Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (55 page)

The Javanese writer Pak Tohari agreed completely with the Dayak bureaucrat Pak Askiman about the legacy of all this subjugation: a culture in which everyone seeks only to serve their boss, and in which the unaccountable boss has only his own interests at heart.

This has wormed its way into the language.
Asal Bapak Senang
– ‘As long as Father is Happy’, usually shortened to ABS – means that you never had to think beyond carrying out the instructions of your superiors. And there’s
belum dapat petunjuk
, too: ‘I haven’t yet received my instructions.’ I used to hear these phrases all the time from bureaucrats in the Suharto era, when I was trying to get information about some development plan or financial deregulation package. Without orders from above, no one would even talk about anything, let alone do anything.

Even the man who presided over this culture of craven obedience got fed up with it. In the early 1990s, Suharto launched a campaign against the ‘
petunjuk
’ culture. He instructed his Vice President to instruct his civil servants to stop waiting around for instructions, to take more initiative. I thought this would make an interesting feature for Reuters. I called the Vice President’s office, and asked his chief of staff if he could arrange an interview on the subject. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ the chief of staff said. ‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘
Belum dapat petunjuk, Bu
’ – I haven’t yet received instructions.

There seems to be a contradiction at the heart of Javanese culture. On the one hand, there’s a fundamental egalitarianism in Javanese village life because everyone mucks in together to get as much rice as they can out of this crowded land. On the other hand, you have the extraordinarily hierarchical structure of power, everyone bowing in the service of their superior. Perhaps this explains a central political contradiction, too: the rapid growth of Indonesia’s communist party in post-independence Indonesia, and the ease with which Suharto re-established political hierarchies after the backlash.

Pak Tohari was an observer of that backlash. His trilogy of novels set in 1965, published in English under the title
The Dancer
, was the first major work by an Indonesian writer to describe the turbulence of the time. Masquerading as the story of a pubescent
ronggeng
dancer who ministers to the libido of her many admirers, it actually addresses the military’s role in the indiscriminate killing of alleged communists. I asked the writer why he thought the communists grew so popular, then were so utterly reviled.

‘For the
wong cilik
[the ‘little people’], well, no one else had ever tried to do anything good for them; many people were drawn to their promises of land reform, of education,’ said Pak Tohari. But, he said, the communist PKI party was also very divisive. They persecuted Muslim preachers and vilified the Three Devils of the City (capitalist-bureaucrats, corruptors and fraudulent manipulators) and the Seven Devils of the Village (landlords, traders, middlemen, extortionists, bandits, money lenders and usurers). Tohari’s own father was deemed a land-owning devil, although his one and a half hectares couldn’t possibly produce enough to feed his twelve children.

By mid-1966 at least half a million Indonesians lay dead.
*
Some had been over-zealous communists. Others were just men who had looked sideways at someone else’s daughter, women who had once embarrassed a pupil in the schoolroom, businesspeople who had refused a loan to the village drunk.

After the slaughter: silence.

‘I waited and waited for the big names to write about what had happened,’ said Pak Tohari. Nothing. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘I had seen people shot with my own eyes. I couldn’t just keep quiet.’ He knew he could not just wade in and write about politics. ‘That’s why I had to wrap it up in porn, in all that sexy
ronggeng
stuff. I didn’t even introduce the violence until the end of the second book.’ Hence the central figure of Srintil, a teenager who restores the self-respect of her village with her fame as a dancer in the titillating and culturally embedded
ronggeng
tradition. Her childhood sweetheart runs off and joins the army in despair when she starts to receive ‘guests’, as all such dancers did. Later, the young soldier is involved in the killing of villagers accused of being communists.

‘Srintil was inspired partly by that woman over there,’ Pak Tohari said, shooting his lips out to indicate a house across the road from his home. ‘When she was young, she used to go around with a bullhorn shouting communist propaganda.’ I asked how she had survived. ‘She was very, very pretty.’

Still now, many Indonesians are reluctant to confront the carnage that brought Suharto to power. As recently as 2007, the Attorney General ordered that stocks of fourteen school textbooks should be burned because they didn’t lay the blame for the events of 1965 firmly at the feet of the PKI.

In 2012, nearly five decades after the fact, the National Commission on Human Rights prepared a report which described the killings of 1965–6 as

a state policy to annihilate the members and followers of the Indonesian Communist Party . . . leading to murder, extermination, enslavement, forced removal, deprivation of liberty/arbitrary imprisonment, torture, rape, persecution and forced disappearance.

The Attorney General promptly rejected the report. His colleague, the coordinating minister for politics, legal, and security affairs, said the military had simply done what it needed to do to save the nation.

When I wondered at the savagery of 1965, Ahmad Tohari had said, ‘Carnage is a sort of Javanese tradition,’ and pointed to the character of Kumbokarno in the
wayang
shadow-puppet plays, a noble hero who fights with his wicked brother and gets killed. The
dalang
, the puppet-master, dismembers the character limb by limb. ‘Then he rips his head off. And the crowd absolutely loves it, they’re baying for it,’ said Tohari.

The wayang is so frequently used by foreigners as a metaphor for all that is illogical or inexplicable about Indonesia that it has become a bit of a joke, an outdated cliché, like people making comments about the fog in London or cuckoo clocks in Switzerland. No Indonesian had used wayang metaphors anywhere on my travels, and I didn’t expect real, live Javanese to do so either. But they do, quite a lot. The former bupati has been succeeded by his wife, you’ll hear, but the husband is still the puppet-master, determining the course of events. People will use nicknames from wayang characters to refer to a new boss or a potential girlfriend, so that everyone will instantly know what sort of person they are.

