Toraja

by Nigel Barley

  Torajan religion makes much use of the killing of animals. Nenek was keen that the rice-barn should be completed with due ceremony. In Torajaland that would normally involve the killing of a pig and the pronouncement of a blessing by Nenek. There were all sorts of reasons – legal, moral, sanitational – why this would be awkward to organize inside a public museum. Nenek was understanding but regretful.

  ‘It is not right. It is not’ – he had learned the power of the word in an ethnographic museum – ‘traditional.’

  We mulled over the possibility of buying a side of pork. Nenek dismissed it.

  ‘A rice-barn,’ he asserted dramatically, ‘needs blood.’ It was to get some.

  I was up on the roof, talking – but not joking – with the carvers.

  ‘Pass me that machete,’ said Tanduk, ‘the one stuck in that bamboo beam.’

  I reached out and grabbed the bamboo, not realizing that the blade projected through the other side. Torajans keep their cutting implements honed to a razor-sharp perfection. Indeed, the carvers used to shave with their carving knives. The machete sliced clean through a finger, severing the artery. A pulsing spurt of blood shot out over the apex of the roof. As I rushed away in search of first aid, a small, slightly triumphant voice called after me, ‘We won’t have to kill that pig now.’

  Of all the carvers, Nenek was by far the most adventurous. Indonesians have a ready-made response to questions about why they suddenly changed the habits of a lifetime and did something completely new. All such actions can be explained by cari pengalaman, ‘to seek experience’, which is unquestioningly regarded as good. Nenek was gripped by this urge to discover. If there was a high building around or a hill to climb, Nenek would want to do it. If there was something new to eat or drink, Nenek would go first.

  ‘He is too old. Leave him at home,’ Johannis would say with the heartlessness of the young. But Nenek refused to be left.

  Every morning, when I crept blearily downstairs, he would be sitting in the kitchen carving contentedly until I made him a cup of tea. (Only later did I learn that drinking coffee is forbidden a Torajan priest.) On the second morning he surprised me. ‘Mercowe,’ he said. I didn’t understand. It sounded like a sea monster from Beowulf. It must be Torajan. I would have to ask Johannis.

  ‘Mercowe,’ he insisted, looking at me.

  ‘I don’t understand, Nenek.’ He grabbed me by the hand and led me to the front door. The welcome mat was upside down and back to front. It read, mercowe. He had begun to learn English.

  He adored looking at strange animals. ‘Strange’ included many Indonesian animals he had never seen before. The greatest success was, without doubt, the zoo. The Torajans jumped up and down with delight at the sight of orang utans. They were suitably repelled by snakes, getting from them the titillating frisson that we get from a horror film. A wicked child terrified Nenek with a rubber snake in the reptile house. When he realized his mistake he laughed at it for days. ‘I like it when people play tricks.’ Nenek loved the gorilla. ‘Wah! Are you sure it cannot reach us?’ The giraffe was so strange an idea that he initially refused to accept it as natural. ‘Was it born like that? Does it eat people?’ As usual, it was not the animals you would have expected that commanded most attention. Buffalo and bison, for all their centrality to Torajan life, were dismissed. Far more interesting were horses – an English horse is two or three times the size of a Torajan horse – and, above all, dogs.

  Torajans have a relatively kindly approach to dogs. They eat them but also pet them and talk to them. Most Torajan dogs are the runty, prick-eared creatures standard throughout South East Asia, but Dutch influence has added absurdly fluffy specimens that are much admired. The sheer variety of English dogs, the way they were allowed a free run of the house surprised them. Most extraordinary was their encounter with a Great Dane. ‘Is that a dog?’ Indeed, it was almost as large as a Torajan horse. They were terrified initially but were rapidly won over by its good nature. Within five minutes Nenek was stroking it – but in such a way that you felt he was pondering the problem of how best to slice it at the joints.

  Yet it was not this that struck them the most. One day they arrived back in great hilarity.

  ‘The park,’ they said, ‘is full of madmen.’ Oh dear.

