Stealing with the Eyes: Imaginings and Incantations in Indonesia

By Will Buckingham

The Tanimbar Islands of Indonesia are remote and largely neglected by outsiders. Will Buckingham went there, as an anthropologist in training, with a mission. He hoped to meet three remarkable sculptors: the crippled Matias Fatruan, the buffalo hunter Abraham Amelwatin, and Damianus Masele, who was skilled in black magic, but who abstained out of Christian principle. Part memoir, part travelogue, Stealing with the Eyes is the story of these men, and also of how stumbling into a world of witchcraft, sickness, and fever led Buckingham to question the validity of his anthropological studies, and eventually to abandon them for good. 

Through his encounters with these remarkable craftsmen—which in relating her also interweaves with Tanimbarese history, myth, and philosophy dating back to ancient times— we are shown the forces at play in all of our lives: the struggle between the powerful and the powerless, the tension between the past and the future, and how to make sense of a world that is in constant flux.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781909961432

Book preview

PART I

BARANG ANEH

STRANGE THINGS

A view of Saumlaki in the Tanimbar Islands

1

AN EXORCISM OF SORTS

I still dream of Tanimbar. I dream of scattered islands and atolls, of rocky bluffs and of cliffs that plunge down into the blue-green water. I dream of fleets of outrigger canoes putting out to sea for sea cucumber. I dream of journeys on foot up the coast roads at night, the stench of forest buffalo hanging in the air. I dream of frigate birds that wheel and circle over my head. I dream of heirloom gold that flashes in the sunlight like the plumage of fighting cocks. And I dream of the sun, shattered into a million parts. These dreams do not come frequently, but when they do I wake with a nagging sense of unease, a mixture of nostalgia and gratitude and regret.

The last time I dreamed of Tanimbar was some months ago. The dream was so vivid that when I woke in the pale light of an English spring morning, my heart beating fast, it took me a few moments to realise where I was. Beached upon the sheets in the morning light, feeling the tides of the dream pull back, I realised that it was twenty years since I had touched down in Saumlaki.

Later that morning, I took down the old cardboard box that sat on top of my bookshelves and opened it up. Inside were sheaves of letters, tattered photocopies, plastic boxes of photographic transparencies. I held up the slides against the light, one by one. The transparencies were turning green with age. Each slide was like a tiny illuminated flash of memory. As I looked through the slides, names and half-remembered Indonesian phrases returned to me. I had a strange sense that I had unfinished business with Tanimbar, or that Tanimbar had unfinished business with me. I had debts to discharge, obligations to meet, even if I was not sure what these debts and obligations were.

I packed the slides away. It was then I realised that after two decades I wanted to write about Tanimbar. I wanted to pass on the stories I had been told, to trade in things half remembered and half forgotten. It would be an exorcism of sorts. It would be what in Tanimbar they call – or they once called – a mandi adat, a ritual-law bathing that squares all accounts with the past.

I packed the slides and the photocopies and the letters away. Then I went out into the spring morning to clear my head.

I flew to Tanimbar at the age of twenty-three, a fledgling anthropologist. A few years before, whilst enrolled at university as a somewhat lacklustre student of fine arts, I had stumbled across the anthropology section in the library and I was immediately enchanted. From the very start, what anthropology taught me was that the possibilities for human life were many. Anthropology sang praises to the malleability of human existence. The more I read, the more I came to see that the things I took to be common sense, the things that I believed were simply the way things were, were nothing of the sort. Kinship, marriage, ethics, law, religion, life, death, politics – everything that mattered seemed up for grabs. Anthropology was an escape route, a back door by means of which I could slip the net of my own assumptions and beliefs.

So, instead of spending my days in the art studio trying to wrestle with the intractability of paint and canvas, I took to hunting and gathering in the library amongst the anthropology stacks. I read about the Nuer, the Mbuti, the Azande, the Trobrianders, the Ik and the Toraja. And sometime midway through my art degree I decided that, like thousands of anthropologists before me, I too would go out into the field and engage in some ethnography – that curious brand of high-minded intrusiveness amongst peoples too polite, or too powerless, to tell you to go fuck yourself.

I started to make plans. And I came, by degrees, to settle on the Tanimbar Islands, a small archipelago set at the end of the long arm of volcanic islands that stretches from Sumatra to Java to Bali and Lombok to Nusa Tenggara and Timor. There were tantalising suggestions that Tanimbar had strong traditions of carving in wood and stone. I decided I would go to Tanimbar to find out more about these traditions, and to meet the artists who still worked there.

