Oma is a rocky, terraced village overlooking the clear, blue waters of the Banda Sea--in fact some of the clearest ocean waters in the world.
It is said that the people of Oma speak too loudly because they are used to raising their voices over the sound of the surf, and this may well be partly true. In any case, the sound of the sea seems ever present in the background, and rises to a constant roar during the southeast monsoon.
The village is approached through a gap in the reef that has proven the nemesis of many a bold canoeman, and cannot be negotiated at all when the waves are high. The tops of the waves spill over the barrier reef, and all the water that gets behind the reef has to com back out this hole, creating a very strong undertow. Once they pulled my friend, Ama, in through this gap by paying out a rope from the shore so that he could tie it to the outrigger strut of his canoe. He had been fishing far out at sea, and the waves had built dangerously while he was gone.
Now this friend of mine, Ama Uneputi, whose real name was Martin David, was an orphan raised by his aunt, Tante Susi, who loved him better than a son. And this same Aunt Susi also loved me, and told me many things about the ancient language, calendar, clan system, marriage customs, and such like. She also gave me a genealogy of the Uneputi family going back some generations.
And although I didn't know it as a boy, the respected guru of the Protestant church in the nearby village of Hunut was also from Oma. He led the Christian services and taught the only school in the village, which ended at grade 3. We called him Tuang Guru Patikawa. He was later also able to help me in my quest for knowledge of the ancient things. I remember often being moved by the singing in his church which I might hear drifting out over the water to my canoe, or in the stillness of the night. It had a quality that I shall never quite be able to describe, and it somehow communicated that elusive essence of the Austronesian past.
In fact there were so many wonderful people whom I knew in Oma that I am unjust to only write of some of them and not the others. But I will mention the buxom Lis Hukom, who told me of the deadly war with Haruku, in which the whole village of Oma participated. When she was a girl, she used to enjoy sailing with me on Ambon bay. Now she is the wife of Rev. Pete Manusiwa, and lives in the Tenggara Islands.
In Oma, heroes gain some kind of supernatural status after they pass on. Such a man was Upu Halawane Latu, who is believed to have said that he would return in the "sinal matae," or rays of the sun that pierce downward through the holes in the thatch roof. This is the essence of ancestral worship, which was the ancient religion of Oma from time immemorial before the coming of the Dutch.
And like all Austronesian peoples everywhere, the inhabitants of Oma are great spinners of myths and legends about rocks which ensuing generations believe without question--except, that is, for families like the Uneputis, who hold such superstitions in quiet disdain.
In fact the Uneputis have always baffled me. How could old Olof be such a rock-solid carpenter able to chisel mortise and tenon into hardwood with the unerring precision of a machine? How could old Susi have such insight and wisdom? How could black Kade have such an incredible soprano voice? How could dark Ama have such lightening-fast reflexes, such precision of movement, and such strength? And why was it that the tall, fair Dode had the bearing of a queen? And now that I am old, and remenber the slant of the equatorial sun over the house and the terrace and the tiny verandah and the yard, I cannot imagine how this once-solid world of ours could simply evaporate, seemingly without trace. No, but I can still see Tante Susi smiling graciously over a cup of coffee she has brought me, and Kade with a sarong tied about her breasts and a basin of wet clothes on her head returning up the terrace from the stream. But how, how, how can all of this be gone? My mind boggles, but these are the realities with which I must now live.
"As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over him, and he is gone, and the place he lived shall know him no more." --King David.