Visuals and Tangibles

When my friend in the UK, Pamela Cross, heard that Ompu Elza's textiles had been exhibited in China, her response was immediate: this needs to be made visible for all to see. "Hang the photograph of the bulang in the Chinese exhibition on the wall of the Weaving Centre," she suggested. It wasn't long before she had also taken it upon herself to commission a T-shirt to celebrate Ompu Elza's great achievement. At the end of July a group of textile enthusiasts would visit the Weaving Centre and the shirt could serve as a prominent visual reminder of this illustrious highlight at our Centre.

Mas MJA Nashir saw the brilliance in Pamela's idea. He has done all of our Pulang Kampung T-shirts and knows everything about the art of T-shirts; he had supported himself with the craft while he attended university. Living in Pekalongan, he had a team to help him. He went to work immediately. 

 

The process was fun and, in the end, also important. I shared the various stages of the design with Pamela and her excitement grew. I told Lasma that the T-shirt was in the works and anticipation in the village also mounted. Anticipation, I was learning, was an important part of the tour and we were having it simultaneously in North Sumatra, Java, England and The Netherlands. None of us could wait to see Ompu Elza's face when she laid eyes on Nashir's product. 

At the last minute there was some doubt as to whether the shirts would arrive on time. The T-shirt had become an emblem of honour. It would be the talk of the town. I could not countenance having to disappoint everyone with an announcement that we hadn't been able to get the shirts to the village on time. Gulp. Luckily our friend Arjuna Bakkara was heading home from Jakarta on Friday evening. Enough of the shirts were done on Thursday evening for Nashir to package them up and send them on the bus to Jakarta that night. Arjuna picked them up, flew them to Medan and then bussed them to Pematang Siantar where Lasma and her husband picked them up on Saturday, with one day to spare before the tour. Such relief!  For a mere item of clothing? No, this was not just a T-shirt; this shirt contained love, admiration, pride, beauty, friendship, our shared dreams coming true.

I asked Lasma to immortalize Ompu Elza with her T-shirt by taking a photograph of le moment supreme and here is the result. Lasma included a quote from Ompu Elza: "If Sandra is proud of my textile in China, I am twice as proud wearing this T-shirt". Her smile had never been wider. Her shirt is a source of constant joy and celebration for her, an historical landmark. Words could never have done what these shirts do.

Nashir confessed that he had worn his everyday since he had taken it off the press. He was not exempt from the excitement. Not having one in Europe, I wore one of Nashir's T-shirts from the Pulang Kampung III journey, on the day that the tour visited the Weaving Centre. These shirts retain their meaning. It made me feel like a part of everything.

The T-shirts have given me pause to ponder Ompu Elza's bulang, that other material item at the Weaving Centre that is having enormous impact. I have known Ompu Elza for as long as I have known Lasma. She is quiet, modest, always friendly, a bit shy. For eight years our relationship consisted of little more than sweet greetings and farewells with smiles in between. No real content.

Until she sat down in her loom. That is when I finally met Lasma's mother. I saw someone of stature emerge. I saw her peaceful, graceful spirit allowing her to resolve every tangle in her yarn and patiently ensure that every gesture in her loom was accurate. I saw textiles grow under her hands that had perfectly straight selvedge edges, a sign of balance and a lot of experience. I saw focus and determination. Ompu Elza's textiles were even and calm. A weaver weaves her own personality. I saw her authority and expertise. I hadn't known what to make of this woman who one day announced her intention to start weaving again. I had had no expectations but my admiration and respect grew every single day.

