Passion and writing

         Fiona is a teacher in the theology department at Satya Wacana, a minister who is on her way in the fall to pursue her Masters in Divinity in San Francisco, after which she will return to Salatiga to continue teaching here. She is one of the members of my writing workshops, which I have been doing with three different groups of faculty who want to work on their academic writing in English. Successful writing in English is of course a centerpiece to academic advancement here, and of course it is incredibly difficult to do well in an academic context. (Especially given that most of the faculty here teach 6-8 courses a semester!)

            As with most of the participants, the first piece of writing Fiona turned in was all about the structure. It’s the way Indonesians often write, and learn to write: students are given, or create, an ideal structure, and then they write to fill it. This becomes even more pronounced when people are writing in English. And what it produces, typically, are papers that are more attempts to meet formal demands than attempts to develop an idea. Anything interesting gets crushed by the tyranny of the template. I am sure that the fact that the workshop leader is an American professor augmented that tendency among the participants. (By the way, the conference I attended in Thailand, where the presenters were all Americans, struck me for two reasons: 1. People are doing some very interesting work through the Fulbright program, important, relevant, and smart; and 2. Academics have the magical presentational ability to make those compelling ideas mind-numbingly dull. We all have our culturally-bound ways to achieve tediousness…)

            Fiona’s piece was about the importance of ecumenical education in Asia societies that are marked by pluralism, which is the topic she hopes to study in her work in the United States. The point of her piece was to argue that Christian education had to focus primarily not on teaching how to focus on the community of Christian believers, but on how to bring Christian ethics and ideas to play in working with other religions in a pluralistic context. (The work ‘pluralist’ is one of Indonesia’s favorite words to describe the culture.) It’s an important issue, especially in a country like Indonesia, where the success of the young democracy will depend on the ability of religious people to accept and engage with people of other religions. Indonesians do this pretty well for such a deeply religious country, but it’s never easy, especially when fundamentalism intervenes. Fiona’s focus not on Christianity as “the only way to heaven” but on Christianity as a way to live in society with others, well, seems the only way forward here, from any religious perspective.

            It was interesting enough, with the requisite nods to other theologians and to the Bible, but it was flavorless, for the most part, defining terms like ecumenical and pluralism and Christian education and mentioning that it is important, but dry and highly formal, a four page research proposal more worried about getting things in the right place than about exploring the ideas. We talked a little about it in the first session, but in the second session, the writing prompt I gave at the beginning of the class – essentially, I asked, “Pretend my dad is sitting here, and describe the project to him” – opened some doors. Fiona did the writing, and when I asked them to read, she took my idea literally, and started speaking to me as if I were my father, asking me questions about my trip, about where I’m from, about how I like Indonesia, and so forth. And she introduced herself, said she came from eastern Indonesia, a place called Ambon Island in the Maluku Islands, and had lived in Salatiga for the last 9 years. So we started talking about Ambon, and she told the most incredible story.

            In 1999, when she was 16, an enormous conflict broke out between the Christians and the Muslims, communities who had previously coexisted relatively peacefully. The origins of the conflict are unclear to me, but they had something to with simmering tensions and with the breakdown of national institutions following the fall of Suharto in 1998. In any case, it was incredibly violent, the start of a five year war that killed thousands. Fiona spoke of a Christmas raid on her village, an alert sounded by a rapid striking of the electricity poles, that sent all the villagers running into the night, wearing black so that snipers on the rooftops would not be able to see them, running into the surrounding jungle. She spoke about tanks commandeered and coming through her town, and about her grandmother being shot, and killed, by the Muslim militia. She told these stories over the course of the next two meetings, in part because after she started telling them I understood, of course, why she was writing about what she was writing about. It wasn’t “simply” an academic project; it was deeply personal. (Of course there isn’t usually a clearly demarcated line between the academic and the personal, and I would venture that in the best scholarship, there is likely no line at all.)

