A Batak Photograph I took in Silalahi in 1986

This Batak photograph graces the hompage of the renewed website of Fashion Act Now. It is from my book, Legacy in cloth, Batak textiles of Indonesia (p. 138). 

It was taken in North Sumatra, Indonesia in 1986, and specifically in a village on the North shore of Lake Toba called Silalahi. I snapped it quickly because I was so excited to see the regional version of the textile called ‘bintang maratur’ (ordered stars) typical of that region. I had seen the ikat patterning and textile layout in century-old museum collections but nobody was making it anymore. The textile tradition of the Batak people is in sharp decline.

Like most varieties of Batak textiles, this textile has become extinct. The Batak people living around the edge of Lake Toba have (perhaps I should write ‘had’) an ancient weaving tradition. Based on weaving vocabulary and the technical repertory, it is believed to be one of the oldest in the Indonesian archipelago. At one time a tremendous number of ikat patterns, expressed in manifold variations in the different villages around the huge crater lake, characterized their tradition, but since colonial times that variety has shrunk as has the quality of the textile work. 

 

This is not the fault of the weavers. Despite often being on the receiving end of blame for the decline in their tradition, in fact they are the heroes of their story. It is by dint of their ingenuity, technical prowess and allegiance to their craft that they have continually been able to adapt the fruits of their looms to the vicissitudes of the market and changing social circumstances. They have learned to deal with altered materials including yarns, dyes and loom parts, and have also altered their patterns to be able to weave faster. This has inevitably meant larger and less complex patterns and letting go of some of the exacting rules taught by their ancestors to ensure high quality. They have developed divisions of labour and the speed of their work is spectacular, but after a while even their amazing creativity and perseverance has not been able to win against the forces of the market. I have witnessed weavers in tears because the cost of yarn had become higher than their earnings from weaving it. They had no choice but to put down their looms. This is traumatic for them because they lose their expertise and social position and are no longer able to supplement the family income. It is not their choice to stop weaving; they are forced. Many of them burn their looms in hopelessness and discourage their daughters from taking up the craft. Poverty is a major reason why their tradition is dying. The failure on the part of government to protect them from competition from (semi-)mechanical looms that take over their designs and then sell their ersatz products at a lower price is partly to blame for their destitution. None of this is the fault of the weavers. They are being sacrificed by the system.  Their skill and aesthetic system is being obliterated by modernization: industrialization, colonialism, capitalism, and the incessant exhortation to wear Western garments and fit into urban culture. 

 

There are amazing stories of weaver resistance here and there around the world. This article about Guatemalan weavers explicitly points the finger at the fashion industry to explain their resistance. An Indonesian story reveals how Mama Aleta in West Timor used her Molo loom and her weaving community to protect her natural environment from planned mining operations. Her story fits the familiar theme of indigenous people standing up for clean water, ancestral lands  and access to the forests for natural dye and other materials. These are people unwilling to be erased and to live in sacrifice zones. So far no leaders in Batak weaving communities have stood up to organize resistance. And their tradition continues to decline.

 

Many initiatives are afoot to further commercialize, professionalize, speed up, commodify and fashionalize the Batak weaving tradition. The computer has been brought into the mix to ‘invent new Batak motifs’ and extensive efforts are trying to fashionalize the indigenous aesthetic. This has led to the introduction of yet more (semi-)mechanical looms in the region. Designers (many of them male) and university students have blithely assumed the weaver community’s prerogative to design their own tradition. Collectors have scouted for the last remaining heritage pieces of cloth and sold most of them to buyers from outside the country and in urban settings. Ironically, these collectors  are often celebrated as ‘aficionados of indigenous craft’. The youth have lost touch with the wealth that their tradition used to embody.  Modern versions of their heritage tradition have become, like fashion, items to parade, wear, use decoratively and then discard where they have permanence as waste because they are made with synthetic fibres.

 

It is, in short, a tale of enclosures, to use a word from the commons. The first wave of industrial and economic enclosures took place a century and a half ago with the introduction of synthetic dyes and commercial yarns and knowledge of natural dyes and fibres went into sharp decline. The second powerful wave of enclosures  occurred with the introduction of (semi-) mechanical looms against which the weavers were unable to compete. We are now in the third wave of enclosures in which computers and professional designers are assuming the weavers' role as designers. It is as though amnesia has struck and all have forgotten that it was the weavers themselves who invented and grew their brilliant tradition. Now they have been relegated to labour positions and become alienated from their own tradition. They have been squeezed out of the social position from which they constructed that tradition. This textile history is also about the loss of women's space. Yet they are the authors of weaving techniques and designs that are unique in the world. The textile tradition that is taking over from them in the name of ‘preserving their tradition,’ especially for tourism, is anything but unique. It represents decline and impoverishment and the kind of transformation that is taking place everywhere. Ho hum.

 

 This why I wanted to capture the image in Silalahi of a woman wearing a beloved textile from times gone by. I am sorry that I was not able to obtain the name of the wearer and she is probably no longer with us today. If anybody can identify her, please let me know. I would like to publish her name for posterity to accompany this photograph.

Follow-up:

C.F. Sidjabat contacted the writer of this blog in April 2023 because he knew the woman depicted in the photograph: Nai Jainus, Nyonya Sidebang, boru Simanjorang.

Ethics and Greed

When Budi died, his family was heart-broken. They are still in mourning. They tend his grave and spend time there with him. They put a roof on stilts above the grave to protect it from the elements. They suffer when they recall Budi’s slow and painful death. They miss him because he was the backbone of the family.

 

The only known photograph of the old village.

