A Rainbow in a Pothole

There is a line in the Rangsa ni Tonun text that we are filming that reads “na songon halibutongan di lupaklupak” We didn’t have a clue how to film it mostly because we didn’t know the meaning of the word lupaklupak nor, therefore, how a halibutongan (rainbow) related to Batak dye. We asked Restuala and he thought that a lupaklupak was the natural sink that forms where the water in the rice terrace falls down to the next level. That little waterfall sometimes creates a spray and if the light is just right, a little rainbow results. We then went off looking for potholes and rainbows thinking that the text was using the rainbow as an anology for the colour that the dye process would give to the yarn.

We found many lupaklupak. The search was delicious. Suddenly we became aware of the structure of rice field irrigation. We saw many little waterfalls that we had never noticed before. We learned to see a micro-beauty in Muara that had been there all the while we had focused our prime attention on the panoramas. Our search took us down roads where I think that tourists seldom go and Restuala even took us to a rather large waterfall hidden in the woods where we saw and enjoyed the gurgle of the stream. What a way to make a film!

Restuala showed us what lupaklupak look like in the sawah
and then we looked for rainbows. It turned out to be as
successful as looking for a pot of gold.

Nevertheless we failed to see a rainbow. Nashir did his best with trick photography but only came up with stars of light playing with the falling sawah water. Only later did we learn that, while close, we were not looking in quite the right place to make our visual translation of this line of the text. Our next stop after Muara was Ompu Okta’s village where she would demonstrate the use of the spinning wheel. The rather long and arduous process of getting the spinning wheel to work (the subject of another blog) meant that I had plenty of time to talk with her. The Rangsa ni Tonun text had continued to play in her mind because her childhood memories of the weaving process were still emerging. (How the film and the text has inspired weavers never ceases to thrill me.)

This time she also took us to the village and house where she had been born (a carved and painted original Batak house on stilts). She showed us pictures of her mother, who passed away in 2008, and her grandmother who would have been born around 1900. Her grandmother’s photo was reminiscent of so many that had been taken during the colonial era, a nice posed black and white shot of the whole family gathered around the grandmother and grandfather seated in the middle.

Ompu Okta's grandmother is sitting in the middle with an ulos over her shoulder.
OmpuOkta herself is the child sitting first on the right, cross legged, in the foreground.

Ompu Okta and her husband both expressed their joy that they had been born at a time when it was still possible to soak up some of the old culture. She had never made red dye herself, she said, but her mother and her grandmother used to make it and she had watched them. It reminded me that her knowledge is, indeed, the result of knowledge that has been passed down for many generations.

This is what she could remember:

The leaves of a mountain tree (hau dolok) called haramonting as well as saduluk and other plants were mixed together with water and boiled in a clay pot (like the one used for indigo dyeing). The water in the pot turned rather red.

The pot was then taken to the rice fields, to the butak: runny mud beside the river. A hole was carved out and the mud heaped up in the middle. Yarn was put in this natural "pot". When well permeated, the yarn was taken out of the clay pot and “planted” in the mud (she called this sigira as well) and pushed down in it so that it would become well-permeated with the mud. The liquid in the clay pot was added to the lupaklupak, as she called it!!!! and this was the reddish “rainbow” in the lupaklupak. The whole process might be repeated three times until the colour was deep enough. This is a colour that won’t fade, Ompu Okta said, extolling is virtues proudly while shaking her head disparagingly about modern, synthetic colours.

Now, I am not positive that I have recorded all of the details of what Ompu Okta said exactly correctly and I would like to go back and check them with her without too many other people and goings-on around us, but I do feel confident that in sitting with her in front of her house in the village, we had stumbled upon the rainbow in the hole in the rice fields that the Rangsa ni Tonun text referred to. The connection with dyeing couldn’t be stronger. It was the critical moment when the red mixture was added to the mud and the dye solution could work its magic on the yarn.

Holbung/Uluan

On the 24th of June, our task was to get from Parapat, on the East side of the lake, to Balige, on the plain south of the lake, to complete the presentations for Uluan and Holbung.