            Fiona has time – she is writing to think more clearly about her course of study in the United States, so there is really no pressure about it. I told her that I thought she needed to write about her experiences in Ambon, that she needed to use that experience to help assert the importance of her idea, and she has tried that out, though it is difficult. I won’t – and can’t – make her write about things she doesn’t want to write about, and she has said that she doesn’t like to think about that time, that she has tried to forget it, put it past her. But of course it’s not past her, as the project she is focusing on makes clear – it has become a central aspect of how she has developed her life’s focus.

            This is still in process. Her personal writing has already raised a couple of questions that she’ll have to explore in her research, such as how can people understand the point of view of someone they have been traumatized by, and why is that religious pluralism so often leads to violence, about how religious violence is always about something more than religion. Still, it’s so hard for her, and I’m not a therapist; she cried a little during the last meeting because talking about her childhood was so difficult. I told her she should follow her own impulse in terms of writing about this, and that whatever she wrote about it now would not have to be in whatever she wrote about it later, that the point was to understand for herself the urgency of her ideas so that the urgency could be communicated in her own writing, even if that writing is not about herself. It’s her choice, of course. It’s already, though, given her writing more power and depth.

 I’ve found, using Fiona’s example as a starting point, that this level of reflection is largely absent with the scholars I am working with here. Their rhetorical concern is with the finished product, the thing that will mark them as an academic, and this is almost always dry and lifeless and boring in its presentation. The ideas, however, are not, and to a person, these writers have big ideas that are driving their writing: the belief that musical performance has played a role in binding diverse communities; the belief that the developing slang of young Indonesians is a sign of social and national strength; the belief that well-managed arts productions are critical to the social cohesion of Indonesia; and so forth. In other words, they are passionate about their ideas, committed to them, excited, even though that is usually drained out of the writing that they do about it.

            Trying to cycle back through that with these writers, trying to get them to focus on what makes them excited about their ideas, rather than on how to present their ideas in the most scholarly acceptable way, has actually generated some good writing, and even better conversation, about the work they are doing. They have stepped out of final production mode and are recognizing that they can use writing as a way to explore their passions, to shed their anxiety about the correctness of the form for an enthusiasm about communicating their ideas. We still have to speak about form, of course, but only as a tool, not as a goal.

            I love doing these workshops. They are the most productive teaching I’ve done since I’ve arrived in Indonesia, a place where I really feel like the work I’ve done in the past has something to offer to teachers here, where I can help them productively in one of the largest challenges of their profession, writing in English. I am working to develop more workshops like this one at a university in Yogyakarta, since I’ve come to think of these workshops as my way back to Indonesia after this year is up. Mostly, I love seeing what happens when writers stop focusing on the fear of getting it wrong and instead focus on why they care about their work. It’s exciting to sit there, and fun, and I learn, I am sure more than any of them.

     Happy May - we only have six weeks left in Indonesia...

Slow Boat to Java

            So I’m on the slow boat – that’s what they call it – the slow ferry from the Karimunjawa Islands back to Java, a six hour ride, on Monday, and we’re crammed in some plastic seats in the center part of the boat, with people smoking all around us, and I am eyeing the sign that says there are 46 lifejackets, the sign hanging just underneath the TV screen that shows the safety video where a calm Indonesian woman in a jilbab helps her daughter put on the life-jacket, presumably while the ferry is descending the way Indonesian ferries do in the media legends. There must be 150 people in this room alone, perhaps all of them thinking something along the lines that I am thinking, which is: “What’s the best way to get to those lifejackets first?”

            Actually, I was thinking of my mom and dad, who were sitting in the row ahead of me with Laura and the kids, and who were supposed to be, on that day, in the Karimunjawa Islands, but for the booking mistake the hotel on the islands made, and which we learned about only after we disembarked from the fast boat on Saturday from Semarang. “There is no fast boat on Tuesday,” said the manager from the hotel. “Only a slow boat on Monday, or Wednesday, to Jepara.” In other words, instead of a three night visit to the islands, with a return to Semarang on Tuesday followed by a 90 minute drive back to Salatiga, we had two night stay with an early Monday departure for a six hour ferry ride followed by a four hour drive to Salatiga.