  ‘What did they do?’

  They giggled. ‘They walked round … with dogs … on the ends of pieces of string.’ Again they fell around with laughter.

  ‘But you do the same with buffaloes. You take them for swims. I have seen people oiling their hooves and brushing their eyelashes.’

  Of course, they agreed huffily. But that was different. To do that with a dog was like doing it with a mouse. Crazy!

  * * *

  In the second month of their stay, the weather improved long enough for them to visit some of the sights of the city. Ancient buildings of stone left them cold. Even the Christians were unimpressed by the great age attributed to Westminster Abbey and other churches. The Tower of London, Greenwich, they found frankly boring. The most successful monument was Tower Bridge. I asked Johannis why. ‘It is on calendars in Indonesia,’ he explained. An unexpected second was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. As I was leading them on a somewhat vague and undirected walk around central London, they happened to notice the carving around the door. It was a simple geometric pattern but very similar to one used as a filler on Torajan buildings. How had it got there? Had it been stolen from the Torajans? They were all for rushing up and asking the Minister at once.

  We went on a day trip to Oxford, an extremely unfriendly and unwelcoming place to the visitor. Most sites of interest were firmly shut against them. As usual, it proved difficult to gain admission to a pub in order to get out of the rain, and everyone in the catering trade was astonished at people wanting to eat on a Sunday. The trip was redeemed by one incident only. The carvers were unused to having to master their bladders. In Torajaland, after all, one can urinate anywhere. We were constantly obliged to make emergency stops. One of these on the way home happened to involve urinating at the back of my former school. It was thought-provoking how many coincidences and unlikely events had had to occur so that I could visit it in such circumstances with a group of Indonesian hill tribesmen.

  Like Japanese tourists, when they found anything impressive they never simply photographed it, but required a group portrait standing in front of and almost wholly obscuring it. Time and again they appear clenched together with cheesy smiles in front of famous places. Even Nenek and Karre would smile fraternally for the camera until a shot was over and they could resume mutual scowls.

  ‘It is like photographing the cat together with the mouse,’ said Johannis delightedly.

  After some two months, the rice-barn was looking more and more convincing. The carvers had stretched it to fit the gallery exactly, something that increased my unease about the supplies of building materials. As the roof progressed, the construction turned into an aerial display. A large wooden scaffolding had been erected all round the barn and on this they swung and balanced as the tiles were threaded on splints of rattan and tied down layer by layer. The characteristic curve of the roof was achieved by attaching a stout rope between the central beam and a major floor beam and simply twisting a stick through until sufficient pressure was exerted to give the correct shape.

  Although Johannis had been brought primarily as a link, he showed himself more and more active in the process of construction. While from a carving family, he had never practised such skills, opting for a modern model whereby a man progresses in the world through school and university. His attitude to Nenek was therefore ambivalent. He was a reminder of Johannis’s rustic origins, therefore an embarrassment. Yet he swiftly perceived that Nenek was, if anything, accorded more respect in England than in Torajaland. He was astonished at the interest and admiration shown his carving skills and the obvious attractiveness of his personality. He and Nenek began to have whispered conversations at night. One day, grinning with bashful
ness, he picked up a piece of wood and started to carve. The other younger men immediately hooted in derision but Johannis smiled and quietly persevered. His natural talent was immediately obvious. It was a more than competent rendition of a traditional motif. He puffed out his chest with pride and promptly sold it to the Indonesian restaurant where he went to collect their midday food. After that he never looked back. He could produce a geometric design at the drop of a hat. He began innovating. ‘This is a traditional design but I have turned these lines into transistors like in my brother’s electronic circuit drawings.’ Within days he had graduated from merely painting the carvings of others to working on the barn in his own right. In the evenings the kitchen was even more congested. There was another carver in the house.

