Veronika Kusumaryati, Contributor, West Papua September 03 2013
Martinus You is an aspiring artist. During the day, he works at an NGO in the mining city of Timika. At night and on the weekends, however, he can be found writing songs in his native Mee language at home or in church.Hailing from the highlands of West Papua, Martinus grew up in Nabire. “I was fostered by a Bugis family. When I attended junior high school, I got close to a Bugis friend. He was no good at school, so I helped him a lot with lessons. He told his parents. Then they asked me to live with them.” Martinus and his fellow musicians have just finished shooting three music videos for their upcoming album. His group, Akawe, performs pop songs written in Mee. “Most of our songs are about our experiences as orphaned children.” The music, which features minimal acoustic guitar accompaniment, evokes Latin or Spanish rhythms.The language of Akawe’s songs is spoken by those living in Paniai and in all the places where the Mee have spread in West Papua. The videos feature typically Mee youths wearing penis gourds (koteka) while playing the guitar, dancing in the river and even while portraying rich and poor characters. One video tells the story of a poor boy who has lost his father. The boy must break up with his girlfriend, who is in love with a rich man (Martinus), who can be seen walking to his car wearing only a koteka and modest headdress.
“Why do we have to be ashamed?” Martinus asks. “The koteka is our culture. We have to be proud to wear one.” In June, the band performed live at a television studio in Mimika to an amused audience. Even in the big city, men wearing koteka are considered exotic.Several other ethnic groups living in the highlands, such as the Dani, Nduga, and Amungme people, also wear koteka. However, younger generations of Mee have left their penis gourds behind, preferring to wear “modern” clothes like other Papuans or the ubiquitous transmigrants from Java and Sulawesi.Seen as a mark of a “primitive” past, koteka today can only be found in souvenir shops and rely on the old generation to maintain their existence. Martinus’ insistence to wear a koteka in the band’s videos and when performing live is partially a marketing move. “There have been a lot of videos featuring songs from Papua, but none of them have shown a koteka. The koteka is unique to Papua, so why we don’t show them? […] A koteka can make our performance distinct. If we follow the existing model, we won’t be unique. We won’t sell.”In West Papua, local musicians have been able to eke out a living in cities such as Biak, Serui, Manokwari, Asmat and Boven Digul, producing CDs and karaoke VCDs featuring local music and gospel music in local languages. As digital copies of the songs easily circulate over cell phones, the musicians have been trying to make money through videos. “People won’t buy music if there is no video for it,” Martinus says. He’s worked as a cassette seller and has a grasp of what people want. Akawe’s videos are local. Two were shot by a river near Timika with a concrete bridge on the background. “We shot on the Pindah-Pindah River because it resembles Paniai, with its foggy mountains and rivers. However, there must be no coconuts, no nut trees and no clothed people. We in the highlands don’t have nut trees, so we can’t shoot on a beach or forest here.”Martinus and his cameraman (a local wedding videographer) have been bucking stereotypes about Papuans. They are an ethnic group that has a good reputation in Papua as a well educated and entrepreneurial people. Mee are also noted for moving to cities such as Jayapura, Timika, and Nabire to run businesses or to be professors or writers. It is said that the Mee has more authors than all of Papuan ethnic groups. “We don’t have much resources in the mountains, so a lot of us go to the cities to have a better life,” Martinus says.The band has been inspired by the singing and dancing that is part of the Mee tradition. Their music is inspired by the conviviality of a yuwo, or pig-roast party, when people buy and sell animals and noken bags, fish and shrimps caught from Tigi and Tage Lakes nearby and fresh produce from their gardens. As young people sing and dance to attract the opposite sex, the old people recall their hunting and gardening experiences. Martinus said that his songs were inspired by his life as a poor kid in Epouto. His mother worked in the family’s garden, as did many Mee in the highland, while his father spent time fishing in Tage Lake. After his father died when Martinus was a teenager, he found it hard to find a Mee woman to marry. “We have to pay a very expensive dowry.” At that time, Martinus had been working as a taxi driver in Nabire — “the first person from the highland that could actually drive a taxi”, he proudly states. In the Mee culture, a man must provide at least 10 pigs to his future wife. Given that a single pig can cost more than Rp 10 million (US$910), marriage is not for those who have nothing in their pockets.
“In those days, parents arranged the marriage. Today, everything is different. People can get married if they love each other. Those days, we had to have money. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to get married,” Martinus said.Things, however, have been changing in the Papua highlands. Not only have young men declined to wear koteka, social structures and traditional culture have undergone a profound transformations. On one hand, people have quickly adopted technology such as cell phones, music players and the Internet as well as Indonesian democracy and a “modern” economy, among other things. On the other hand, communities have been struggling to maintain their communal identities. While decades of militarization and marginalization have made this struggle harder, West Papua is not merely a setting for tribal wars and insurrections. Akawe is one of the many local proofs that Papuans have never simply been passive objects upon which greater forces have acted. Martinus is proud of what he has created, albeit realistically. “We want to sell the CDs to the Mee community in Paniai and to the Mee diaspora across Papua,” he says. “We want to show that once we had this culture. Maybe someday our children will look at us proudly.” Akawe’s album is scheduled be released in October.
— Photos By Veronika Kusumaryati And Onny Wiranda