Tana Toraja, Southern Sulawesi Highlands

I want to write about our overnight excursion into Toraja; the highlands of Eastern Sulawesi.  I want to write about the 5-hour bus ride that averaged about 30 km/hr on bumpy, dusty roads.  I want to write about the legions of smiling faces waving at the coach as we chugged by them, their basic stilt houses with corrugated tin roofs virtually billowing and blowing in the breeze we left in our wake.  Feeling like an ambassador I sat in the back window of the bus and waved, smiling, while encouraging waves and smiles from scores of people we passed.  As we ascended ever so slowly, the dusty roadsides with their powdered white front yards and stringy dirt-coated weeds started to give way to true, satiated greenery.  Terraced rice fields appeared and the road began to coil like the body of a snake ready to strike. 

The coaches weaved and threaded their way along the road, and it is worth a diversion here to try to describe the traffic flow.  In a word it’s insane.  There were many times I had to close my eyes and ride on pure faith that we were not going to squeeze the mopeds, motor cycles and cars inside us off the road because we were driving and overtaking as head-on we barreled towards an overloaded filthy behemoth of a diesel powered truck.  Every vehicle ducks and bobs in and out in an unchoreographed, schizophrenic dance as they maneuver to be out in front while pushing the limits of each engine’s speed, power and torque.  My favorite sight is a parent racing along with a small child.  From the age they are able to sit up by themselves, the kids are riding up in front, holding onto the inside of the handlebars and straddling the chassis.  These are speed demon children.  They are raised facing into the oncoming traffic, fearlessly grinning as the wind blows back their hair and mom or dad steers the motorbike from behind them.  I wish I had a photograph.

But, back to Toraja.  At some point in the drive I started to see incredibly steep, jagged mountains in the distance, and then we were in them.  A quick pee break at a restaurant and market overlooking the Erotic Mountains (named for a peak that resembles a part of the female anatomy), and we were back on the buses continuing our climb.  

This landscape is painted below...

Artist's rendition of the Erotic Mountains (in case you were still wondering where they go their name from)

About an hour later we passed through a fabulous arch into Torajaland – Tana Toraja.  This is another universe.  Seriously.  We had just entered a place where people measure their wealth in how many water buffalo they can afford to slaughter at a relative’s funeral. It is a place where families bury their dead, mummified and wrapped in cloth, in natural caves riddling the hillsides, in blasted out meter-by-meter square sarcophaguses, or in concrete mausoleums that are sprinkled around the countryside.  Elaborate effigies are ritually carved for the dead, with a ceremony for each feature of the face and each appendage on the body.  It can take weeks to prepare an effigy and only skilled practitioners are given the honor.  Many are life sized, dressed, painted and sit perched in front of their resting place looking out at the world, protecting their descendants, and looking incredibly life-like.  Poor Torajans break eggs at their funerals in lieu of slaughtering buffalo and pigs, and leave their unprotected dead on the ground.  It’s the best they can do, but to not honor the dead, to not spend all you can on a funeral, it leaves a hole in your heart as one man described it to me.  It means that the ancestors will not look after your family and this is unthinkable.  It is 2011, and this is real. 

Hillside burial sites

Man carves Tau-Tau (effigies) for tourists -- the real deal would be done in private

Traditional Torajan homes are shaped like the bow and stern of a ship and ornately carved.  The carvings are painted red, white, black and warm yellow.  The legend says that the original people came up river to the area in similarly shaped ships.  The curved roofs may also represent the cycles of life without start or end.  They are always oriented from north to south with east the side of the house for the living, thanks to the rising sun, and the west part of the house left for the dead. 

If someone in your family dies, they officially become “sick.”  They are mummified, wrapped and stay in the home.  No one officially mourns, no black clothing is worn and the women of the household prepare three meals a day for their sick relative, as usual, until the funeral.  I heard Torajans saying that it can take years for a family to save up enough money and to find a time when the family can come together to hold the funeral.  It can nearly bankrupt a family to feed someone, three times a day, who is no longer contributing to the family’s income. 

