Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (2 page)

I left the country for the second time in 2005. But every year, I somehow contrived to go back to Indonesia for a few weeks, staying in the same house, using the same cell phone, borrowing back the same motorbike, then wandering the provinces with the same old friends. I began to feel that the country was one giant Bad Boyfriend. It tickles the senses and elasticates the thinking. It prompts laughter, produces that warm fuzzy feeling that goes with familiarity and slightly embarrassing shared intimacies. Then it forgets important anniversaries, insults friends, and tells endless low-grade lies. Just when you think you are really getting to know it, it reveals some hidden secret, or reinvents itself completely. With Bad Boyfriends you know full well it will all end in tears, and yet you keep coming back for more.

Another thing about the Bad Boyfriend: however much you sometimes want to slap him, you always want other people to admire this wild and exotic beast, to wish they knew him better. And yet over the years I had become used to seeing a mildly panicked look in people’s eyes when I mentioned Indonesia at a drinks party in London or New York. I can see them thinking: ‘Oh God, Indonesia . . . is that the new name for Cambodia, Vietnam, those places near Thailand . . . ?’

In late 2011 I decided to try to introduce my Bad Boyfriend to the world. A book about Indonesia would give me an excuse to spend more time in the country, to get to know it better, to try to understand how it has changed over the years of my sometimes frustrated devotion. I put the day job running a public health consultancy in London on ice, and made for the islands. I’d start in the south-east of the country, I thought, and travel in a vaguely anti-clockwise direction up through the eastern islands. In the best of all possible worlds, I’d then turn left and head across to Sulawesi, Borneo and Sumatra. I’d close the circle by trailing south-east through Sumatra. I’d leave Java, the island where nearly two-thirds of Indonesians lived, the template for most people’s thoughts about the nation, until the very end.

I had a vague idea that I’d like to track down some people that I had met in my earlier incarnations and travels – maybe even the young man who invited me to tea with his dead granny. I was also keen to visit parts of the country that no Indonesian I knew had ever been to. That was the extent of my planning. Because in Indonesia, planning is a mug’s game. Boats come three days late or not at all, flights change destinations mid-air, new visa regulations send you dashing unexpectedly for borders, serendipitous encounters sweep you wildly off course.

There was another reason not to plan. I knew that I could never hope to give a full account of this kaleidoscope nation, a nation whose multicoloured fragments seem to settle into different patterns with every shake of history and circumstance. Though I wanted to capture the essence of ‘Indonesianness’, to try to find the
benang merah
, the ‘red thread’ that binds these different islands and cultures into a single nation, I knew the country would change even in the time it would take me to travel it. I was trying to paint a portrait of a nation on the move, and I could only see one fragment of it at any given time.

So I fell back on one of the core principles of my day job as an epidemiologist, the principle of random selection. This holds that if you can’t study everyone, the best way to get a picture of what’s going on in a large population is to draw a sample at random. Rather than planning where I would go and who I would talk to in advance, I simply trusted that if I got out there and looked through the eyes of enough people in enough places, I’d be able to piece the fragments together into a portrait of the nation as a whole, to understand better the threads that tied the glorious disparity together. I hoped, too, that some of those threads would bind the present snapshot into a larger historical album, revealing some of Indonesia’s deep and lasting qualities.

I only had one rule: ‘Just say yes’. Because Indonesians are among the most hospitable people on earth, this made for a lot of yesses. Tea with the Sultan?
Lovely!
Join a wedding procession?
Yes please!
Visit a leper colony?
Of course!
Sleep under a tree with a family of nomads?
Why not?
Dog for dinner?
Uuuuh, sure
. This policy took me to islands I had never heard of. I was welcomed into the homes of farmers and priests, policemen and fishermen, teachers, bus drivers, soldiers, nurses. I travelled mostly on boats and rickety-but-lurid buses that blared Indo-pop and had sick-bags swinging from the ceiling. Sometimes, though, I lucked into a chartered plane or rode cocooned in a leather car-seat behind tinted glass. I can count on one hand the number of times I was treated with anything but kindness. I can also count on one hand the number of days that I did
not
have a conversation about corruption, incompetence, injustice and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

