River Voices

And once again, when the river had just increased its flow in the rainy
season and made a powerful noise, then said Siddhartha: 'Isn't it so,
oh friend, the river has many voices, very many voices? Hasn't it the
voice of a king, and of a warrior, and of a bull, and of a bird of the
night, and of a woman giving birth, and of a sighing man, and a thousand
other voices more?'
- Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse

Drifting into the twilight zone of sleep the other night, outside echoed the punctuating sound of some bird unknown to me, whose call is a series of bursts of increasing frequency: “thork…......thork…..thork…thork..thork.thork.tho.th…” - the audible equivalent of a pebble skipping across a pond. Ringing through the paneless windows of my room, that sound mingled among the Indonesian or Wehean chatter next door I cannot translate, the intermittent bass-baritone moo of the cow nearby, gheckos’ cheeps, the incessant chirping of crickets and, in the absence of soundproofing in this house, the echoes of a sleeping occupant of the house and every turn on her mattress, as if she were in my room beside me.

Then the half-consciousness conjured briefly the memory of my stopping in the mid-day heat on a clay-gravel road, with Ulin wood houses lining the riverside, to sketch a village road configuration. With the sound of light footsteps behind I turned to look into the darkly freckled face of a man whose piercing eyes and subtly mischievous smile startled me. But at that point I noted nothing else remarkable about him, and I put aside my initial start when he stopped to look at the map I was drawing, as others also had done. Awkwardly I gestured to indicate my task. Then he uttered something in Indonesian, smiled wryly, and raised before me a weighty and bloody brown pig’s head, which he held by the long stiff hairs of its forehead, and walked on.

In that vivid moment, cacophonous and hypnogogic, I stood at an open window covered with a diaphanous curtain, looking out into a dark night, when the curtain was drawn aside by an invisible hand revealing a sky dotted faintly with stars, the silhouettes of enormous banana and palm trees. Then I perceived the whole course of the lives of a thousand people here, from birth to death, and felt a wonderful strangeness to this place I have not experienced in any place before. In that moment I perceived deeply that these people are different from those who have populated my life experience. Of course they are fellow human beings who share all that is commonly human, yes it is true, but their perceptions of the world have been shaped by traditions, beliefs and a physical environment fundamentally different from my own.

Perhaps some might say that I glimpsed the spirit world of the people of Nehas. I would be interested to know if the experience might be described as a spiritual initiation, or, in a western Judeo-Christian description, a kind of religious experience. From my rational-scientific perspective, it was merely a hypnogogic dream, but I give it significance because the sensation was profound and quite unlike any I have previously experienced, and it lingers with me. Still, it was brief, and in the morning the village seemed only as different as it did the morning of the day before, as seen through the eyes of a man born on the Canadian prairies and whose adult life has been spent among the comforts of west coast British Columbia.

And by contrast, in the mornings the school-children are smartly dressed in uniforms and may be heard to repeat in English “the father, the son, and the holy spirit”, while televisions, cell-phones are abundant, computers available, and western pop music is frequently heard among the teenagers. Popular American, European and Asian influences do not seem overwhelming here, but they are apparent, and it seems to me the youth are growing into a globalized world that is alien to their grandparents. Here is a village at the cross-roads between shifting its physical location upriver, the loss of the elders’ connection to their ancestral homes, and a new village in a new location, and a new order that may arise in the face of the realities of globalization. Village leaders have devised plans to move villagers in stages, beginning as early as 2012 if resources allow, upriver to an area of higher ground. Some villagers have started their preparations. What will be lost if that happens and what will begin anew? What voices of the river will be swept under its rapid current and disappear among the floods?

- Liah Linyai Lediu (we have all be given adopted names, this is mine)