Remembering the Season of Suffering: Cloth and Memory

Abstract

Narratives of cloth in oral history interviews may be read as rich autobiographical tales. This article explores the symbolic meaning of cloth in the life narratives of elderly Javanese plantation laborers on the Kayu Aro estate in Sumatra, Indonesia. Through stories of cloth, narrators communicated the hardship they experienced during the Japanese occupation and subsequent Indonesian national revolution, a time narrators referred to as “the season of suffering.” The narrative of Mbah Cilik, whose memories of the season of suffering are bound up in stories of cloth, is explored in detail to illustrate how stories ostensibly about cloth contain deeply personal recollections.

Keywords::

• Oral history;
• memory;
• cloth;
• textiles;
• Indonesia;
• life narrative;
• Japanese occupation

Acknowledgements

The fieldwork for this article was undertaken as part of my doctoral research funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award and a Monash University Postgraduate Travel Grant.

Notes

1. While the Japanese occupation of Indonesia began in March 1942, the isolated location of the Kayu Aro estate and the continued Dutch management of the estate until late 1943 meant the effects of the occupation were not immediately felt on the plantation.

2. The Muslim holiday of Lebaran is celebrated annually at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

3. The names of informants which appear in this article are pseudonyms given to protect the privacy of individuals. The Javanese honorific Mbah means grandmother or grandfather.

4. Kampong, modern spelling kampung, is a village.

5. Of the conditions in Central Java, Anton Lucas writes “In the last months of the occupation even in the towns cloth was so scarce that head scarves were made into shorts, mattress covers into women’s sarongs and white burial cloth appropriated for apparel. In the rural area clothes made from gunny sacks were full of lice, and sarongs made of sheets of coarse latex painted to look like cloth stuck to one’s body in the heat and tore easily. When these ran out, people made their own cloth substitutes from yarn extracted from fibrous leaves and bark” (Lucas 1991, 40).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Lamb

Nicole Lamb is an historian of Indonesia with interests and expertise in oral history, colonialism, and labor history. She received her PhD from Monash University, Melbourne in 2014. [email protected]