            The hotel was, in fact, the textbook study of the false tap, which device faithful readers of this blog will remember was installed in all the sinks in all the rooms in my hotel in Jember, a faucet which didn’t work, which was not even attached to anything, but which completed the illusion that the sink in the bathroom was functional. I will not belabor this point, only to say that I was enormously frustrated that this apparent highlight of my parents trip to Java was somewhat tempered by a hotel that was something like an Indonesian version of Fawlty Towers, only with a very pretty beach. A pretty beach we all went down to that afternoon to swim (after the nearly inedible lunch we were sent to after we learned that they had booked us into the wrong rooms, which mistake they rectified) and we frolicked, and laughed, and Graham ran into the water and right into a jellyfish, which embraced his legs with that calm jelly zeal and elicited a scream of pain and all the staff running down to the beach to treat Graham with vinegar and pain cream. They were very nice, and competent, and they slowly peeled off the tentacles of the jellyfish off of the swollen leg while Graham howled.  And Graham and Laura went up to the room, and the rest of us stared at the Java Sea, stared, quietly, a little forlorn, and sort of scared to swim again, though we did.

            So the snorkeling on the next day was wonderful, and Graham recovered and you can prepare yourself to be regaled, by Graham, with the story of the jellyfish and how incredibly painful it was and do you want to see the picture of my knees with twisty swollen jellyfish marks on it? (By the end of the weekend Seamus displayed exostion [‘exhaustion’ as spelled by Graham in his first round spelling bee elimination on Thursday] by Graham’s epic jellyfish adventure narrative and knee museum.) Truly, the coral was magnificent, and the gardens were rich and extensive, and I saw a yellow fish with black polka dots that was shaped like a box with a small nose and fin, a boxfish, I later learned.

            We were mollified by the snorkeling, using it to see past the doors that were very pretty but that could be opened easily after they were locked with a deft pull back and sideways, or the mosquitoes that enjoyed our company in the rooms without mosquito netting, or the showers that had several complex mechanisms that operated three different water systems, or the jellyfish, or the lousy breakfasts, or the fact that on Monday morning I led my parents into their authentic Indonesian traveling experience, the slow boat to Java, on a hard plastic seats. But it was a smooth ride, and my parents served a useful purpose: when Graham, or Seamus, began to complain about the ride, I could point to my father, and say “Your grandfather is 80 years old and doing just fine” and they retreated in a way they would never have done without them there. My father spent a good deal of time mastering the golf game I downloaded just for him on my iPad, my mother read, Seamus and Graham wandered around and played games on their Nintendo travel device Seamus rented for the year from our neighbor. I finished two books I had started already, a book of short stories by T.C. Boyle and a book about the Scottsboro trials in the 1930s and 1940s.

One hopes for companions like my parents on trips like this, understanding, bemused, patient, and better-humored than the rest of us. Their visit has been wonderful. I spent four days driving them around Central Java, exhilarating days like any days spent driving in Java. We saw a good chunk of the place, and we ate well, and they met several of our friends, and we had snacks at our maid’s house (they cut open three young coconuts they had taken from their tree and served us coconut water with chunks of coconut and palm sugar [made from the flowers of the same tree]).  It has been incredibly fun showing them around, in part because we’ve realized, in doing so, that we have actually learned this place a little bit, that we can maneuver comfortably – and sometimes uncomfortably - around an island that is not an easy island to negotiate. We have been so grateful for their visit, and this time with them. I keep trying to talk them into staying for another week, but they won’t do it. My mom says they have some appointments, but I suspect the real reason is that my dad can’t miss his tennis match next Monday.

