by Nigel Barley
‘Mamasa?’
‘Polmas.’
‘Er … yes, but Mamasa?’
‘Polmas … You get in bus.’ I sought Polmas in vain on my map.
‘Where is Polmas?’ The querulous voice asking the obvious. No answer.
‘Is Polmas near Mamasa?’
He shrugged. ‘Yes, near.’
‘How near? Can I get from Polmas to Mamasa in one day?’
‘Oh yes. You get in bus.’
‘Certain?’
‘Yes. You get in bus now.’ I did not believe a word of it but what are you to do? They were friendly people. I had coin of the realm and would not starve. Ignoring the proffered front seat (more expensive, more likely to be sick), I clambered in the open back. We set off.
We set off up to a point. Rather, we roamed the town looking for people who looked as though they might want to go to Polmas – wherever that might be. We cruised languorously up and down the main road, seeking to entice those who might be yet in doubt. We honked the horn at cewek and leaned out grinning. We accosted anyone carrying a heavy load, displaying with spread arms the space available.
‘See! There is yet room. Mount! Come with us to Polmas.’
I say we for no distinction was made between crew and passengers. It was accepted that we were now engaged in some common enterprise, that our fortunes were inextricably mixed. Passengers leapt deftly down to assist new arrivals with their baggage. We made room. We shared cigarettes. Suddenly, we were a band of brothers. Bags of rice were embarked, children materialized in droves and were packed among the chattels like china. We set off towards the mountains in high good spirits – and returned to the bus station to collect more passengers. We drove around looking for someone’s brother, picked him up and returned to his house for more luggage. Finally, when it seemed that all hope of departure today was lost, we set our backs to the coast and rattled off towards the darkening mountains.
Somewhere along that road, there lies an invisible frontier. It is first apparent in the surface. The tarmac peters out. It becomes dirt. The dirt gives way to bare rock over which the bus bucks and heaves. At points are huge yellow machines, radiators snarling with Japanese characters, busy pulverizing stone and spewing it across the road. But soon they give way to an untamed wilderness where the road is not a channel to communication but a barrier to it. Two things spread the ketchup of Western culture across the planet. One is communication. The other is its most powerful metaphor – money. But here, we were quite suddenly in another world, one that looked inward not outward, where material comforts could not be taken for granted but where there was the exciting possibility of glimpsing an alien vision of reality. To anyone hooked on the ethnographic quest, that is the greatest possible excitement. I asked a question of the man next to me, the litmus paper of our state.
‘What time will we arrive?’
He shrugged. ‘How can I know?’
I was right. We had crossed the frontier. He tunnelled down into his corner seat, wrapped his arms around me without further acquaintance and settled to sleep, breathing contentedly against my neck. This was another world. I draped myself around him and soon fell asleep too.
‘Touriis!’ It was dark. An awareness of bitter cold. Touriis!’ A woman calling. The engine had stopped and the passengers were all crawling out of the van looking intensely crapulous. I thought it worth the investment of time to scowl at the woman. She smiled back, patting a small boy who had run up and was also grinning.
‘Her son,’ explained a yawning fellow passenger, ‘is called Turis. She had him when a stranger was passing through the village and she liked the word.’
Turis looked at me but did not ask for money or sweets. It was a medieval scene, a caravan of pack-horses had come to meet the bus and boxes were being unloaded under flaring torches by men with cloaks wrapped around their shoulders. They pulled out swords to hack at the fastenings.
‘Come and drink coffee,’ said the woman. ‘I must light the lamps. The electricity goes off at ten.’
We stretched and yawned, mimed comic shivers and shuffled across to a bare concrete house that stood stark on the top of the mountain, limpid starlight washing down on it. The driver was already inside pumping an oil-lamp. Some stopped to urinate against the wall. As we passed through the door, the electricity went out and the corners of the room shrank down around us to a cosy dusk. In the kitchen a sort of shadow play produced hot coffee.
‘Please no sugar.’
‘No sugar?’ The entire kitchen gathered to watch this wonder.
‘You drink coffee with no sugar?’ The Indonesians were ladling five or six spoonfuls into each cup. They watched as I drank as if suspecting some last-minute substitution.