  When not carving, they would watch television compulsively, harassing Johannis to translate for them until he could stand it no longer. War was extremely popular, followed by sex. Love scenes did not have to sink very deep to be considered highly pornographic, since censorship in Indonesia is strict in such matters. A sure sign that a programme was being enjoyed was to hear them tutting in disapproval. Most popular of all, of course, were advertisements, now discontinued on Indonesian television, and I would hear them humming the tunes in the bathroom, interspersed with the patriotic ditties that feature so largely in their own country. Sometimes they sang patriotic words to the jingles advertising chewing gum and lavatory paper.

  Their standards of criticism were harsh, however. Their view of the Open University programmes was, ‘There was too much story, not enough women and no one got shot.’ Nenek alone seemed to enjoy programmes of intellectual content. He watched a whole course on quantum physics with evident enjoyment and thoroughly savoured a biography of the late Ernest Hemingway, breaking off to comment, ‘It’s good to see people who are old like me.’

  It was on his trips to the restaurant in Soho that Johannis discovered the seamier side of London life. He must have passed this knowledge on to Karre because the latter began to inquire on the activities of ‘hontesses’ (their version of ‘hostesses’). When informed of probable prices, however, he was scandalized.

  ‘I could get a buffalo for that – quite a pretty one.’

  At the time AIDS was widely, if briefly, advertised on television, to the point that one of the carvers was convinced he had mysteriously caught it. Fortunately, it turned out to be dandruff.

  All parents know that sudden realization that the house is just too quiet. The children must be up to something – and something wicked. It shows how far I had unwittingly slipped into the parental role that I had exactly that reaction one evening. I crept into the doorway. From the living-room came sounds of tutting and tittering. Exercising that ingenuity for which Torajans deserve to be famed, they had come to a deal with the waiters at the Indonesian restaurant – carvings for videos, art for porn.

  Relations between Nenek and Karre continued frosty, Tanduk sometimes exercising a moderating influence, sometimes supporting Karre. Johannis won a great deal of my respect for the way he dampened down conflict. They quickly adapted their style of disagreement to the possibilities of an English house. Karre was the first to discover the dramatic possibilities of stairs. They were ideal for stalking up in outrage with a final insult tossed over one shoulder. Nenek, however, discovered door-slamming. Torajan doors are small and tend not to have a knob that allows them to be slammed without trapping your fingers. Unfortunately, several of the doors in my house were not ideal for slamming with force because the carpet prevented it. The only good slam in the house was the bathroom door but you were then obliged to sulk in there until driven out by boredom.

  If Johannis acted as a moderating influence in domestic Torajan affairs, he none the less enjoyed teasing me. He let slip the information that Karre had been in trouble for violence against another man in the village.

  ‘But that,’ he said sweetly, ‘was an affair of buffalo and women. It could happen to anyone.’

  Karre launched into a new offensive by moving into Nenek’s sphere. He began to offer explanations and interpretations of the patterns he carved. While Nenek ‘explained’ in terms of names of motifs and general principles like ‘riches’ or ‘luck’ that they represented, Karre offered proverbs. When marking out the motif conventionally glossed as ‘tadpoles’, for example, he declared in front of Nenek. ‘We put these on a barn to show that many should live together and each respect the other like tadpoles in a rice-field. No one tries to be chief.’

  He also added a new twist to the interpretation of the cockerels carved on the eaves: ‘We put them here to show how men should not behave – like animals that put themselves above others.’

  In his own way Karre was making the point that the traditional motifs of Torajan life can be adapted to the demands of a new morality. Like the apparently rigid binary oppositions of Torajan classification, they could be used in infinitely flexible ways.

  As it turned out, there was no shortage of material for the rice-barn roof. The structure was finished in good time and we were able to have a formal completion ceremony at which Nenek, to the rage of Karre, pronounced a blessing but no pigs were killed.

  Relations between them had further declined when Nenek completed the barn by carving his own name in large letters on the door. Karre got up specially early and obliterated the name. Nenek was very calm.

  ‘He is a man of no culture,’ he declared loftily, pleased, I suspect, that this action had proved his assessment of his former pupil. He took me to one side.

  ‘Wait till we have gone home, then paint my name back in.’