Undaunted by the fact that I had no qualifications in anthropology whatsoever, I wrote a research proposal for the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and contacted universities in Indonesia to ask if they would work with me. I visited museums in London and in the Netherlands. In dusty storerooms I gazed at beautifully carved house-altars, or tavu, adorned with swirling wave patterns; at squatting ancestor figures, or walut; and at kora ulu prow boards from war canoes, decorated with fighting cocks. Meanwhile, I opened a bank account and started to apply for grants to fund my trip. The money began to trickle in.

Somehow, by the time I graduated from my degree, I found myself with a bundle of permission letters, the backing of the University of Pattimura in Ambon, a permission letter from Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia – the Indonesian Institute of Sciences – and a small research budget to pay for the trip. All this is how, towards the end of the summer of 1994, I came to catch a flight to Indonesia.

At the heart of the story that follows are my encounters with three remarkable sculptors – Matias Fatruan, Abraham Amelwatin and Damianus Masele. My instructors, guides and accusers, these three men taught me lessons that I am still struggling to fully master. I am indebted to them. But this book is about other things besides. It is about possession and exorcism, sickness and healing, time and history, uncertainty and change. And it is about how I eventually took fright at the prospect of becoming an anthropologist, and how I came to leave behind anthropology – the art, as Matias Fatruan put it, of ‘stealing with the eyes’ – for good.

2

SHIT-BABY

Getting to the Tanimbar Islands was not easy. It was a late summer afternoon when I boarded the plane to Jakarta. I touched down and found myself a cheap guest room in the Jalan Jaksa, where the travellers’ hostels were. I spent my first two weeks in Indonesia involved in paperwork. I shuttled between government offices, waited in corridors under slow-turning fans, processing documents and collecting official stamps on my growing stack of permission letters, permits and passes. Eventually it was done and I flew east to Ambon, the provincial capital of Maluku province. In the hotel in Ambon, the receptionist, an attractive woman in her mid twenties, looked alarmed when I said I was going to Tanimbar.

‘There are many witches in Tanimbar,’ she said. ‘You must be careful.’ I could see from the expression on her face that she was not joking. I reassured her that I would take care.

From Ambon – having failed to book a space on the infrequent flight to Saumlaki, the capital town of the Tanimbar Islands – I hitched a ride to the volcanic Banda Islands, taking the slow route to Tanimbar. In Banda I gorged on fresh fruit, read and reread anthropology textbooks, and swatted away mosquitoes as I waited for the next ship south. It was a week before the boat arrived – a passenger ship run by the Perintis (meaning ‘pioneer’) shipping line. The ship had once done service as a Chinese cargo vessel – you could still see the Chinese characters beneath the paint on the hull – but had since been converted into a passenger ship. It now carried up to three hundred passengers on the open deck, sheltered from the elements by an orange tarpaulin.

I spent three sleepless nights on the deck of the boat before we put in to port in Tual, the capital of the Kei Islands. I was tired and dirty, and there were several days of travelling to go until we reached Saumlaki. Not only this, but the mosquito bites I had picked up in Banda had already turned into running sores. I disembarked and bought myself some ointment for my infected bites from a pharmacist. Next to the pharmacy was a travel agency. I went inside and asked about the best way to get to Saumlaki. There was an unscheduled flight from Tual the following morning. I booked myself a ticket.

The following day, I hitched a ride to the airport on the back of a motorbike. The plane arrived – a small twin-prop, built in Indonesia after an Italian design. We flew south-west across the ocean, and then down the coast of Tanimbar’s largest island, Yamdena. I could see the road that connected the villages strung out along the seaboard. A couple of vehicles inched along like termites. The villages below me were orderly, their rusting tin and grass roofs extending inland from the beaches in strict rows.

We circled over Saumlaki. Out in the bay, boats were moored along the jetty. The plane banked, the water flashed in the afternoon sun and the ground loomed towards us. There was a blur of treetops followed by the thud of wheels on tarmac. Everybody clapped. My fellow passengers smiled and offered up prayers, to God and to the ancestors.

Saumlaki airport – a couple of miles out of town – was no more than a single-storey building by the side of an airstrip. The plane taxied to a halt and we clambered out. I took my bag and I walked past the sleepy officials, through the arrivals lounge. Outside, a small cluster of minibuses and taxis was waiting to ferry arrivals into town. The afternoon was sunny but not too hot, a breeze coming off the sea. I clambered into a Suzuki minibus. A neatly dressed man with a small briefcase and a holdall got in behind me and smiled. The driver offered to take me to the Harapan Indah hotel. The name, in translation, meant ‘Lovely Hope’. It was the best hotel in town, he told me. There was another hotel, cheaper than the Harapan Indah, but it doubled up as a brothel. ‘You will be more comfortable in the Harapan Indah,’ he said.