In the end, I spent just over a year travelling the archipelago. I occasionally brushed against parts of the country most frequented by visitors – a beach bar in Bali crowded with well-preserved but slightly leathery white men and honeyed Balinese boys, a Jakarta restaurant catering to bankers and stockbrokers fitting in a quick drink before Wall Street opened and their BlackBerries started buzzing. But as I trekked 21,000 kilometres by motorbike, bus and boat, and covered another 20,000 kilometres by plane, I found these encounters were vanishingly rare. Overall, I visited twenty-six of the country’s then thirty-three provinces. Though this book starts with an account of some of the archipelago’s previous incarnations, and some of my own early encounters with the Bad Boyfriend, it is largely the story of the Indonesia I discovered on this recent journey. More dizzying in its diversity, but also bound more tightly together in ways that I had not expected, it is a nation quite different from the one I thought I knew.

*
These numbers are all hard to nail down. In 2012, the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics reported 17,504 islands based on government listings. However, a GIS survey in 2011 conducted in collaboration with the United Nations that excluded atolls that only appear at low tide in reported 13,466 islands. Between 6,000 and 7,000 are thought to be inhabited year-round.

1

Improbable Nation

When the flamboyant nationalist leader Sukarno proclaimed the independence of Indonesia, he was liberating a nation that didn’t really exist, imposing a notional unity on a ragbag of islands that had only a veneer of shared history, and little common culture. The haphazard declaration, with its ‘etc.’ and its ‘as soon as possible’, was blurted out just two days after Japan’s unexpected surrender in the Second World War. Japan had invaded the Netherlands East Indies in 1942, kicking the Dutch colonists out of the islands. This was a cause for celebration among Indonesian nationalists; 350 years of Dutch kleptocracy left them deeply distrustful of white rulers. But the Japanese turned out to be just as bad, though in different ways. The hasty declaration by Sukarno and his fellow nationalists was designed to keep the islands out of the hands of any other grasping outsiders.

‘They were unforgettable, the Japanese.’ This came from the mother of a fisherman who I stayed with in Eastern Indonesia in early 2012. Though her face had shrivelled in on itself like a dried sour-plum, she must have been a great beauty in her youth. ‘Soooooo cruel,’ she said. ‘All they wanted was to take away the unmarried girls.’

The subject had come up when I asked the woman how old she was. She didn’t know exactly, she said, but she was ‘already grown when the Japanese were here’. I asked her what those times were like. She shook her head. ‘They made the men dig a pit. Then they stood two men at the edge of the pit.’ The old lady struggled arthritically to her feet to demonstrate. ‘They tied a cloth around their eyes, a white cloth,’ she mimed the blindfolding of seventy years earlier, her own eyes still bright with the memory of what she had seen. ‘And then from behind, crack, crack,’ she chopped at the back of her neck with a wizened hand, then tottered back into her chair. ‘Their heads fell into the pit, and one of the bodies sort of hung there, until a Japanese solider pushed it, and then it was in the pit too.’

Several decades later, a Japanese company set up a pearl farm near the old lady’s house; a group of executives from Tokyo were taken on a tour to see a bit of local colour. ‘I was sitting in the market selling fish. And I greeted them in Japanese and started bargaining; they were so surprised. This granny in the market selling fish in Japanese. They bought all my fish.’ She grinned. ‘I made them pay four times the normal price.’

The Europeans who preceded the Japanese came to these islands in large part because of the pearls and other riches found in the marketplaces; today’s Indonesia was melded together by the cupidity of Dutch merchants. But for centuries before the Europeans arrived, Arab and Asian traders did business in the independent fiefdoms of the archipelago, without feeling the need to bind them into a whole. They were helped along by the winds, which have driven long-distance trade for most of human history. Around the equator, the winds change direction mid-year. That provided a convenient conveyor belt between China and India, the two powerhouses of production and consumption at the time. They blew south from China between December and March, and provided a fast passage up to India from June to September. Anyone who wanted to ship silk and muslin, ceramics and metalwork, tea and silver between India and China had either to climb the Himalayas or to pass through what are now Indonesian waters.

