What Time Will You Come Back

One word, many sides

There is a word that surfaces in nearly all the interviews, and each narrator explains it from a different side. That word is dema.

Yulius Romeo Mahuze explained it from the side of form. Dema, he said, is the lord of the land. It is a human not yet human, like a spirit or like a god, taking the form of an animal such as a snake.

There is a sea snake and a water snake called Sarendo, and this snake likes to make rivers wherever it goes. Historically, Sarendo belongs to the Gebze clan. There is also Misdema, the guardian who carries the bow, a human who walks about with arrows and who watches over the high ground. Misdema belongs to the Mahuze clan.

Dominggus Bakap explained it from the side of relation. For him dema is not first of all a figure but a place of origin.

"Dema goes back to where we are and where we come from," he said. "Dema goes back to our identity."

Every place, every customary territory, has its own ancestor or dema. And because every place has a different background, the ancestors in each place differ too.

A question that is not small talk

Out of that explanation comes a very practical custom, and it is here that this knowledge is most easily recognised by an outsider.

When someone comes to ask permission to enter a tract of forest, the village head or the customary head will ask one thing. What time will you come back.

That question is not small talk. That question is an emphasis. Go by all means, but remember to be back by such an hour, because that place runs somewhat hot and somewhat extreme.

An illness that is not medical

The reason is explained honestly. If the person is late, if he should have returned at three and comes back only at four, and then suddenly falls ill at home, he must not blame those who asked.

That illness is not a medical illness. Medical treatment will say there is no disease. What has happened is, in the narrator's phrase, that the dema is teaching that person.

What must then be done is to return to the customary head or to the owner of that place, so that the person may be given back.

"That custom still holds to this day," he said. "And it will never disappear."

Two things to understand precisely

First, not all dema are good. If someone does wrong within that territory and the dema is angered, the person will see nothing. A dema is a spirit, and no one knows where it appears from. Neither does it give warning beforehand.

Second, dema is not only a matter of danger. Dema, Dominus Bakap said, is at the same time the guardian of the universe and the guardian of the place one holds. For that reason not just anyone may enter, and not just anyone may do damage.

In village speech and in customary speech, that is called pemali.

And it is pemali that binds it all together. That prohibition is not a prohibition standing on its own. That prohibition is the most compact form of a relation between people, place, and what guards the place.

A boundary the narrator marks himself

Asked whether this knowledge of dema and pemali holds for the Malind broadly or only for the Marori Menggey area, Dominggus Bakap answered carefully.

As a general picture, he said, the practice is indeed attached to the Malind, and attached directly to the totems that exist. Yet he added one sentence that deserves quoting whole.

"I do not know about other peoples."

He also marked one further boundary. There is a part that truly cannot be told because it is private and sacred, and there is another part that can indeed be conveyed publicly.

"I must speak honestly that there are spaces that for us are private," he said. "We cannot simply enter there."