Bulang Pulang

A remarkable Batak textile fell out of the skies and into my lap. It is a beautiful, old Simalungun bulang, very fragile. It’s previous owner, Nancy Barr, lives in Alaska. Years ago she found me on the internet and asked me the provenance of this cloth that she had purchased on e-Bay. And now she has bestowed me with it claiming a change in her circumstances – and also out of respect for my work. I had forgotten the details of that cloth from years ago, but when I opened the carefully wrapped package, I had to pinch myself. It was a Simalungun bulang. And the bulang used to be made in Lasma’s village, Nagori Tongah. It felt like I had received a message, but a message that I didn’t quite know how to fully interpret.

This bulang is handspun and dyed with the plant called mangkudu.
The photograph gives a sense of its worn fragility but also the soft faded
colour and the beautiful weave

This bulang feels precious, like a sacred trust. I have no bulang like it in my collection. It is made of handspun yarns that are dyed with natural dyes and I certainly long to be “the owner”. But it doesn’t feel quite right to just store it with my other textiles. Surely it is destined for greater things. It is fraying at the edges and there is a hole in it. It has had a long life and has been well used on top of having travelled internationally. Surely the textile has come to me for a special purpose.

Last August I went to Indonesia. It would be a busy trip but I was able to arrange things so that I could spend a week in North Sumatra to be with my daughter, Lasma. I couldn’t resist bringing the textile with me. What would Lasma think of it? I went straight to her village upon landing.

I carefully rolled and wrapped the bulang so that it would not be damaged by the journey. When the right moment came, I unrolled it. And there it was, back home. This cloth that had once been worn everyday by a Simalungun woman (perhaps it had been worn by its weaver) was back in Simalungun. More than a century ago when the cloth was made, women in many Simalungun villages would have woven the bulang. There was no way of knowing which village it hailed from, but there was always the chance that it had actually been made in Lasma’s village and that I had truly brought it back home. How wonderful to consider. This cloth from Nancy Barr in Alaska, obtained on e-Bay from someone who had inherited it from his parents and knew nothing about it, now back in Tano Batak. Back to the village; pulang kampung.

Lasma's mother points out a detail in the supplementary warp

I watched Lasma’s reaction. Her mother and her aunt, her father and her younger siblings, as well as some men from the village who had come to their little café to drink a cup of coffee, looked on.  What leapt out were the similarities and differences with the bulang they knew. While nobody makes the cloth anymore, Lasma’s mother and aunt used to weave it. There were no oohs and aahs of surprise; the patterning had remained remarkably constant. There was delight at the natural colour and the fineness of the yarn and the weaving. It was familiar to them.

Lasma inspected the cloth minutely

I wondered if the cloth inspired Lasma. She inspected it minutely but I couldn’t see whether she had fallen in love with it.

Lasma shows Pung from the Bebali 

Foundation and Jean Howe (to the 

right,  not in the picture) the bulang 

from her tradition.

During the following week I brought her to Bali to meet the crew at Threads of Life, the company that specializes in Indonesian textile revitalization. There, Jean Howe, one of the founders of Threads of Life, instantly fell in love with it. It felt good to show them a Batak textile that they didn’t yet have in their collection. And to give Lasma a sense of where her future market could be found. She witnessed how much a bulang could be admired somewhere else in the world.

Lasma learned about working with mangkudu dye when
she visited Threads of Life in Bali. The learning process
is long and dyeing with mangkudu also takes a great deal of time.

After our journey to Bali, Lasma returned to Tano Batak. She was anxious to get to work carried by the energy of her new inspiration.  She was full of

I showed the textile to students in
Pematang Siantar. Wherever I went, I took
advantage of opportunities to show Batak people
this remarkable piece of their heritage.

enthusiasm. I continued on the rest of my journey alone.

When the trip was over, because of its fragility, I brought the bulang home with me again.

