Mama Tua

MJ my love,

You are enjoying the most of your school holiday when I write this. Today we made a delightful hairy rainbow snake together, and tomorrow we will plant strawberries. As I watch you grow older and sweeter, it becomes harder to resist the urge to write down my memories about people and places that I knew and left behind.

Therefore, we will start with Mama Tua, whom I haven’t told you about yet, but as summer comes closer, it is time for us to remember her. I hope this story is fascinating enough for you to read until the end and understand why she will remain an important knot in our lives.

**

Mama Tua is your great-grandmother, my grandmother, and your Awa’s mother. She was one of the many scattered descendants of the sultanate of Buton, born in Raha, the twin island of Buton. She was the firstborn of La Ode Aga Raafi, a Muslim intellectual and trader of his time. Legends (read: memories of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and other family members) mention that in her youth, she was a beautiful, graceful lady with high moral standards, touching many men’s hearts.

I recall one of the stories about her from a cousin, that she was a real hard worker and particularly good at making money. She was in the fashion business and earned more than enough to have an easy living. She traded beautiful fabrics, both traditional and modern at that time, and made clothes.

She told me that when they were still little, they sneaked into Mama Tua’s bedroom and found trunks full of expensive fabrics and statues. Only God and Mama Tua know where these treasures are now, as my cousins noticed that the trunks gradually emptied before they were all gone. Their best guess was that Mama Tua sold each item whenever the family needed money.

So how did this once-well-earning lady become poor and sell her precious belongings?

We can have endless assumptions and theories, but to put ourselves in her shoes, growing up and living a life in a small Sulawesi town in the 1940s, she was expected to follow the linear path of marriage and childbearing, just like hundreds of thousands of other women. And obviously, she wasn’t a member of any of the women’s movements such as Putri Mardika or Aisyiyah who fought for women’s rights beyond the domestic domain, nor did she attend any of the women’s congresses of early 20th century Indonesia.

So when she met La Ode Sitoro, your great-grandfather whom she loved so madly, deeply, and truly, they got married as soon as possible with the blessings of her beloved parents to fulfill their societal expectation.

Between us grandchildren, there were moments we fantasized that she had accepted the love of another man, a kind and loving Chinese man who was also crazy about her. When asked why she rejected him, Mama Tua said that her heart simply did not feel anything and that she always respected him as an acquaintance.

After they got married, they stayed in Raha until your Awa, my father, was born. He is the first fruit of their love and named after the sea, bahari (from bahr, Arabic). Mama Tua told me once that your Awa was born with the help of Aretha, a Dutch midwife. If you one day expand your reading to Indonesian history, you would not be surprised to understand why there was a Dutch midwife in a place that you never found in your daily information consumption.

Not long after Awa was born, they moved back to Wakorumba in north Buton and for a solid long time, they lived in a small coastal village in the district, Koba-Koba—the name that Awa always mentioned when he told me stories about his village, although its official name is Lasiwa.

Until about seven or eight years ago, your Mama Tua’s house was the first house that you would see when your boat landed on the small, wooden harbor. The original house was a traditional Butonese house, a sort of rumah panggung (stilt house). Now, the house has a modern twist, thanks to one of your architect uncles who played a big role in revamping and preserving the family heritage.

In Lasiwa, they had a ten-hectare coconut plantation, which theoretically should have been enough to give Mama Tua a good, comfortable life in the village. They could even have become landlords and given their children the best things and education in life at that time. But dear God had another story planned for the strongest and kindest among His creations.

Mama Tua was pregnant with her second child when her husband started his love affair with another woman. He lived the rest of his life switching between the two of them, but more often with his new wife. In total, he became a father to thirteen children. Today, the relationship between the children is beautiful. But to reach this point, there were tears, hate, jealousy, betrayals, tragedies, slanders, miseries, and wounds that were dried and could only be healed by time, my love.

We will not dive deep into those miserable details here, but if one day you find the Pandora’s box, feel free to treat it as your heart leads you.

Like Mama Tua, he also lived a long life—and a good one, I hope. I recall stories around his death that I took as how the universe taught him about pain in his dying days. All his children flew back home to send him to his final resting place. But somehow, even after having all his children complete by his side, he still could not die. Something held him.

