Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (19 page)

5

The Emperor is Far Away

At Lembata’s only bus station, I found the usual crop of Terminal Crocodiles, young men who have nothing to do but hang around transport centres, leaping on new arrivals and offering them motorcycle taxi rides, accommodation, anything that country folk might need when arriving in the Big City. In Lembata they are really only Crocodiles-in-Training, pale imitations of the boys in the provincial capital Kupang, who turn their bemo minibuses into rolling temples of rap and who set national standards for loutage. Still, this outpost offered a betel chewer in a ‘Punks Not Dead’ T-shirt, an anarchist, and a young man who wore his Liverpool jersey cut off below the pecs, showing a stretch of taut brown torso above low-slung cut-off jeans. Their fashion sense was imported on a roundabout route from the Bronx, the über-bling crosses on big-ass chains once so favoured in the ’hood here replaced with plastic rosary beads bought from the many Jesus shops that dot this predominantly Christian region.

Each had a variation on the all-important lout haircut. This is common to Terminal Crocodiles throughout Indonesia, a sort of elaborate mullet in which a spiky central column towers over close-cut sides (often with a pattern shaved into it), before squibbing into a wispy pig-tail at the nape. This look is particularly fetching in the sub-species
Crocodilus Timoriensis
because the young men of NTT, of Timor, Lembata and the like, are ethnically Melanesian and so have frizzy hair. Which means that no matter how much gel they use, the centre strip of the mullet coagulates into a mass of curls that wobbles inelegantly over the sides, while the pig-tail twists in a satisfyingly pig-taily sort of way. As a bonus, attempts to dye the central reservation blond often stall at just that orangey-brown colour that is a symptom of malnutrition.

Eventually, a construction truck fitted with benches pulled up at the bus station and one of the louts nodded at it. It was the bus to Lamalera, already thudding out rap songs encouraging us to do unmentionable things to close relatives. I grabbed pole position, the place nearest the open back of the truck. It was furthest from the boom box and most likely to get some breeze and provide a view. We drove around town for an hour or two in search of passengers. The benches filled up and a bouquet of baggage flowered on the floor between us: potted plants, a piglet, a large stack of plastic chairs. On the chairs were enthroned two large trays of eggs; perilously close to the giant speakers, rattling menacingly with each throb of the bass line.

Eventually we left town and tarmac behind and lurched uphill, bamboo and long grass whipping our backs through the open sides of the truck. There were eleven people folded onto the bench opposite me and perhaps as many on my side, limbs pressed into odd angles against the baggage mountain. In the heavy air of noon, neither the discomfort nor the thudding music was enough to keep my fellow passengers from Indonesia’s national pastime: sleep. Within minutes, every single one of them dozed, mouth open, head lolling. Each slumped domino-like onto the person downhill from them, piling finally on to the person right at the back. On my side, that was me.

After three or four hours, we crested a shrivelled brown hill and saw the village of Lamalera clinging to the shore below us, positively Mediterranean-looking. In a shrine on the hilltop, the Blessed Virgin Mary stood above a plaster whale. The village was festooned with drying flesh. Lamalera specializes in catching whales and dolphins – it was this that had brought me here. I had arrived two days after their biggest catch of the year: six sperm whales in one go, about thirty-six tonnes of meat. Every available clothes line, every bamboo rack, every metal pipe was garlanded with strips of whale meat. It hung between the remnants of other hunts: turtle shells pendulous on bamboo walls, dolphin jaws baring their razor teeth in casual piles beside a well. It looked as though the devil had got into the specimen cupboard of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, multiplied its contents, and tossed them around the village.

From the fat yellow steaks of drying meat, oil dripped into corrugated zinc gutters and was channelled into sawn-off water bottles. On the beach, a gently rippling sea teased a giant spine back and forth. Lashed to a rock, a skull washed about, covered still with blackened flesh. Ribs reared higher than my head out of the dark sand. The whole town smelled of stale sex. And I was served whale meat for supper every day for four days.

I stayed with the widow of a local schoolmaster. On the wall was a whale map, like the posters that map the cuts of beef in a butcher’s shop, showing who gets what when a beast is caught. This part goes to the eldest male in the clan of the person who harpooned the whale. That part goes to the clan of the boat owner. There are bits that go to descendants of the first clans in the village, other bits for the carpenter who maintains the boat, for the boat manager, and many others. All of these people will then divvy up their chunk; after a big hunt, virtually every family in the village gets something. The first person to spot a pod of whales shouts ‘Baleo!’ This cry is a hangover from the days in the sixteenth century when Portugal ruled these waves, spreading Catholicism, DNA and commercial mayhem in about equal measure. It sends virtually every able-bodied man in town rushing to the boats that while away the days under thatched roofs all along the beach.

The boats are between fifteen and twenty metres long, banged together out of heavy wooden planks. It’s hard work just launching them down a sandy beach over rough-hewn bits of wood, especially if the able-bodied men have been frittering away their day in Lamalera’s other male pastime: drinking palm wine straight from plastic jerrycans. Breathless adventure-travel rags give the impression that these men, eight or ten to a boat, power down on their quarry in a flash of paddles. My personal favourite, a
Daily Mail
feature from 2007 entitled ‘The stone-age whale hunters who kill with their bare hands’, informs us that they also use sails woven from gebang leaves and that ‘each vessel is hand-made, with no nails or metal parts’. In fact, water wells energetically into the boats where nails have rusted away, and much of the whalers’ time is spent fiddling with overused and underpowered outboard motors.

I happened to be on the beach when a group of hunters were heading out; they invited me along. Clouds frowned over an already angry sea. The boat was heavy, so heavy that the boys had to recruit some collateral drinkers to help launch it. We were ten people, six harpoons, and one rusty 25-horsepower engine.