  There now came the moment I had been dreading – payment.

  The original contract had been negotiated in buffalo but there is a recognized rate for converting buffalo into money. The young carvers had decided they wanted money and Nenek had gone along with this. This was surprising. The problem with cash is that it can be seized by rapacious relatives and divided up infinitely while a buffalo is indivisible. The problem now was whether we should pay everyone the same amount or whether Nenek as the head should receive more. The younger carvers had insisted that all should receive the same. Half-way through the operation, I suddenly saw myself as they must be seeing me. I had a vision of a little old man up on a bamboo platform at the end of a funeral. He was distributing meat, calling out the names and flinging down portions of dead buffalo. It is the moment when people’s standing and rank are publicly declared and fixed for years to come, a time of strong passions and prickly sensibilities, when resentments rise to the surface and fights break out. Already Nenek was bristling with outrage, ready to leap to his feet. Karre had his arms crossed truculently. Even mild Tanduk glowered. Only Johannis grinned his enjoyment of others’ discomfort. This was clearly a situation where a beginner was going to do himself no good. There were awkward moments before a satisfactory solution was reached whereby all apparently received the same payment while Nenek received an additional present. Even more important was that the others should know that he had received extra money but not know how much.

  ‘What will you do with this money, Nenek?’

  His eyes twinkled. ‘I shall save it. Save it for my old age.’

  To enter into an agreement such as this, with people from a culture very unlike our own, was fraught with problems of a moral kind. It is a moral space, indeed, from which all exits are shut off in advance.

  Ethnographic exhibitions involving people are not new. In the nineteenth century they were common. One offered as its chief attraction the chance of seeing a savage Filipino eat a dead dog.

  Participants can have had little knowledge of what lay in store for them and were treated like wild animals in a zoo. At the end of the exhibition, they were sometimes simply thrown out to fend for themselves.

  The world has changed since then but power relations are still very unequal. It is hard to protect people in a world they do not understand without being accused of paternalism, or leave them scope for initiativ
e without being accused of neglect. To treat them as one would Englishmen is cultural imperialism, to insist upon their difference from us smacks of racism. To ask members of another culture to ‘perform’ seems demeaning, while to ask our own artists to do so is not. It was clear, however, that the Torajans did not feel humiliated but honoured. They were not dressing up in tribal costume to do something just for tourists. As far as the carvers were concerned, this was another contract for another rice-barn. They returned to their own culture with increased status and wealth. Johannis’s parents had been firm.

  ‘We would not let him go if we did not know you and trust you. He wants to go. It will be good for him.’

  It is good to be able to organize an exhibition that does not simply take from a Third World country but fosters a skill under threat. In a sense, the best tribute was that Johannis, a thoroughly modern Torajan, started carving. In a sense it seemed as if it was through coming to London that he had fully become a Torajan. It was, however, with mixed feelings that I listened as he explained to me that now he had enough money to go to university, he would have to write a thesis. He had decided, having watched me work, that he would turn his grandfather into his thesis. He was well on the way to making that divide between traditional and modern life that characterizes the former as ‘custom’ – a party hat, or in this case an academic cap, to be lightly put on and off at will.

  What did they make of us? It is perhaps easier to get at an answer than might be thought. Torajans have a refreshing directness. For example, once I gave Johannis a shirt, for which he thanked me. When I asked him if he liked it, however, he said no, quite frankly he did not. Torajans often seem to tell the truth when we would tell small lies simply to be polite.

  When it was time to go home, two were homesick and two were not. Johannis said that he had enjoyed his time here but he looked forward to returning home. Tanduk was desperate to go home and plant his fields. He explained that he had seven children, which was why he wanted to go back. Karre, on the other hand, had eight, which was why he wanted to stay. Were there not other people here who wanted a rice-barn? He would gladly build one. Most surprising, it was Nenek who was keenest to stay. ‘The food is good here. English people are nicer. Why should I want to go back? I have planted coffee in your garden. I want to harvest it.’