Who is Ibu Stephanie?

Stephanie Belfrage, the Australian woman who gave her beautiful batik textiles back to Indonesia, is "one of the warmest and most generous spirits you could wish to meet" according to a friend of hers. This warmth has shone through all of the correspondence that I have had with her.

Stephanie Belfrage with her husband and one of her hand-made quilts.

In addition to this, I know her through a short blurb that she wrote  for the big repatriation event in Pekalongan. Here it is:

In 1971, I left Australia, newly married, for Paris.  Seven years later, we packed up our young family and set out for Jakarta.  There was a marked contrast in lifestyle but the whole family fell in love with the people, the landscape and the vibrant Indonesian culture, and embraced it all with open arms. 

We wasted no time in learning Bahasa Indonesia, and quickly made friends among both Indonesian colleagues and fellow expats.  I became involved in a number of projects, all related in some way to textiles.  I joined a quilting group and through it learned about the different batik textiles.  I was on a committee that set up a shop, ‘The Red Feather’, to provide skills and income for the paraplegic residents of the Wisma Cheshire Home in Cilandak, Jakarta.  We taught the residents basic English and Accounting.  The girls learned to cut and sew patchwork items.  The boys made superb dolls’ houses.  The shop was very successful and enabled the residents to achieve a degree of independence, which would not otherwise have been possible for them.  (I am not sure whether or not the shop is still functioning). 

Batak textiles from North Sumatra were first introduced to me through the  Ganesha Society (now called the Heritage Society??) where I also met Batak people living in Jakarta.  I then began to collect their textiles,  learning about the significance of  ulos within Batak culture.  This study became part of a lecture programme of  the Ganesha Society

Double ikat weaving, unique to the village of Tenganan, was introduced to me in regular sojourns at Ibu Oka’s Ashram in Candi Dasa, East Bali. A visit to the Batak homeland of Samosir in North Sumatra expanded my knowledge of their textiles (ulos). Attendance at a traditional funeral ceremony in Sulawesi resulted in the acquisition of one of the most valued textiles in my collection, which has recently been most welcomed by the Jakarta Textile Museum and is now, as I understand it,  part of the current exhibition of Torajan textiles.  Travel to Cirebon and Linggar Jati in 1985 to visit the home of the beautiful Pekalongan batiks and to watch them being created in the traditional workshops, led to my exposure to yet another variety of Indonesian textile.

Everywhere we went, we collected textiles.  The everyday ones, were cut and used in patchwork quilts as shown in the photo attached.  When we left Indonesia in 1986, the textiles and patchwork quilts came with us.  They have been much admired and much loved since then.

However, life goes on.  This year we have moved to a smaller space and foremost on my mind was what to do with the textiles.  Of the options available, returning them to their original home seemed by far the most satisfying.  Indonesia had been so welcoming to us, introducing us to wider cultural  perspectives, which in turn invited us to reflect on our own. Thanks to modern technology, I ‘met’ Dr. Sandra Niessin, who told me about her Pulang Kampung project, which I immediately identified with.  With Sandra’s guidance and the help of Mrs. Mara Soekarno, Dr. Anne Conduit, Mr. Greg Roberts and Mr. Ian Reed, all the textiles are now returning home.

Stephanie's photograph was projected on the wall behind us  as I 
spoke about the spirit of repatriation in Pekalongan's 
Batik Museum

Genealogical Riddle Solved

As the strange ways of luck and synchronicity would have it, not too long ago, on the very same day and at the very same moment, I received emails from two unrelated people both offering me the complete overview of the descendants of Elize van Zuylen-Niessen. Both were responding to my blogs about Pekalongan in which I scratched my head and wondered out loud about my genealogical connections with Elize, the remarkable and famous batik maker in Northern Java.

Photo by MJA Nashir
Sandra Niessen holding up a batik made by
Eliza van Zuylen Niessen

Both thought that I might be a descendant but I knew that this was not the case and that I would have to dig much further back, before the birth of Elize’s father. One of my correspondents was able to tell me enough about Elize’s father’s family that I could finally make the connection. The great grandfather of Elize’s father’s was also my ancestor, a man called Wijnand Niessen, born in 1712 in Hundshoven, The Netherlands.

In the 18th century, the enterprising son of Wijnand Niessen, named Dionicius, left home and settled in Buren further north. For generations his branch of the family, from which I hail, lived along the Lek/Rhine river leading to Rotterdam. Elize’s father’s people stayed in the region around Heerlen, Sittard and Hundshoven. Her father, Matthias Nicolaas (the spelling varies), after a long stay in the Netherlands East Indies, returned to the region of his youth where he died.

