Why is it that there are two versions of oral history about the great gun or cannon, Meriam Se Ndai? From a literary point of view, there are two reasons that should be taken into account to understand why Mite Pale’s descendants deconstructed and reconstructed their version, which is different from the version of the Arab’s family and the whole society of ’udu kére Ende ’éko napa Jawa. The first reason is the gradual erosion of oral culture by written tradition in Flores. In the everyday discourse of a non-literate people such as the Keo, the storytellers are not merely entertainers and literary artists. They are at once scholars, jurists and custodians of the traditions of their society in the original sense (Sweeney 1991: 22-3). When written traditions were introduced, the new repositories of traditional knowledge were educated storytellers and writers who could more effectively store, retrieve, transmit and sometimes reconstruct the traditions of their people. The dependence on the memory and oral recitation skills of adat leaders was no longer absolute. Eventually, a whole set of new criteria was used as a legal basis in modern disputes: 1) land certificates, 2) evidence of who holds the sacred paraphernalia in dispute, and 3) logical and historical relationships between any group and the disputed object. This seems to be the start of an erosion of the traditions of oral history (Sweeney 1987: 284).

The second reason for there being two versions of this history concerns the relationship of the text to issues of power and knowledge. In modern literature, a text is viewed commonly as a written communication enmeshed in a context and environment—historical, cultural, political and religious. Although the father of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss, studied mainly unwritten texts or oral traditions, most of the structuralists perceive the text rather as a series of forms produced by the institution of literature and the discursive codes of a culture. However, the postmodernists argue that every text is related to every other text, and this makes for ‘intertextuality’ (Foucault 1972; Kristeva 1980: 36) and emphasises the relationship of the text to power and to the many forces that influence its production and its final form (Rosenau 1992: 36). The reinvention of the story about Meriam Se Ndai by Mite Pale’s descendants should be viewed in line with Foucault’s theory.

The abuse of power by the Government-appointed village head (kepala desa) of Mbae Nuamuri was one basic reason why Mite Pale’s descendants created a new version of the story. The village head seemed to have acted in collusion with the subdistrict leader (camat) and the Hadramis in recommending to the BPN (Badan Pertanahan Nasional) that it should issue a certificate for the disputed house site. At the same time, the power of the adat assembly seems to have declined and was therefore not taken into account by either the kepala desa or thecamat. Decisions made by functionaries of President Suharto’s New Order State (Orde Baru) were challenged retrospectively by ’Embu Mite Pale’s descendants, as is evident in the following letter, which they sent to the Juridical Court of Bajawa:

It is clear that the certification on behalf of Thaha Idrus (an Arab) is false because it has been issued by the New Order Government in a manner categorised as an act of corruption, collusion and nepotism. The New Order Government pretended to issue mass certification on the basis of a program known as the National Project of land certification (PRONA) for the government’s benefit as well as the people involved in it. This [mass land certification scam] should be taken into consideration in this court-case (in the current Reformation Era) in order that [the court decision] should not be accepted as valid, and [the defendants] should not be tried as criminals. (Tangkisan serta Eksepsi, February 17, 1999, p. 17) ^[26]