In 2001 I spent three months in East Timor assisted by an Ian Potter Cultural Trust grant. I interviewed and photographed over sixty women from all walks of life as part of a broader project to highlight the crucial role that women are making towards reconstruction and their contribution to the independence struggle. My project, ‘Lives Remembered –Stories of East Timorese Women’, was a personal response to the fact that very little was reflected in the Australian mainstream media after the violent events of 1999 about how East Timorese women were faring.
Tais weaver, OMT women's collective Maliana, East Timor 2001
I first visited East Timor in 1997. Bishop Carlos Belo, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and spiritual leader to the Timorese, described East Timor as a place in which half the Timorese were paid to spy on the other half. It was a time of 6pm curfews, secret police and informers, machine gun wielding Indonesian soldiers patrolling the streets and controlling the population through fear and intimidation, torture and imprisonment.
Daily life for women under that brutal regime meant the ever-present threat of sexual violence. The journey sowed the seed for this recent body of work. I developed a passion for the people and the culture and wanted to return to document the courage, strength and determination of East Timorese women through their personal stories.
Recent Background
The newest democratic nation of the 21st century is struggling to recover and rebuild its physical, emotional and psychological landscape. In the aftermath of the militia violence following the 1999 referendum ballot the population of East Timor resembled a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces thrown to the winds. People were herded onto trucks and taken to squalid camps in West Timor where they remained for months until the INTERFET forces intervened.
Thousands of women were made widows and many suffered sexual violence. They returned to their villages to find homes, crops, farm animals and possessions looted and destroyed by Indonesia’s scorched earth policy. Many returned with just the clothes they stood in and started their lives from scratch.
Tais weavings and baskets, Maubara roadside stall, East Timor 2001
Reconstruction has been slow but grass roots development is taking place. Across the country East Timorese women are attending literacy and language classes, workshops about the political process or learning small business management. They are forming cooperatives to produce traditional handicrafts such as tais textiles, basket making and pottery to sell to the large international presence. These old skills are providing a rare means of economic independence and the new skills are laying foundations for the future.
Timorese textiles
The craft of tais is only performed by women. These textiles are an important part of Timorese cultural heritage and play a vital role in traditional activities. Tais are made for ceremonial occasions such as births, weddings, funerals or other important traditional events as well as for everyday personal wear. Tais textiles can depict cultural beliefs, stories or record significant events. Traditional motifs and patterns are passed down through the generations.
Weaving is considered an integral part of a woman’s duties. They must fit it into a day full of the chores and family responsibilities expected of their gender and often weave together as a social activity.
Some tais are considered valuable family heirlooms as are gold coins and jewellery from Portuguese times. These tais are often used as part of a dowry or berlaki that a prospective husband’s family pays to the bride and her family. There was little formal handicraft production during the twenty-four year military occupation. Indonesian culture and language were imposed upon the Timorese. Families were displaced and separated during the years of repression and forced from their ancestral lands. As a result social cohesion and community bonds suffered. Traditional practices are passed on by word of mouth through the generations and much information was lost.
Isabel de Jesus, 60, tais weaver, Suai, rolling cotton into shape for spinning
This applies to the traditional Timorese tais made from home grown cotton seeds and dyed using colours derived from plants, leaves and trees. A few older women told me they no longer know how to produce certain colours used in the antique tais of their forebears. Fewer young women are interested in learning how to weave the modern tais from synthetic cotton let alone the labour intensive traditional tais. In 1999 many tools of production were burnt along with crops of cotton trees, seed stocks and the native bushes and grasses used for dye colours.
The old women say it is difficult to keep the old traditions alive when the raw materials and tools are in short supply.
Men and women wear distinctively different tais. Tais Mane or ‘man’s cloth’ are woven as one large piece of cloth in bright colours often featuring a fringe or tassels. These are wrapped around the waist like a sarong. Tais Feto or ‘women’s cloth’ are sewn together to form a tube. The women wear it tucked around the waist or pulled high like a dress worn with bare shoulders.
Knowledge about sacred symbols and patterns and the techniques of spinning, dyeing and embroidering is handed down from grandmothers and mothers. Each of Timor’s thirteen districts is culturally and linguistically unique with their own techniques, symbols, motifs and weaving styles.
Tais cloth is woven on a simple backstrap loom, which can be dismantled quickly and easily. The weaving can be lifted off and folded away for safekeeping. Women weave on the floor of their homes or on a straw mat outside in the shade.
The horizontal threads are passed through the cloth by hand using thread attached to a sharpened bamboo stick and then pushed into place by a wooden cross bar. The vertical threads are coloured using the resist process. Skeins of yarn are wrapped at intervals in strips of plastic cord. These sections resist the dye and are left plain or are dyed another colour. When these threads are woven into the tais the dyed areas form the pattern. Motifs are woven into side or central panels and depending on whether it is a male or female tais and the district it originates from embroidery, tassels or fringes are added upon completion. Larger pieces are made by sewing several identical tais together.
A tais made from Indonesian synthetic cotton can take anywhere from four days to a month or longer to complete depending on its size. The traditional tais from home grown cotton take more than a year to complete hence their rarity and value.