Finger trick

My father did his finger pulling off trick for a group of Balinese young men sitting on the stone steps leading down to the ancient temple site, Gunung Kawi, to their applause and delight. I have now seen him remove his finger all over the world, and talk likr Donald Duck. I used to think it was super hokey and corny when he did that. In fact it is super corny and hokey. But he's always known how to work a crowd, no matter what language he speaks.

Bali with parents

I am having a remarkable gift at the moments, five days with my parents in Bali, just the three of us before we head back to Salatiga to visit the rest of the family. I am lucky, so lucky, to be with them here, and to have time without anyone else. My father is 80, but you'd only know by checking his birth certificate, my mother 75. Here we are in Ubud, drinking gin and tonics and heading out to the shadow puppets. I am also only with my Ipad, which makes typing a pain. So that is all.

Small drama

     It's been raining all the time here, or at least it feels like all the time when it's raining. Mostly it comes in the afternoon, downpours like you can't imagine. Umbrella, raincoat, poncho, sometimes even house, won't keep you dry. (1) It gets a little old, because you either give into it, or stay inside. Supposedly the dry season will come soon, but it is not here yet, and everybody thinks it's all screwed up anyway because of climate change, which is going to hit Indonesia like a slow-moving tsunami.
    Today, walking from one building to another, in the morning, sky cloudy but no rain, I walked by the soccer field which is smack in the middle of campus, a grass and mud expanse that is usually clear of people, but occasionally, like today, has a game going on, with spectators, and cheering, and people on the side selling things.
  Today it was two shades of yellow going at it, bright yellow and striped yellow, and I watched for about three minutes as striped yellow made a run for it, stealing the ball at mid-field and passing it deftly down the left side to a player who trapped it easily. Everyone was covered in mud, and the ball splashed and sloshed its way down the field, but nothing else seemed to slow from the condition of the field, and as always, the soccer playing was something magnificent to behold.(2) So I stopped, and watched, watched the players maneuver the ball around in front the goal, some stops, some passes, some missed shots, and finally a hard shot on goal, fielded handily by the keeper.
  I am grateful for these small dramas, these little bits of street theater, that happen all the time here - and everywhere, if my eyes are open. The bus and motorcycle jostling for position, the haggling over prices at the vegetable stand, the conversation about politics in the tiny city bus, the counterfeit 50,000 rupiah note we have to deal with, the students practicing dance in the hallway outside my office. (3) For three minutes I watched a little play, entranced by the performance on the rian-soaked field, distracted by the looming lateness to another engagement where even late I would be earlier than anyone else.


(1) We had a massive flood at our house a few weeks ago. I was reading comfortably on the couch during a torrential rainstorm - so loud on our hard plastic roof that you can't have a conversation at dinner - home alone, relaxed, and the rain kept getting louder, or at least closer, and when I looked up it was dripping through the light fixtures from the 3rd to the second floor, and I leaped up, and ran upstairs, through a lovely cascade of water coming down the stairs, and out onto the 3rd floor balcony, where a drained was clogged and a very large balcony had filled up with several inches of water which then proceeded to empty into our house and down the two flights of stairs so that every flat surface in the house was wet by the time I cleared the drain. It took several hours to recover from the flood, but our neighbor helped tremendously. She said, "In Java, when there is a crisis, everybody pitches in and helps clean up from it. It is the Javanese tradition." And she sent over her maids to help.

(2) Even with children, this is true. Graham played briefly for an Indonesian soccer club, and enjoyed it, though it was a little difficult for him, both in terms of language and skills. These kids were amazing, at age 10 with a clear sense of the field, incredible passing skills, fast and aggressive. I spoke with one father on the sideline, asking him why Indonesia didn't have a soccer team usually in the World Cup. "We have the skills," he said in Indonesian, "but we don't have the mental toughness."  Most Indonesians are much tougher than me, for what it's worth, but I am not very tough.