Without waiting to fill any of the remaining seats, the taxi driver pulled away. The road into town was lush with thick vegetation. Cows grazed on the verges. My fellow passenger was chatty. He was a government official from Surabaya in East Java, returning from Ambon where he had been attending some meeting or other. He had lived in Tanimbar a long time.

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked him.

He hesitated. ‘Tanimbar is different,’ he said. ‘It is different from Ambon and Surabaya. You have to understand the people here. If you understand the people, you will not have any problems. What are you doing here?’

I told him that I had come to study the art of woodcarvers.

He nodded. ‘You will find it interesting,’ he said. ‘There is a lot of history here. Adat is very strong.’

‘Adat’ is one of those words that are almost impossible to translate with precision. Usually it is translated as ‘ritual law’, which is to say the law sanctioned by the ancestors. In this sense, adat involves everything from land rights to whom you can or cannot marry, as well as questions about inheritance, about rituals and about taboos on particular foods. Adat is so extensive in its reach that it impinges upon almost all aspects of everyday life. But adat is more than just a matter of tradition, ritual or customary practice. I soon came to realise that, for the Tanimbarese, adat had all the force of the laws of nature. To break with adat was to risk angering the ancestors. A violation could lead to madness, sickness or death.

The Javanese official leaned towards me. ‘You must be careful,’ he said. ‘I have seen many things here in Tanimbar. There are many barang aneh.’

Barang aneh: strange things. I had not heard the expression before. But over the months that followed, I became accustomed to talk of barang aneh. It was a catch-all category for anomalous events and strange phenomena – uncanny forms of magic, vengeful witches, tetchy ancestors or deranged foreigners.

The minibus pulled into Saumlaki, the lush verges giving way to houses and shops. The Javanese official stared out of the window. Then he called out to the driver, who pulled up to a halt. My fellow passenger jumped out and shook my hand.

‘Good luck,’ he said, sliding the door closed. It appeared that I was paying for us both.

He waved us off as we headed down Saumlaki’s main street. I looked out at the low shops and houses. They were shabby and down at heel. A few moments later the taxi stopped in front of the Harapan Indah. I paid the driver and climbed out. Then I stepped into the hotel.

The reception area was spacious and cool, decorated with woven ikat cloths. Cases of Tanimbarese art made for the tourist trade lined the walls: sculptures carved from kayu hitam, or black wood. The sculptures seemed strangely dissimilar to those I had seen in the stores of museums in London, Amsterdam and Leiden.

I rang the bell on the front desk. A friendly, briskly efficient woman in her late twenties came out of the back office.

‘Welcome,’ she said in English. ‘Are you looking for a room?’

This was Dina Go, the hotel manager. The Go family were Chinese-Indonesian merchants who ran a small business empire centred in Saumlaki, trading throughout Tanimbar and beyond. Dina checked me in. I took one of the cheaper rooms upstairs. I dumped my bags, then Dina showed me around. At the back of the hotel, a wooden pontoon stretched out into the bay. The pontoon was crowded with luxuriant pot plants. Across the other side of the water, I could see the low hills. It was a beautiful spot.

‘Welcome to Tanimbar,’ Dina said. ‘I’ll get somebody to bring you a drink. Coffee?’

‘Coffee would be great,’ I said.

I looked out to sea and drank my coffee. The air was becoming cooler as the afternoon advanced. I drained the last dregs, then walked back through the hotel and into the street. Saumlaki was waking up after its afternoon siesta, merchants rolling up the shutters of their shops. I headed down the dusty main street to the Yamdena Plaza, a crumbling concrete complex of small shops selling Chinese-made fountain pens, medicines, expensive snacks, soap, dried fish and cheap hardback notebooks. Outside the pool hall lounged a cluster of bored, unemployed youths. One was seated on a motorised scooter, stripped to the waist, wearing mirror shades.

‘Orang bulel’, he muttered. ‘Whitey’. When I passed, I felt a rain of small stones skittering around me. I did not turn round.

The Yamdena Plaza was the commercial heart of the Tanimbar Islands. Barefoot villagers were negotiating prices of sacks of copra with more well-dressed merchants. A man lurched towards me carrying a bag of sculptures and ikat cloths.

‘Sculptures?’ he asked in English. ‘Ikat? Very cheap. Dollar price.’ I shook my head. Unruly children hurtled through the crowd, leaving staccato trails of curses and complaints in their wake. At small warung stalls, young men were selling banana fritters and ‘shining mooncake’ – two fat pancakes sandwiched together with jam.