I spent long hours with Ompu Elza as she wove. Sometimes I had a camera in my hand and sometimes a notebook and pen. Mostly I just sat and observed as the sun slowly made its way across the sky. Sometimes I asked questions. She answered patiently, often putting down her sword to give me her full attention.  She repeated her answers to make sure that I had understood and that her answer was sufficient and complete. I saw that same diligence as when she wove and I began to wonder whether her character had been shaped by the hours she had spent in her loom. "I am the same way in the fields," she said. "I don't like to hurry, don't like to work by the clock. I don't take breaks. I like to proceed steadily, in a focused way, slowly and very surely. That's just the way I am." This gave me the first inkling that I was in the presence of a master. She was not a weaver who just slammed in the weft to get a cloth ready for market; she was someone who attended to details and for whom the final product was her foremost priority.

One day while she was working on her second textile, she looked up from what she was doing, and I saw another facet of her personality emerge. "Mantap," she said. "Mantap". (Super!) "I didn't think I could still do this!" She was expressing amazement at herself. "I haven't woven for so long and I didn't know if I could still remember this. Super!" Her face was wreathed in smiles and for a moment she was exuberant. All of us sitting around her, her children and I, laughed with her infectious energy. Later she told me how much she liked the combination of weaving in the loom and working as a farmer in the fields. "Weaving forces me to think," she said. "It keeps my brain sharp. Working in the fields allows me to move and sweat. Then I feel better physically. You don't mind if I don't weave everyday?" "Of course not, I said. It is up to you how you organize your time! I am happy that you would like to weave for me, but when and how much is entirely your own choice." "Then I choose for this balance, back and forth between the fields and the loom, depending on how I feel, my other duties, and the weather," said Ompu Elza. This made me so happy. This is what handicraft should be, I thought. This is what weaving must have been before the market became overbearing. 

Often, as I sat beside her I felt quite emotional, overwhelmed by the beauty of her character, so willing, so kind, so uncomplicated, so gentle, so strong. I saw a deep beauty in this woman that I had known for 8 years, but never met until I saw her in her loom. When I saw the photograph that Lasma sent of her wearing her bulang while weaving a bulang while sporting her bulang T-shirt, I teased by calling her Ompu Bulang. That, in my heart of hearts, is truly how I think of her. She did not just weave yarn with her skilled and careful hands, she wove her personality and she wove our relationship. My hours beside her loom are precious to me as I recall them here in The Netherlands and miss the beautiful ambiance of my Weaving Centre. I may have built it, but she is creating it.

Ompu Elza is receiving the honour she deserves. Here she stands with her
beautiful daughters and her little grandson at her sides, together with tour leader, Mary Connors.

How important is something tangible; how important is making a product. Perhaps that is what the English idiom: "having something to show for oneself" means. The culture in the material. The loom gives Ompu Elza the opportunity to create herself. I wonder if it is just I who thinks of her as whole when weaving is part of her life? I wonder if that is how she thinks of herself? One thing is clear. Weaving is not drudgery to her when she has the freedom to do it when and how and where she wants. She is the weaver to whom I absolutely must give free rein and impose no constraints whatsoever. This genius deserves all the room she can get.

This brilliance is what Pamela's/Mas Nashir's T-shirt announces.

July 2018

At the end of July, we will receive a tour at the Simalungun Weaving Centre. Lasma and her family are taking it on with great anticipation. I have been doing what I can from Europe, including this letter to the tour participants that I would like to share more widely. I have not blogged for a long time. I lived in the village for 4 months at the beginning of 2018 and wanted to keep a low profile while I worked quietly. Now I am ready to 'come out', at least a little bit. This letter provides a bit of an overview of what has transpired.

Dear Textile Tour Members

Welcome to the Simalungun Weaving Centre!

Bulang

I cannot be with you today, alas, but I would like to share some background information about the Centre by way of this letter. 

I started my anthropological career when I did my first 'fieldwork' in the area of Lake Toba in 1979. Since that first visit, I have seen the Batak weaving tradition decline drastically. In 2010 I handed out copies of my book, Legacy in cloth, Batak textiles of Indonesia to the weavers depicted on its pages so that they would have access to documentation of their own tradition. The transformative journey turned me into a textile activist. I realized that the weaving tradition would die out unless the weavers are encouraged and filled with pride for their work -- a tall order when they do not receive a living wage.

