Sitor was very influential in my life and especially in my research into Batak culture. After he died, his wife Barbara sent me an email. The next day I took the bus to Apeldoorn and had dinner with her and their son, Leonard in their home. I was able to pay my last respects to Sitor, for which I am truly grateful. I had spent the day writing down some memories of Sitor and going through old boxes of photographs. I would like to share here, on my blog, what I contributed to the outpouring about Sitor on Facebook.
Pierced by the arrow of remembrance: Sitor Situmorang 1924 - 2014
Last night Sitor Situmorang took his final leave from us and
from this world. A monumental figure in modern Indonesian literature has
departed. He had been ebbing away, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Sitor
was a man of words but he shared his greatest wealth more easily with the page
than with people. His vast interior vault slowly became silent. We had been
losing Sitor for a long time. He became pale and so painfully thin, more and
more transparent until even his whisper was gone. His dedicated wife, Barbara,
sent me the news late last night and I woke up to it this morning.
Sitor was the second Batak that I ever met (the first was
B.A. Simanjuntak who was studying in Leiden at the time). The year was 1978. I
had come to The Netherlands to do my PhD and Sitor had come to Leiden to explore
his culture through colonial writings. Jan Avé, then the S.E. Asia curator at
Leiden’s Museum voor Volkenkunde, told me about him and probably introduced us,
but my first memory of Sitor is in the KITLV library. He was wearing a jaunty
blue French beret and scarf. He was tiny, had a special vigour, a ready laugh,
and an equally quick temper. I quickly
learned to be afraid to say the wrong thing. There was always that sense that
he was working on something monumental while I was a mere mortal; Sitor guarded
his boundaries carefully.
We met at a remarkable crossroads: Sitor had come to The Netherlands from Indonesia. He was trying to come to terms with his own Batak identity by consulting
the archives and ethnographic literature. He must have been around 55 years old
and was just beginning an exploration that would fill a significant part of the
remainder of his life. I was 22, and had just come from Canada. I knew neither
Dutch nor Indonesian. I was still a tabula rasa preparing to head out to
conduct fieldwork in North Sumatra, which I had not yet laid eyes on. I was also
in The Netherlands to research the Batak archives and ethnographic literature.
Sitor had recently been released from a long imprisonment
and had obtained a Ford Foundation grant to facilitate his inquiry. He had a
new and beautiful blond Dutch wife. He was embarking on a new life and was
excited to be in The Netherlands. The Suharto era had been the watershed of his
life. Previously he had held diplomatic posts, gained fame as a poet and member
of the ‘Generation of ‘45’. His Dutch was perfect, English excellent, French very
good. I remember his eagerness to take stock of Dutch culture. I had no knowledge
context in which to situate Sitor and he had little patience for my detailed inquiry
into the skipping generation principle in Batak kinship terminology. He had
other things on his mind. He was impatient with me, but he believed in my
anthropological quest and supported it by giving me contacts in North Sumatra
and occasionally excitedly sharing his findings from the KITLV library.
I left for North Sumatra in 1979 and Sitor came back to Tano
Batak in 1980. He asked me to travel with him. I had a tape recorder and tapes;
he had an itinerary and specific people he wanted to meet. He wanted to hear
their views about his father (Ompu Babiat, the head of the Situmorang clan) and
the Si Singamangaraja (the ‘wife-taking’ clan of the Situmorang in neighbouring
Bangkara Valley); he wanted to see Batak history through their eyes. He said
that he could use my anthropological perspectives to help him understand his
childhood memories, put them in cultural/historical context. Perhaps I had
insights, queries or language that were important for Sitor; I hope so. My
sense was that he mostly needed a sounding board and that his insights grew from
formulating his reactions and questions. I provided an ear and asked questions.
I also manned the tape recorder and observed.
I learned the momentousness of Sitor’s exploration. His life
straddled eras and cultures. He was the son of a Batak leader and thus eligible
for a Dutch education. He left his valley/bay and went to the city: Balige,
Tarutung, Jakarta, Yogyakarta. He learned the language of the colonial power. He
became a journalist and writer. When his country threw off its colonial
shackles, he became a Sukarno diplomat. He traveled the world at a time when
few Indonesians enjoyed that privilege. He loved to tell about meeting Marilyn
Monroe in New York and life in Paris. He revelled in being a citizen of the
world. I imagined that his years in prison gave him the time to reflect on all
of this and awakened within him the need to understand the historical forces that
had carried him out of Harian Boho and into the world. I traveled with Sitor
Situmorang, but it was his journey; I was an observer.