‘Truly Dutchmen are strange.’
‘I am not Dutch. I am English.’
‘Are not all puttymen the same? We call them all Dutch.’
‘Are the Buginese and the Torajans the same?’ They understood that all right. I suddenly realized that it was pitch dark and I still did not know where I was going. The driver had a map.
‘What is the name of this place?’
‘It has no name. It is just a house.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Polmas.’
‘Where do you go next?’
‘Further, Polmas.’
‘But …’ Then the penny dropped. They had taken the names at the two ends of the road, Polewali and Mamasa, combined them and used them for the whole region. I was in Polmas and going to Polmas.
We sat in Polmas and ate little cakes brought by the mother of Turis. Again, the usual questions. My little-learned Indonesian was brought out and paraded like a spoilt child before visitors. Several of the passengers were schoolteachers. In the Third World, they are always travelling. They could translate between Indonesian and Torajan, a quite distinct language, and also knew some Dutch which did us no good. I thought of some children I had once known in Cameroon who had learned Norwegian in the hope that it would open up to them a new world of communication.
At least I did not have to explain my trade. There were, it seemed, other anthropologists about.
‘Up in the north, there is the French lady. She was once very beautiful but I think she is now old. In the west is the American. He speaks our language very well. Then there is the American girl but I think she only speaks English though she is close to God. Then there are the Dutch. They have children.’
‘Their own children?’
‘No. Torajan children. Our children are very beautiful. That is why we adopt each other’s children. I was adopted when I was small. Perhaps you will stay here and marry a Torajan girl and adopt children. I have seven, you can have some of mine.’
‘I will take all seven. You can make some more.’ We all laughed. I looked at Turis’s ears. They were not in the least pointed. I had been misled.
We set off again, rumbling and rolling. The driver had used the stop to repair the cassette-player. It wailed the same six songs over and over again. Outside, giant ferns waved their fronds at us.
It was long past midnight when we reached Mamasa and pulled up outside the only hotel, a wooden shack whose doors were firmly locked. I stood helplessly outside. They took pity on me.
‘Is there anybody there?’ cried the driver, knocking on the moonlit door. A chain reaction of barking spread over the mountains. He knocked again. A tiny, wobbly light appeared in one corner of the house and trembled closer. The driver shook me firmly by the hand.
‘There is someone coming. You will be all right. Sleep well.’
He revved hard and shot off with a screech. I was the only one left who could be held responsible for all this disruption. A large number of bolts were adjusted and a sleepy face peered at me.
‘I’m very sorry …’ I began.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said. Talking was too much effort. I caught a vision of rows of bottles and stools made of tree-trunks and was led up a vertical ladder to a small room of pine. He wait
ed till I had lit the candle and then walked silently away. The dogs were still disputing which should have the last bark.
Horse-trading
The guidebook describes Mamasa as ‘Tyrolean’. It is surrounded by mountains but not the sporty alpine sort of Austria. They are glowering woody slopes with rashes of bare red earth. Still, the adjective is justified by the presence of two white, steepled, wooden churches at the entrance to the valley in which houses are lined up along a purling brook. It is clean, rural, cool.
But there was something not mentioned in the guidebook. In this remote mountain valley, there was a conference of church youth choirs.
Christianity is a religion with many faces. It may be frowzily ceremonial, embarrassingly emotional, frostily ascetic. Each culture takes what it likes from the religion it is offered. In the export of date-expired religions from the West, one factor has constantly impressed the Torajans about Christianity – the possibility of forming choirs. Their traditional religion makes much use of choral singing in an extensive repertoire of songs for all occasions. The arrival of church singing and the guitar have allowed this ancient root to blossom. In the evening, Torajan towns resound to the strum of instruments and the lilt of voices. On Sundays, they shake to the power of flexed vocal cords.
