The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  But in a few short years those idealizing Europeans turned the indigenous people into beasts. “It is noteworthy,” wrote Brooke’s biographer Nigel Barley, “that in their relations with Borneo the British switched easily between their two dominant biblical myths of the wild—the notion of Sarawak as a paradise to be preserved from corrupting ‘outside’ influence, and as a wilderness to be roundly civilized.” Either one was myth, oversimplification, objectification, a long history of Western exoticism that involved, at its heart, writes the novelist and essayist Andrea Lee, “strangeness and desire, the desire for strangeness, with a sense of risk but no real threat of danger. There is always an element of ownership and control about ‘exotic’—because the dreamer controls the fantasy—which is the downfall of real contact.”

  In the postcolonial 1960s and 1970s, abetted by cheap air travel that brought far-flung worlds together as never before, the idea that so-called primitive people were either children of nature or savages to be civilized gave way to a new ideal—that they possessed something sacred that Western society had lost. These New Age noble savages possessed a spiritualism, a wisdom, a way of living with nature that was an antidote to the war and avarice and racism and consumerism that characterized Western culture. Biruté Galdikas, the orangutan researcher, expressed it well. In the early days of her research in Borneo she had been “seduced by the ‘naturalistic fallacy.’ Nature was pure and noble, beautiful and bright. Nature produced happy endings. In traveling to the tropical rain forest, [her husband] Rod and I were fulfilling our generation’s dream of ‘going back to nature.’ Returning to the garden of Eden.” Bruno denied that his attraction to the Penan had any romantic notions. “I was drawn to the Penan for the simple reason that I feel well in nature. It is nothing romantic. When you live in the jungle you realize that daily life doesn’t permit romanticism. One walks, the legs hurt; there are leeches and rain, and then you see something beautiful—that is your wage. Then you remember we are all one heart.” Yet he also said that in being among the Penan he had found his “paradise,” as he called it, a place where he finally felt at home, “like the child in the arms of the mother.” Paradise, the arms of the mother, all notions of Eden before the Fall, places of transcendent unity, expressions of God itself, as romantic and reductionist as it gets.

  Then came the bulldozers.

  Michael Palmieri heading upriver in a longboat, Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, 1970s. (Michael Palmieri)

  Six

  Late one afternoon in the spring of 1974, Michael and Fatima climbed down from a horse-drawn wooden cart on a dirt road in the village of Legian, Bali. They had flown from Kathmandu to Surabaya, on the neighboring island of Java, and traveled by bus, ferry, and finally the cart. The air felt hot, humid, but sweet and balmy, a smell of cloves and smoke, the sky so cloudless it was cobalt blue. Palm trees dotted a grassy stretch in front of a wide beach, white sand as far as they could see to both horizons, north and south, before huge breaking barrels of aqua and white foam. Beyond the big swells lay an ocean of eighty-five-degree water so blue it was bluer than the sky.

  It was instant love. There was no turning around. Bali was like no other place they’d seen, a miniscule, densely populated ninety-mile-long-by-fifty-mile-wide petri dish of extravagantly cultivated emerald rice fields rising in perfect, winding steps to three symmetrical volcanic cones, “their craters studded with serene lakes set in dark forests filled with screaming monkeys,” in the words of Miguel Covarrubias, who arrived on the island in 1930, among a vanguard of Western artists to be seduced by its beauty. “Ravines washed out by rushing rivers full of rapids and waterfalls, drop steadily to the sea,” this whole natural wonder presided over by a rich pantheon of gods and goddesses, the propitiation of which was—and still is—a full-time job for the Balinese.

