Jane Guinery
Malvern u3a
West Midlands region
A Walk in the Forest
I came by sea, leaving the rain drenched city of Medan on the west coast of Sumatra. From the ferry deck, through torrents, I waved farewell to my uncomprehending wife and boys. I could not explain the importance of this journey back to see my father. As the ferry approached my home island, few lights shone on the coast until we rounded the headland. A sprawling shanty town perplexed my memory, blasting neon yellows across the water. The shore was littered with debris; the mouth of the estuary disgorged a muddy stench into the once pristine ocean.
The muscled canoe man paddled hard upriver, then set me down on the bank, leaving me alone in the oppressive humidity and heat. I walked on homeward, down a bendy track as narrow as a person, across slippery mud slopes and rivulets. As the vegetation bore down it crowded in on me. Stooped branches and leaves brushed and scraped me, and I contemplated leeches. This was claustrophobic in a way I had not felt before in the forest. It brought back the memories of dread and confusion felt as a younger man when, in a quest for better things, I’d made my way to the city.
Sweaty, I stumbled, my faintness intensified by the screeching roar of cicadas. At last, I emerged as a stranger into the clearing, clammy and drenched. Despite the temperature, cold numbness suddenly pervaded my body. I smelt the pungent aroma of my own anxiety.
Everything was unreal as a dream, primitive, yet familiar: tall roofed wooden houses on stilts, thatched with sago palm leaves; pigs and chickens slumped in shade; the compound with two elderly darkly tattooed men squatting low in bark loin clothes tipping hunting darts with poison. How skinny and immobile they looked. Yet I knew that this night they would be running through the forest after wild boar, cunning in the chase and swift as their prey.
“I know you”, a yet unobserved old woman called from the house. “You are Joseph. Why have you returned? These five years your family does not live here. The young are gone.”
I responded simply in her tongue, “I have come to walk with my father in the forest”.
“Come and rest awhile”, she said, “sit with me, be calm”.
How perceptive she seemed. Clumsily I climbed the steep stepped log up to the veranda; my muddied shoes slipping on the footholds. This made me have to balance arms out like a tightrope walker. She laughed at this clowning, in her mirth revealing a few blackened teeth. She offered me betelnuts, I politely refused. Having brought water to me, we sat together in comfortable silence. Time to reflect, time to wonder. This was the home I once had. Everything looked familiar. The wooden platform veranda and cavernous room behind it, skulls of respected prey hug on rafters, and the two footmarks in red pigment on the back wall marking the passage of my father. How could this be my past? How could this be?
As the light faded, thanking my companion, I slipped away between tall trees to meet my father. The full moon greeted us as we walked at arm’s length and yet together, my father’s slight and bent physique almost translucent in the moonlight. His skin was vividly marked in the patterns of the tribe. Arms heavily ornamented, black squares on back and cheeks; shapes and lines that symbolised the competent oarsman and hunter.
“Son, my footmarks are all of me that remains, yet you have come to walk with me?”
“I have to speak with you. I no longer know who I am.”
“To understand you must know the before and after, and that you have always been a part of both. You must understand where you come from and where you belong. Will you listen?”
“Yes father, this time I will. I have come to hear you”.
He spoke to me in a calm voice as we moved along a broadening path.
“Our people had a balance. We respected the forest and creatures within. Some trees were cut for shelter, and palms were opened to encourage in weevils to produce the grubs we eat. We took few animals from the forest, gathered fish and plants and recognised their seasons and needs. Then the missionaries came. They brought medicine and schooling, and sometimes strange foods, grain and yeast. As pork was our meat, we could adopt their ways. Their Jesus, who had died for them, walked together with our ancestors in the forest, observed us and watched over us with kindness. We could accept their church’s gifts and maintain our own council. I named my firstborn Joseph, knowing you would have sons who would be good and loving. It could have stopped there. Then came travellers, the foresters, miners, and finally the palm oil men from the cities. Our highways were the rivers. There was no need for roads and destruction of the trees that sustain and shelter the animals. You have seen now how the land is scarred and disfigured, and the coast is defiled by the palm oil plantation. Top soils, cut from the hills, trickle down pouring toxic sludge into our streams.”
“But father, good came from these people as well. Remember, first came the young travellers who befriended us and gave us fishing twine, and nets, and money to trade for better things?”
“What good was there in that? What became of the river fish? You can only take so much. Remember your sisters, waist deep in the stream collecting but a few. Remember them picking the fresh leaves of the tapioca and tending the chickens and pigs. Your lovely sisters, the youngest taken early by the water sickness that they brought with them.”
He paused and turned to me. Eyes dipped in sadness. “Son why did you not see this? Why did you need the baseball cap and the trainers? This was what money bought you? With my bare feet I encircle the branch that crosses the stream, it is the foreigner that must travel with crutch like sticks or be supported by the arms of others, unable to grip, feet encased in fabrics or hard leather, and unable to see dangers in the forest. Yet you showed them the way to the hard wood trees in return for meaningless trinkets.”
“I was a young man. I wanted what I didn’t have. But father can’t you see, the way you are is not what modern man should be, living in the wild, virtually naked! Our tribal tattoos are ugly and primitive. We look like animals of the forest. I must hide my arms in shame and cannot disguise the marks on my face.”
“Shame? There is no shame. You learnt so little from me. I wanted to give you so much, you are my son. I wanted to show you how to make the poison arrow and to hunt, to plan the harvests, and to make the baskets to raise the chickens into the canopy of the house away from night walkers, scorpions that prowl in darkness. Where is the balance now, where is your heart and soul! I see an emptiness in you and fear in your eyes. You are as foreign as the missionaries and woodmen that first came, and the palm oil men that followed. Can you not see any more the movement on the ground beneath your feet and in the canopies above, the beauty and abundance of the forest … so much you have lost.”
“But father can’t you see the good things that these strangers gave us. You rejected their medicine. With all that they have brought, you could have travelled to the city for their help and lived. You made me watch you as you faded away day by day. You would not listen!”
“I found peace with the forest in the way of our people. I walked out each night with the spirits of our ancestors, to prepare, to join them. I belong with them here.” He momentarily hesitated in what he said, “And Joseph, after this, you took your mother to the mainland, and made hers a harsh and long death. She has gone from the forest and will never re-join me!”
I wept in my heart as I loved them both, “Father, forgive me”.
“Joseph, hear this, I am not angry. You are still of this tribe. You must be, you are here walking with me. Don’t torment yourself, know yourself. I’m no longer in your world, yet you see me. You visit your ancestors according to old customs. Your sons and city wife will never understand as you do. When your time comes return to us.”
With this he slowly turned away, dissolved in a whisper and moonlit shadows. I echoed his parting words, “as long as there is a forest, our spirits will dwell here and embrace all we truly love.”