Morning is always the time when one’s cultural relativity is sorely tried. We are all xenophobic at that hour. It is a time of firm prejudice and heightened sensitivities. The sight of others sucking in large quantities of garlic and rice for breakfast is always hard to take. The cheerful generosity with which they offer to share it with a foreign traveller would at all other times be endearing. In the morning, it leaves you feeling grumpily disagreeable. The inn was crowded with young people, beautiful, smiling, friendly as puppies. They offered me garlic. In my urgent need for coffee, they sang me a hymn – just for me – at deafening volume and with grinning gusto. The young ladies showed me how exquisitely their voices could trill. The young men flaunted their bass resonance and perfect teeth. I felt old, seamy, hung over from travel – above all, betrayed. For I had not come so far to meet Christians, to see people who doggedly refused to accept the picturesqueness I wanted to thrust upon them. Where were their strange customs and odd rites? The only odd thing about these people was how they could be so totally nice and unremarkable.
Over the other side, sat two men of a different kind, hunched over the coffee as if the music scalded their ears as it did mine. We grimaced at each other in mute sympathy. One extended a hand hospitably towards a tree-trunk stool. I joined them.
‘You like the music?’ one asked.
‘It’s a little loud.’
‘They are Christian. You are Christian too I think.’
‘A sort of Christian.’ In Indonesia, only the criminally insane have no religious affiliation. What were these men? Possibly, the old pagan religion. I brightened.
‘We,’ said the other, ‘are Muslims.’
‘Torajans?’ They held up their hands in horror.
‘No. We are Buginese from the coast. We are schoolmasters.’ The term was being lobbed into the conversation like a hand grenade. It was calculated to evoke respect, not the reaction of a Godfrey Butterfield MA.
Another choir, summoned by the sound of their confreres, appeared in the door. It was a mark of their spirit of Christian fellowship that they immediately abandoned their own hymn to join in that of the first group. By now, we were conversing in hoarse bellows.
‘Is it not difficult to live in a Christian town?’ I inquired.
‘No. We are all one nation now.’ Pancasila – the five principles of the national ideology – just what one would expect from a schoolmaster.
‘Only occasionally is there trouble.’ He leaned forward and his voice subsided to a confidential yell.
‘The last time was when the mobile cinema showed that anti-Christian film.’
‘Which film?’
He groped as if pulling spiders’ webs out of his hair. ‘The one that showed Christ as a dirty, drug-crazed hippy.’ Hippy. They knew the word.
‘What was it called?’ He consulted with his friend.
‘Jesus Christ Film-star.’
‘Superstar?’
‘Yes. That’s it. There was fighting. They said it must be made by Muslims.’
‘I don’t think that can be right.’
‘The other time was when I told the children that the bodies of Muslim saints do not rot.’
‘But we say the same about Christian saints.’
‘I know, but that is because God wishes to preserve the example of their wickedness for the instruction of the faithful.’
I fled the world religions and sauntered around a sort of village green with a football pitch at which goats chewed. The road led on through rice-fields, snaking along the bottom of the valley with long grass growing up through the sandy soil like a nineteenth-century watercolour of the English countryside. Horses stood glumly in the fields – up to their fetlocks in water – as though being punished. It was a beautiful day of gentle heat cooled by a soft wind. Everywhere was cascading water. Up on the hills were little bamboo windmills clicking and whirring. A horseman approached on a diminutive steed that danced and bucked under him. We laughed at each other and I offered a cigarette. He adjusted his sword and dug out an ancient flint lighter.
‘Where have you come from?’
He gestured into the hills with a thumb.
‘I have come to the market to sell my wife’s cloth.’ He indicated the cloak of faded orange he was wearing.
‘They still weave cloth up there?’
‘Oh yes. You will see at the market tomorrow, if you go there.’
I indicated the windmills. ‘What are they for?’
He looked peevishly up at the hills. ‘Oh, just a toy. For the children.’
We parted and I walked over a roofed wooden bridge with seats sunk into the sides like church pews. Two little girls came up and held my hands in rather shocking trust, one each side like in the pictures of Jesus suffering little children. Almond eyes of limpid innocence stared into mine.
‘Give me some sweets. I want money.’
‘Sweets will rot your teeth.’
An old lady working in a garden cackled approvingly. ‘Quite right. They should be ashamed.’ They did not look ashamed but ran off giggling and blowing raspberries.
‘Good day, mother.’
‘Good day. Where are you staying?’ I explained and we went through the usual questions. ‘Where does this road lead, mother?’