When the funeral finally comes together the spotted white and black buffalo with blue eyes are the most valued.  For every buffalo, a handful of pigs must also be sacrificed.  The first time I locked eyes with a massive blue-eyed water buffalo I got the distinct feeling that there were things at play here that I couldn’t come close to understanding.  It was eerie.   

We had the opportunity to attend a funeral as honored guests.  The women entered first in single file and then the men.  We sat in temporary bleacher-like structures of bamboo that are built especially for each funeral.  The women sat on woven straw mats to the left and the men to the right.  Women dressed in black from the deceased’s family came and offered us beetle nut, tobacco and little candies.  We accepted the candies, grateful and relieved not to have to chew on anything unsavory, and then had the coffee and tea that followed.  After a few brief speeches, I assume welcoming us; a large water buffalo was paraded out into the open area in front of our ringside seats.   A specially skilled and trained man then took ahold of the buffalo’s halter and slit it’s neck with one grand motion.  The buffalo went down quickly and quietly and bled to death in the dirt.  A second buffalo was brought out and the same process began again, only this one danced away from the knife as soon as it made contact with the soft skin of its neck.  The man still successfully and cleanly slit the animal’s throat, it just seemed as though the buffalo experienced the abrupt, painful contact with the blade and was startled, jumping up onto its hind legs in one last burst of life before falling to the ground. 

 After watching the attention doted on these animals all around the countryside – the careful washings and groomings and fresh, handpicked grass feedings they got daily – I can sympathize with the buffalo’s shock at this ultimate betrayal.  A lifetime of care and attention came to this – in an instant the animal’s life was seized and its blood shed on the ground.  The buffalo are then butchered right there on site.  Several men jump in to do the task and the hunks of meat are passed around and then slowly cooked inside hollow bamboo logs over open fires spread around the funeral grounds, presumably belonging to different branches of the family.  In the meantime, a host of pigs are literally hogtied to bamboo poles and lay panicking on the ground.  That bothered me more than the buffalo slaughter, because they were so obviously aware that they were screwed – that the jig was up.  I had to walk away before they killed a pig.  The terrified squeals were enough; too much.  I did watch one sacrificed pig being roasted whole over an open fire though.  And I watched in a sort of daze as a small boy carefully prodded and fingered the entrails laying on a woven mat nearby like he was searching for the prize inside a Cracker Jack box, or playing in a sandbox.  I thought about how this ritual is such a part of the culture and of this one small boy’s life.  The guts, and the death, and the bones of the dead are real, and tangible, and accessible.  This is death, in life, in the present moment, forever linked.  It’s pretty amazing.

We also had a chance to briefly experience a ritual undertaken by several families in which the entombed dead are withdrawn from their resting places and cleaned with oils and herbs and then carefully re-wrapped and placed back into their hillside graves.  This takes place about 15 years after the dead were originally buried and is essentially spring-cleaning.  The heavy caskets are also taken out and repainted, the carvings and trim around the tomb are scrubbed and re-painted, and the effigies are redressed and cleaned as well.  While the dead are washed out of view inside of private homes, I did watch, despite the lack of safety precautions, as a few men hoisted a heavy, hardwood casket back up into the cliff face, and then later as men carried a wrapped body down out of another hollowed out stone grave.  There had to be a couple hundred people in attendance all along the narrow mountain road.  Men on motorbikes drove by with hogtied pigs strapped on the back of their bikes ready for a feast somewhere.  It was chaotic and we didn’t stay long.  Our group of about 70 white faces was adrift in the sea of Torajans doing their best to honor their dead.

Spring cleaning - note the tau-tau (effigies) sitting on the left

This is the body going back up into the crypt following the casket

All in all, I loved Toraja.  I loved the green terraced rice fields and the friendly people, and the rich culture, and I hope they are able to preserve this way of life and their priorities without becoming lost in this new world of ours.  The investment in death is somehow, oddly, preserving and protecting a way of life that is astounding when you really think about it.  I will not be the same for this experience.