Existing documentation of Fataluku culture

There is a great store of narratives concerning the origin of the island of Timor and of the various clans (ratu) into which Fataluku society is organized; in addition, each ratu has special practices and prohibitions, the knowledge of which is tei, “restricted” or “dangerous.” Tei is considered too “hot” for young people to know—it can render them infertile or damage their health—and accordingly much of the knowledge of tei is restricted to the elders, who pass it on only when the next generation reaches middle age. The stories parents tell their children are stories about the origins of their clan, its rules and practices, the origins of their community, and the hardships of the period of resistance to the Indonesian occupation (1975-99).

Mothers may sing lullabies (moco lolole) to their children that teach them the origins of their own names and the other names particular to their clan. There are also legends about animals, plants, natural features such as individual mountains or the large lake Ira Lalaro, and the sea. Such stories are often believed to “belong” to certain groups of people and not to others: if one asks, for example, for stories about lake Ira Lalaro, one will be told that only the people who live in certain communities near the lake should tell those stories.

A major storehouse of Fataluku oral literature is to be found in the vast body of sung poetry known as vaihoho (see below), and probably also in the sau singing at the funerals of venerable elders. Vaihoho poems may be cast in ordinary daily language (as in the narrative poem about a fatal accident at sea, given in the selection of vaihoho texts appended to this report), but they often use a “high” literary language with rare or archaic words. Compounding this difficulty in interpretation is the fact that the symbolism and imagery can be quite obscure, referring in highly condensed form to stories that must be known beforehand if the reference is to be understood (Yampolsky, 2012).

Sadness is the main feeling when singing in Fataluku tradition. The main song theme was once about sad love but now the Fataluku people sing about war (Rappoport 2015). Fataluku songs are frequently sung using diphonic singing (Rappaport 2015). Diphonic – also known as overtone – singing is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances (or formants) created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out of the lips to form a melody. This creates the impression that the singer is making more than one pitch or melody at the same time.

Fataluku songs are often two-part songs with two or more pairs of singers (of the same or different gender), including a leading voice or na lafair (voice big), and a following voice or na moko (voice child) – also called em hi’ a moi (take up and move) and em isi (take descend). Polyphonic technique uses pseudo-drone polyphony. The two voices favour mostly small, simultaneous intervals such as minor and major seconds and minor thirds. They meet in sporadic unisons’ (Rappoport 2015, p. 142).

Rappaport (2015) found that vaihoho is the most valued repertoire of the Fataluku people. Vaihoho are traditional poems either spoken or sung, often in call and response format relating to harvest. When sung, this is done a capella by choirs of varying sizes. Vaihoho range in length from one to many stanzas. Poems are used either as part of ritual or for pleasure. Variances in vaihoho are evident between the far east style, where vaihoho is only sung as alternating duets, and the western and southern styles, where in large groups contexts, an initial duet is answered by multiple duets sung simultaneously (Rappaport 2015, pp. 141-2). Two-part singing is performed for ‘welcoming guests, weddings, harvests, funerals and concerted works (threshing rice, hauling a tree from the forest, planting the post of a house, harvesting sea worms, walking, passing the time)’ (Rappaport 2015, p. 142). Both the poems and music are endangered. It is estimated that approximately 30 per cent of vaihoho poems have already been lost, and the remaining 70 per cent are critically endangered because knowledge of them is held by only a few elders.

Vaihoho recorded in the 1966 by Henri Campagnolo and Maria-Olimpias Lameiras-Campagnolo can be found here