October 5, 2010
I’m writing about the history of the literacy test, as an obstacle for voting, at the childhood desk that we borrowed from my colleague, the daughter of the women from whom we are renting our house, the outline of her girlhood stickers all that remain from the scrubbing. It’s a heavy desk, tall, with drawers and crannies; it can be folded closed. I sit in a old chair on loan from the English Department here, the only other things in the room a couple of suitcases packed with books we brought, somewhat randomly. We finish them and then pass them along to an eager bunch of expats starved for new reading material. I’m not sure they share my tastes – Suttree as Southern gothic as they get – but they can have the books. We’re not bringing them back home.
My head is full of the racist policy proposals of old Southerners like Edward McCrady and Ben Tillman, frantic to reclaim the South from the sudden hands of freed slaves. In the afternoon I scour The Jakarta Post, the strange English language newspaper full of stories of graft and terrorists and religious zealots and political infighting. Today I read on a political website that Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina thinks sexually active single women and all gay men should be banned from teaching. Yesterday I read about an official in Sumatra who wants only girls who are virgins to be allowed to receive a free education.
On Sunday I went with S to a community center in the center of the city to a youth theater workshop run by a man Laura met doing some other projects. It was an open, dark, hall, two old fans spinning slowly from the low ceiling, opening onto a quiet lane. When we arrived, on one side, there were a group of high school age students with guitars and drums, singing, reciting poetry, laughing. D, Laura’s friend, a lithe Javanese man, led another group of teenagers in an intensely physical warm-up routine, collaborative and grueling, with the most hilarious stretches that made my body ache just from watching. S watched quietly and curiously, interested but wary – he’s been invited to join the group, and I think he wants to, but doing so would be about the most courageous thing he’s ever done. He hasn’t decided yet.
They rehearsed a piece written by D, as far as I can tell a deeply political piece that deals with the lies of politicians and a population hungry for equity. D’s wife sat next to me, holding their extraordinarily cute 9 month old baby. She is Australian but lives permanently in Indonesia, and she speaks Indonesian and Javanese, and she explained various bits to me, mostly about the kids performing, where they come from. They were wonderful, enthusiastic, committed. It was dance, and theater, and poetry, demanding intellectually and physically, accompanied skillfully by the musicians. As far as I could see, they pulled it off with youthful aplomb. D spoke to them in Javanese, their first language (and the 8th largest language group in the world); the language of the play – sparse – was Indonesian.
“Three of the kids aren’t here today. They were in a big street fight. They fight a lot here,” she told me. “It’s the way of poor youth in a lot of places, a habit made worse by the dictatorship” – this ended in 1998 after a dramatic series of student protests led from Bandung in West Java – “the officials here open this hall whenever it’s free for events like this, so there is some productive place for them to go.” All of the kids were happy to meet us and invited S graciously to join them. He was quiet, curious, open-minded.
After six weeks here, it’s easy to feel like there is a routine, though fragile. Things feel a little normal. We talk to the neighbors on our walks by the house, and my bike ride to school is second-nature (with occasional merging challenges). Being here isn’t a daily trial, though it isn’t without its headaches. (Or gut aches; the demon in my intestinal tract is persistent and demanding and pops up at the most unfortunate moments – today I had to cancel a some student conferences and make my way home to bed). We have a marvelous maid, who delights in our language problems and cooks the most amazing food (with delicious homemade sambal, the Indonesian chili paste that goes on everything). I like my students. The school our kids go to is not any less strange, but by now they know who we are, and so far we haven’t been forced out, even though G argued back with his fifth grade teacher about evolution and S told some teachers that Satan sounded like an interesting person, and who would want to spend eternity praising God anyway – how boring. S would leave today for Bozeman if we gave him the option, but we’re not going to, and in two weeks we will spend one week touring around Bali in a rented car.
But everything isn’t routine of course. We still know nothing about this place, and however good my Indonesian will be by the time we leave, I will know nearly nothing about the native language of my neighbors, aside from the fact that it is a lot harder to learn, and that it has four grammatically different levels, depending on the status level of the person you’re addressing. We are clearly welcome here in Salatiga, and people are eager to help us learn about what we want to learn. And it’s extraordinary anyway, just out of our grasp but part of our daily lives. I cannot know what my kids will think of it, even tonight, much less in their lives in Bozeman, or what I will think of it. But in the hall, watching a group of Javanese youth hold hands in a circle and fall back in an impressive warm-up stretch to a live soundtrack performed by their peers to the side, I saw it again for the gift that it is, the wonder that it is. Here I am, in a small city in Central Java, at the girlhood desk of my colleague, writing about the trials of plurality in America while watching a young nation live out the trials of plurality in its day-to-day existence, in reality and on stage. How unlikely, how impossible. How wonderful that something so strange, for fleeting gracious moments, can feel like my life.
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