Elize van Zuylen-Niessen’s father, Matthias Nicolaas Niessen, was a KNIL (Royal Dutch-East Indies Army) officer who received a military medal called the Willemsorde. He fought in Bali in 1849, in Borneo in 1850 and Riau (Sumatra) in 1858 and 1959. He was then Luitenant.

Elize’s mother, Elisabeth Christina Anna Geertruida von Ranzow, was the fourth generation of the Von Ranzow family to live in the East. Her great great grandfather sailed for Ceylon from Germany. Two generations of his descendants lived on that VOC Island, but her father was born on board ship heading towards Batavia. His mother was a “princess” from Palembang.

In other words, aside from a common last name, probably half of The Netherlands, to say nothing of a certain family in Palembang, is as closely related to Elize van Zuylen Niessen as I am. There are 6 generations between myself and the ancestor that Elize and I have in common. Moreover, Wijnand, our common ancestor, married twice; she descends from the second wife while I descend from the first. Very distant family indeed. Nevertheless, it is always nice to have an illustrious family member; I enjoy feeling a personal attachment to her life and times in Indonesia.

Banun and Kadir

In 1922 a remarkable man was born in Pekalongan. He was a joyful man who loved a challenge. When he became old, he joked to his son that he would like to swap ages because he was still so very full of the possibilities of life. The 89 years that he was allotted were too short for him. In his home where his daughter continues to lives, there is a cartoon of him hanging on the wall. Beside his head, in big letters, a single word that characterizes his life is written: “THINK”.

Kadir's son and daughter in their ancestral home.

Kadir was a conservationist and recycler before his time and he was unstymied. If materials were not available, he found substitutes. If quantities of available materials were becoming a nuisance or going to waste, he found ways to make them useful. Similarly if peoples’ talents were going to waste, he found a way to deploy them. If he was stuck with a technical problem, he turned himself loose on his library, and let the people in his surroundings apply themselves to the problem to see if their collective thought could yield a solution.

furniture made with water hyacinths

He was an inventor, engineer, intellectual and socially engaged. And he had a weaving factory. He had no use for patents. For him, the joy in life was in meeting problems creatively and sharing solutions, allowing the intellect to bubble and spread and not to be defensive. He learned how to make and weave pineapple, banana, abaca fiber and water hyacinths.  
  
None of these materials are new today, but he was the first in his region to make use of them.  He transformed waste newspapers into weft and he batikked towels. He also invented a remarkable technique that he called “banun” that collapses batik (the “ba” part of the word) and tenun (the Indonesian name given to woven unbatikked cloth, the “nun” part of the word).

The technique works like this. First a length of cloth is woven. A pattern is then wax-drawn, as though to make a batik, onto the finished cloth. The cloth is then dyed, dried and unwoven. Then the batik-dyed warp is re-woven with a new weft. This is why Kadir’s son and daughter explained to me that the cloth was “woven twice”. Why would one go to so much effort when it would be just as easy to ikat pattern the warp yarns? Moreover, there would be no waste in the form of discarded weft. “Because people here are willing to weave, but they are not willing to tie ikat patterns” was the response. The technique coincides with a social circumstance.

unwoven warp up to the not yet unwoven part

Because I was not able to conceive of “unweaving” a cloth and how the unwoven warp is put on the loom, I was taken into the back room where the looms were in use. Only part of the cloth is initially unwoven. The rest is rolled up the way a warp would be rolled on the warp beam. The ends of the warp are installed in the weaving mechanism and then weaving proceeds as normal. Weft is removed as more warp is needed. The process is not particularly cunning. It is simply yanked out of the cloth.

Batak textile "fake" made by Kadir's children

In the course of our conversation, I learned that Kadir was also the source of the “fake” ship cloths that were made at the end of the last century. It was an inventive process in which he even revived hand-spinning in Pekalonan. “The cloths were ’saleable’ for a little while and then the market for them disappeared and he stopped making them” I was told. I remember when people were just learning that “fake shipcloths” were on the market and they had to be warned that they were not purchasing “the real thing”. My visit to Kadir’s home taught me great respect for the inventiveness needed to make such “fakes”. Indeed, the history of cloth could well be framed in terms of inventiveness inspired by novelty. 

