A Singular Woman (24 page)

In June 1978, Ann learned of an elderly kris smith living in Kajar. In Javanese tradition, the kris is an object of extraordinary importance and power—a weapon, an heirloom, a mark of rank, a male symbol, an item of male ceremonial dress, an art form, a sacred object with protective powers and a life of its own. “There are numerous stories of kerises rattling about in their cases, wanting to get out, or of kerises flashing about in mid-air, independently attacking their owner's enemies,” Ann wrote in the early 1980s. According to the Solyoms, who have written extensively on the kris, a man might go so far as to trade his car or his house for a kris that he senses is right for him—one that makes him feel spiritually complete and personally content. The makers of krises were believed to be descended from the gods. Like wizards or magicians in Western cultures, master kris smiths possessed special knowledge. Their craft was passed on only within families, and was seen as dangerous; it demanded, as the Solyoms put it, “the release and control of threatening powers that could go astray if not treated properly.” By the late 1970s, there were said to be no master smiths left in Java, just a few village smiths carrying on the tradition of their fathers. On June 19, 1978, Ann wrote in her notes that she had learned that there was one kris smith left in Kajar. (She later learned there were two.) “He still has the magical power to make pamor kerises,” she wrote, referring to the light-on-dark damascened patterns on a kris blade, made of layers upon layers of iron and meteoritic nickel sandwiched together. “He has not been able, however, to pass the tradition on to anyone and he is old now.”

In early July, she and Waluja interviewed the kris smith, Pak Martodinomo, one of two surviving sons-in-law of Kasan Ikhsan, one of the two original smiths in Kajar. He was about eighty years old, Ann estimated. In his prime, he had received seven or eight commissions a year. Now he rarely received one. “People don't attach importance to kerises any more,” Ann wrote in her notes. “A change in the times.” Martodinomo's father-in-law had been an expert in a type of Javanese mysticism known as
ilmu kebatinan,
which Ann described later as a set of practices, Hindu and Buddhist in origin, intended to increase a person's spiritual power and insight into the meaning of life. Ann listed the steps required before starting a kris: Fast for three days; hold a private
selamatan
with barbecued chicken, coconut rice, and boiled rice to protect the kris during forging; hold a personal
selamatan
to protect the smith from bad spirits. Work on a kris was to commence at the beginning of the Javanese month called Suro, continue intermittently throughout the year, and end the following Suro. A smith could kill no animals during Suro and was required to fast Mondays and Thursdays. “Get acquainted with the spirit of the iron to be used,” Ann wrote. “If you don't get acquainted, can have an accident while working e.g. be blinded, paralyzed, very sick, insane or even die suddenly.”

Ann appears to have had little difficulty convincing her subjects to talk. In small script at the bottom of one page of field notes, she noted, “None of the people interviewed so far are comfortable in Indonesian.” For that reason, Djaka told me, he and Ann conducted all of the interviews together. She would discuss with him, in Bahasa Indonesia, the questions she wanted to ask; he would then ask them in Javanese and record the responses in his book. In the evenings, he would translate the answers into Indonesian for Ann, who in turn would translate them into English in her notes. When I asked why he thought the villagers were as forthcoming as they were, he first said, “Because I asked them in Javanese.” In addition, he said, “If a foreigner asks questions, they want to answer. They're happy to be asked, and they're delighted to answer.” Furthermore, he added, they came to think of Ann as a good woman.

During a visit to Kajar in July 2009, I met two women, Suparmi and Mintartini, who, like many Indonesians, did not use surnames. They identified themselves as daughters of Pak Sastrosuyono, head of the blacksmiths' cooperative when Ann first arrived in the village. They told me that they remembered seeing Ann in Kajar when they were children, and they recalled the pleasure she seemed to take in talking with villagers. “People would shout, ‘There's a
londo
here!'” one of the women told me, using a Javanese word for Dutchman that is often used for any European, Westerner, or Caucasian. “Everybody came. She was like a celebrity here. They really liked it. Some people couldn't answer the questions, but they were happy that she was here.” In the acknowledgments in her dissertation, Ann described the Indonesian villagers she encountered as “invariably friendly, pleasant and willing to patiently answer many questions concerning their enterprises and personal finances, even when dozens of neighbors and village children are crowded in the doorway or looking in the windows. I do not recall ever being treated rudely by an Indonesian villager, or ever having had an unpleasant fieldwork experience while in Indonesia.” On one occasion, the headman of the largest hamlet in Kajar announced at a village meeting that he had “adopted” Ann and Djaka Waluja as his children. He renamed Ann, Sri Lestari. “I gather it means ‘Forever Beautiful,' and wasn't that gallant of him,” Ann wrote to Dewey. “Thank God for nice comfortable middle-aged men who don't give you any complexes.
Amien!
”

