Setting up Sopo Sorha

The decline of Batak culture is not sitting well with me. Not at all. I see it most clearly from the vantage point of the weaving arts. Yes, there are still weavers. People can point to them and say, “See, the weaving craft in the batak area is still alive.” But I see something different: the most skilled and advanced manipulations of the loom have been forgotten; the social rules enforcing quality have been forgotten; most of the motifs have been forgotten; weavers have been forced by the market to adopt a division of labour and their weaverly knowlddge has narrowed. When the oldest generation passes away, the sophisticated knowledge of one of the richest and most beautiful weaving traditions in the archipelago will have disappeared, even though there may still be a few weavers left, toiling over their South Sumatran look-alike textiles that are the only ones truly viable on the market.

Restuala Namora Pakpahan’s Sopo Sorha Harungguan in the bay of Muara, where the weavers are trying to revive the weaving arts, is a precious oasis of cultural truth in the cultural sahel. The weavers there are keen to weave the cloths that they admire and that their ancestors wove. They are being aided by staff from YPBB, who are helping them recover their natural dye recipes. Before I left Indonesia, Restuala presented me with a textile, just freshly cut out of the loom, completely dyed with Morinda citrifolia, the indigenous Batak red colour. I was overwhelmed by this expression of hope.

I agree with Restuala’s initiative and goals. He has asked me to be the Foreign Ambassador of Sopo Sorha Harungguan and I have agreed to accept this posting and all of the responsibilities that it entails. I have been "in-vested" and his red natural-dyed textile is my cloak of ermine.

My horses are galloping away in front of me. I envision the following:

• the construction of a sustainable weaving centre that will provide an example of future architecture with a minimal ecological footprint

• purchase and storage of excellent collections of textiles to use as templates for the weavers

• conservation training programs for young people so that they can look after their collections

• curatorial training for young people so that they can learn how to develop high quality exhibitions

• record and revive techniques on the brink of extinction by organizing workshops with the last remaining practitioners of the techniques

• facilties for people who want to come (from afar) to learn weaving

• write children’s books about weaving

• facilities to organize and participate in a wider textile community: nationwide, ASEAN, or Worldwide (Indigenous Weavers Unite!); they can learn from each other and stimulate each other

• develop natural dyes

• develop marketing programs

• develop language training programs

• translate Legacy in cloth into Indonesian and/or Batak

• development of an annual prize to highlight the extraordinary accomplishment of a Batak weaver or weaver-champion.

I am looking for sponsors: local corporations that are active in the Batak area and want to “give something back”, individuals who want “to make a difference in the world”, granting programs, existing organizations that would like to support these initiatives. Where there is a will, there is a way.

O Tano Batak

Back in The Netherlands. Home after 2 months in Indonesia. It is not yet clear what my next step will be. My mind is crowded by the possible projects I envision. I feel an overwhelming sense of urgency. The alarming statistics about the decline and loss of human cultures were once only statistics. During this last trip to Asia, they froze my heart as I witnessed the desertification of the Batak homelands. Desertification because the villages are being deserted; many have become lonely and desolate; Desertification because the villages have becomes resource deserts: no knowledge, no vibrancy, no future and, worst of all, nobody who cares.

This is Tano Batak today, physically one of the most spectacular places on Planet Earth: stunning nature surrounding an indescribably beautiful crater lake. What stands out is the merciless need for the remaining inhabitants to run after a few pennies to survive. That there are no garbage systems as a result of which the plastic of decades is cumulatively decorating but not beautifying the landscape. Opulent mausoleums built to the ancestors represent almost the only influx of capital from migrant Bataks. Tano Batak is becoming a burial ground. A place of refuse. The contrast is painful. From a vantage point overlooking Lake Toba, the heart misses a beat. The landscape is so generous. It gives its all. Down below, the culture has become so stingy, grasping, needy -- and it is eroding the natural bounty. O Tano Batak, indeed! The memories of past history, social rules and ceremonies, indigenous crafts (the mouthpieces of thought systems), all have almost entirely disappeared. How often have young people said to me, “How can I love my culture if I don’t know anything about it?” There is nothing there anymore to teach them to love their history and culture.

Culturelessness, a state that is being encouraged by TV commercials and malls, is a social time bomb. A people that is rootless and without social norms and rules that can be enforced is vulnerable. They can fall prey to further agents of destruction: substance addictions, extremism and intolerance of thought, inability to take responsibility.

This crisis is as great as the current global economic crisis. Where are the sage heads bowing over this problem and working feverishly on solutions? The solutions need to be found in our generation.