In 2012 I met Lasma Sitanggang, 18 years old at the time. She and I were both anxious to do something for her ailing culture and to reduce poverty, so we joined forces and developed a relationship of mutualism. We are both more effective when we work together!  Eventually I purchased the land where the Weaving Centre is located and built the house. Lasma and her husband look after it and develop its role in the village. The world is in deep crisis. Lasma and I both want to be part of the solution and not the problem. I invest the little that I have directly in the village, rather than in big business, and try to pass on my knowledge of the Batak weaving arts while I am still able. Lasma and her family are my guides and connection to the village.

I chose Lasma's village because it needs a boost, and also because it was once the centre of production of the headcloth called 'bulang'. I knew that if the bulang tradition was not revitalized quickly, it would be lost forever. Older women who know how to make it all stopped weaving when the bottom fell out of their market 15 years ago. They are now traumatized and distrustful. It is hard to get them to weave again. Lasma's mother was the first to dare to take up the loom again and she is enjoying it! Her daughters are learning from her. We hope that others will follow suit. Your tour may help convince them that weaving is appreciated and can be viable. 

We are still at an early experimental stage. I bring photographs of old museum bulang to the village, and import natural-dyed yarn from Java, Bali and Savu (we don't yet produce it ourselves). Finding the right yarn is an enormous challenge. We discuss everything at length and try to decipher the best way to proceed. Luckily our senior weaver, Lasma's mother, Ompu Elza, is patient and helpful. Each textile she makes is slightly different. Our goal is to develop beautiful artworks of the highest quality for a market that will truly sustain the weavers. Achieving that kind of quality and market will take time. In the meantime, I pay the weavers a living wage for every bulang they make and we document the specifics of each textile carefully. We are building a study collection, a record of our experiments.

Ompu Elza at her loom

Our logo is 'weaving for wellbeing'. Our dream is to create a place where weavers have the latitude to express their creativity and feel respected and happy. Lasma and her husband, Ober, have taken a course on organic farming and will hold an organic garden workshop here at the centre in September for fellow villagers. Eventually our dyes will be organically grown.

When I come back at the end of the 2018, we plan to hold a workshop together with weavers from other regions so that we can share and explore supplementary warp techniques. This is an important step for producing a bulang of the very highest quality. 

I hope you enjoy our House of Simalungun Weaving Culture. We are small and at the very beginning of what we hope will be a long and fruitful journey that benefits the whole village. Your visit is filling everyone with energy and opening their eyes to new possibilities. I believe in the importance of "holding hands" between North and South for the betterment of us all. 

Thank you for joining us!

18 February 2017: 14 new pupils

"I have some news," Lasma told me during our last telephone call, and then she shared it with tremendous excitement: "We have 14 new pupils". It took my breath away. She has ordered new looms at a good price and is planning to purchase the yarn. She has teachers and pupils for the three major Simalungun textiles: bulang, surisuri (nanggar suasa) and hati rongga. They want to start within 3 weeks.

The pupils are, for the most part, motivated by money. The subsidy has enticed them; due to it they would rather weave than not weave. This is very telling and suggests that, indeed, the lack of a decent market is the core reason for the decline of weaving. The teacher at the school with whom Lasma works to rekindle interest in weaving, together with Lasma, drummed up the enthusiasm at that school, Lasma's alma mater. Our challenge now is to keep that enthusiasm high.

The need to chase down markets will continue to grow; that is obvious. I also think it will be important to build some kind of "initiation" into the weaving program informing the pupils about the support coming from outside their country and the importance of markets.

I think we also have to work on a text and a label so that purchasers know what they are supporting when they buy a textile from the Simalungun Weaving Centre and, hopefully, with time our label can be synonymous with quality. Perhaps we need to put a green sticker on the first ones to signal that the textiles were made by a novice.

