Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (11 page)

These chickens tell our individual fortunes, but the sum of all chickens tells the fortune of the clan. In traditional agrarian societies, the strength of the clan is in the number of workers it commands. In societies where tribal wars are common, more men mean stronger armies. In Sumba, where farming and warring have shared the billing in shaping society, wealth is a numbers game. I had increased the relative strength of Mama Bobo’s clan by taking my chicken to her house for slaughter. By the end of the day, she had more than a hundred birds piled up in huge plastic bins. They would be stewed for the following day’s feasting.

Initially, a couple of other families in the village were cross that I had chosen to take my bird to Mama Bobo’s household, but it didn’t last. The important thing, from everyone’s point of view, was that I should ‘belong’ somewhere. One of the most important functions of these rituals is that they tie people into their place in the local cosmology, ensuring that everyone knows where they, and everyone else, fit.

I had picked out my own chicken in the market, choosing a cockerel with a cinnamon ruff streaked with black, and a cascade of glossy tail feathers. An auspicious fowl if ever I saw one. The seller looped its legs together and I went off with it swinging upside down from the handlebars of my bike, squawking crossly.

I stopped at the post office on the way up to Tarung, taking the bird in with me for safekeeping. In even the smallest town in Indonesia, the post office, dressed in orange livery, is a little island of efficiency. Its staff are well trained, friendly and almost embarrassingly helpful. They will keep the office open as you dash to the market to buy a rice-sack to wrap your parcel in, then help you sew the parcel up with thread that they dig out of their own handbags. They’ll telephone to let you know that this week’s boat has been cancelled so your parcel won’t leave for another ten days. ‘When Indonesian institutions have to line up at the gates of heaven, the post office will be let in first,’ one old postmaster told me, and I agreed.

The chicken and I found the Waikabubak post office crowded. It was payment day for the families with poverty cards. The key to Indonesia’s nascent social security system, these cards provide access to subsidized rice, free medical care and cash payments. They are highly prized, and because of a little payment here or a small favour there, do not always go to the poorest families. Still, today’s queue was made up mostly of people who looked like they came from the traditional villages that were dotted on the hilltops around town. Since it was the end of Wulla Poddu, they were mostly dressed for the festivities to come, the women in woven sarongs, the men in waist-cloths and head-ties; none of them batted an eyelid at me and my squawking chicken.

Then in walked Fajar, the Javanese doctor whom I had met in the share-taxi from the airport; I’d since had supper with him once or twice, and I was pleased to see him. I greeted him enthusiastically. He looked me up and down. Like most of the other clients in the post office, I was dressed for the party in Tarung. I was wearing my best sarong. Slung from my shoulder was a palm-weave pouch containing
sirih pinang
, betel nut and limestone powder. This combination stains mouths into scarlet gashes, rots teeth into black stumps, and is the common currency of polite interaction in rural Sumba. You can’t climb on to someone’s veranda without being offered
sirih pinang
, and you shouldn’t climb on to someone’s veranda without having some to offer in return. In one hand, I held a parcel I wanted to send to Jakarta. In the other, I gripped a flapping chicken by its ankles. Fajar turned away, embarrassed.

It was as though I had joined the other side. It was not just that I was ridiculous, that I had so quickly ‘gone native’. It was something worse. Along with all the other dangerous, ignorant peasants who were sitting quietly waiting for their social security payments, I was sullying the post office. We were bringing that distasteful old world of arcane traditions and primitive beliefs into the space inhabited by modern, functional Indonesia. I began to feel positively uncomfortable. The upside-down chicken somehow contrived to shit on the post office floor.

I’d get a similar reaction whenever I went into one of Waikabubak’s many photo shops to get prints made for my new friends. I’d hand over my USB drive to a spiky-haired Chinese boy or to a teenager in a purple jilbab. They’d open up portraits of Mama Bobo and her family, photos of me with a group of
rato
, pictures of chickens or buffalo lying in pools of blood, and they’d look at me quizzically. ‘These photos? Really, you want prints of these ones?’ It was okay to take pictures of the quaint traditional houses and of the megalithic tombs that dot the villages and the landscapes of Sumba, but these people, these rituals . . . They are relics of a primitive past that we’d rather not think about. They are nothing to do with
our
Indonesia.

I thought back to my first encounter with Fajar, when I had laughed at all the men wearing their machetes under the banner reminding us of a ban on machetes. Since then, I’d seen machetes used to slaughter animals, to make drums, to hack open coconuts, to sharpen pencils.

I had also realized that the dismembered corpse in the photo Fajar had shown me was not an isolated case.

Violence seems to be woven into the fabric of this island, despite the best efforts of the soldiers, missionaries and bureaucrats who have trickled through since Dutch times. It’s one of the reasons the people of Sumba still cling to their fortified hilltop villages; inconvenient for the women who have to spend three or four hours a day fetching water up from the valleys below, but more defendable than villages on the plains. To this day Loli can’t stand Weyewa, Lamboya hates Ede, nobody likes Kodi. The smallest event can spark a conflict; in 1998 dozens were hacked to death and hundreds displaced when a complaint about favouritism in the civil service exams exploded into a full-blown clan war. Nowadays the outbursts are smaller but regular. As I headed up to Kodi on my motorbike one day, I got a text from Doctor Fajar: ‘5 corpses in Kodi. Because of elopement, apparently. Watch out for a war.’

