Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (10 page)

There were definitely no Indomarets in Waikabubak.

Raise your eyes from the undistinguished streets of Waikabubak and you’ll see the other West Sumba. Much of this part of the island is made up of lumpy outcrops of rock, rising from flatter land. It is on these hills that the quarrelsome clans of Sumba built their citadels and it is there that the traditional villages sit to this day. Modern Waikabubak has seeped into the flat bits all around these outcrops; the villages stand proud above the concrete sprawl, in it but not of it.

The first village I spotted was Tarung. From the road, all I could see was a bit of thatch, a few pointy roofs teetering above a patch of jungle. As I scrambled up a rocky path towards the village, the scraps of thatch resolved themselves into a group of bamboo houses built on thick wooden stilts. Each one had two doors opening on to a wide bamboo veranda, and each was dwarfed by its roof, which started broad and low over the veranda, sloped gently up towards the centre of the house, then narrowed and shot high into the air. It made me think of a child wearing a dunce’s cap jammed down over a thick fringe. I kept climbing, weaving past runaway chickens, piglets and children, and emerged suddenly into the centre of the village. A ring of houses decorated with the skulls of long-dead buffalo stood guard over a large oval clearing studded with megalithic tombs. On the carved top of one tomb, a fire raged. At its centre was some kind of animal.

As the flames subsided, I saw that it was a wild boar. The beast was on its back, four legs sticking rigid into the air, a smooth grey stone lolling in its mouth where its tongue should be. A village elder wearing a head-tie made of beaten bark leapt up onto the tomb, unsheathed his machete and cut a shutter in the boar’s belly, then reached in and started dolloping innards onto a banana leaf. From a higher tombstone above him, a haughty, hook-nosed figure wearing an iridescent pink napkin on his head and a stunning woven
ikat
cloth around his waist in place of trousers directed the distribution of goods. An ear for this family, the tail for that. That gloopy yellow bit from near the liver to someone special.

Entirely by chance, I had happened upon the celebrations that mark the opening of Wulla Poddu, the ‘month of bitterness’. In the Marapu religion, Sumba’s particular brand of animism, the bitter month is the equivalent of Christian Lent or Muslim Ramadan. It’s a month of restraint, a month when women are not allowed to pound rice after dark, and when there’s no dressing up or playing loud music. Striking gongs, sacrificing animals and ritual celebrations are all forbidden. Except, of course, for the gongs, sacrifices and celebrations that go with the Poddu itself.

Of those there are many. That first night, I sat on one of the stone tombs in the centre of the village until well past midnight, lulled by the call-and-response between the priests and the young men of the village. The women all stayed in their houses during most of the action, but no one seemed to mind that I was there, or to take much notice of me. I didn’t really know what was going on: I don’t speak the local Loli language and (I learned later) much of the chanting is in any case in a sacred language that no one but the Marapu priests understand. But I listened to the beating of the sacred gong, an instrument brought out only during this month. I watched as, one by one, the village heads of household walked into the clearing between the tombs and laid down a bowl of rice as an offering to the ancestors.

It was quite hypnotic, the low light, the steady chanting, the slow, repetitive movements. Suddenly there was a blood-curdling yell; I snapped alert to find the young men of the village charging towards me in a pack, lances raised. Then the pack parted, flowed around the tombstone on which I was sitting and poured down to the back of the village. The young men hurled their spears into the thicket below, the village was symbolically purged of last year’s sins, and the month of meditation could proceed.

I climbed back up to Tarung the following morning. An old lady with a wide, flat nose and a face made crinkly with smiling motioned me over to the veranda where she sat shelling beans. She was wearing an old cotton sarong printed with blue flowers, and a lacy top with a deep V-neck that looked like it was intended for someone fifty years her junior. As I took off my shoes and hiked myself up on to the waist-high veranda to sit with her, she disappeared without a word, then reappeared with a flowery tin tray that held a glass of tongue-numbingly sweet tea. In the other hand, half behind her back, was a little woven basket of trinkets: fake coral beads, golden earrings in the womb shape that confers fertility, strips of cloth woven with the word ‘Sumba’. Not many tourists make it to West Sumba; she looked disappointed when I batted her offers away, explaining in my brash Jakarta accent that I wasn’t really a proper tourist, that I lived in the capital, that I was at the start of a long journey and couldn’t carry anything. Then I asked what she could tell me about last night’s ceremony.