Lasma Sitanggang

After leaving the home of the last bulang weaver, it was simply a matter of turning a corner and driving up a narrow path to get to the home of the bulang weaver depicted in Legacy in cloth. The welcome that I received was extraordinarily warm. We were invited into their home where after exchanging pleasantries we talked about Nashir’s book and showed them a copy of it.
Lasma Sitanggang was one of the several young women in the room. When she came and sat down beside me, she confided that she wanted to learn to weave. I was surprised. Until then, I had only heard from young people that they did NOT want to learn to weave because it was too difficult and didn’t pay. From Lasma, I received such a clear and thoughtful answer about the importance of continuing her culture and the work of her ancestors that I asked Nashir to film it. Before the camera, her answer was just as lucid, detailed and even more extensive.

When she was finished and Nashir had put the camera down, she asked if she could tell me more. She confided that she had been selected to compete for a university scholarship, but had failed to make the final selection. She recounted bravely, but the emotions got the better of her and she broke down and sobbed bitter regretful tears on my shoulder. She was a bright, beautiful, articulate young woman with an open and engaging smile. She had lost the future that she dreamed of and felt estranged from her friends who all went off to university without her. She had no money to pay for a university education and she was doing her best to accept her fate with grace. She showed me her hands and said that she was not afraid to work hard in the fields. She would be stuck in the village, probably for the rest of her life.

I found her pain difficult to watch and decided on the spot to give her a copy of Nashir’s book because it would support her in her resolve to explore the knowledge of the ancestors. Nashir and I both expressed our belief that there are valuable forms of knowledge that are not taught at university and we pledged to bring her in touch with people who could support her on her journey to explore the Simalungun weaving tradition.

How strange and wonderful it was to have this happen around the corner from the old woman whose loom was lost amidst the broken-down motorcycles and becaks.

This morning, I shared the story by phone with Restuala Namora in Muara and Jean Howe (Threads of Life) in Bali. Both were receptive and supportive of Lasma Sitanggang. I hope that this remarkable meeting has satisfying follow-up for all concerned. Some employees of Threads of Life will be in Sumatra at the end of November. My heart and thoughts will be with Lasma. I hope that her future will be bright.

Sadness in Si Hotang

There is a house in SiHotang. And a rice barn. Both are elaborately carved. They are praised and depicted in an early 20th century publication about the Netherlands East Indies. These magnificent Batak architectural accomplishments were one of the foremost reasons why the Batak poet Sitor Situmorang brought me to visit the valley in 1980. I later spent a few days in that same village inhabited by his relatives. Some pictures that I took of the house are published in my dissertation (1985). They were the reason why I wanted to bring Nashir to Sihotang in 2011. Also to visit Ompu Borsak whom I had missed in June 2010 during the Back to the Villages project.

When I visited in 1980, Darwin was there, Ompu Borsak’s youngest son. He was younger than I, a gentle, gracious fellow, shy and kind. I never saw him again. When I returned in 2010, he was dying. I spoke to him briefly on the telephone but by the time I got to Pangururan, he had passed away.

At last we found his village. There was garbage strewn everywhere. The majestic house and rice barn were now anything but majestic. There was junk lying around the buildings, the carcasses of attempts to make a living. A clumsy attempt had been made to touch up the paint on the walls and it had only succeeded in making the building garish and inconsistent. The once-proud village square was now overgrown with weeds and the stone walls had also become home to messy shrubs. It was like a desert.

There was one woman in the village, a widow with a child living in a crumbling house across from the once-magnificent pieces of architecture. I went up to her and learned that Ompu Borsak had fallen and was now living with another son (the one to which I had given Legacy when I was not able to reach her last year) in Pangururan. I asked her what had happened to Darwin. She responded scornfully. “Oh, he drank himself to death. That is what all the men do around here.”

We left SiHotang silently. I began to formulate an image of Darwin, the youngest son and required by adat to stay in the village. I imagined him day in day out, year in year out in this village of former glory (his great grandfather had been a regional leader), being able to recite his mother’s stories about his great and gracious ancestors. I imagined him unable to find employment, unable to make something of his life and everyday staring out at a Batak house fading and declining. I imagined Darwin fading and declining with the house. Perhaps the attempts to spruce it up had been his. Half-hearted, unskilled, hopeless.

Darwin is now buried just behind the house. Even in death he will forever remain in this village which could not nurture him. Those “left behind” in the villages have little future or hope. “O Tano Batak” is being hollowed out.

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.

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.