Lasma said that the quality of weaving by the first pupil, Nita, is already as good as that of the grandmother, her teacher (whom she has watched all her life). Lasma is so deeply struck by Nita's capacity that she is encouraging Nita to learn everything that her grandmother can share. Her grandmother is 85. When she is no longer with us, Nita will be able to fill her shoes -- or rather her loom and her teaching role in the Simalungun Weaving Centre. Luckily that is also Nita's ambition.

Methinks this is all pretty good news.

Thank you again to all of you who have contributed to the "First Textile" pot.

New legacy (and information) from Legacy

I have a new friend on Facebook: Hotnida Saragih. As soon as I accepted her friendship request, she wanted to chat. She knew my book, Legacy, she said, because I had visited her mother’s textile store sometime in the past and because, quite by chance, her grandmother is depicted on page 129. “She is the one wearing a green sweater and chewing betel,” Hotnida said by way of indicating which picture. I had snapped the picture when walking by because it was a rare example of a person still wearing an indigenous headdress, but I had not spoken to its wearer. Now, 29 years later, I was chatting through Facebook to her granddaughter. One cannot help getting a few goose bumps.

Our chat was interesting. Hotnida has taken over her mother’s shop in Pematang Siantar called “Ulos Gedogan Kain Simalungun”. (They used to have a ‘kiosk’ in Saribu Dolok; that is where the picture on page 129 was taken.) This immediately whet my interest. “There is quite a difference between the textile market of today and what your Mom used to know,” I threw out, curious how she would respond. She was in overwhelming agreement. “Nowadays people are interested in quantity but not quality,” she responded. “The artistry in the textiles has disappeared.”

Tapak Satur

In response to my subsequent question about whether there was a demand for textiles of high quality, she was able to answer in the affirmative and point out that she was trying to meet this market by introducing Simalungun textiles in silk. This, too, made me curious. Silk? I had brought silk from Makassar to Hutagalung in 1986 but none of the weavers had been able to use it; it just was not suited to the Batak backstrap loom. Hotnida, however, insisted that it was possible, that she truly was using the backstrap loom, and that it was real silk and not synthetic. She obtained her silk from a friend in Bandung, she said, but she did not know its origin.

She had had a few silk outfits (sarong and selendang) woven in Porsea. Again my interest was piqued. Simalungun textiles woven in Porsea (a Toba region south of Lake Toba) from silk???? “They are still traditional Simalungun textiles,” she claimed…  I could not help but begin to wonder about her definition of “traditional textiles”, especially given that there are essentially no Simalungun weavers left. It turned out she was referring to the textile patterning; her textiles are the Tapak Satur variety, a Simalungun pattern often used by brides. “Tapak Satur being woven in Porsea?” I queried. “Why not?” was the response. “The Porsea weavers are better at using fine yarn than the Silalahi weavers,” she pointed out. I made a mental note to try to look this up someday and take pictures.

Bulang

Then her story about her traditional Simalungun textiles took another interesting turn. The signature Simalungun textile, known as ‘Bulang’, she has woven in Jambi (a province in the south of Sumatra), she said. At this point, I just about fell off my chair. The story became a little more credible when she pointed out that it was Simalungun weavers, originally from Tiga Runggu (until recently the centre of Bulang production in Simalungun) in Jambi who were doing the weaving. Again, she stressed, “traditional Simalungun”.

How much more complex the geography of Batak textile production has become!

Without the Income from Weaving

I gazed around Mamak Si Dirita’s house with admiration. ‘You are doing so well,” I said. ´Your house is very nice and your children are beautiful and healthy. When I first me you in 1986, you were very poor and your clothing was torn. (I showed her pages 495 and 496 in Legacy where she is depicted) You were harried and distraught at the time. Things have gotten better for you.”

