User:Joseph Lamont/sandbox

Kahi Ata Ratu was born in the 1960s on the arid plateau of Desa Hangaroro, an expanse of rocky farmland perched above the royal village of the powerful Ana Mburung clan, Preyawang in Rindi prefecture, East Sumba, Indonesia. At eight years old Ata Ratu was chosen by Umbu Manjang Mungu Hau to study the ritual poetic couplets Lawiti from the Kanatang clan, and to sing and play a four stringed guitar like instrument called a Jungga

From her teens until her early twenties her songs could only be heard sitting at the wooden verandah of her parents house. After her proposed marriage to Umbu Manjang Mungu Hau was refused by his first wife she was forced into another marriage and moved from Hangaroro to her husbands Tihddu clan home in Desa Palanggay. Many of the other female singers she grew up with were forbidden to sing after marriage. Ata Ratu insisted her husband allow her to continue to perform and sing professionally and he agreed to allow her to follow this path. He was also an accomplished dancer himself and would often accompany her touring around Sumba.

During the 1980s portable cassette recorders began to be sold by foreign traders at the weekly locals markets. People who could afford these new machines had begun to record Ata Ratu’s porch-side performances to take home with them. Ata Ratu saw a new opportunity using this technology and soon bought a small one deck cassette recorder some blank tapes and started to make her own recordings at home.

Ata Ratu traveled the roaming local market circuit along with traders from Java, Flores and local produce sellers, creating custom made cassettes. The ability to record and sell her songs brought a relatively stable additional income for her family aside from rice farming and raising livestock.

From a sixty-minute tape she could comfortably fit three songs on each side. The selection and order of the six songs depended on the particular narrative she was requested to tell. She would listen carefully to a person’s story and decide on a suitable sequence of themes before returning home. In one night she could record two unique bespoke cassettes, which she delivered to her customers the next day.

Her music was soon bootlegged and began to be sold at local markets by a trader from Bima called Pak Serles. Ata Ratu was instructed by the police not to record for him again. She explained that it made little difference to her; people still wanted unique songs about their own life. Mass produced recordings did not create anything unique that spoke to individual experience as her one-off tailored recordings did.

Ata Ratu recently returned from her first European tour and is currently involved in the research and recording of traditional Sumbanese songs in a program supported by Ciptamedia, Wikimedia and Ford Foundation.