The youngest of the whalers and I were on bailing duty more or less constantly, a task complicated by the fact that my half-jerrycan of a bailer had a large crack in it, so that as much water slopped back into the boat as slopped out each time I scooped. Along one side of the boat, raised on a couple of cleft sticks, were bamboo poles an ungainly four or five metres long. When the hunt was on, a vicious metal arrowhead shaped like a tight-angled number 7 would be attached to the end of the poles with a great length of rope. Until then the weapons lay coiled menacingly in the bottom of the boat. The Chief Harpoonist stood on a platform at the upturned bow. Most of the others stood not far behind, scanning the horizon for a whale’s telltale spout. We saw no whales, but as we sighted the graceful arcs of a school of dolphin on the move everyone went completely silent. Elaborate hand signals took over from the teasing and gossiping of just seconds before. This despite the racket of a rusty outboard motor gasping to keep a heavy boatload of hunters moving through a rising sea.

The Chief Harpoonist took up his position, a perfect yoga Warrior Two, except that in this case what looked like an arm extended over his bent front leg was actually his harpoon, ready to be unleashed. But it’s hard to spot a dolphin in a sea wine-darkened by the glowering sky. And the dolphins weren’t helping. Though they could easily bolt away from us, they criss-crossed in front of the Warrior, flicking his attention first left, then right, then far right, then centre left, until he didn’t know which way to look and he raised his harpoon straight up to the sky in defeat. I confess that I was not overly thrilled at the idea of having to bail diluted dolphin blood out of the boat as our catch was butchered at my feet. But as the hunt went on I grew less soppy. To get caught on a day like today, a dolphin would have to leap into a high arc directly in front of the Warrior and push the slow-motion button on itself as it breached the water to give the drunken harpoonist time to focus. Any dolphin that we took home that day had no place in the gene pool.

All this spotting, half-chasing, giving up was exhausting. The boys decided to take a break, just as the worst of the storm clouds rolled towards us. They switched off the engine, smoked tobacco folded into palm leaves and munched on bananas, unworried that we were drifting towards an obvious reef. At first I wasn’t all that worried either: I had long ago put my camera in the ‘dry bag’, a bamboo tube with a tight-fitting cover of palm leaves. But as the whitecaps started to crash over my legs into the half-bailed boat bottom, I ventured a suggestion. ‘Shall I put down the anchor to keep us off the reef?’ ‘Anchor? We don’t have an anchor,’ came the reply. We spent another few hours drifting, chasing dolphins, smoking, motoring around in apparently random circles, then went home, soaked and empty-handed.

Later, chatting with a couple of the whale hunters, I showed photos of the red plastic kayak that I like to paddle in the Atlantic, off the west coast of Ireland. I said that I often saw dolphins from my boat, and sometimes even a whale, but I wasn’t allowed to hunt them. ‘What, because you are a woman alone in a boat?’ No, because it’s forbidden.

‘Oh right, it’s that thing, those people – there’s a word for it, isn’t there? What’s the word?’ said the other bailer. ‘
Konservasi
,’ prompted his friend. ‘Yes, yes, that Conservation thing!’

For my part, I don’t feel the maritime mammal population is too greatly threatened by a village full of people who get drunk and go out in leaky boats with no anchor and holes in their bailers and who don’t throw a harpoon a single time in a six-hour trip through water roiling with dolphins because the effort of pulling the harpoon in again exceeds the likelihood of success. Perhaps they were less motivated than usual because of the vast catch of a few days previously. Because the fact is, they
do
catch whales, between eight and twelve a year on average. In the decade they’ve been using outboard motors they catch lots of dolphin too – my own band of drunks walked up the beach with dripping chunks of seven of those the very next day.

This makes some Western NGOs cross, and Western NGOs make emotive YouTube videos about the slaughter of dolphins and whales in places like Lembata. They demand that people stop eating tuna canned in Indonesia, because the country isn’t dolphin friendly. This in turn makes the central government cross: in response to a video posted just a few months before I visited Lembata, the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries in Jakarta called a press conference. They accused the dolphin-huggers of undercover protectionism, attempting to keep tuna canned in Indonesia out of European and American supermarkets.

‘It is not true [that dolphins and whales are hunted in Indonesia]. How could that be? I have never heard of dolphins being hunted before,’ the Director of Fish Resources told journalists. ‘Local people consider them as man’s best friends, so they would not go after them, let alone eat or use their meat as bait.’

These days, it’s perfectly plausible that the Director of Fish Resources, sitting in Jakarta, had no idea at all what ‘local people’ do, especially in Lembata where you can only make a phone call by holding the trunk of a particularly tall cashew tree at the top of the village which seems to act as a natural antenna.

The chains of command so carefully wrought by Suharto – chains that passed the will of the capital’s bureaucrats down to the villages and sucked resources and information back to the centre – have, during The Reformation, been shattered. And the shattering is deliberate. It was largely the idea of President Habibie, who stepped into Suharto’s shoes when the Old Man threw in the towel in 1998. Decentralization was a reaction to Indonesia’s loss of East Timor.

Blindsided by Jakarta’s crushing defeat, Habibie was forced to wonder what implications East Timor’s referendum on independence might have for the rest of the country. Lots of other regions felt they had been slighted by the Suharto oligarchy. In islands that were made of nickel and copper, that sat above pools of oil and gas, or that were once covered in precious hardwoods, the universal rhetoric was that Jakarta was sucking riches out from under local feet, and was using the treasure to develop Java. Yes, nearly 60 per cent of the population is squeezed into the single island of Java, but that still left a hundred million citizens in other islands. To add insult to injury, Jakarta had for years sent Javanese governors and Javanese troops to stamp on any sign of protest at this injustice.