took the longer but apparently faster way. I am deeply sorry to not have been able to have seen all the landscapes. I promised myself to take a boat in the future. How much more pleasant the journey would have been in a boat!  Just as in the old days when the great dug-out canoes transported the Batak and their market wares criss cross over the lake. (Large  market boats still sail, but they are too slow for my current purposes.)

However, the spirits of Toba were once again guiding our day. In Balige, we had to make an unexpected stop at my old haunt, the nurse’s residence, which was my pied-a-terre in 1979-80. My photographer had developed such a severe toothache that he needed medical attention. Luckily we were in Balige when he announced that he needed care and the town played the same role as it had played for me in the past, offering care and guidance. My thoughts went back to Nuria Gultom, Ibu Hutabarat, in my day the heads of the residence and the nurses’s training; to Dr. Westerhausen, the kind Germany doctor then in residence. (As the fates have willed it, she phoned me unexpectedly just before my departure to Indonesia because she had purchased a copy of Legacy. The book keeps bringing me in touch with my past.)  My mind also went back to my attack of dysentery, and other medical issues that occasionally brought me back by boat from Harian Boho to Balige. My debt to the hospital in Balige is huge – and continues to grow! In no time, Mas Nashir had visited the hospital’s dentist and had a handful of medicine. We had dinner in Balige and pushed on in the dark to make our destination.

From the turn-off to Muara, the road has been immensely improved and although it was dark, the journey was not too harrowing. Our hotel is new and comfortable. I am hopeful that Mas Nashir will be recovered enough to be able to perform today with his regular spirit and energy.

(Ah! A text message from Mas Nashir. He is up and about, fresh from a good night’s sleep, taking photographs of the sunrise downstairs! Once again, our hotel is on the edge of the great lake.)

Yesterday, our day was long and successful, but I only disposed of 4 books and I would have liked to have had occasion to give more away. More about those gifts anon.

Today, we hope to find the women in the opening photograph in Legacy, the ones with the happy faces. Yesterday, we visited the market in Nainggolan and I saw several textiles there from Muara, so I know there is still active weaving here. Hopefully, we will be able to fill our goals here, if the spirits of Toba are willing.

Pages 10, 11 - fig. Acknowledgements 2 Weavers in Muara. 1986.

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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.

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Piercing the Bubble

It is 3:30 a.m. I am gearing up for our departure at 8 am. It was postponed for one day to accommodate the schedule of my photographer, Mas Nashir. I spent that extra day in luxury: a large, air-conditioned room in a delicious hotel. With pleasure, I joined the world that I describe as a bubble.

It is a fake world far from the heat and the grime of Medan streets, far from soil and plants, not a whiff of poverty in the filtered air. People transfer from their air-conditioned rooms to their air-conditioned vehicles to air-conditioned malls and back again. It reminds me of Edmonton, Canada, where people transfer in a comparable way without ever having to pull on a coat, even in the deadly cold of winter. It is a comfortable life: a bubble.

I flip back in my notebook to a blog entitled “The Poverty of Wealth” that I never got around to posting. I want to read my thoughts of 2 weeks ago. It was impossible not to be struck, in Jakarta and in Medan (Indonesia’s third-largest city), by the spectacular displays of luxurious wealth. Oscillating between these cities and the Batak villages, it was equally impossible not to be struck by the contrast between the easy expenditure on a first-class hotel room and the difficult earnings of a weaver: a weaver must toil diligently for several months, making one textile a week, to make close to the rental of one of these rooms for a single night. And the rooms, by European standards, are not even expensive.

Superficial “bubble life”, guided by passing fads, comes at the expense of the survival of indigenous culture. Bubble life is our monument to financial success. Everywhere, people scurry to “keep up” with financial demands and trends. Weavers weave ever more quickly, ever more loosely, with increasing division of labour, making ever-more standardized products using faster machinery – and end up not with more wealth (they cannot keep abreast with the rate of change) but with a hollowed-out art form that has lost its indigenous value, and has no allure in the bubble world. It becomes a lost art in every sense. Both integrity and desirability are gone: a huge price to pay for worse than “disappointing” results.