Popular motifs include the gecko, the horse, the distinctive Timorese stilt house and the crocodile. Myth has it that the island of Timor is the solidified body of an old crocodile which the people call ‘grandfather’.
Other kinds of tais include the ‘Ine’, a wedding tais for women woven with synthetic gold threads; the ‘Kadele’ worn by men at funerals; the ‘Sabu’ a general purpose ceremonial tais that indicates high social status; the ‘Bodato’ also used for ceremonial events. The selanda or sash draped around the neck or across the chest is worn by both men and women and is often presented as a gift at official occasions. Some of the most beautiful and coveted textiles are produced by women’s cooperatives in Oecussi, Bobonaro, Lautem, Ermera, Suai, Viqueque and Bacau. Many other areas are exploring ways to market their craft both within East Timor and abroad.
Present Situation
Micro credit loans and grants from donor agencies are helping women to achieve a measure of economic empowerment. Women’s groups such as OMT (Organasao Mulhers Timorense) which assisted the clandestine independence movement have village representatives across the country. They help women build their skills, self esteem and confidence. The collective efforts of the cooperatives exert greater bargaining power and fairer prices for their work as well as fostering a sense of solidarity.
The grants are used to purchase materials in bulk or to renovate destroyed buildings to use as permanent premises in which to weave or to sell other mixed goods. Nove Nove in Maliana in the heavily militarised south of the country and the Lautem Widow’s Centre in the north are two such enterprises. Many women lost husbands and families in 1999. The few trauma and survivors of torture counselling services in existence are under resourced and based mostly in Dili. The Nove Nove women told me that weaving together helps them heal their grief.
The major hurdle to marketing these beautiful handicrafts overseas is the lack of a reliable buying and marketing chain. East Timor is still in a state of flux over the rebuilding of major infrastructure such as roads, bridges and ports. Subsequently trade has been slow and haphazard because of the poor state of its roads.
The only public craft market is in Dili, the capital of East Timor. Around thirty stalls, mostly run by men, sell tais bought from women all over the country. The quality is varied as cheap imitations produced in Indonesia are appearing in the market. The prices are inflated and reflect the high salaries of the foreign workers who work in the UN and NGO donor sector. A viable tourist industry is still in the early stages and many other vital infrastructure are still in need of repair.
The American dollar is the official currency and the dual economy (that is the everyday Timorese economy and the service industry catering solely to cashed up foreigners) has created a false market for these crafts. Once the UN mission scales down towards May 2002 the opportunities for women to sell their work in the domestic market will be drastically reduced.
Some recent suggestions include setting up a central East Timorese fair trade body responsible for collecting the best tais from cooperatives around the country and selling them to overseas buying chains. Sustainable markets need to be identified and developed for tais products and other Timorese crafts such as basketware and pottery. Their craft skills provide one of the few sources of hope for sustainable income generation.
There are so many areas of the social and economic fabric of East Timorese society that need to be rebuilt that the specific needs of women may be sidelined. After so many years of darkness the strength of Timorese culture and the indomitable spirit of East Timorese women needs to be spotlighted.
STORY OF ISABEL RAMOS TASI
Isabel Ramos Tasi, 40, is a tais weaver who lives in the village of Bobometo in the Oecussi enclave. This isolated East Timorese district is separated from the rest of the country and surrounded by Indonesian West Timor. It was 95% destroyed by the militias in 1999.
Isabel learnt the craft from the age of fifteen from her mother. She has a husband and seven children and is teaching two of her daughters to weave. She is chief of the local tais cooperative set up with a $2,000 US grant from UNHCR under its QIP project (Quick Impact Program). They mostly use the brightly coloured synthetic cottons from Indonesia. Isabel is concerned the knowledge of how to make the rare and coveted traditional tais is slowly dying out.
'Only the older generation can make these traditional ones, like my mother,' Isabel explains, 'the younger ones don't know how to make them and the raw materials are not available. It is very difficult. We use our hands to spin the cotton. We don't have spinning wheels. It is too difficult but if there was a market we could do it. If we had an order we would try. One piece takes a person a year,' she says.
'The symbols we get from our grandparents and they are passed from generation to generation. They are used by the whole of Oecussi. We want to help all the members of our families. We have no experience with marketing. But we have no way of getting any training,' explains Isabel.
The funds raised by selling Tais through the cooperative assists local families. The UNHCR grant enabled them to market their work through a QIP shop in a suburb of Dili but the tais take a long time to sell because they rely on foreigners to purchase them at higher prices than those charged for the domestic market. They obtain their cottons from across the West Timor border by ordering through a middleman.
'We order our cottons from the border,' says Isabel, 'the
price is a little bit higher than in Indonesia. We order
in big numbers. It is not safe for us to go to the border.
We have contacts at the shop in Bobometo or in Oecussi and
they go to the border.'
Security is still a major issue and cross border trading
is both illegal and dangerous because there is still a threat
from militia. When the cooperative runs out of cotton Isabel
makes contact with the local storeowner and he arranges
to buy more stock at the border. Materials from Dili are
too expensive because of the added transport costs as they
come on the once a week barge.
Dawn Delaney is a Victorian based freelance photojournalist
Last modified 07-May-2003
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