Budi’s village moved three decades ago from a self-contained spot beside running water to an open, windy place beside a new transportation artery. Like many villages. If the running water and the pond offered a bathing hole for humans and buffaloes, and a ready source of water for the gardens and every other need, the new road offered access to the market. And money. The old village had vernacular architecture, symbolism and history. The buildings were built in a cluster. The were no roads, only paths to neighbours, gardens, rice barns, water. The village had an intuitive, organic layout and the paths traced daily life. Its logic was local. Everybody in the village was related to each other either directly, or indirectly through marriage. It was a tightly woven  community. The weavers shared their knowledge with each other; the twine-makers helped each other twist the fibre into long ropes; the water was communally owned and used; the surrounding woods as well. People helped each other in their gardens and there were rules about how to share the yields. Everybody had the same lifestyle. There was hierarchy, certainly. It related to birth order and relationship to the primary clan, also talent and character traits. But the hierarchy was local and not too stretched, its extremities still in view and under social control.

 

People say that the village moved when the government refused to install electricity that far from the road. To have electric lights, the people had to move closer to the main thoroughfare. The new location is built on a grid, the village roads filled with potholes and mud when it rains, but nevertheless still usually accessible by trishaw. The shacks and bungalows line those pockmarked roads. They are built on privately-owned land. Most pieces were purchased at a premium from a local speculator. The owner of each plot must find his own source of groundwater and nobody goes back to the old stream and ponds except the occasional water buffalo herder  Each family unit pays for its own electricity. The family unit has superseded the village unit and the communal forest has been chopped down. It’s every man for himself.

 

That’s what Budi described. His home was one of the shacks along the new pockmarked road.  He and his wife talked about life back at the old village and they missed it. “People were nicer,” they said. “They helped each other; there was trust. Now there is only jealousy.” When one person gets ahead, the whole villages hates them while plotting, at the same time, to either better them or bring them down a notch. Jealousy and resentment are the norm, the response to the other one’s success. It has become dog eat dog. Avoiding the shame of poverty and failure is a prime motivator, and dodging arrows the task when there is success. Social face has never been more important than in this dirt-poor village. 

 

The village is still the frame of reference for daily life but external factors have come into play: the church and its often corrupt access to village money, school fees, taxes. Locally-run shops, but especially the multinational chains with their modern, cool appearance, suck the money out of the village. The local land speculator amassed his initial capital from his hardware shop. Cigarettes are another suction strategy, plotted by some of the biggest multinationals in the world, insidiously hooking the hapless farmers to ensure a steady income for the state and the tobacco industry.

 

Budi died recently from smoking. Not just his last cent was sucked out of him, and he left behind a wife and five children, the youngest still in grade school, as well as a smoking-related debt. He didn’t have an easy life. He was an orphan, so he never knew parental support and he inherited no land. He was condemned to poverty – and to face much shame, therefore, in the village. During the early years of his marriage he lived in a hut in a garden, not able to afford a home. He was proud to finally be able to  inhabit a house, even though the roof leaked. He was always careful about how he presented himself. He taught his children important values: to respect the community, to be honest, to be respectable despite living in poverty. He could be heavy-handed to enforce these values.

 

When he died, the family was stricken. His daughter told me about his goodness. "He never turned away a person in need." If there was only a single can of rice left in the sack and someone came by to ask for food, he would command his wife to give away the last bit that they had. The family often ate cheap tubers when their rice ran out. They knew hunger, too.  They could identify. For Budi it was a source of pride as well as adherence to village ethics to give to those less fortunate. He did it above protests from his wife whose focus was on providing nutrition for her children. “How can we eat if somebody else is going hungry?” Budi would ask. He maintained the values of the old village. Life was better there, even if there was less cash. People were kinder; you had more security, you could trust your neighbour’s heart. I wonder how much reciprocity Budi’s values met after they moved to the road? “Life is not fair,” I say to Budi’s daughter who is negotiating her way in this world, “but we have to be true to ourselves; otherwise we have lost everything.”

 

Budi’s widow has only one piece of land. It is located far from the village, symptomatic of her family’s penury. To get to it, they have to cross the plots of others but right of passage has always been normal and unquestioned. There are worn paths skirting the boundaries of the gardens granting the access that everyone needs. And people tread those paths respectful of each other’s gardens. Budi’s widow’s plot has been farmed for generations and she feels attached to it. “I have harvested corn here with my mother,” she says. The significance of her words is self-explanatory for her. She is saying that her bond with the land is eternal and irreplaceable. She is also steeped in the values of the old village. She knows her heart. A woman of few words, she says what she knows, simply and directly. "I don't want to sell my land. Nothing could replace it." She herself knows no malice, but she feels the pain of malice deeply. It is incomprehensible to her.

 

Now somebody wants the land far away from the village because it has a nice view. The government is pushing tourism as a local industry. It is supposed to generate modern wealth for this impoverished region. The local rich man, who garnered his wealth through his shop, and then made a killing by buying up and selling the land where the new village stands, smells new profits. Now he wants to play with even bigger boys: investors in the tourist industry. He has bought up all the land on the escarpment from the poor farmers and he can expect to rake in the profits when he resells to the developers. He has local police and politicians behind him, all expecting their ‘right’ of cut. He is not afraid to use pressure tactics to acquire his land. He has enough land now to be able to deny right of passage to farmers who want to reach their plot. He can secretly destroy their crops. He is rich and will get richer. The extremities of hierarchy are becoming more distant. He is a member of the village lineage but he compartmentalizes his values. “Business doesn’t know family,” he points out. “Business operates by different rules.” The old village is still dying.

 

…

 

When I think about what is needed to create a sustainable world, to push back against the hand of capitalism, I feel discouraged recalling what has been tearing this village asunder for generations, and knowing who is holding the ‘apparently’ winning hand, a hand that entails  suffering and decline of every kind for everyone else.