I’ve been in Jemberrrrrrrr (pronounce it without the trilled r and no one knows where I am), East Java for the past four days, attending first a creative writing workshop I weaseled myself into, one designed for English language teachers to work on creative writing in English, that lasted for three days, and is followed by a creative writing conference for English language teachers, that started today. It’s been an amazing event, in many ways, not least for the couple of comic characters that have been present.
One of them is Iqbal, an English teacher from Pakistan, a rice farmer who is passionate about breakfast and about poetry. Every morning he sits at the table and eats buckets of rice and piece after piece of toast with jam. He is a tall man with a thick mustache and a thicker accent, and he fixes his gaze on you in a way that forces your involvement in conversation, and begins discoursing about food.
“I eat a large breakfast, and a small brunch, and then I do not eat lunch. Later I will eat dinner,” he says, spreading pineapple jam on his toast. His pause demands a reply, but for the life of me I cannot think of anything to say, and I nod. I say something like “I can see why,” and he nods, staring and me, chewing and spreading, folding his bread in half, and eating it, and making another piece. Before him is spread out platters of fruit, which he eats his way through one by one. During the workshop he will interrupt the workshop leaders with strange comments, usually misusing the word ‘lecture.’
“Professor, thank you for your lecture on the three word poem,” he will say to one of the leaders, who has just briefly suggested a writing exercise in which students write only three words. “I have been inspired by this lecture, and I would like to write some three word poems, and I think that I will have my students write some three word poems. I will ask them to write four words.” And he will stop, that fixated stare, impressed by his innovation on the form, as always demanding a response. Every time he uses the word lecture I have to look down at my paper or fuss around in my bag in an attempt to keep myself from giggling. In spite of all this, I find him charming.
The person most like a character from a comic novel, however, is our host for the conference. Before we came, he arranged transportation for all of us from the airport in Surabaya, the largest city in East Java. In his emails he began telling us that the drive to Jemberrrrrr was only three hours, which as the trip grew closer grew to four hours. In my car, the drive was five and a half hours. Another car took seven hours. When he greeted us for the conference he cheerfully acknowledged the deception, saying that he believed none of us would come to Jemberrrrr if we knew how long the drive was (I think this is true – the workshop leaders would not have scheduled the conference here). He is the quintessential yes man, more than anyone I have ever met. He reassures you with a yes as soon as he recognizes the intonation of a question, before the subject matter of the question has been broached. He says yes to everything, and at least half of the things he has said yes to this week have been no’s. No there is not a car to the hotel. “Yes yes, there is a car.” No he has not arranged a dinner. “Yes we have dinner arranged.” No there will be no internet service today because there has been a flood in the building with the server. “Yes it will be back immediately.”
The other day, the workshop took a field trip to a beach south of Jemberrrrrr, which he said was a 45 minute drive, and when everyone teased him, he said, “no, no, it is only 45 minutes, I promise,” and we all laughed, reassured actually that it was so close, only it was 90 minutes away. Because one of the writing tasks we had been assigned for the day was a haiku, I wrote a haiku in honor of him:
I have written a Handoyo haiku.
Each of the lines contains a set number of syllables.
That second line had seven, this one five.
His desire to please without knowing whether he can actually follow through on the pleasing is something bordering on the pathological, and one of the leaders of the workshop, a very pleasant British teacher, is finding it especially irritating, although I find it more comic than anything.
There is something schizophrenic about Indonesian teachers trying to come to terms with creative writing. In one session today, in which teachers described a fairly interesting narrative assignment where students collect local folklore from older people in the city, folklore that has not been adequately chronicled in any other place, many teachers became quite urgent as they questioned them about form. “You must give them a form of the story, so that they understand how stories are shaped,” one teacher said. “Here is the form of the story,” and she gave one, but another teacher said that this was not the proper way to guide students to write stories, because it was the wrong form for them to use, and she had a better one. I imagined people hundreds of years ago, on a beach, arguing about whether the story they had just heard had a proper resolution, or whether the character had been properly introduced before the conflict had been offered. Then, when the conversation turned to assessment, it became even funnier. One of the ways of assessing the story was how many different “chronologies” the story had: first this, then this, then this (that’s three chronologies, apparently) as if a story is better the more there are things that happen one after another.
It’s one of the thing that I have noticed about the teaching of writing in Indonesia: people cannot put pen to paper without a tightly defined structure that explains exactly what the form of whatever it is should be. I presented at the conference today too, about my work with the National Writing Project, and many teachers were quite concerned that we did not tell the participating teachers the proper way to give feedback on writing. This became a very distracting and highly amusing series of conversational turns in which I reiterated one of my main points – that teachers are professionals who can determine such matters themselves, in collaboration with other writers – to which they replied that experts should tell them the things to look for in the writing. Still, many teachers heard what I was saying during the workshop, which I learned during the obligatory photo-photo session after the 45 minute presentation, during which I had my picture taken with every participant, while another participant tried to ask me a question about the presentation.
“Professor how do you,” someone asks, and I break eye contact with them to lean next to the person who is posing with me for a photo and smiling at the camera, “select teachers to be part of the project?”
“Well, first you have to,” break eye contact and stop for the next photo, “use the teachers you already know to nomi” – stop and photo –“to nominate other teachers.” This times 25.
Jemberrrrr is the most remote place I have been so far on Java, even though it is a city of several hundred thousand people. It is completely off the tourist track, and I had a brief Javanese food breakdown here, thinking I could not eat another bowl of rice, or shredded coconut thing, or drink another cup of highly oversugared coffee, or eat more sambal with too much fish sauce in it. But we had a good dinner tonight.
There was also a desperate search for wine that the workshop leaders, one from Malaysia and the other the Brit, engaged on determinedly since we arrived in Jemberrrrrr. (They had not brought wine with them because our host had said (no you cannot find wine in Jemberrrrr) “Yes we have already purchased the wine which we will serve at every meal.”) In our car with a driver we went, after dinners, to every grocery store in Jemberrrrr looking for wine, finding only beer and sparkling grape juice. I politely suggested from the very start that they were wasting their time, but one of the leaders finally found a nightclub where he bought a bottle of Jacob’s Creek Shiraz for US $75. I had a glass, and it was delicious, even so.
One more day, and then the slog drive to Surabaya tomorrow through the tortuous Javanese traffic, and then home – home to Salatiga. I have missed it this week, oddly, because it is where my family is, I think. Funny that I wrote home before I even noticed what I had done. Our time here is ticking quickly away, and this makes me excited and happy and sad and sorry, all at the same time.
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