Striking Gold

It is easy to imagine the Pekalongan of yesteryear when the Dutch were still here. There are still so many of their buildings: the home and office of the Resident, the “societeit” (soos) where they used to gather to satisfy their social needs, the church and so on. The city centre, now a huge traffic circle built around a park, is still intact; it must have made a glorious and majestic impression.

The newly-furbished excellent Pekalongan Museum is in an old VOC building. The floors are original, so are the ceilings. Even the bars over the windows of the room where the money was imprisoned are still there. 

The curator, Zahir, came up to me with his black eyes flashing mystically and said, “The money is still here. Perhaps the Dutch hid it under the floor.” I disabused him of his fantasy. “The walls of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam are decorated with gold purchased with colonial money,” I said. Zahir was only partly joking, however. He is intensely aware of the “value added” of the beautiful museum building. Precisely its authenticity, that it has been maintained but not overhauled, means that the building has a particular aura, like a whiff of something that half awakens a memory that cannot be defined. “This building is gold,” said the perceptive and articulate Zahir. “In any other building, this museum would be so much less.”

Alas, the home and workshop of Eliza van Zuylen have been demolished.

Zahir was captivating. His passion for batik was almost palpable. While I stood gazing at a beautiful copy of a Van Zuylen batik with pastel colours, he came up to me and his black eyes started to flash again in that mysterious way. “All of the original Van Zuylen batiks have been bought up by collectors outside the country. The batiks are now unaffordable. We have none left here in Pekalongan. Maybe there are a few in private homes, but the museum has none.” In a nutshell, Zahir had expressed one of the great ironies of this grand Kota Batik (City of Batik).

The next day, my host Arif Dirhamzah, took me to the computer office of a friend, named Zakaria. He teaches batik producers to access international markets using the internet. We sat at the screen of one of his computers and mas Arif showed me the photographs of Pekalongan batiks that he had found on the KITLV website. There were several from the Vlisco collection in The Netherlands, so we shifted to their website, and then I showed them the on-line collection of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. At one point Arif stopped when he found the name of a local producer in the documentation of a cloth. “Who is that person again?” he asked his friend. Zakaria reacted with amazement and peered at the cloth. “That was my grandfather,” he said and started to recite the names of several generations of his family. As we were about to leave, Zakaria said, “With this visit, I feel like I have struck gold. I cannot tell you how much this discovery means to me.” “Keep going with your discovery of museum collections,” I said. “There are more people in Pekalongan who will get that same feeling when they see the cloths of their ancestors. Perhaps you have struck gold in more than one way. Think of what your computer can mean to all descendants!”

Arif organized a dinner party around my visit. It took place in the gracious home of Bapak and Ibu Fatchiyah, a large Pekalongan batik producers. Mas Arif invited a remarkable collection of people who could offer memories or insights into the Van Zuylen batiks. Some brought textiles from their homes to show and I saw how deftly the people unfurled them and held them up, how they spoke the same language when discussing the cloths, how admiring their were of good designs. Again and again there were expressions of regret that the Van Zuylen pieces had been almost entirely bought up by people living outside the city and the country. There was little tangible evidence on which to rest their conflicting claims about Van Zuylen colour, dyes and designs. “Outside Indonesia, the collections are complete,” they said over and over again.

At the end of the evening it was my turn to say a few words. “We stand at the beginning of a new era,” I said. “The past was the era of collecting. Now is the era of sharing. The Tropenmuseum and other museums may have many textiles but these textiles do not live the way that I have seen them living here tonight. They are stored carefully, however, so that they will last. They are a priceless resource that can be consulted. They are a public resource. In this age of internet access is no longer as challenging as it used to be. I hope that you will think of them as your own collections. You can “revive” those museum collections lying “dead” in their storage chambers and make them live again, just like the cloths in this room. These collections are pots of gold waiting to be mined by you.

Looking for Eliza

Upon our first meeting, mas Arif said that he wished to know how I was tied by kinship to Eliza van Zuylen. I countered in the same way: I wish to know my kinship tie with Eliza van Zuylen. We looked at each other and laughed. I am from Holland and I am looking for a family member who lived in Pekalongan. Arif lives in Pekalongan and longs for archives stored in Holland so that he can learn about his city’s history.

Living in Oosterbeek, I know what it is to be “without archives”. Our town hall was destroyed during the Battle of Arnhem. I believe that the great numbers of avid local historians in the town were spawned by the absence of those archives. We are all trying to bridge that gap that separates us from the pre-war era. This is the way in which I understood Arif’s and Zahir’s reference to the lack of information about their buildings and streets. What was the Pekalongan in the colonial era that is still so present in the streets? Suddenly I became aware of what a great luxury it is to be able to access the Dutch colonial archives. I believe that lack of this kind of access inspires a particular kind of longing and disorientation. There needs to be a large, carefully planned effort to transfer information from The Netherlands to the former Netherlands East Indies so that the people here can explore/ interpret/ construct their past. Indonesia is ripe for this. Over-ripe.