The bulang is here with me now again in The Netherlands, rolled and safe  -- and still undeniably present. It has gone back to the villages for a short visit, but it is still like a scrolled message waiting to be interpreted. It is not mine. It goads me. It asks for revival.

My next step will be to contact the Batak weavers who attended our workshop and learned how to spin. Time to commission some handspun yarn, and I know someone who works with red mangkudu dye…

The future is still long. I hope that someday there will be a safe opportunity for this bulang to go back to the villages permanently.

5. It's about Pride and Knowledge

In my official description of Back to the Villages / Pulang Kampung III, I write that an intangible outcome of the project for which we strive is the immeasurable good called ‘pride’. I cite William Ingram, one of the founders of Threads of Life in Bali, in his TEDx talk, “Where there is pride in identity, traditions get passed on from generation to generation.” In other words, we want to get to the generative heart of the maintenance and revival of Batak weaving.

I have to admit that one of the things that moves me the most in this world is when I see someone awakened by pride. Perhaps this is my single, most powerful memory of Pulang Kampung I. I watched weavers look at the corpus of Batak textiles and become confronted and moved by the beauty of their own weaving tradition. I get goose bumps even just thinking about it. Weaving today gives no status and no glory in Indonesian society, and it generates next to no income. Weavers, while they know how difficult and complex their art is, feel no pride in their skills. They are more likely to feel shame. To be a weaver indicates that you have no education and no money.

Clearly, there is something wrong with the marketing of Batak textiles. If marketed cleverly, the weavers would be able to derive sufficient income from their skills, perhaps even a good income. But the uneducated poor in the society are not in a position to discover and create a good market.

I am not the one to find new markets or to exhort Batak weavers about what they should and should not do.  What I can do is share the results of my anthropological work together with my sense of admiration for their traditions. I am eternally sad that weavers feel little pride in their work. This is why I want to give them recognition. I want to see their faces bloom in smiles and their energy soar. 

Nai Arta, Silindung Valley,
Photo by MJA Nashir, 2010
I love her smile. She has woven so diligently throughout the years.

When that happens, the rest will happen by itself: young people will take up the art; schools and universities will know that indigenous techniques are also worth teaching; consumers will pay more for the products of weavers and weavers will try harder to make beautiful cloths. They will take it upon themselves to explore marketing avenues and options; textile artists will go international with their innovative pieces.

I know that pride is closely related to knowledge. To know about Batak textiles is to love them. Our film, Rangsa ni Tonun, offers the audience a tiny bit of insight into the complexity of backstrap weaving. It also offers a tiny bit of insight into the Batak literary tradition because it is based on a text committed to paper in 1872 by a guru who was a traditional literary specialist. The Batak have no access to this text; I found it in the archives of the VEM in Wuppertal, Germany. When it returns to North Sumatra in the form of our film (and yes, I will also hand out photocopies of the original text to all who would like a copy of it) it will be cause for celebration. Every villager who watches the film will learn that weavers a century ago were admired and their skills were understood as having come from a goddess. This little bit of knowledge is reason enough to feel immense pride.

Living Threads - 17 March

In transit now in Singapore, on my way back to The Netherlands, I think of my first meeting with Pung and Frog in the dye studio of the research foundation arm (YPBB) of Threads of Life. They were showing me how to make red dye using the roots of the Morinda citrifolia tree because I had never had the opportunity to see it done in the Batak area. The Batak stopped using that natural dye decades ago.