I didn’t see any corpses that day, but I didn’t doubt they existed. In an attempt to reduce these fatal outbursts, the local government has banned machetes in town and at many traditional ceremonies too, with exceptions made for tribal elders. The banner at the airport reminded us that under Law 12 of 1951, carrying a sharp weapon without a licence could land you in jail for ten years. That law was made in Jakarta, by a parliament trying to put out fires lit during the five-year guerrilla war against the Dutch. It was a law for a modern, unified state, a state in which people no longer have to defend themselves against headhunting neighbours or wild animals.

Picturesque as the machetes are, arguing against restricting them is a bit like arguing against gun control in the United States. Yes, lethal weapons were a foundational part of the national culture in the US, when pioneers hunted wild animals and fought native tribes. But they are hardly necessary now that we hunt in the supermarket and expand our territory in courts of law. Machetes have far, far more uses than guns do, of course; most of Mama Bobo’s sons and grandsons used their weapons daily without ever, to my knowledge or hers, hacking someone to pieces. But over time, modern life erodes even the legitimate uses that still make machetes indispensable in rural Sumba. In most of Indonesia, disembowelling animals after ritual sacrifice is not a common pastime. And even in Sumba’s biggest city Waingapu and the modern part of Waikabubak, people have found other tools to do the job of the household machete. Pencil sharpeners, for example. Abattoirs.

Indonesia’s diversity is not just geographic and cultural; different groups are essentially living at different points in human history, all at the same time. In the early twenty-first century, some parts of the country are hyper-modern. In other areas, people spend their days much as their ancestors would have done. Often, more-or-less ancient and relatively modern coexist in the same space; farmers get to their rice-field on a motorbike, villagers film a ritual sacrifice on their mobile phones.

In Waikabubak, where modernity has dragged its feet, the two extremes are only now beginning to bump up against one another. But the aspirations of young people in a modern economy have been clashing with the demands of family and traditions in other parts of the country for nearly a century. Indeed the first modern Indonesian novel, Marah Rusli’s
Sitti Nurbaya
, deals with exactly this tension. It was published in 1922.

This presents the nation’s leaders with a headache. If ancient and modern Indonesia coexist, which should they make laws for?

When I was preparing to go back to Indonesia in 2011, I came across photographs I had taken in Sumba during my first visit, two decades previously. I scanned them onto my iPad, and, in a moment of rainy idleness on a veranda near the south coast, I showed them to Lexi, the young man I was chatting with. Lexi was taken as much with the iPad as with the photos, swiping between images just for the fun of it. He swiped up a photo of a small boy in a primary school uniform and a warrior’s head-dress, holding on to his pony and staring straight at the camera. The child exuded defiance. ‘So small but so fierce,’ I said. Lexi agreed. ‘He’s got that “don’t mess with me” look, like our village head, Pak Pelipus.’ He swiped on.

Then he swiped back.

‘Wait, that
is
Pak Pelipus.’ I laughed. It didn’t seem possible. Apart from anything else, we were twenty-five kilometres away from Gaura, where the photo had been taken. In West Sumba that may as well be another planet: a different language, a different clan, a different set of loyalties. And the boy in the picture couldn’t be older than thirty now, nowhere near old enough to occupy the venerable position of village head. But Lexi, whose wife, it turned out, was from Gaura, was insistent. ‘It’s him, I swear!’ So we set out to find Pelipus.

In the one-size-fits-all government structure left by Suharto, village heads are supposed to keep office hours. I’ve never known one that does, but the office seemed as good a place as any to start looking for Pelipus. It was around 10.30 in the morning. A sleepy guard told us that Pelipus was off at an adat ceremony, he had no idea where.

Lexi and I bumped into one hamlet after another, hoping for news of Pelipus. Eventually, someone told us that he was in the next hamlet along, negotiating a bride-price. We teetered along a high ridge towards a clump of greenery, and parked the bike next to the village pigpen, which contained one sow and a large squeal of piglets.

Above us was a pointy-roofed house, its veranda creaking with the bride-to-be’s family. They were waiting for emissaries from the groom’s family, but they welcomed these other, unexpected guests. Grey-haired men rearranged head-ties and fished out pouches of betel nut to offer us. An ancient woman squatted quietly against the wall, rolling a golf ball of tobacco from side to side under her upper lip. There was the usual quota of teenaged boys, their hair carefully gelled for the solemnities. If an adult shifted and a small space appeared, it was immediately filled by a child. The kids were uncharacteristically tidy, scrubbed up in their impress-the-neighbours best. Negotiating the sale of a sister is a serious business.

In the middle of this press sat Pelipus. He was half the age of many of the men there, but he had clearly stamped his authority on the gathering. Though this was not his house, it was he who invited us onto the veranda, he who gave the nod to the women’s quarters to get another round of coffee going. He was friendly enough, but decidedly haughty. There was no question about it: this was the defiant child that I had photographed more than two decades before.

Pelipus and the family elders were discussing their negotiation strategy. There would be a number of niceties to observe before they could get down to brass tacks. First, Pelipus told me, they would have to kill a dog chosen by the bride’s family. A
rato
from each side would read the dog’s heart, to see if the pair were well suited. The dog would become the first course in a pig-roast dinner, shared by all sides as a sign of good faith.