I am here in Pekalongan as the guest of the Pekalongan Heritage Community, a group of citizens committed to making the most of the gigantic potential of Pekalongan’s history. Mrs. Eliza van Zuylen-Niessen is an historical figure in Pekalongan who has gained world-wide attention for her signed batiks. I have my name to thank for this extraordinary invitation.

Now we have found each other. We each have access to what the other does not have. During my three days here, mas Arif showed me Pekalongan’s enormous strengths. Now it is up to me to go back to Holland and accumulate information that can be meaningful for them.

The past three days I have been examining the hopes that they have pinned on me from many angles. I would like to develop a project proposal that is mutually satisfying and beneficial. Not just a research project, but a project that demonstrates that I have learned from the Back to the Villages project and thus places the needs of batik producers, rather than researchers, front and centre. Then I will feel that I have truly left the ivory tower behind.

Pekalongan received me very warmly. I sense a longing here to have the real Eliza van Zuylen walk through the door and begin talking about her life, take them on a tour of the city as it once was, hold up her batiks and explain them.

Batik, Batak, Batak, Batik

Last night MJA Nashir’s mother showed me her old batiks: one from Cirebon and the rest from Pekalongan, beautiful old batiks as they are seldom, if ever, made anymore.

We had just arrived from Yogyakarta. I hadn’t been to Pekalongan since 1980. At that time I fell in love with the colourful batiks that are typical of here. MJ de Raadt-Appell’s book (in Dutch) entitled De Batikkerij Van Zuylen te Pekalongan, was published in that same year but I didn’t find out about it until considerably later when both Rita Bolland and Harmen Veldhuisen asked me if I was related to Eliza van Zuylen Niessen to whom De Raadt Appell had dedicated her book. I had never heard family stories about her, and knew of no family members except my uncle who had been to Indonesia. I did not believe that I was related to this talented and now-famous woman.

Eliza Charlotte Niessen was born on 23 November 1864 in Fort de Kock (now Bukit Tinggi in West Sumatra), a century and six days before I was born. She married Alphons van Zuylen from Pekalongan. Her sister Christine married Jan van Zuylen, his brother. Christine moved to Pekalongan and one of her sources of income was a small batik workshop. When, in due course, Eliza and her family also moved to Pekalongan she helped her sister with the batik. Eventually, she started to produce it on her own turf. Eliza gave birth to twelve children. She was widowed in 1918 at the age of 54 and the war put an abrupt and ugly end to her batik workshop. It was plundered and destroyed by the Indonesian freedom fighters and she and her daughter Clementine were imprisoned. When Eliza became ill, they were transferred to the Franciscan monastery in Pekalongan. She died there in 1947 at the age of 83 and her remains were buried beside those of her husband in Pekalongan’s European cemetery.

Eliza Niessen’s workshop was one of the most famous of its time. Her signed batiks have become collectors’ items. Harmen Veldhuisen has written eloquently about them and Rita Bolland, former curator of textiles at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, wrote the Foreword to De Raadt Appell’s book.

Thirty years after shrugging off their question about kinship with Eliza Niessen I started to do genealogical research to find out whether my black eyes originated in Indonesia. I found some records about Niessen ancestors going off to the Netherland East Indies, but I do not know what became of them. I did enough research, however, to conclude that all of the Dutch Niessens are related.

The subject of Eliza Niessen re-emerged when I met MJA Nashir, my photographer and now author of the newly-launched book about our journey together in 2010 (Berkelana dengan Sandra, 2011). His mother was a batik maker who worked for a Van Zuylen competitor, Oey Soe Tjoen. With this surprising information I was compelled to return to the famous Niessen of batik….hence this short pilgrimage to Pekalongan.

Last night was special because Nashir showed his mother his book for the first time, just as she showed me her batiks. Nashir has gone from batik to Batak. I have gone, ever so briefly from Batak to batik and it all came together around the living-room table.

In the meantime, in the heart of Batakland, our friend Restuala Namora, the central figure in the revival of Batak textiles, has just launched Nashir’s book at a gathering of government people. In a week’s time, Batak and batik will once again mingle when he weds his love from Solo. Batik-making is among her many accomplishments.