Yesterday, I enjoyed a conversation with Torang Sitorus and Henny Harsha over a cup of hot chocolate (the bill for three beverages came to half the price of a hand-woven cloth) about the future of Batak textiles. Current production is following in the footsteps of the industrial revolution. The old cloths are forgotten rarities. My fellow conversationalists talked about displaying the antique cloths in malls to awaken demand. These textiles can only become viable again if they register in the glamorous bubble world. Desire must be kindled.

The problem, then, will be at the supply side. No weaver can afford the cost of time and materials that it takes to produce a beautiful, old-style cloth of integrity. She will have to be supported.

But a seed has been planted. Henny Harsha is a member of the Indonesian Heritage Society and a textile-lover. Torang Sitorus has fallen in love with the traditional textiles of his own Batak culture and wants to promote them. The two of them want to combine forces to make a mall exhibit, thereby placing Batak textiles in the heart of bubble culture.

My own work right now focuses on the weavers, handing over to them the visual record of their own weaving tradition, something they could never afford to purchase on their own. Yes, I am distinctly aware that Legacy in cloth could be used to stimulate market demand for the beautiful old items, but I will leave that work, at least for the time being, to creative people like Torang Sitorus, Henny Harsha, Merdi Sihombing and Sebastian Hutabarat and I will continue to plant seeds. Today I head off in my air-conditioned car for the villages.

* Yesterday, I gave Henny Harsha a copy of Legacy in cloth to thank her for her assistance in importing and storing the book in Medan until my arrival. This book was donated with the generous assistance of Henk and Margot van Dalen who wanted to support the project in any undesignated way that would be helpful to me.

** I gave Torang Sitorus a copy last week on Samosir Island in the name of the Soroptimists of Arnhem (see blog “Didn’t pay? It was costing money!”). I think that book has turned out to be an important investment. Moreover, Torang fills high-end requests for Batak textiles and offers many weavers, thereby, a livelihood.

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Intermezzo

We are back in the third largest city in Indonesia: Medan and back in Hotel Tiara. If it’s not Viennese waltzes, it is the schmaltzie Bee Gees playing in the Lobby….Gotta get a message to you….! One more hour and… I have to be ready to visit the Sultan’s Palace to see if it is an appropriate activity for our weaver tour next year. Tomorrow, my traveling companion for the tour preparations, Jantine Koobs, will be on a plane heading home to The Netherlands. I will be turning around and heading back to the Batak villages.

My thoughts are not entirely with the end of our pre-tour journey, but with the preparations to leave again for the Batak Villages and the completion of my Back to the Villages project.

Laundry is already done. Possibly I should buy some peanut butter and crackers. It hasn’t been easy being vegetarian here. I have eaten altogether too much capcay and gadogado and ignored the occasional shrimp and chicken bouillon that has found its way into it all.

Negotiations are underway to see if Mas Nashir will join me to photograph the events. He is a Javanese photographer, a friend of my friends Nia and Ismoyo, batik artists in Yogyakarta, and of my new, very interesting and dynamic acquaintances, Irwansyah and his wife, Ritha. The latter professors at the University of North Sumatra are doing what they can to record and revive the tail end of the music traditions of Sumatra.

We have to find the right vehicle and driver to take us to the villages. I am terribly appreciative of our excellent Javanese driver of the past two weeks, Pak Saito (of Narasindo Tours), but I am concerned about bringing him too deeply into the villages where pigs and dogs are eaten; it will make him feel uncomfortable even though he will hide his feelings. Reluctantly, therefore, I am looking for a Batak driver who will enter differently into the spirit of it all. He will undoubtedly bring a new and interesting dynamic to it all. In addition, it will be good for him to learn what we will be learning about the Batak weaving arts.

I am behind on my blogs. I still want to share the happenings in the Silindung Valley where I was reunited, at long last, with my closest Batak families. First, however, the Sultan’s Palace is on the agenda.

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Glimpse of a good future

I met Sebastian Hutabarat in 2003 at an event to call attention to the environmental destruction occurring around Lake Toba. He was a photographer and it quickly became clear that he was artistically very talented. According to the Batak kinship system, because I am an adopted member of the Hutabarat family, he is my nephew. His father, deceased since then, was my brother. His mother showed me her beautiful collection of textiles which she had inherited from her forebears.