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| I think this is the only photograph that Sitor took of me. He made sure to include the great Pusuk Buhit and Lake Toba. |
(I treasure to this day that I was able to join him. When I
reached the age that Sitor was when we met, it was my turn to explore my own history
and culture. His journey served as a beacon for my own, but that is another
story….)
The tape recordings I made are still in the box; Sitor never
consulted them. He relied on the memories and insights that he gained and gathered
as we traveled. He was not a man of notes and personal archives. He was a man
from an oral culture, a person who filled his inner chambers, swelling them to untold
richness and releasing only in small, precious doses. How many letters I have
from Sitor telling me that he will be sharing something important with me, but
he never does. That was not his way. He let things out, occasionally, a brief
story, an allusion, a poem.
Years later, when we met up at a conference in Switzerland
(1991), we had the opportunity to take a boat ride on Lake Zurich. Sitor fell
silent, became withdrawn. He said that a poem was brewing. A few days later he
shared it with me. Lake Zurich had brought him back like a lightning rod to
Lake Toba, tapping into his store of memory and feeling.
The Wind on Lake Zurich
The wind, the sky, the sun: a momentary theme
That echoes in your laughter on the lake.
Nature and remembrance, which for a moment fuse,
Expire in the expanse of the seven seas
in your gaze. Yet here
idle, a listless boat, in a forgotten land
sticks in the craw and resounds
a gaping wound that will not heal
pierced by the arrow of remembrance
a primordial murmur, the water and sky of Lake Toba
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| Ompu Babiat, Sitor's father. |
When we traveled together, he sometimes shared a node in his
intellectual universe. He told me how he had worn a gelang as a boy, a large
Batak bracelet befitting a person of his high status. Apparently it was one of
those things that one never removed in traditional culture, but when Sitor went
off to school, it became a millstone. He mentioned his embarrassment to his
father. His father quietly fetched a tool and freed Sitor’s arm. And that was that.
Sitor told the story without emotion, but it sticks in the craw when I think of
the significance of that act for Sitor’s father, and also for Sitor in later
life.
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| A vantage point overlooking Lake Toba. The photograph was probably taken by Barbara Brouwer |
Once we climbed to a high point on the Western edge of Lake
Toba. Sitor had shown us paths carved into the hills along which his father had
walked. Now, from this lookout, he pointed out the territories belonging
to various clans. He stood where his ancestors must have stood, generation upon
generation, strategists in politics and war. He explained how marital relations
among the clans were ways of consolidating alliances, ensuring safety. The Si
Singamangaraja must have stood like that as he planned his resistance against
the Dutch. The wind played with our hair. I perceived the succession of eras. Later
the geo-political insights that Sitor had shared informed my understanding of how
weaving patterns and techniques spread around the lake.
Sitor was very fond of his younger sister. She had never
left the valley. They could not communicate by telephone or letters. We met up
with her in Harian Boho. She was a betel-chewing, patient woman who spoke only
Batak. Standing beside Sitor, I saw a woman steeped in her culture and a man of
the wider world. The juxtaposition made me feel some of the loneliness that Sitor
must have experienced. “A gaping wound that will not heal.” It was Sitor who
told me, when I confessed difficulty in knowing how to combine and make sense
of my Canadian roots, my Dutch heritage and my Indonesian life, just to let it
be. Uniting it all is an impossible task. They are united in your being; no
selections need be forced and no unity need be forged. Acceptance brings peace.
The last time I saw Sitor was a few months ago. We had lunch
together and for a moment, when Barbara left the room, I was alone with him. We
were both silent. I did not know where to find Sitor in the silence, but I badly
wanted his wisdom on the current decline in Batak culture. I sketched the
decline as I knew it. What did Sitor make of it all? This man who had known the
Batak pre-colonial culture, who had grown up during the colonial era and had
become a world-famous poet, this intellectual who had devoted a great part of
his life to piecing together Batak history: what did he make of the
disappearance of the culture of his own origins? Sitor mumbled something about
remnants in the villages and then stood up and busied himself in the kitchen
closing me out. When Barbara came back into the room she assessed the situation
immediately. “Did you ask him a difficult question?” she asked. “If it is
beyond his capacity, he withdraws.” Sitor had ebbed away.