Mama LakaBobo clapped her hands with delight. She shoved the basket of trinkets out of sight and, in the lovely sing-song Indonesian of the eastern islands, embarked on the task of educating me about the culture of West Sumba. It is no easy task.
Everything
in Sumba’s traditional villages has significance, I was to learn: who gets to beat which gong in what location, who enters which house through what door. I learned that in the language of Tarung’s Loli tribe there’s one word for rice, for a machete, for a head-tie, when these things are in the village, but their names change when they are taken into the forest with parties of men hunting wild boar for ritual sacrifice. The sacred spear lives in this house, the sacred gong in that. Women are allowed to weave on this veranda but not on that one. To my endless ‘Whys?’ I always got the same answer. ‘
Ya, adat memang begitu
’: ‘That’s our
adat
.’

Adat
is one of those Indonesian words that defies translation; quite specific, but somehow hard to grasp, like a cloud. Crudely, adat is a cultural tradition, but in the days before Suharto and his wife tried to pare it down and scrub it up to display in the pavilions of Mini Indonesia, it was much, much more than that. Adat is rarely spoken of in big cities like Jakarta. But in many islands, the engines of communal life – birth and death, marriage and divorce, inheritance, conservation, education – are fuelled by the body of lore and transmitted wisdom that is adat. People in West Sumba say with pride that their tradition, their adat, is ‘thick’ or ‘sticky’, like condensed milk or treacle, though in truth it probably survived Suharto’s efforts to reduce it to the graceful twirling of wrists and tinkling of anklets mostly because Sumba was so very marginal to the national economy. In this island, where adat is deeply entwined with the local Marapu religion, it takes on the cast of something sacred. But it can also be more sinister. In the post-Suharto years, adat has been reclaimed and sharpened up as a tool in electioneering and politics, and as a weapon in the battle for rights over resources and land.

In Tarung, adat is so sticky that it can’t be rushed. Life passed slowly during the quiet month of Wulla Poddu. Whatever time of day I showed up, Mama Bobo would be sitting on the veranda, as if just waiting for a coffee and a gossip. Further up the village, too, verandas were scattered with people cycling through the tasks of life, methodical, unhurried. On one veranda, women were plaiting palms into pointy-hooded baskets that would hold the sacred rice at month-end. On another, an elder carved a drum. The haughty, hook-nosed man in the pink napkin, temporarily freed of his duties as High Priest, played a game of
congklak
, which involved moving dried-beans between hollows scooped from a squared-off log.

As the priest dismissed a group of young children who were lying to me about the rules of the dried-bean game, I remarked that the government’s family planning programme didn’t seem to have made much headway in these parts.

‘Thank goodness,’ he said. ‘If you only have a few children, you’re going to want to educate them. Then all of this – ’ he waved his hand to indicate the witches-hat houses, the carved gravestones, the bloodstains that remain from the ceremonial slaughter the night before, the elder whittling at the drum – ‘all this will be lost.’

The adat encompassed by that wave of the hand certainly keeps villagers busy. Never too busy, though, to share a cup of tea or coffee with me, to discuss the prospects of the various groups who were out hunting for wild boar, to explain why you should use buffalo-hide for a shield (tough) but horse-hide for a drum (sonorous).