After I left Pak Tohari, I stayed for a couple of days with a friend who had recently built a comfortable house at the edge of the rice fields in a pretty village outside Yogyakarta. Kharisma was telecommuting to a well-paid day job at a foreign-funded research institute in Jakarta, but on Sunday morning he trooped down with all the other men of the village – the farmers, the cop, the headman – to break rocks for a new drainage canal. I joined the women, serving up a communal lunch, then doing the washing-up. This was
gotong royong
in action, the sort of village-level co-operative work which both Sukarno and Suharto held up as the core of Indonesian life, but which is in fact deeply Javanese.

After Kharisma had finished with his communal labour, we went off to eat at a Thai restaurant, one of the many delightful places that had recently mushroomed out of the rice fields around the increasingly sophisticated suburbs of Yogyakarta. Kharisma had told me that the nearby region of Gunung Kidul, which he described as a desiccated ‘pocket of poverty’ in otherwise fertile Java, had been a PKI stronghold. The backlash had been concomitantly brutal.

I flagged down a bus that was headed in that direction, sitting next to a woman who was on her way home from her job as a hospital orderly. She introduced herself as Tini, and she invited me to stay with her in the Gunung Kidul village of Nidoredjo. It was the day of the annual ‘Cleaning of the Village’ ceremony, she said, which meant that the yearly wayang would be staged that night if I wanted to go along. Marvelling again at Indonesia’s kindness to absolute strangers, I said yes. On the way to Tini’s home, I noticed that many houses had zinc replicas of characters from the wayang guarding the corners of their roofs, often with the date of construction enshrined between them: 2010, 2012. Even in this pocket of poverty, newly built houses seemed to be ten a penny.

It was a busy evening. First, there were community prayers at the Blessed Virgin Mary grotto – the village had converted to Catholicism
en masse
in 1966. Then I was taken to the farmers’ cooperative meeting, where around thirty men and two or three women sat in their best batik shirts being elaborately polite to one another as they reached agreement over fertilizer subsidies. Finally the village wayang. I felt like I had walked in to a Suharto-era film about the golden age of Javanese village life.

When we arrived at the wayang just after 10 p.m., it had only just started. A string of makeshift foodstalls lined the path down to an elaborate marquee over a solidly built stage. Across the far end was stretched a huge expanse of white cotton. In front of it hung a blindingly bright electric light, shaded from view by a carved mask-shade. Along the bottom of the screen was a shelf made of the trunks of freshly cut banana trees; into this were jabbed a hundred or more wayang puppets, arranged by height. The largest and most impressive were exiled to the outskirts of the screen; the puppets swept down in progressively smaller and more manageable versions towards the centre where the puppet-master sat. The buffalo-hide puppets were carved, right down to the patterns on their batik sarongs, then painted and gilded too. It seemed like a lot of work for something that was going to show up as a shadow.

But the audience was all on the puppet-master side, the side where you could see the nice, colourful puppets. So was the large group of uniformed musicians, each with a kretek drooping from his mouth, each staring into space as he beat out extraordinarily complex melodies on his gong or xylophone. Kneeling in a row behind the orchestra were four stout women, all the rounder for their bulbous,
Mikado
-style wigs. These were the singers, each accompanied by a capacious handbag out of which popped powder compacts and lipsticks, and tissues with which to blot delicately heaving bosoms. The women were well past their glory days, but their singing was splendid yet.

Didn’t anyone watch from the shadow side any more? I asked the man I was standing next to. He laughed. ‘When did you last go to the wayang?!’ More than twenty years ago, I confessed. ‘Wah! It’s changed a bit since then,’ he said. The audience started shifting in force to the other side of the screen when the wayang went electric. Before that, when the light came from a large, flickering flame encased in a lantern, it had been much easier to imbue the shadows with life (and also rather harder to show off any on-stage glamour). ‘Now, the audience wants to see
everything
. It’s all about the showmanship.’

This puppet-master, sitting dead centre, his dagger sticking prominently from the back of his sarong, was certainly a showman. By day, he was an architect, working mostly with engineers on infrastructural projects – he had built the new runway for the local airstrip.

The only thing happening ‘on screen’ was a loooooong conversation between a waspish character and his bulbous-nosed opponent. And yet there were sharp intakes of breath from the audience, laughter, collective sighs. The architect was embroidering new patterns onto well-worn stories; he held the village spellbound. Except for the children who lay asleep open-mouthed in their parents’ laps, of course, and the people who were wandering around because they were hungry, or had run out of cigarettes, or just wanted to stretch their legs and see what was on offer at the food stalls.

I went to the other side of the screen, to see if anyone at all was watching the shadows. It turned out that this was where the ‘committee’ – the group of village worthies who controlled the budget for the show – gathered to enjoy the fruit of their organizational work. They were all men, dressed mostly in smart batik shirts and peci caps, but they had not been ushered into a front row of overstuffed sofas the way they would have been at an ersatz cultural ceremony in a part of Indonesia that was trying to rediscover its adat. In this village there was no obvious ‘Big Man’. I tried to guess who was who, to discern the hierarchy that would have been made explicit at a state-sponsored event. I pegged one man for village head on the strength of his clothes; he wore a beautifully cut, Nehru-style jacket in midnight blue. The following day he came out of his shop to greet me with a tape measure around his neck. He was the village tailor.