Ingredients in one of the red dye recipes




Frog working on a Morinda dye bath in the YPBB studio

Pung and Frog are seasoned field workers. They love to go into the villages and speak with the weavers. They are quiet and both are good listeners, respectful of local dynamics, styles and traditions. They like to get close enough to the weavers to become the recipients of stories about their youth. Often it takes awhile before a dye recipe bubbles up in their memory. (We noticed this with Ompu Okta. It emerges gradually. They need to have the opportunity and the encouragement to re-open memories of past weaving practices.) Rarely do Frog and Pung need to teach a dye recipe because they are unable to recover/uncover the local one. And, out of respect for local traditions, they never share a recipe if it has been given to them in confidence.
Pung’s and Frog’s knowledge is rich and varied. They know the trees and plants, the composition of the soils and the waters and the chemical reactions when all the components come together. With their knowledge, they could fill tracts and tomes and contribute so richly to the academic library on Indonesian weaving (including dyeing) traditions. But “writing up findings” is not their thing. Their first love is being in the field, experimenting with the recipes they learn about, assisting the weavers and making beautiful natural colours. They showed me the results of their failed experiments with a laugh. How much work it took to learn the basic proportions needed for a good dye and the factors that influence the variations!

Ever the academic, I felt regretful that this information and their stories were not being pegged down in writing and disseminated. But there is another side to it all. I am also aware that they are preserving knowledge in a different way. When I think about it, I believe it to be a more valuable way. The West would not need or have museums if indigenous worlds were not disappearing. Many of the activities of ethnographic museum flow from the understanding that it is important and possible to “preserve” indigenous traditions in storerooms and documentation systems, the academic formaldehyde for posterity, so that when the traditions disappear forever, there is at least a record of them. Pung and Frog, on the other hand, are reviving traditions. The dye recipes that they have discovered are not being pickled and described for a rarified Western audience, they are being cultivated once again in their cultures of origin. Dissemination happens when a mother teaches them to her daughter. They are dynamic traditions susceptible to change and renewal. I recall haviong felt a little confused when I realized that the successes of YPBB were taking the urgency out of the necessity to record everything for posterity.

I am an anthropologist who has been shaped by museums and steeped in their history – yet I was curiously elated when I realized that Pung and Frog were making part of the museum endeavour redundant. How brilliantly liberating! If cultural dye traditions were to live as vibrantly as Balinese orchestras in the face of modernity, if they were available for researchers to visit at any time, if indigenous traditions were not threatened but there was room for them and respect for them in the world…it is difficult to even contemplate… the world would be transformed into a living museum and the otherwise redundant buildings called “museums” could perhaps adopt a different interactive role in support of indigenous traditions. How invigorating, satisfying...

On the day that I left Bali (16 March), Frog and Pung left as well. They were heading for the Batak area carrying with them a bag of Morinda citrifolia root, their arsenal of knowledge and their sensitivity to culture. How I wish I could be the proverbial fly on the wall as they work among the Batak. I am impatient to see their results, but they tell me the process is slow and I will have to wait for years. Impatience has no role in this process. If and when they succeed, Batak dye recipes will again be firmly rooted in a few communities, and the weavers will have Threads of Life as their market outlet making their efforts financially worth their while.

...As I post this blog from my office in The Netherlands (in the meantime, I have arrived back home) I have just received a message from Goodman Ompusunggu on Facebook telling me that the weavers in Muara have met Frog and Pung and are excitedly participating in a workshop with them. There is plenty of energy around this renewal of their weaving tradition....How I wish I could be the proverbial fly on the wall....

...A week later, now. Jean Howe has sent me an email telling me about the findings and successes of Frog and Pung. Not surprisingly, the Batak have their own unique recipes with regional variations, and apparently the Morinda root in the Batak area is of high quality. There is great anticipation that soon a natural-dyed Batak textiles will enter the collection of Threads of Life.

Closer to Threads of Life

In March 2009, I gave the first copy of Legacy in cloth, Batak textiles of Indonesia to Threads of Life. At the time, I had not yet met them. I had only heard about their work and read about them on their website. I was excited about their cause and felt that my book, while academic, was written in the spirit of their own very practical work keeping Indonesian weaving traditions alive. I wanted to use the public occasion of my book launch to highlight what they do. It is now two years later. I have now met Threads of Life and learned first hand about what they do.