It had been a few years since I’d spent any real time in rural Indonesia, but I found myself slipping quickly back into life as a curious but generally harmless outsider. I tried to help out with whatever task was at hand, if not shelling beans then sorting beads to make into trinkets, spreading corn kernels out to dry, bagging peanuts into penny packages to sell to hungry adolescents. On veranda after veranda, people would shuffle up to let me help with a task as long as they deemed it within my capabilities. If they didn’t, they made no bones about it. It was less than five minutes before I was demoted from weaving baskets to chopping onions. In every household, we started out with the usual chit-chat in Indonesian. So that people could place me in the universe I told them about my imaginary husband, about my non-existent job, about my parents’ village. Soon enough I just became part of the woodwork; people resumed conversations around me in Loli, I lapsed into companionable silence and all was well.

Mama Bobo had at first tried to treat me as a guest. I was invited into the house by the right-hand door, the men’s side, stepping over a threshold made of the skull and spreading horns of a buffalo. There were many of these skulls nailed in tidy columns down the front of the house, the legacy of past funerals and sacrifices. The forest of remembered carnage is how a clan advertises its standing to strangers.

The men’s side is the part of the house reserved for formal occasions, and, when the electricity supply allows, for watching television. Though the spirits that live in the towering roof hover equally above both halves of the house, the men’s side seems lifeless. The action is over the chest-high partition in the women’s side, where smoke billows from wood under the cooking cauldron and slops are pushed down through the cracks in the bamboo floor to the pigs and chickens that live below the house. Above this hearth hangs a huge wooden cage, crusty with soot. It’s here that the sacred objects are kept. There are beautiful
ikat
cloths that eat up six months of a weaver’s life and that will emerge only to be wrapped around a corpse and planted in the grave. There are heavy ivory bracelets, cracked with the passing of generations, without which no girl of good family can get married. There are drums and gongs which come out only for weddings and funerals. All growing gently smokier with every passing meal.

Mama Bobo was keen to show me all these things, but they could not be brought out without cause. ‘You’ll have to stay until someone dies,’ she said.

Over much peeling of garlic and mending of clothes, I ceased to be a guest and our conversation changed. The intricacies of local adat were replaced by more universal topics. Mama Bobo would take me by the hand and draw me close. She always wore her hair in a bun, from which wisps of grey escaped to frame a kindly face. When she was upset, her twinkly eyes would grow cloudy. She was worried about her daughter-in-law, who wasn’t getting pregnant. She was annoyed with her grandson, who wasn’t pulling his weight in the rice fields. She wished the local government would stop promising things that they didn’t deliver. She thought the many grandchildren who visited her veranda spent too much time playing with their cell phones and not enough time with their schoolbooks.

This diminutive woman was the steely core of a sprawling clan which snapped to attention whenever she chose to exercise her quiet authority. I started to do the same. ‘There’s a surprise tomorrow morning, be here at eight,’ she’d tell me. And I would drag myself out of bed and up the hill at eight, to find that Mama Bobo had spent the night in another village and had not come back. Still, I had been commanded and I obeyed, sitting around doing whatever needed to be done until the matriarch reappeared, with a smile and no explanation, three hours later.

The quiet month closes with three days of partying, interrupted by mass murder. In the Marapu religion, the spirits speak through nature and their messages are interpreted by
rato
– priests, more or less. Once a year, the spirits write our fortunes into the entrails of a chicken. At the end of Wulla Poddu, every member of the clan brings a chicken to the clan house. One by one, their necks are wrung, one by one, their throats are slit, one by one they are impaled on a skewer over a fire to rid them of their feathers. A couple of lads are charged with parting their chests with a single blow of the machete to expose the entrails. Then the halved chickens are laid out in rows. Hard enough to distinguish from one another even when alive, they look almost identical once they’ve been skewered and singed naked. Yet no one loses track of their own bird. As the rato approaches a chicken, its owner sidles up, solemn, nervous. The rato takes his own machete, makes a careful slit in the gut, and exposes a line of fatty tissue. If it is thick and yellow, the owner has a marvellous year ahead. A fractured line, thin and whitish, and the owner leaves in tears.