In Balige, on our way to the Silindung Valley, yesterday, we dropped in to see Sebastian. He and his wife were building a new house overlooking the lake.  A dream was being realized. Sebastian had designed it himself. He wanted a place of beauty in Batak style to promote Batak art. We joked about the process of the construction of his dream: from Bali to Balige. The young papaya trees that he had planted (because they are expensive to buy in Balige, so why not plant them yourself and share the seeds with everybody around?) were doing well. His garden was organic. He had a solar water-heater on the roof and had cleverly re-used some of the wood that would normally be wasted when a house is built. He wanted a place of beauty and health with low environmental impact – and he wants it to be a showcase of possibilities.

His mother was ailing a little, he told me. She was on my list of people to receive a book and he advised me to give the book as soon as possible to cheer her up. He agreed to take the photographs of the event. So we piled back into the car and drove back down the hill to the centre of Balige where Sebastian’s mother, Mutiara br. Napitupulu lives. She is a woman of tremendous beauty and grace. She received us with shining eyes and Dutch words that she remembered from her past.

I handed over the book in the name of Dirk van Uitert and Sineke de Vries. Sometimes wearing the hat of alderman, Dirk has worked for years on environmental programs and social development. It seemed to me to be a good match, as I know that Sebastian will showcase the book in his studio and exhibition space.

During the course of my travels, I have come to accept, however reluctantly, that the traditional role of indigenous cloth in Batak culture is all but dead and has no future. If there is a future, it is because the designs inspire the artistic creations of current and future Batak artists. With Sebastian Hutabarat, the inheritor of his mother’s textile tradition, the book has found a good home.

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Efficacy

Today, for the first time, I gave away a copy of Legacy to active weavers. It was an invigorating and inspiring moment. My favourite photograph of the event is the one in which four different hands are all pointing to a pattern on the same page. The weavers in the village, particularly one white-haired woman, absolutely devoured the tome. 

It was not a village that I had been to before, so I had no personal tie with any of the weavers. “Sangkalan” was in the vicinity of Lumban Suhisuhi, north of Pangururan on Samosir Island. The weaver with white hair kept trying to convince us that the textiles that she had hung out for sale as soon as she saw our vehicle pull up had been woven in the village, while it was clear that they had been made elsewhere on a semi-mechanical loom. I thought it might be a useful strategy to give her a copy of Legacy so that she might begin to speak to me seriously. Moreover, this was a village that our weaver tour could visit next year and it seemed to be a wonderful opportunity to test the reception of the book after a year had lapsed.

First I asked the white-haired weaver to sit with me in the shade. We took our places on the bright blue tarpaulin that she unfurled and I placed the book in front of her, inviting her to look through it. From that point onward, she was totally engrossed. I recognized that, purely by chance, I’d given absolutely the very best person a copy of my life’s work. Nobody could have appreciated its contents more; it was immensely satisfying to see how deeply it moved her.

The other weavers in the village deserted their looms and joined us. Villagers emerged from their houses and gathered around. Finally, I asked if I could interrupt their inspection of the book to tell them something. When I had their attention, I told them about the project, read the inscriptions aloud and told them about the work of the donors, the Soroptimists of Arnhem, for the good of women. I asked them to pass on their knowledge to the youth.

I continue to try to determine the most efficacious way of distributing Legacy in the Batak community. I heard, today, of the death of two more weavers in the region to whom I had wanted to present a book. I think that it would be most meaningful to present their copies to young weavers in their villages. They might be inspired to continue to weave and do inventive things. One of them might be the Picasso of Batak weaving!

I loved being in the villages today, loved watching the weavers at work. I know how difficult their work is and they make it look so easy. Their strokes are clean and efficient, like music in movement. I know that it will only take one generation of not weaving for the tradition to completely disappear. That kind of beauty in motion can only be learned when generations of practice gets passed down from mother to daughter, from aunt to niece, from friend to friend. Their legacy is inscribed in their motor skills.

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Didn’t pay? It was costing money!

In the fertile Purba region of Simalungun, yesterday, in the village of Negori Tongah, we found Roslina br. Purba’s husband by showing her laminated picture to some men on the road. 

One of them turned out to be her husband and he led us to her. She had a large cloth on her head to protect her from the sun, a huge rake in her hand and a red wad of tobacco and betel nut in her mouth; she was returning from the ladang. I didn’t recognize her, but the driver of my car saw immediately that she was the same person as the younger version in the photographs.

