'The White Banyan' preserves old stories

'The White Banyan' preserves old stories

The White Banyan, Le Banian Blanc; Lahirnya Kembali Beringin
Putih; Narrator: Elizabeth Prasetyo; Distributor: Basis Yogya;
p. 247; Price: Rp 40,000 (soft cover); Rp 60,000 (hard cover).

JAKARTA (JP): It is inevitable that the reader of The White
Banyan would find the book a kind of cross between Antoine de
Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince and Ong Ken Seng's
multicultural Lear.

This enchanting tale, retold by Elisabeth Prasetyo, is
enriched with charming drawings by Yogyakarta's world-renowned
artist Heri Dono rendered in a similar spirit to de Saint-
Exupiry's illustrations.

The book is presented in four languages: French, Indonesian,
Japanese and English, all in one single publication. This, with the
existence of some captions in Javanese, makes it a truly multicultural
tome.

It starts of with the tale of The Elephant Tree. The curiosity
of the narrator -- who takes the role of a volcanologist
inspecting the activities of Mt. Merapi in Central Java -- about
the existence of a large banyan tree at such a high altitude on
the volcano, and the strange sound that can be heard there, leads
engineer-on-duty Pram Sartono to recount the old legend.
During this time, people who were originally sailors started to
plant rice.

However, not long thereafter elephants destroyed the rice
fields. Led by a figure called Barata, men started to hunt the
elephants and claimed victory over the animals. However, one day
Little Flower, the leader's beloved daughter, was trampled by an
angry elephant. Barata vowed vengeance and was determined to kill
all the elephants.

One by one he killed all the elephants, until he realized that
killing them would not bring his daughter back to life. He became
enlightened that only by caring for the suffering of others would
he be able to cure his own pain.

So, he started to take care of the wounded animals who were
climbing to the elephant's paradise, the northern side of
the volcano which the elephants chose as their final resting
place.

Most of the elephants were dying, and Barata attended to the
very last of them, and said, "You are the last one. If you die,
the hunters will finally be able to tell their children that
elephants never existed.

"In order to protect you, I will put a spell on you. You will
become a tree and I will live in your branches." So, the
elephant tree was born; it stood at the crossroads before the
village, near the volcano.

The elephant tree wished to be freed from the spell that
spared its life, but Barata rejected the request to ensure the
tree's safety. Later on, the people's need for more land for rice
cultivation put the tree under the threat of being chopped down.
Barata undid the spell and led the tree to the elephant's
paradise.

However, the tree confessed to him a long kept secret and
asked his dear friend to recast his spell. The spell was recast,
and the elephant tree once again stood erect at the crossroads.

As the writer and journalist Sindhunata mentions in his
introduction, the book is a story about friendship, a friendship
that "has to be slowly developed and tested, growing from hate to
love, from obligation to sacrifice, from hostility to
reconciliation, until at last it turns into an eternal bond
which nothing can ever destroy ... In the end there is no
elephant and there is no man. There is only the nothingness of
the two friends which manifests itself through the existence of
an old banyan tree."

He also points out that the book was published in an
auspicious time, not long after the end of the New Order,
controlled by former president Soeharto's Golongan Karya
"functional group" which used as its symbol a banyan tree on a
yellow background.

"The banyan which in olden times used to symbolize
existence, protection and the resistance of the people ... is
white. The banyan is the tree of the people," Sindhunata wrote.
The White Banyan signifies the reclamation of the banyan which
has been seized by the state for far too long.

In many ways the story of The Elephant Tree is the story of
our contemporary society, struggling for national reconciliation.
It is a story that might be relevant to what is happening in the
Maluku islands and other troubled regions of Indonesia.

The book includes stories surrounding Mt. Merapi, its sacred
sites of the Elephant Stone and White Banyan, and the accounts of
its first recorded eruption on Aug.4, 1672 compiled by historian
de Graaf in 1940.

The volcano's significance in society is related in a chapter
entitled Offerings 1995.

The White Banyan is dedicated to the inhabitants of Kinahrejo,
the village located on the slopes of Mt. Merapi which provides
the setting for the Elephant Tree story. In particular it is
dedicated to mBah Marjian, the kuncen or "key keeper" of the
volcano. The book closes with the accounts of Mbah Marijan's
dreams, written with white text on dark pages, suggesting
their origins in the dream world.

The story of The Elephant Tree was originally written in 1991,
around the time when the author gave birth to her daughter in
Java. At the time, the Elisabeth Prasetyo had not yet met mBah
Marijan. Later, after a few encounters, mBah Marijan also related
the story to her and pointed out the sacred sites of the Elephant
Stone and White Banyan.

The author would tell her daughter that words were not only
used for speaking, but also to show that which we cannot see,
"the things which have always been there but which we are afraid
to see."

Long before she heard about the story of the Elephant Tree,
every time she passed by a banyan tree, she always had the
feeling that it was not a tree, but an elephant.

-- Amir Sidharta