To my great surprise, Mamak Si Dirita burst into tears. “It hurts me so much to remember that time, she said. My husband had fallen sick and I did everything that I could for his health. There is not a clinic or hospital that he has not seen the inside of. All of my children were very young and I had to make ends meet with my weaving and my agricultural work. Eventually my husband got better but it was a difficult time. It hurts to think about it.” The poor dear could not stop weeping. Her tears told me about the depth of her pain. I was sorry that I had opened it up. She and I shuddered to think what would have become of her without the income from weaving.

Now her eldest daughter has a bakery in the back of the house and they make delicious sweet breads for sale. Her husband and she are both healthy. Their eldest daughter will marry next month and their house is new, spacious and relatively comfortable.

There was no social safety net when she fell upon her hard times. Weaving was her only regular source of cash besides the one or two harvests. I have often referred to that photograph of her weaving a bulang to demonstrate the poverty of the weavers, but I had not known until this visit just how desperate her straits had been. What do people today rely on? Now weaving is more costly than helpful.

The Last Simalungun Weaver

Simalungun was on the agenda for 20 October when we left our gracious hosts at DEL University. Every Batak region is special in its own way. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Simalungun, but enough to know that the crisis in the weaving tradition is very serious. During the opening of our textile exhibition, I wore a Simalungun textile because there were no Simalungun weavers represented in the exhibit. During the Back to the Villages project I had only seen one elderly weaver. Our meeting was fleeting. Now I wanted to find her and also the former bulang weaver depicted in Legacy and to whom I had given a copy of Legacy in cloth. I wanted to give Nashir a chance to work his magic there with his camera.

It was a wet, grey, cold day. First we found the elderly woman. I had not remembered that she lived in a vehicle repair shop. Literally. Now it is something that I will never forget. There were vehicles in various states of decomposition strewn around the yard and when I knocked on the door and peered into the house, I saw that the front room was being used as a garage. I wondered how anybody could call premises like those a home. I recognized the spot under the too-skimpy front eaves as the place where I had seen her weaving last year. The thin piece of plywood on which she sat and the little bench that she used to support her sword while weaving were still there. I then wondered whether that little bundle wrapped in cloth might be her loom. What shocked me most was that somebody had parked his motorcycle on top of that little piece of wood, but how would he recognize this as a place to weave? Imagining how the weaver must feel, I felt angry and hurt and tried to distance myself from these feelings to recognize the situation for what it was: the last weaver whose work and tradition was clearly not valued or respected. It was being crowded out by the more pressing business of her son’s vehicle repair shop. Probably his work brought in more money. This is the way a weaving tradition ends, I told myself.

The elderly woman appeared and at my urging unwrapped her bundle (after the man moved his motorcycle) and resumed weaving her bright red bulang.

Her son, a gentle, shy fellow with greasy black fingers, came and sat down beside us. He had seen the copy of Legacy that I had left with their neighbour and was curious about my interest in Batak cloth. He was aware that his mother was the last weaver of bulang textiles in the district, but not aware of its significance. I tried to impress upon him the age, complexity and uniqueness of her work and how highly I valued it. His response was a look of surprise, puzzlement, reflection. I thought that I detected some deep awareness that she was enacting an ancient tradition, but this may have been wishful thinking on my part. He seemed to display some shame or embarrassment about his lack of respect for her work.

I told him about Nashir’s book and how it was Nashir’s intent to raise awareness of what is happening to indigenous Indonesian culture. He thumbed through it; he was curious about its contents but he said that he could not afford the $10 that it cost. I told him to just give us what he could afford and I would be happy to subsidize the purchase because I really wanted him to have it. Planting another seed?

I gave him a gift of a Dutch handkerchief which he was delighted to immediately tie around his head. He and all of the men in his repair shop seemed happy and honoured by our visit. I gave his mother a crocheted doily explaining that it was the craft of a Dutch grandmother. She was mystified by the gift because she couldn’t imagine what it could be used for. There really wasn’t a place for such an item in a motorcycle repair shop.