In the interim months, the islands sat in the fickle-winded Doldrums. During these months, traders stayed in the bustling ports that grew up to meet their needs. They unloaded and reloaded, they refitted and provisioned ships, they married local girls in each port and left them to source cargo for their next visit. From the eastern islands of Maluku came nutmeg and cloves. From the other end of the island chain, the Sultanates of Aceh and Sumatra, came pepper. Local rulers competed to attract traders and sea captains to their own particular patch. This port offered the best access to stocks of pepper, that one was known for secure warehousing. Here harbour charges were low, there you were less likely to get robbed. Marco Polo, who is said to have been floating around these waters on his way home from China in around 1290, describes the bustle of Java’s ports: ‘This Island is frequented by a vast amount of shipping, and by merchants who buy and sell costly goods from which they reap great profit. Indeed the treasure of this Island is so great as to be past telling.’

Wander through any market in an Indonesian trading town today and you’ll probably find much the same sights and smells as Marco Polo would have found more than seven centuries ago. Rickety stalls crowd in on one another, cobbled together out of old packing cases, discarded furniture, stray planks and (these days) last season’s election banners. No one cares what their stall looks like, it’s the goods on the table that count. On one stall, a giant volcano of red chilli peppers is piled simply on white sackcloth. Next to that is a Rubik’s cube of wooden boxes, one stuffed with nutmeg, another with pepper, a third with cloves, the other twenty-two in the grid filled with turmeric and ginger, galangal and coriander seeds, with all manner of spices that you might recognize more easily on the tongue than in the raw. On a stone slab, crabs bubble at the mouth, their claws tied with raffia. At the corner stands the equivalent of the old general store. Palm-leaf hats to keep the sun off hard-working rice farmers hang from a pole. There are brooms made of bamboo and coconut fibre, round-bellied terracotta pots balanced on little braziers for tomorrow’s soup.

These days, country markets also come with a full complement of patent medicine sellers, who peddle their wares surrounded by props too modern for Marco Polo’s days. At one market I visited, a rapt audience listened to a quack promote a cure-all herb over a crackly disco sound-system. They were watched by a model human head, split down the middle, half good-looking youth, half muscle, sinew and popping eyeball. Not far away, a woman sat quietly over sliced circles of what looked like mud, riddled with holes and threaded through with fibre. I guessed it was some kind of tuber, but no, it was indeed mud: an ants’ nest. Cooked up in a soup, a slice of quality ants’ nest will cure diabetes and high blood pressure, she assured me. Next to her, an old guy with ears like cup-handles and an intermittent moustache had split his stall in two. On one side, he was selling Coke bottles full of
raja gunung
, ‘the king of the mountains’, a viscous black potion made of roots of plants that grow high on the slopes of the volcanoes that towered over us. This, he explained between hacking cough and gobby spit, is a cure for lung cancer. The other side of his stall was given over to little mounds of tobacco, and dried palm leaves in which to roll it.

The traders spoke to me and their other potential customers in the national, rather than the local language. Born again as ‘Indonesian’ for political reasons in 1928, the lingua franca of these islands is actually a form of Malay which has been used by traders for millennia. Foreign merchants moved through the polyglot communities of the straits in waves; the Persians dominated in the seventh century, but were later eclipsed by the Arabs. They in turn were challenged by Indians from Gujarat on the west coast and Coromandel on the east, while the Chinese began a strong showing from the 1100s. What they had in common was a passion for trade; then, as now, people of all colours and races from these islands and much further afield haggled in Malay over baskets of mother-of-pearl, cords of sandalwood, cases of birds of paradise, sacks of pepper, rubbery mountains of tripang sea-slugs. Their legacy is handy for travellers today; though private conversations usually take place in the hundreds of local languages spoken throughout the islands, virtually everyone can speak Indonesian; it’s the language of public discourse and is used in day-to-day life in the large cities where Indonesians of different backgrounds congregate.