Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (17 page)

Almost every conversation starts off with the inevitable
dari mana
? – ‘Where are you from?’ Once tribal loyalties have been established, the teasing begins. ‘I’d offer you some dried squid, but I know you Sundanese only eat leaves.’ ‘Oh, don’t let him upset you. You know how Bataks are, always sooooooo rude . . .’ ‘Bugis, eh? Well, I’ll watch out doing business with you, everyone knows how tricky you lot are!’

On Pelni ferries, most conversations are in Indonesian. They have to be, of course. A man from Maluku chats to a Timorese woman; there’s an Acehnese talking to a West Sumatran; people from different parts of Papua are comparing notes on their time in Java. The national language is the only one these people have in common.

It’s a funny one, Indonesian. Like many languages that evolved principally to ease negotiation in polyglot marketplaces, trading Malay/Indonesian is grammatically very simple. Instead of fussing with plurals, Indonesian just doubles up the noun.
Anak
: child;
anak anak
(often written
anak
2
): children. There are no tenses; Indonesians just stick time words into the sentence to indicate past, present or future. ‘I pay you yesterday,’ or ‘I pay you tomorrow.’ It’s also a very vague language,
besok
– ‘tomorrow’ – can mean the day after today, but it can also mean some unspecified time in the not-too-distant future.

The early nationalists chose Malay as the common language for the yet-to-be-created nation because it was easy to learn and already widely spoken, at least in the commercial realm. But there was also a more overtly political reason: it was not Javanese.

Most of the educated nationalists were Javanese speakers, and it would have been easy for them to adopt their mother tongue as the language for the new nation. It is a credit to them that they did not. Javanese is fiendishly complex; had it become the national language, Indonesians from other islands would have been at a permanent disadvantage. Javanese is also fiercely hierarchical; there are whole different vocabularies for talking to superiors and to inferiors. Sukarno and his cohort were at least rhetorically egalitarian; they did not want to entrench the feudalism which runs deeply through the culture of Java by spreading a class-conscious language nationwide. Sukarno delighted in being addressed as
Bung
, ‘brother’. The paternalist Suharto, on the other hand, wanted to be called
Bapak
, ‘father’.

Since independence, all schools have taught in Indonesian. Within a generation, almost all Indonesians spoke the national language; local languages persisted at home and crept into the marketplace, but I rarely heard them used in the public realm in either of my previous incarnations in Indonesia. That has changed, possibly because of a political decentralization which has reduced the number of outsiders in the civil service and puffed up local pride. In late 2011, on the verandas and in the coffee-stalls of NTT, in the market and the village head’s office and even in some schoolyards, the chatter was in any one of the province’s seventy-six local languages, not in Indonesian.

When I stepped onto a Pelni ship, a little floating Indonesia dependent on the national language, I could suddenly eavesdrop on almost every conversation. Most of them, I found, had a subtext. Passengers were either off to seek their fortune, or on their way home after trying to make their mark in the wider world.

Those going ‘home’ had the swagger of success or spoke in muted tones that betrayed disappointment. If they were on their way to a new life, people fizzed with optimism and apprehension. Often, an uncle or an older sister had gone before; the newbie would be met off the boat, they would have somewhere to go. Still, it is a big step for people who have never lived outside the cocoon of the village, with its clear hierarchy, its well-known rules. When they stepped off the boat they would have to be more Indonesian than ever before. And they would probably be relieved to find that at their destination, too, they would be able to buy nasi Padang.

Off the eastern tip of Flores hang a number of small islands that rise dry and lumpy from the sea; life there depends largely on what people can fish out of the waters. On a smallish local ferry that makes the rounds of these islands, I met Mama Lina. She had the stolid, sago-fed build of the women of eastern Indonesia and she had tried to tame her frizzy hair straight with waffle irons; the look was matronly, but not unkind. She had been at a teacher training workshop in Flores and was returning home to the island of Adonara. ‘Why don’t you come home with me?’ she had asked, and I had just said yes.

Mama Lina clapped her hands with excitement, but as the journey progressed, she became more and more flustered. What will this white woman eat? Where will she sleep? Don’t white people use those odd toilets you can sit on? She started managing my expectations, perhaps even trying to put me off. There’s no electricity in the village you know, there’s no running water. But I had got on the round-robin ferry without even deciding which island I was headed for; I was thrilled to have a plan, and was not to be dissuaded.

Mama Lina’s village is one of the most isolated in Adonara, sitting high on the slopes of the volcano. A concrete path leaps straight up the side of the volcano from the main road, the incline so steep that motorbike passengers have to press themselves up against the driver to avoid sliding off backwards. Since there was just one motorbike taxi hanging around at the bottom of the path, Mama Lina sent me on ahead. Where the concrete path came to an abrupt full stop and I was unceremoniously unloaded from the bike, a clutch of women sat gossiping. They stopped in mid-sentence and looked at me with wide eyes. I greeted them cheerily, commenting on the gathering rain clouds. It was as though a dog had just trotted up and started chatting about the weather. They continued to stare, unable to muster a response. Then Mama Lina arrived on another bike; she explained me with a curt ‘My friend. She’ll be staying for a while’ and bustled her trophy guest off home with no further explanation, leaving them speechless still.

We scrambled as quickly as we could up a path that wound between wooden houses, but the clouds were ahead of us; the first, fat raindrops plopped down and we sought refuge with Lina’s in-laws. Within minutes the rain was drumming down so hard that we had to forgo the niceties of introductions. Mama Lina’s sister-in-law made coffee while Lina and I collected the rainwater that now gushed from the corrugated tin roof in determined rivulets. We’d position cooking pots under one or other of the individual streams, then reposition them as the wind blew the water out sideways. ‘Look, that stream’s bigger,’ pointed out the sister-in-law, and we would shift one of the pots. ‘Over here, over here.’ More shifting. It seemed a haphazard way of collecting water in a mountainside village that had no well.