‘Into the mountains. To Bittuang if you want. There is a fine house about two kilometres along. You should go there.’
On impulse I pointed at the windmills and asked, ‘What are those for?’
She smirked, showing mahogany-coloured teeth. ‘Those make the wind for cleaning the rice.’
I passed on, feeling increasingly like a traveller in a fairy-tale.
The road abandoned all pretence of being an English country lane and assumed a cobbled surface oddly at variance with the banana groves on either side. Above the trees appeared the roof of a house, a ponderous curved structure of wooden tiles.
Torajan houses are justly famous. They are huge constructions of wood, raised off the ground on stilts, cunningly jointed and pegged, their whole surface magnificently carved and painted in intricate designs, buffalo heads, birds, leaves. They may be hundreds of years old and are the fixed points by which people work out their personal relationships. They face north, the direction associated with the ancestors, and before many is a pillar running up to the roof ridge on which are stacked the horns of buffalo killed at festivals. Directly facing the house are its rice-barns, smaller versions of the same structure. Under the main storage area is a platform on which people sit and engage in the small but vital acts of social life. Here, all can gossip and receive friends, women weave their cloths, men repair their tools, guests sleep.
A group of men sat cross-legged and watched me approach.,
We exchanged greetings and they invited me to sit. Again, I cursed my lace-up shoes that had to be laboriously unknotted when removed to enter anyone’s private space. Having exchanged cigarettes and established my identity as a Christian Englishman, we moved on to the staggering fact that rice did not grow in my country, therefore we had no rice-barns to sit on. Would I like to visit the house? An alarmed face spotted our approach from a small hatch some twenty feet off the ground and disappeared in a scamper of feet. I laboured awkwardly up the ladder and past a door carved with a deep image of a buffalo head.
The house was divided into a number of small rooms with raised sills like the watertight compartments of a boat. Along two sides ran an open gallery – again like the deck of a boat. No wonder that early travellers had suggested to the Torajans that their houses were modelled on the ships of some original migration – a view of things they have now come to believe; after all, anthropologists should know best. The shutters were open to admit a little light that streamed with motes of dust like the light in a church. The ancient walls were decorated with pictures of Western film stars torn from magazines and hand-tinted photographs of marriage scenes, the faces rendered bulbous and unrecognizable as if painted from a description only. We went on a tour. In one room, a cat dozed contentedly in the ashes of a fire. In another, a stick-like arm hung through the mosquito-net shrouding a bed.
‘My father,’ explained the man. ‘He wants to greet you but he is ill.’
I shook the hand with its rasping, paper-thin skin, hot and dry. Eyes glowed redly in the darkness. Thin white lips muttered politenesses. We returned to the entry room and sat on blue-painted cane chairs. Such houses were not made for furniture and its intrusion makes them cramped and ungainly. Coffee was brought – incredibly sweet – its cloyingness not mitigated by the cakes of red palm-sugar served throughout Torajaland as a token of hospitality. It felt good to have got away from the tourist round and met these good, simple people. The subject of my marriage state came round again. The sheer inevitability of marriage in Indonesia makes the unwedded or even divorced state incomprehensible. If children seem unwilling to sort out such things for themselves, the parents move in. I have known Indonesians in Europe terrified to go home even for a short visit on the grounds that they would be kidnapped and find themselves wed overnight. One of the most useful accessories of the anthropological trade is a picture to be carried in one’s wallet. It depicts a blonde, heavy-breasted woman whose dress is simultaneously decorous yet suggestive of vast charms. It is invaluable evidence for getting you out of all sorts of difficulties or for initiating discussions of marriage practices. It can be explained as representing one’s wife or sister, even – given the notable inability of those from other cultures to accurately guess the age of Westerners – one’s daughter. The only problem with such deception is that you rapidly lose track of those settings in which you are wed and those in which you are unwed. Informants too have an unfortunate habit of talking to each other. For this reason alone, such ploys are best used in casual encounters only but can be a valuable short-cut when you simply cannot face going through the whole business of marriage in Europe yet again. Nevertheless, this was a welcome opportunity for some gentle ethnography.