Everything about blacksmithing captivated this native Kansan. If she could be reincarnated, she told a colleague, Don Johnston, years later, she would come back as a blacksmith. “I still dream of the day I can visit you and go upriver to see those big blacksmithing villages you told me about,” she wrote to another acquaintance in Kalimantan in 1981. She was not simply interested in the technical aspects of the craft; she could see that, in the hands of a skilled smith, utilitarian objects emerged as something closer to art. She became almost proprietary about her village. “She was very possessive of Kajar,” said Garrett Solyom, who was doing research on the kris, working closely with a smith in another village in Java. “It was very clear that she knew she'd stumbled on something special. She made it clear, in indirect ways, that she didn't want me poking around there.”

Kajar was just one of a half-dozen villages, each with its own handicrafts industry, on which Ann had chosen to focus. There was Kasongan, a center of crockery production seven kilometers south of Yogyakarta, where competition from factory-made pottery was cutting into the market for traditional earthenware products. There, tourism was creating a new market for animal banks, toys, and terra-cotta souvenirs. Malangan, fifteen kilometers northwest of Yogyakarta, had been a center of hand-loom weaving, specializing in striped sarongs and solid-colored waistcloths. When shortages of yarn and competition from mechanized textile mills put most of the weavers out of business, villagers turned to converting bamboo and palm leaves into items such as baskets, winnowing trays, and rice steamers. That industry, too, was encountering competition from factory-made housewares. Pocung, like Malangan, had once been a thriving hand-loom weaving village specializing in
lurik.
When that industry faltered, villagers switched to trading or to making perforated leather shadow puppets out of animal hide. With the rise of tourism had come increased demand for leather “
wayang
-style” souvenirs, including bookmarks, lampshades, miniature puppets, and key rings. “Problem with marketing through stores because stores only want cheap wayangs and don't care about quality while Sagiyo doesn't want to make cheap wayangs,” Ann observed in her notes from a long interview with a puppetmaker named Sagiyo from the village of Gendeng. (Her notes from that day included a sketch of a birthday cake with four candles. “Joko's birthday,” she wrote.)

Patterns and themes began to emerge. It became increasingly apparent, for example, that women were not necessarily benefiting from industrialization. When female-dominated industries adapted to competition by producing new products for new markets, the best paid jobs often went to men. The most profitable industries—the ones requiring expensive raw materials and access to working capital—were almost exclusively male. In one village, Ann found that nearly every household made bamboo basketry, but only forty of those had the capital to work with more lucrative rattan. In all forty, the entrepreneurs were men. Another pattern that captured Ann's attention involved the industriousness of Indonesians. “We found almost every family to have an incredible array of subsidiary activities which they juggle around to make sure that they are always occupied and always have something coming in,” Ann wrote to Dewey from Kajar. That ingenuity seemed to defy the assumptions of scholars, such as J. H. Boeke, the early-twentieth-century Dutch economist whom Dewey had mentioned. Boeke had described the economy of the Indies as “dualistic,” with a gap between Western-style, capital-intensive enterprises and the more labor-intensive peasant enterprises. He attributed the gap largely to cultural differences—an Indonesian inclination toward cooperation rather than competition, a lack of interest in capital accumulation, and a tendency to engage in wage labor only until one met one's limited needs. But Ann found village industry producers intensely interested in profits and keenly aware of fluctuations in the prices of fuel, labor, and raw materials. Instead of cultural differences, Ann thought, a lack of information and lack of certain technologies might help explain economic “dualism.” But what about access to capital? Even the relatively large investment in equipment of a successful entrepreneur such as Pak Sastro in Kajar paled by comparison with the money required to set up a Western-style factory.