  Bali embodied all of the tropical fantasies of northern Europeans and Americans. Palm trees. Volcanoes. Beaches. The eroticism of bare-breasted maidens, all wrapped in a mystical culture. The American writer Hickman Powell rhapsodized about the moment when “a scarf fell carelessly from a shoulder, and the bronze bowls of maiden breasts projected angular, living shadows.” The island “dripped and shone with moisture like a garden in a florist’s window,” said the writer and musicologist Colin McPhee. “No other race gives the impression of living in such close touch with nature, creates such a complete feeling of harmony between the people and the surroundings,” raved Covarrubias. “The slender Balinese bodies are as much a part of the landscape as the palms and the breadfruit trees, and their smooth skins have the same tone as the earth and as the brown rivers where they bathe . . . relieved here and there by bright-coloured sashes and tropical flowers. The Balinese belong in their environment in the same way that a humming-bird or an orchid belongs in a Central American jungle, or a steel-worker belongs in the grime of Pittsburgh.” Bali appeared to westerners exactly like the imagined tropical paradises of their dreams, like a real stage set for Michael Palmieri’s childhood television hero Gardner McKay, except this exotic jewel was a tiny Dutch colony. While fantasy-laden destinations like Tahiti had long been evangelized by Christian missionaries, their once rich cultures largely destroyed, and Borneo just a few hundred miles away remained a vast and wild jungle, Bali still felt unsullied, yet compact, accessible, and open to them.

  The Balinese were descended from Hindu Javanese who fled the spread of Islam and sought refuge on the island a thousand years ago. Art and beauty seemed to infuse all facets of their life. Every Balinese was an artist: they danced, they wove, they played fantastic orchestras of gongs and xylophones, they painted and built phantasmagorical temples out of carved wood and stone. And perhaps most special of all, a fact that still holds today, the Balinese seemed to possess a unique capability of absorbing and accommodating their Dutch overlords (and later, mass tourism, consumerism, Indonesian Islam) without losing their rich, complex Hindu culture, their souls.

  In a fortuitous twist for the hippies looking for something new after Goa and Kathmandu, it was the cool, misty mountains and lakes of central Bali that were the source of the islands’ fertility and the home of the gods. “For the Balinese, everything that is high is good and powerful,” wrote Covarrubias, “so it is natural that the sea, lower than the lowest point of land, with the sharks and barracuda that infest the waters, and the deadly sea-snakes and poisonous fish that live among the treacherous coral reefs, should be considered as tenget, magically dangerous, the home of the evil spirits.” Which meant that when the first surfers and hippies started to arrive in the early 1970s, the enormous beaches of southern Bali—a strand of white sand that stretched for twenty miles, without question some of the most spectacular beaches in the world—were deserted and dotted with small villages inhabited only by the poorest Balinese.

  No beachfront hotels. A handful of shacks. Just palm trees and dirt roads and horse-drawn carts and that rich Hindu culture full of temples and ceremonies and cremations and music, and it all cost nothing. Two Australians had just opened the Blue Ocean, a tiki bar and a few primitive rooms on the beach in the village of Legian, and Michael and Fatima jumped right into the burgeoning scene, along with other refugees from Goa and Kathmandu. “Every day everybody would go to that beach and we’d all be there at sunset smoking chillums and doing yoga and omming and we were butt-ass naked,” said Michael.

  A group of foreign investors had tried to open a fancy beachfront hotel, the Kayu Aya, a few miles north of the surfer haven of Kuta, but the enterprise had come crashing down, and Michael met a Balinese man who owned the land and said Michael could move into the manager’s house if he would manage some of the unfinished hotel’s bungalows and try to rent them out to his fellow hippies. It was all without electricity or plumbing and they moved into a roomy thatched-roof house of coral stone and a broad verandah right on the beach where the Oberoi Hotel stands today. There was nothing but the sea and the romantic lights of their kerosene lanterns, the rest of the abandoned hotel filled with the
ir friends from Goa, one endless party. “Once a week Fatima and I would go to the main market and she’d hire two little girls with baskets and she’d buy rice, oil, veggies, fruit and spend the whole afternoon there and take a bemo back with chickens and pigs to Kuta and hire a horse and buggy to take us down to our house.”

  That’s when the magic of Bali—indeed, of the whole Austronesian spiritual and ancestral world he would soon plunge into—reached out and touched him for the first time. A magic that drew him in and kept him coming back to Bali and Borneo. Their bedroom was a loft with screen windows overlooking the sea, and one evening soon after moving in they were lying in bed when an apparition swept through the screen. A diaphanous essence of light. It didn’t have any particular form, and it brushed their bodies and jolted them both. They could feel it. “What’s that? What’s that?” said Fatima, grabbing Michael.