Behind the plaza was a fruit and vegetable market. On parallel rows of covered tables, women from the villages sold mangoes, tomatoes, chillies, bananas and carrots, arranged into tidy piles. Those who could not afford to pay for the privilege of taking their place at the tables instead spread squares of sacking on the ground. Saumlaki housewives wandered from stall to stall, haggling over prices.

On either side of the vegetable market, buses sat with their engines idling. They belched thick exhaust clouds as they waited to fill with passengers. The buses were adorned with slogans in English: ‘Cleanliness is Holiness’, ‘Love is Life’. Leaning out of the bus doors, wiry ticket collectors shouted their destinations over the hubbub of the crowd. When they were full, the vehicles lurched out of the marketplace to the villages beyond.

I stopped by at a shop that sold pencils, pens, small snacks and tattered notebooks. The sign outside announced that this was a toko buku, a bookshop. Inside there was only a small shelf of books, mainly primers for schoolchildren on maths, Indonesian and English language. The shop owner lounged behind the counter, propped up by a photocopier. He was dressed in a string vest and sarong, and looked half asleep.

I said hello, and browsed through the books. At the end of the shelf was a slim little volume with an orange cover. I pulled it off the shelf. On the cover was a line drawing of a cockatoo. The title, Nangin Tanemprar, was in the local language, Yamdenan. Underneath was written, in Indonesian, ‘Folk Tales from Tanimbar’.

In the book were five stories in all, translated into Indonesian from the original Yamdenan, and published by the missionary group the Summer Institute of Linguistics. There was no price on the cover. I asked the shop owner how much it was. He waved his hand and plucked a figure out of the air. It was cheap, so I bought it.

‘You can read Indonesian?’ the shopkeeper asked.

‘With a dictionary,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a good book, a history book.’

‘It says they are folk tales,’ I said.

‘Yes, folk tales. This is our history in Tanimbar. This is our adat.’

‘Oh,’ I said, looking down at the book.

‘You will find it interesting,’ the bookshop owner said, as he counted out my change.

That evening I sat on the pontoon looking out to sea. There was still a glimmer of evening sunlight coming from the west, turning the sea to fire. The water out in the bay was flat and calm. Frigate birds wheeled overhead. Sea eagles dived for fish. They plucked them, squirming, from the water and flew off to devour them. Across the other side of the bay, from behind the low line of trees, a thin tendril of smoke reached up to touch the thread-like clouds. It was the burning season, when the Tanimbarese ‘clean the earth’ – cuci tanah – preparing their plantations for sowing the new crop. It was beautiful, and yet I felt ill at ease. I thought of the hail of stones that had greeted my first appearance in the streets of Saumlaki. I thought of the Javanese businessman and his talk of barang aneh and strange phenomena. And I wondered what kind of a place it was in which I now found

Reviews for Stealing with the Eyes

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Tanimbar Islands of Indonesia are remote, not particularly easy to get to and are often overlooked and ignored by outsiders and travellers. For Will Buckingham though, they seemed perfect, even more so when he found out about the sculptors who lived there. Cobbling together a research fund he became an anthropologist in training and started to make his way out there.

He had in mind finding three sculptors, Matias Fatruan, Abraham Amelwatin, and Damianus Masele. Each of them had a particular set of skills in their carving and to discover the cultural references that help define their art. It was a world that still had its roots deep in their past even though the modern world had tried to push and pull them in different directions. Their art is something that they saw cannot be taught to anyone as each sculpture is as much the work of the ancestors as it is the work of the craftsmen.

The title of the book comes from a conversation that he has with Fatruan. He accuses people like Buckingham, of being one of those that come and enquire about all aspects of their lives and culture, but who can never fully understand them because they do not have the same deep links with the ancestors that are all around them.

It is a culture that has been mostly suffocated by the catholic religion, but if you know where to look then you can still see glimpses of the earlier traditions still shining through. He is prepared to stay with the villagers and get to know the people at a much deeper level. This closeness to the villagers has its own problems, he gets very ill and is treated as a Tanimbarese would be by using herbal medicines and witchcraft. One of the things that he learnt from this trip, is that he does see just how much of a problem a visiting anthropologist can cause to a society. He learns as much about himself as he does about the three sculptors that he is visiting. He is a talented writer and this book is full of evocative descriptions of the villages that he is living in and the people that he meets on his day to day routines. Well worth reading if you want to discover a little more about this part of the planet.