Land That Walks After the Sea

Telling with place names

There is a distinctive way of telling in Yulius Romeo Mahuze's account. He does not name years. He names places.

And every place name marks one removal, so that the history of his village reads like a chain of land walking after a retreating shoreline.

Lima Suba

The first place the Buti people lived was called Lima Suba. Its location, as the narrator pointed it out, lies around Kelapa Lima and Jalan Beringin, toward Kuprik. There the Buti people lived for centuries.

And in that time, he said, the ground we now stand on was still sea. Only the high ground was land.

Bui Pare and Tot Pare

After centuries at Lima Suba, they began coming to look around. The land had come forward, and they moved again. The second place was called Bui Pare. That is the area now known as the Kodim quarter.

Nearby lies another name again, Tot Pare. That name carries its meaning inside it. Tot Pare is the place where people gathered coconut blossom, together with the sheath that wraps it. In earlier days coconuts were plentiful there.

A place name, in this way of telling, is a record of what people once did in that spot.

Mbanggu

That area too was still sea. Then the Dutch built irrigation, and the irrigation dried it out, until what had been ocean became land.

From Bui Pare the Malind moved once more, this time as far as Mbanggu. Mbanggu was formerly a sacred place, and it was later divided into groves and tracts, namely Nawari, Katif, Inotif, Buti itself, Kare-Kare, Ndorem, Yawati, Waraku, Yobar, Spadem, as far as Kaikay.

How a boundary is known

How does one know the boundary between one tract and another, when inside the forest everything looks the same. That question was put to two narrators, and both answered in the same way.

Alexander Kaize, customary head of Wasur village, answered that the boundaries are many and take the form of natural signs. A clan boundary does not run straight. It always runs at an angle, never straight in a single stretch. He gave the sequence in his own territory, from the Basik-basik clan, curving as far as the boundary at the diggings, then the Kaize clan, then the Balagaize clan, then Gebze.

These markers were not made by one generation. "That is from the ancestors, from the ancestors down to us," he said. Even the turn of a river can be a marker.

Yulius Romeo Mahuze answered in the same way, and added its origin. The boundaries were made out of the experience of walking, out of the places where people rested and found food.

Even brothers do not ask for land

There is one last matter that states the relation between territories exactly.

At Hurung there is a Mahuze clan, and at Buti there is a Mahuze clan. The two, Yulius Romeo Mahuze said, are indeed born brothers. Yet even born brothers may not come and ask for land.

"He cannot come here. Nor can I go there and ask him for land," he said.

What is possible is a gift, not a request. He recounted that his brother once gave him land for rice fields at Semangga Three, and he stressed that he had not asked for it. That gift was born of the awareness that they are one canoe.