  Michael didn’t know, had seen nothing like it before. “Something happened. We weren’t stoned. We both experienced the same thing. We saw the light. It came back again. Moments later. Brushed up against me and brushed against her. This was touching magic. It reached out and touched us.”

  They didn’t sleep that night. In the morning they described what they’d seen, felt, to the houseboy. “Layaks!” he said. Evil spirits. Dead people. Right there in the palms off the beach behind where the house now stood, the houseboy explained, dozens, maybe hundreds of Balinese had been slaughtered, some of the one hundred thousand on Bali alone—the highest concentration of killings per capita in all of Indonesia—when the army had risen up and deposed President Sukarno in 1965. The houseboy brought the village priest to the house and Michael again described what had brushed against them. “Layaks!” the priest confirmed. He put out the checked poleng cloth and incense and rice and made Michael and Fatima dress in traditional Balinese sarongs and sashes, a kebaya for Fatima, an udeng headdress for Michael, and recited incantations and prayers. They were never bothered again in that house.

  “Magic exists!” Michael said. “It exists!”

  Soon after the Layaks incident they met a French couple who had just returned from Borneo. Borneo. The name resonated and ignited his fantasies. The wild men of Borneo. The head-hunters of Borneo. He and Fatima didn’t waste any time. Within a few weeks they returned to Surabaya, flew to Balikpapan, in East Kalimantan, made their way to Samarinda, and went up the Mahakam River.

  Bali was a rich, tropical fantasy, but it was easy; there was nothing wild about it. But the upper Mahakam River felt untouched. Pure. A wilderness of women with distended earlobes and people covered in tattoos. They bought baskets, hundreds of them, brought them home, sold them at a weekly flea market on the grass near their house on Sunday afternoons. They sold them all and Michael returned to Borneo for another round.

  Michael had fallen in love anew, this time with a place and a people, transported by the beauty and wildness and purity of the Dayak world. They read everything they could find on Dayak culture, took notes, and he—and sometimes Fatima too—began venturing deeper, farther, longer, to look for not just baskets, but other things too, the products of Borneo’s long and complex history. The island was a natural stepping-stone for onward journeys on the great migration and trade routes of a dynamic region, and over millennia its indigenous Austronesians were subject to wave after wave of increasingly sophisticated cultures. The Dong Son of Vietnam, beginning around 600 BC, brought complex Bronze Age technology. Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam washed across its shores and penetrated its rivers between the fourth and thirteenth centuries. Along its coasts thrived opulent Malay sultanates, the legacy of Hindu kingdoms whose rulers later converted to Islam, and Chinese colonies of traders. The Portuguese, the first westerners to reach Borneo, landed briefly in what is now Brunei, on the northwest coast, in 1521 during Magellan’s circumnavigation. The Dutch arrived in the late 1600s. In 1841 the rich British adventurer James Brooke declared himself rajah in the northwest, a reign that lasted three generations, and it wasn’t until the turn of the twentieth century that colonial powers penetrated the central highlands.

  The long romanticized head-hunting Dayaks in its interior—notoriously the wild men of Borneo—had been trading and fighting with the island’s sophisticated downriver communities and the Penan in the deepest interior for thousands of years. Although there were hundreds of different Dayak tribes and language groupings, with subtly different spiritual practices, the heart of their cosmological world mirrored the physical one—a world of lush forests represented by the tree of life.

  In Dayak consciousness, human beings originated in the feminine underworld, were born into the middle world, and ascended into the upper world after death. The tree of life embodied that understanding—the roots in the underworld drew up water, the stuff of life, in the form of sap. It formed fruits and flowers that emerged as human beings, and in death their “spirits” migrated to the upper branches of the tree. It was from there that rain fell, returning life to the underworld.