When she saw the pictures, she shook her head and said, yes, they were taken when she was performing the technique of warp substitution (tingki manuloki). I’ve stopped weaving, she said. It didn’t make sense, any more. It was better to work the land.

Roslina br. Purba (then known as 'Mamak Si Dirita', mother of Dirita) substitutes the warp in the Bulang textile. Naga Panei, Simalungun. 1986. Legacy, Page 495, Fig. Tech 6.19.

I opened the back of the car and prepared to give her a book, a donation from my dear high school friend-for-life, Colleen Flood. It was the usual story, children gathering around, people jostling each other to get a look at the pages. The former weaver’s eyes sparkled. 

Roslina br. Purba holding her copy of the book with fellow villagers, June 2010

During the course of conversation, I mentioned that it apparently didn’t pay enough to weave. Her husband corrected me. It was not that it didn’t pay enough, it was costing money!

Later in the day, I had a happy reunion with my former assistant, Linda, in Parapat (and gave her a book privately in my own name). Her brother Jonny also came by. He had been a marketing co-ordinator for weavers in the Silindung Valley and nobody understands better than he the financial circumstances of textile production. He explained that the Batak people had become too poor to purchase their own weavings. That is why they purchased cloth commercially produced on a semi-mechanical loom when they needed one for ritual purposes. The consequence of this was that money was leaving the community and going into the pockets of the (relatively richer) directors of the commercial workshops – to say nothing of those on Java who are producing printed textiles resembling hand-woven Batak textiles.

I then understood the decline and death of weaving in the Batak area more clearly. It has always been the local market that has supported textile production. The foreign market, including the tourist market, though welcome, has just been incidental. If the Batak are not able to support their own production through their local markets, and the external markets are too weak, weaving is precisely as Nai Ati’s husband explained: an economic liability and no longer a way to supplement farming income.

We searched in the Simalungun region and found only one maker of the bulang textile type. She was old. She will not continue much longer.

Later in the evening, a young Batak man, Torang Sitorus caught up with me in my hotel on Samosir Island. He wanted a copy of my book. He had fallen in love with Batak ulos, he said. Prosperous in business, he was making a collection of ancient pieces. I could tell by the way he approached me that he had the skills to find and acquire the very last heritage pieces that people might still have stored in their closets. 

He had plans to set up a museum and to work with designers to inspire the continuation of Batak motifs.

I pointed out there were probably just a few possibilities for the future of Batak textiles. One would be their incorporation in fashion and the other would be their recognition as an art form. In both cases, their survival would depend on wealthy external markets and the highest quality of production.

This is a sad time for me. I am beginning to understand that by giving away my book to weavers, I can thank them and return their heritage to them, but I can’t do much for the future of Batak weaving. I feel angry at the banks (and all other structures for which banks have recently become a symbol) who milk the poor to support their own wealth. The gigantic, luxurious, superficial, meaningless wealth in this world has developed at the cost of indigenous culture, among many other things. The weavings of great integrity of which Batak women are still technically capable can no longer be made. I mourn for the Batak weavers who have the creative talent to produce amazing things, but no social avenues available to express their talent. What a waste of lives, of creativity, of knowledge built up through millennia of experimentation and carefully selected influences.

The idealistic young man sitting in front of me at the table last night talked about reviving indigo and showed me pictures of the attempts by a weaver in Muara. He invited me to come to inspect his collection. He talked about his future museum. He talked about setting designers in Jakarta loose to work on clothing inspired by Batak designs. And he wanted one of my books very badly.

In the end I gave him one. It felt like a capitulation, an admission. He is not a weaver, and I had intended the books for weavers. But he may represent a future for Batak textiles. I did not say, as I say to the weavers when I hand them a book, “Thank you”.  I let him know that the book that I gave to him was an investment and that the gift came with expectations attached to it. I still feel sad and torn about this donation. I hope that his initiatives will represent a phoenix that rises from the ashes.

The day has sent me into a tailspin. We left Nai Ati in the Simalungun area after giving her a book and when we returned ten minutes later to ask a question we found a huddle of people, mostly school children, around the book. My Back to the Villages project is just an experiment. It is an expression of hope and of thanks. It may have practical consequences and it may not. A school child might become inspired. It is a seed. I am planting it here and there. Even in the garden of a wealthy business man. May it bear fruit. 

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