After all his worldly adventures with women, in his last moment, he asked for Mama Tua to let him go. I believe she was always nearby, but staying in the shadows and minding her own business. But God, if He exists, showed my grandfather and everyone who was there a lesson about love and faith, and who was the winner of his game and gamble of love.

All her life, after being treated with such a disrespect by her husband, who had promised her parents to care for her and give her a good life, she never did anything to hurt him back. I even suspect that she never stood up for herself. It was as if she knew that it was a hard voyage that she just had to embark on. So she set her sail and faced every storm and lightning strike with absolute faith and, at the same time, resignation.

When asked, “Do you still love him after what he did to you?” her cheeks would blush, and she would recall their sweetest times together. Never in her tone would we find a signal of anger or desire to destroy his life and his relationships with other women. Which, of course, left us grandchildren furious.

So on that day when he was dying, Mama Tua, with her unfathomable love for her husband, sat by his feet. As Awa told me the scene, she started praying as she gently massaged his feet. In a matter of minutes, after three days of being on such painful edges, her prayers set him free.

As he wished, he was buried in the middle of his coconut plantation, near the house of his second wife. His grave is the only one there, as the village cemetery is located in the opposite direction. From the village’s main road, everyone could see his grave, decorated in pale, light blue ceramics—the kind of color we would find in the 80’s or early 90’s Indonesian bathroom style.

After his death, Mama Tua ordered her children, who at that time were in a much better economic situation, to work together to support the widow and her children’s lives. While she was alive, she took them under her wings and did what she could with everything she had to make sure that her stepsons and stepdaughters had sufficient education as life support.

I remember for some years in my adolescence, one of my uncles and aunts from my step-grandmother came to live with us. They helped around at my parents’ home business, and my uncle, who is only a couple of years older than me, also attended school in my hometown. We sort of grew up together, and my hope is that he now lives a happy life with his wife and children, after all kinds of uncertainties and wounds rooted in my father’s traumas.

As she grew older, her children and grandchildren encouraged her to move in with Tante Sukma, Awa’s younger sister, in the province’s capital, Kendari. She, of course, still regularly checked her village and plantations until her body was too weak to handle hours of car rides and small ferry trips.

I met her for the last time at around this time, six years ago, a month before I left the country. She called all her grandchildren home at that time. She wanted to see us all because she knew that it would be the last time for her to see all her grandchildren. We gathered at my aunt’s place where she held a traditional ceremony for all of us—a ceremony that, according to her, would protect us wherever life takes us.

One of the rituals in the ceremony was to let go of our boat in a river. The boat was made of leaves. The farther your boat goes, the farther you will go from home. My boat sailed until it was out of our sight. A month later, I left Indonesia with the certain thought that I would come back after two years. But little did I know that morning that life was paving a different path.

Two years after I landed in Schiphol, I found out that I was pregnant with you. I did not know until quite late that you were there all the time. Together, we completed my thesis about the diplomatic history between the Buton sultanate and the VOC.

In the same year, Mama Tua’s condition worsened. Hospital trips became more frequent as her body grew weaker. Finally, in July, she was ready to leave. All her children and grandchildren gathered to be by her side in her final moments. She had lived a long life and served her world with faith as strong and bright as a lighthouse. She was indeed the lighthouse and light bearer itself for those who had known her. She left in peace surrounded by her loved ones after eighty-eight years.

**

In the same week of her death, you kicked me for the first time. To me, that very week was a blatant revelation of Life’s cycle. As if her soul and your soul met at the threshold—one departing after a life fully lived, another announcing its existence. Sometimes in my wild imagination, I picture you shaking hands with her, agreeing to make the most out of this life you were about to begin.

And perhaps this is her greatest legacy to us: that strength isn't always loud or demanding its due. Sometimes, it's serene, steadfast, and generous beyond reason. As we grow, may we inherit her capacity for compassion without losing our voice, her resilience without sacrificing our joy, as well as her power to forgive what seems unforgivable. And for you, my dear child, whenever you face storms in your own voyage, remember that you come from a line of people who knew how to navigate stormy waters with grace.

This story, though not an end but a beginning, is a small brick in a bridge between worlds she and our ancestors knew and worlds they never saw—between their Buton shores and our European playgrounds. Between their time and ours.

Love, Mama.