I wanted to give a book to the elderly weaver depicted on page 461 (it is her loom on page 6) – she had been wonderful to talk with - but I knew that she would be deceased. We made a few stops but were not able to find her descendants or anyone who knew her. Still, I wanted to make sure that I left a book behind in the Lumban Julu region where she had lived. I admire the textiles from this region. It was annexed relatively late and some of the nicest old pieces still come from there, but it still feels like one of the most difficult regions to connect with.

By once again letting the spirits of Toba guide us, we found Ompu Okta, and it was both one of the most richly satisfying and one of the saddest meetings of the project (see the description in blog entitled Dilepaskan).

We drove on to Porsea. I remembered very clearly where the couple standing there proudly on page 534 lived in Huta Parparean. When I did a customary Batak yell and knock at the door, the woman who came out immediately recognized the couple depicted on the plasticized picture; it turned out that she -- and everybody else in the village -- was related to them. There were alot of them and they all gathered around me, the strange phenomenon in their midst. There were no weavers among them, so I elected to give the book to the little worried boy in the photograph being held in line by his grandfather’s hand. 

The villagers fetched him and he arrived, all vibrantly grown up, half wet and half naked, apparently interrupted in his work at the fishpond in the back. Overjoyed with the book, he offered me a goldfish in return and we joined him on the trek to the pond. From the clutter and chaos of his village we were suddenly greeted by a beautiful, green and peaceful vista and we expressed our admiration spontaneously and bountifully. The villagers warned us that our delight was a delusion because if we looked carefully at the hills in the background, we would see that they were being clearcut and it was already disturbing their peaceful pond. Such is the environmental drama unfolding right now in Porsea. 

In the end, I came to my senses and turned down the goldfish, pointing out that I had no tank in the car in which to carry it and, at the end of the road, no fire to cook it with (I didn’t say that I was vegetarian). They understood my argument and forgave me and we undertook the trek back to the chaotic, tumultuous village and said our good-byes. The villagers promised that they would show the book to the weavers (probably of ragi hotang textiles) they knew living close by Porsea.

The book was a gift from Sandra Sardjono who is using textiles to explore the mysteries of her homeland.

The next stop was Laguboti. I was anxious to find Ompu Si Masta (depicted on page 143 of Legacy). I last met her in 2003 in the Balige market. Although we had built a strong tie during my research in 1986, we no longer recognized each other; we had both changed. I sat in her stall and began to ask questions, apparently just as then, about the names of textile types. She gave me the superficial answers typically given to the casual shopper but I kept pestering her for more details. Finally she looked at me and said, “There used to be a Canadian girl who knew all the names of Batak textiles. She used to come to me to learn them all.” “What was her name,” I asked, suspecting that she would mention my name. When she did, I let the cat out of the bag. “That’s me”, I said. “I’m her.” Then she fell on me and smothered me with hugs.

It was a long search, but we finally met up with her in her home. Her son led us there and we waited until she emerged from a meeting with a Bibelfrau. I warned Mas Nashir to be prepared for her exuberance and keep his finger on the shutter release of the camera... And so we were launched into a joyful afternoon. She took us all out for an extended lunch and entertained us in her extroverted way, remembering so many incidents and details. “You were my friend,” she said. “I treated you fairly and we never haggled on the prices of the textiles I found for you.” She had been a wonderful source of textile types and taught me a great deal.

Now she was well into her 70s but had too much energy to stop her work. She still sold textiles at the market, three times a week, still liked it, and wanted to continue with it for as long as she could. I didn’t get a sense of what she thought of the book. Perhaps she will only formulate her impression after she has found the time to study it. I wonder if she will take it with her to the market? May it remind her of our many discussions about textile types the way it reminds me of her. I had been so worried that I would never have the opportunity to see her again and rejoiced at this opportunity to meet her in her home together with her family.

Her book was donated by the Soroptimists of Arnhem.

See Back to the Villages - the map!