The main cause of the gap in the Indonesian economy was not cultural, Ann came to believe. It was differences in access to capital.

In March 1978, Ann found herself face-to-face with the problem to which she would end up devoting much of her professional attention in the coming years. She was attending a meeting of the Indonesian government agency that had sponsored her research, a unit within the Department of Industry that worked with small enterprises. According to her field notes, the subject of the meeting was income distribution and employment. The question arose: Why was the government's development aid not reaching the lowest levels of the landless? The answer given was that credit was going to farmers—not to village industries, including handicrafts. Under the government's five-year plan, special banking units had been set up to make loans to small farmers. But there was no similar program for rural craftspeople. Banks were interested in efficiency and profit, not in employment and income distribution. When craftsmen filled out loan forms and took them to the bank, even with the help of Department of Industry officials, the banks turned them down. Employment would increase and income distribution would improve, someone pointed out, only if small entrepreneurs got help.

“Ask Subroto where the credit is,” someone said, referring to a Department of Industry official. “We never see any credit.”

When Ann was not in the field, she was in Yogyakarta, sometimes with Maya, sometimes not. Lolo Soetoro's niece Kismardhani S-Roni, who was a teenager when Ann moved to Yogyakarta, remembered Ann and Maya living for a time with Lolo's mother in the house near the bird market and Ann homeschooling Maya in a room hung with Maya's drawings. “Tante Ann” was an exacting teacher, Lolo's niece and her brother, Haryo Soetendro, recalled. Maya got no favored treatment just because she was the only student, Soetendro remembered. “You had to work hard to get a good mark from your ‘teacher,'” he wrote in an e-mail to Maya in 2008. At other times, while Ann was in the field, Maya sometimes stayed with her cousins and their parents in a big house on the edge of the campus of Gadjah Mada University, where Lolo's sister and brother-in-law taught. “I wandered around a lot,” Maya recalled. “Mom was working sometimes, and I would be taken care of by a collection of people—possibly some were employed by the family, possibly some were family, some were neighbors. There was a complex across the way. I remember old Dutch gates and wrought iron and running around there. Sort of like ‘it takes a village' kind of thing. A lot of the women who took care of me had other kids. . . . But I also remember her being very present in the afternoons and teaching me.”

For several months, apparently in mid-1978, Ann stayed with an Indonesian family in their house next to the Pakualaman Kraton, a smaller compound not far from the main compound of the sultan. Maggie Norobangun, who was teaching English at the time, had met Dewey in 1976. Dewey had become a close friend of the family's and a regular guest. With Dewey's help, Ann stayed for several months in what Norobangun called “Alice's room.” She would leave early every morning on the back of the motorcycle of yet another graduate student who was working as her research assistant in the field. She would return late in the day, saying, “Oh, Maggie, I'm dead beat.” She was friendly, easygoing, and happy to be living in Yogyakarta, but she never spoke about her family, Norobangun told me. On one occasion, to Norobangun's surprise, Maya, then age eight, came to visit for several days. Norobangun had not understood that Ann had a daughter. On another occasion, Lolo stopped by with Barry and Maya on a trip to Borobudur. “I didn't even know about Mr. Soetoro,” Norobangun told me.

By the fall of 1978, Barry was seventeen and a senior at Punahou in his last year at home in Hawaii. Ann had never found the distance separating them easy, commuting between continents and trying to remain engaged in his life. Now his childhood was coming to a close. Nancy Peluso, Ann's friend from Yogyakarta, told me she remembered meeting Ann earlier that year in a small hotel in the southern part of Yogyakarta. They made a practice of getting together when they were both in town—to eat dinner, catch up, get a massage. On this occasion, Peluso recalled, Ann broke into tears. “She just started crying,” Peluso said. “And she said, ‘You know, I've got to go back to the U.S. for the last year that Barry is in high school. I really want to do that. After that, he's gone and I won't have any chance to experience that. I just want to be back there.'”