By the time it stopped raining it was getting dark. ‘Sorry, no lights,’ Mama Lina had repeated, and we slip-slid the rest of the way to her house through the mud by the light of my torch.

I was a little surprised, then, to see a satellite dish next to a papaya tree in the garden, and a TV in the inner sanctum of the house. The village, it turned out, had a communal generator. By common consent this was prodded into life every evening at an hour set by TV programming executives in Jakarta, a whole time zone away. As the lights came on and the television sprang to life, random neighbours would wander into Mama Lina’s house, spread palm-weave
tikar
mats on the floor and flop down with the family for an act of collective worship at the altar of the
sinetron
.

The sinetron, or soap opera, has come a long way since Suharto first allowed his daughter to fill time on her newly minted TV station with imported Mexican telenovelas in the early 1990s. Dozens of locally made tales of intrigue, back-stabbing and redemption now compete for viewers and advertising dollars. The storylines are hackneyed but strangely compelling. Will Ricky’s DNA test show that his love for Indra is incestuous, or is his mother not the beacon of probity he imagined? What about Siti’s feckless husband – could he really prefer that simpering schoolgirl to his dutiful wife?

Stories of virtuous country cousins bewildered by the wicked ways of the city-slicker relatives invariably unfold in the upholstered sitting rooms of marbled houses. There’s also a fair bit of slamming of car doors and storming off into the night, illuminated by the window-glitter of Jakarta’s high rises. Curiously, the cars are never stuck in one of the three-hour traffic jams that eat up the lives of people who live in off-screen Jakarta. None of the characters lives in a hut cobbled together from plywood and old election banners on the banks of one of the city’s stinking canals. No one ever pays a bribe to fix their residency papers, gets shaken down by a cop or a judge, or rushes a teenager to hospital because they’ve been wounded in one of the endless running wars between rival high schools.

Needless to say, the soaps are peppered with adverts. As I sat on the floor having eaten rice and dried fish for the sixth meal in a row, I wondered what Mama Lina and her friends made of these paeans to skin-whiteners and hair-enhancers, to ads for internet-ready tablets and quick breaks in Bangkok.

Some of the products advertised were, in fact, available in Adonara. Indomarets may not yet be universal across Indonesia, but the roadside kiosk certainly is, usually a slightly wobbly-looking wooden or bamboo shed with a small window carved out of the front. Hanging from a wire strung along the top of the window are strips of single-serving coffee powders in red and gold packaging, colourful sachets of hair gel, shampoo, washing powder, peanuts, almost anything else that can easily be divided into tiny portions. On the window sill there will be a little pile of betel nut and a pyramid of mangoes from the tree in the garden, perhaps, but also a tin of kreteks that you can buy by the stick. The Indonesian retail market has always been dominated by things sold in tiny quantities – a hangover from a time when a whole bottle of shampoo or jar of coffee would eat up more cash than people had handy.

Did Mama Lina and her friends think that a sachet of shampoo might smooth their crinkly hair into Sunsilky cascades? Did they aspire to become smiling mums turning Indomie noodles into sophisticated Western-looking dishes, served up to an adoring husband and two squeaky-clean kids who all eat together, using forks and ‘sitting
at a table
!!!’?

This last note of astonishment came from a friend who knows what meals are like outside of Jakarta’s middle-class bubble: the alpha male of the household is usually served first, most often sitting on the floor. Older children and teenagers grab food whenever they feel like it, carrying it off into a corner where they can play with their cell phones. Everyone eats with their hands except kids. It’s a bit of an acquired skill, moulding together a little cone of rice between the thumb and the first three fingers of your right hand, then using that as a spoon to scoop up some sauce, a bit of chilli, a fragment of salt-fish. Once I had acquired it, though, I began to agree with the contention of many Indonesians that food just tastes better eaten with the hands. The smaller kids are spoon-fed until they are five or six, usually by female relatives who follow them around the house or the yard, dolloping food into their mouths as best they can. Adult women scoop up the scraps left when everyone else has had their fill, often while watching the ads that sing of an ‘Indonesia’ that bears little resemblance to the one they themselves live in.

Even the actors come in a different flavour, not the
hitam manis
(‘black with sugar’) of dark-skinned Adonara, but
kopi susu
, ‘milky coffee’ – mixed-race Indonesian and European. These pale, rich people, ill-mannered and selfish, are what many people in other islands now think of as typical of urban Java. Suharto’s satellite, his great project for national unity, is now delivering up images of the rich for the viewing pleasure of those who can only dream of riches. And those viewers are lapping it up, rather as a hungry urchin might stand on tiptoes in a snowy street to peek in at a family having a slap-up meal in front of a roaring fire. Then the daily fuel ration for the generator runs out and everyone troops off to bed by the light of a kerosene lamp.

On the one hand, the disconnect between
sinetron
Indonesia and village Indonesia might drive a wedge between city and country, between rich, Sunsilky pale and poor, crinkly dark. On the other hand, the
sinetron
expose tens of millions of people to hours of the national language every day. On top of that, the pap drama and game shows are interspersed with some news programmes that tell of goings-on in other islands. For all their sense of local identity, villagers now discover that they have much in common with Indonesians across the land; it’s not just their own district head who is on trial for corruption, school rooms are collapsing in Sumatra as well as Papua, other farmers are also wondering how to spend the income from rising cocoa prices.