It has all been sparked by Legacy in cloth. They found that the book offered potential as a foundation for working in the Batak area. Until now, they have always worked in Eastern Indonesia. When I was in the Batak region last October/November, some members of the YPBB Foundation, the research arm of Threads of Life, joined me. They wanted to pinpoint places where they could begin to work.


The men in the photograph, from left to right, are Daud, Pung, Nashir and Frog.
The women are former weavers in Sianjur MulaMula



I enjoyed Jean Howe's company alot during those travels. (Photo MJA Nashir)

Phase two of our collaborative plan is happening now, in Bali. I am being given the opportunity to explore what they do and how they do it. The visit is touching me in the very marrow of my anthropological soul. In the first place it is fun to renew my acquaintance with Pung, Frog and Jean Howe, who visited North Sumatra. They shared openly and alot at that time. Now I am seeing them on their home turf. Threads of Life is a beehive of activity. What they do is careful, thoughtful, and complex. I am discovering that I have been given an opportunity to be privy to what I will not hesitate to call one of the most extraordinary experiments in the textile world. My respect and admiration for this organization grows with each passing day.
I have seen their natural dye laboratory/studio, poked my way through their shop, gone behind the scenes in their offices to see their data banks, day-to-day operations and textile stores, and visited field sites in Timor and Bali. All the while, I have been able to talk with them endlessly about what they do and why they do it that way.


Examining one of Ompu Okta's mother's textiles in the Threads of Life office.
Frog is to the left, Jean Howe is pointing thoughtfully to the beadwork in the cloth,
and Pung is to the right. These three had joined me in North Sumatra in November.

Central to their work, and the reason why I find their work excellent, is their sensitivity to the cultures in which they operate and their intense awareness (and learning) of the role that textiles play in those cultures. The revival of textiles often (if not inevitably) resides at the heart of cultural revival. Jean Howe told me yesterday that cultural revival was perhaps their most important goal when they started their business more than a decade ago. And this is what clearly excites the members. Pung, Frog and Sujata, the dye team, have told me many tales about the discovery of natural dye recipes. They do not enter a new area with the tried and true recipes that they know, but facilitate the remembrance of the local recipes and colours. This is a sensitive process that may take years. During the process, the team works like a partner, noting (what is remembered of) the recipe, going back to the lab to try it out, returning to the people to compare results, assisting and troubleshooting aided by their knowledge of the chemistry of the dyes… until they finally get the results they are looking for. In this way, they revive not just the natural dyes, but also local recipes and colours (each dye yields a vast array of colour and each region has its own recipes and preferred tints and tones) and stimulate the revival/retention of that exciting diversity that characterizes Indonesian culture.
Colour is just one facet of the process of textile renewal. Ancient textiles may be “replicated” in appearance, but when they are revived in this cultural sense, including songs, techniques and equipment, associated rituals and so on, this is what is truly exciting and laudable. And this is what Threads of Life does.

On the first day of my visit here in Bali, I saw some “revival textiles” in the Threads of Life storage area that filled me with such emotion that I later had to sit down and try to figure out what was going on inside me. It is hard to explain. At first I described it as akin to the first time I saw impressionist paintings in Paris after having learned to love them in books and postcards. But the wellspring of my emotion was much deeper  than that. I love the quality of the ancient textiles of Indonesia but for so long they have also been the source of a dull, sad ache because I know they represent a past era. Modern products are different. They are not as fine, they are more standardized so that the weaver’s hand is virtually absent as a signature, the materials from which they are made are usually inferior, and so on. In my writings, I have described and analyzed the kinds of changes that have taken place and the social and economic reasons for these changes. Seeing revived textiles has moved me to tears. It is like witnessing a miracle.

 Oh Shoppers, when you go to the Threads of Life shop in Bali, know what you buy! Your purchase is supporting indigenous Indonesian culture, making a tiny bit of room for it in this world.