  In that cosmos ordinary animals and objects had souls, spirits played an active role in every daily event, and nothing happened by accident. If a hornbill flew across a man’s path from right to left, it was a sign that hunting would be good. Integral to this idea was “the concept of a parallel universe, the other, darker side of reality,” writes Biruté Galdikas. “The universe we see is a mirror image of the other. One might compare the two universes to a film negative and a photographic print; unlike heaven and hell in Judeo Christian and Islamic teachings, the parallel universe is not a distant place, accessible only in the next life. The parallel universe is real; it exists in the here and now. Humans can go there while still in this life, through dreams and visions,” and shamans were especially adept at this, for they could not only travel among the worlds but interpret the dreams and signs, understand them, read them. The female god who ruled the parallel universe appeared in the here and now, for instance, as a serpent-dragon. Crocodiles, once ubiquitous in Borneo’s rivers, were the dragon god’s helpers, sent from that other universe, a fourth dimension, as real to a Dayak “as antimatter is to physicists, or negative numbers to mathematicians.”

  Death, that always looming and most inconceivable and often sudden thing (especially in a society without modern antibiotics and full of wild predators and swollen rivers), made the most important rituals the funerary ones. Every death had two stages. At the moment the heart stopped beating the spirit left the physical, corporal body, which was quickly buried or cremated. But the spirit hung around, was reluctant to move on, wanted to stay close to all it knew and loved, where it wandered aimlessly and could make trouble for the living. To release that spirit required a secondary burial ceremony, which might be held a month or even years later. The bones were exhumed for a ritual cleansing, after which they were placed in an ornate ossuary and reinterred in elevated, equally elaborate carved hardwood family mausoleums, shaped like a house or a boat, or sometimes in caves or even big ceramic jars.

  The Tiwah, as it was called in central Borneo, reunited the two parts of the soul, was the ticket that sent the dead on their way. If the ceremony did not take place, the body’s soul could remain in limbo and become a ghost, bringing trouble to the community.

  Life, death, the spirits of animals and of ancestors, they were all around the Dayaks everywhere, at all times, moving among the branches of the trees that surrounded them, the trees of life. The dead ancestors, properly guided to its upper branches through those secondary funeral rites, supported the living descendants on the tree down below. They protected them from enemies, ensured that healthy children were born, made crops flourish, and encouraged the fecundity of village animals. In return, the living were expected to venerate these ancestors who guarded them; it was a two-way street, you might say, each with a job to do, a contract between the living and the dead that resulted in the ubiquitous presence of ancestor figures in everyday life.

  The Dayaks, like all humans, were creative and inventive, and living in such a
fecund world of plentiful game, fish, forest fruits and vegetables, and bounties of rice, they had the time, space, energy to express themselves and their myths and cosmology in everything their hands touched, with artistic beauty and power. The swirling, branching tree-of-life motif appeared everywhere—carved in longhouse doors, atop the spines of roofs, on totemlike poles topped with ossuaries, on ornate shields often adorned with human hair, in intricately woven and dyed textiles that sometimes took years for a woman to make. Wooden figures, often squatting, knees and elbows bent in positions of power, like the one that caused the ruckus in Michael’s house, guarded villages, longhouses, rice fields; magical carved sticks hidden near traps in the forest lured pigs. Shamans carried ornately decorated boxes full of teeth and animal parts, and the bodies of men and women were covered in tattoos of those same swirling icons, received at important life milestones—the taking of an enemy head, for instance. And unlike most modern Western art, these images were sacred; they held power and meaning. They embodied spirits and souls, were inseparable from this living, dynamic multidimensional world.

  Dayaks had a particular reverence for family heirlooms, known as pusaka, which were closely bound with a family’s wealth and status. Textiles, head-hunting swords with handles elaborately carved out of animal or human bone, brass jewelry, trade beads, often ancient and from distant lands, were passed on within families for generations. Especially valued were brass gongs and Chinese ceramic jars, which first appeared on the island a thousand years ago and were an essential part of every ritual, from marriage ceremonies to ancestor worship to mortuary practices and ceremonies involving the drinking of rice wine. They lined the walls of family rooms and communal galleries in longhouses, and the number of jars showed a family’s wealth and status. Their ancestors had paddled them up great rivers and carried them on their backs over mountains. The objects were venerated, surrounded with beliefs and legends. Carl Bock, whose 1882 account of his travels up the Mahakam, The Head-Hunters of Borneo, did much to romanticize them, reported that Dayaks believed jars were made of the same clay from which the gods “made first the sun, and then the moon.” Others said that the jars themselves were fruits from the tree of life or that they could transform themselves into animals and people, or were oracles with the power to foretell the future.