Keeping Alive the Textile Traditions of Timor Leste

In 2012, Jill Forshee, a cultural anthropologist at Colombia College in Chicago, made a trip to Timor Leste to learn more about the country’s textiles. Forshee took photographs of East Timorese cloths (tais) from the collection of the UCLA Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, Germany, and other collections, hoping to confirm the origin of these cloths. To her surprise, she actually found the weavers who had made two of the tais in the photographs and the daughter of a weaver who had made a third. 

One of the weavers that Forshee found was Arestina dos Santos, who told Forshee that she wove the tais in Forshee’s photograph in 1995, and it had been her finest piece. She had never had the time to weave another one like it. Dos Santos, who lost her husband in 1979 and was left alone with four children, sold her masterpiece in 1999 for US$150 in order to pay school fees for her children; it eventually found its way to the Fowler Museum.

Marobo weaving is among the most ancient in Timor Leste.

By the time the UN Peacekeepers arrived in 1999, the practice of handweaving in Timor Leste had been devastated. Many heirloom textiles had been stolen or burnt; the only textile from the National Collection in Dili that survived was a bark cloth tubular skirt. However, peace did not end the devastation. Women who had desperately carried their family heirlooms into the mountains when they fled the soldiers and militias or buried them before they left their homes were forced to part with these treasures after the war in order to feed their families or meet other household expenses. The tais were sold to peacekeepers or foreigners who arrived with the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor; some of the very best pieces ended up in museum collections around the world.

Bunak weavers excel in the supplementary weft technique.

The importance of textiles in East Timorese culture cannot be overstated. Social organization in Timor Leste is kin based, and clan identity is expressed through textiles; many patterns are restricted to a particular clan. Tais embody social order and mark all important ceremonies in Timor Leste. Thus, the destruction of so many textiles during the 1975-1999 war was deeply traumatic.

Timor Aid, an NGO that started out aiding refugees and helping to reconstruct the country, watched with dismay as heirloom tais were sold to foreigners beginning in 1999. They very quickly established a department to buy up textiles, so that the tais would at least remain in the country. Timor Aid also began documenting thetechniques and patterns, in an effort to conserve crucial textile knowledge. This effort was spearheaded by Rosalia Soares, an expert on the tais of Timior Leste. Soares and Timor Aid continue this work today, but are hampered by lack of funding and facilities. Fortunately, they have placed the 180 textiles in their collection online at: http://www.timoraid.org/. They have also published monographs on the textiles of Lautem, Cova Lima, and the Kemak of Marobo. 

Timor Aid has published several important monographs on tais weaving in Timor Leste

Although the island of Timor has one of the strongest textile traditions in the archipelago, with a dazzling range of techniques and designs, very little research has been done on the textiles of either East or West Timor, as the entire island was cut off from the outside world because of the conflict in Timor Leste between 1975 and 1999.

In 2014, the Fowler Museum published Textiles of Timor, Island in the Woven Sea, the first book to examine textiles from both sides of the island of Timor – in conjunction with a pathbreaking exhibition of the same name. Forshee’s moving essay about the weavers she encountered in Timor Leste, “Loss and Return: Personal Stories of Fataluku Weavers,” is included in the volume, the cover which features the weaving that Dos Santos sold in 1999. 

Dos Santos’ finest tais is featured on the cover.

Textiles of Timor, Island in the Woven Sea was edited by Roy Hamilton and Joanna Barrkman. Hamilton, who is Curator of Asian and Pacific Collections at the Fowler Museum, built the museum’s collection of Timorese textiles, which is now the largest and best documented in the US. He is the author of Gift of the Cotton Maiden; Textiles of Flores and the Solor Islands. 

Barrkman is Curator of Southeast Asian and Pacific Arts at the Fowler Museum and has researched and written extensively on East and West Timorese textiles. Her Ph.D. thesis, Return to Baguia: an ethnographic museum collection on the edge of living memory, examines the question of whether ethnographic museum collections are relevant to living descendants of the people who originally made and used the objects. Her research involved traveling to Baguia in Timor Leste to show villagers digital copies of 700 artifacts, including textiles, which Alfred Bühler collected for the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland during a 1935 trip to what was then Portuguese Timor. 

Within the tremendous diversity found in Timor Leste, Barrkman and Hamilton have identified 10 major textile style areas. There has also been widespread mixing of techniques and motifs, as women married into other clans and whole villages were displaced during the years of turmoil. Large swaths of Timor Leste have not been studied at all – the central region is very mountainous and inaccessible. Much remains to be done. (The photos accompanying this essay showcase some of these different textile styles.) 

This tais feto (woman’s cloth) from Cova Lima features intricate ikat motifs (likely inspired by Indian trade cloths) encased by finely woven float warp borders.

Traveling to Timor Leste and Seeing for Yourself

For those interested in learning more about East Timorese tais or obtaining textiles for their collection (and don’t want to travel Timor Leste’s tortuous roads to find the weavers), there are two good options:

Alola Foundation, a women’s rights organization founded by Kirsty Gusmao – the Australian wife of Xanana Gusmao, the first president of Timor Leste – has a textile extension program and works with weavers all over the country. Alola holds pre-Christmas and pre-Easter handicraft fairs in Dili, where artisans and weavers from all over Timor Leste come to sell their wares. Dates for these fairs can be found on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Alola-Fair-Feira-Alola-1453459631556039/

Weavers from Marobo at the Alola textile fair in Dili. Milena dos Santos (left) is the master weaver featured in the film that accompanies the book Reaffirming the Kemak Culture of Marobo, then and now.

In addition, high quality tais from all over Timor Leste can be found year-round at Things and Stories, the handicraft shop on the main floor of Hotel Timor, with branches at the Timor Plaza Hotel, the Dili airport, and the Museum of the Resistance.

A stunning Beti Bose from the Timor Leste enclave of Oecusse – the motif was revived by Timor Aid, woven by Filomena Suni, and sold by Things and Stories.

What Things and Stories has done is create purchasing power for quality tais that was not there before. Monnereau and Ferro buy everything that meets their quality standards – everything – meaning they have a huge inventory (ask them if you are looking for something in particular, and they will bring out what they have if you don’t see it in the store). They see it as their job to develop products with tais and find the markets. To their surprise, they have found quite a large market within Timor Leste itself, so that their export business is, as yet, only a secondary line. 

Maite Monnereau and Joao Ferro see it as their job to find markets for East Timorese tais.

Their insistence on quality is helping to keep alive the best textile traditions in the country. In the beginning, they bought only 20% of what was offered to them, but they met with every weaver and pointed out what the problems were and why they were not buying. Now they buy 80% of what comes to their door – 100% from some vendors. And they pay according to complexity and quality. Tais are priced according to a very strict evaluation of every step of the work, so that each part of the process is duly paid. The weavers know they can get a fair price and immediate cash for high quality textiles – they do not have to place items on commission or wait in Dili for weeks or months until the tais are sold.

Text and photos by Marianne Scholte. This article was originally published in Textiles Asia, May 2019 volume 11 issue 1

Weaving from the Tutuala region of Lautem may incorporate the ancient motifs of boats and horses and riders found on the rock art on the walls of the Ili Kere Kere cave. Archaeologists believe that some of the paintings in the cave are 1500 to 2000 years old.