(3) Seamus and Graham went out to lunch the other day - they had to take a bus, and before they went they bought some root beer at the store around the corner, because they didn't have root beer at the restaurant. When they tried to pay for their lunch at the restaurant with the change from the store, they wouldn't accept the 50,000 rupiah note (about $5) because it was counterfeit (they can tell by shining a black light on it) and so Graham had to take the bus home by himself (they didn't have a phone) and tell us, and I rode up to the restaurant on the motorcycle, paid for Seamus's lunch, and then went to the store. I was ready, stupidly I think, to get all American-indignant on them, but I didn't have to. They happily replaced the counterfeit bill.

The False Tap, and the Empty Shell

            As one of the activities in the creative writing workshop in Jember last week, on Tuesday we drove 45 minutes (1/2 hours) to a beach on the southern coast of Java, a lovely and relatively secluded place where we were supposed to become inspired by “the nature.” It was truly beautiful, and another bule who had tagged along with us, and I, rented two masks and one snorkle from an outfit that apparently was somewhat equipped (we were the only snorklers that day), and we went out and swam around what used to be a coral reef before it had been dynamite fished in the past. There were little tidbits of glory amidst the shards of coral, but in general, sort of dispiriting, although the guy I was snorkling with, one of those travelers whose aspect is overwhelmingly positive no matter what, could not stop gushing about it.

            I found, though, nestled between little pieces of broken bleached coral, a beautiful small sea shell, brown with light speckles on the top, those delicate sea shell groves on the bottom, smooth, and shiny. I inspected it to make sure it was empty – I had been trained years before to not remove anything living from the ocean – saw that it was empty, and pocketed it. Back on the shore I showed it off, my little prize, perhaps I would even write a little haiku about it in the spirit of the day (I did not – but I did write one about the dead coral).  I was proud of my little shell, though, and imagined it one of my small mementoes of my year on Java.

            (There were incredible boats floating in the small bay too, large wooden fishing boats, painted with bright colors and motifs and carved figures, tied, bobbing, beautiful and tranquil, though I imagine some of those motifs sought protection for the less tranquil times.)

            We went to another beach too, where a long narrow outcrop known locally as Snake’s Head Rock jutted into the ocean, apparently the head of a prince whose princess was killed at sea by the jealous and evil witch who kind of runs the show on the southern coast of Java. (We were cautioned against wearing green, because this witch doesn’t like it and might make you drown, with that sort of semi-ironic tone sometimes taken by people who don’t really believe what they are saying but who nevertheless would not wear green no matter what. Needless to say I did not wear green.) There was a hotel that had fallen completely apart next to the coast, the victim of bankruptcy and scandal, according to one local, though another assured me that it was haunted, which was convincing because there was a statue of the witch in front of it, looking very threatening and angry on her horse.

            No one drowned, and we drove back to the hotel. I stowed my shell in the bathroom, and went to dinner at the house of the University President, where we ate all sorts of Javanese delicacies that added to what became by the end of the week my Javanese Food Breakdown. On the ride home we drove for an extra hour while the group leaders tried to track down wine (barely successful, and highly overpriced, in a city of almost one million – for my next Fulbright, I’m going to investigate the cultural drinking habits before I make my request.)

            The next morning, in the shower, I was shocked to find that there was a little piece of purplish flesh sticking out of the shell, the dead remains of whatever living being I had inadvertently removed from the sea. I washed it, sprayed it, tried to pry it out with something narrow, but I could not get the little carcass out, and by Thursday night, it was actually creating a stench that I think could have been the revenge of the witch from beach – when I came back from dinner, the bathroom smelled like an unsanitary fish market (I know this smell rather well at this point). I moved the shell outside, under the chair in front of my room, where I hoped that ants would clear it out (ants in this part of the world could clean the flesh off of a whale in a matter of minutes). I forgot about it, though, and perhaps it still sits there, under the chair.

            My hotel room in Jember had a sink in the bathroom, with a faucet that didn’t work. Next to it, over the tile floor, was another faucet that did work but that did not empty into the sink. (Javanese bathrooms are just a sheet of tile, like a giant shower room – the whole thing gets wet.) This in itself – the faucet that didn’t work – is unremarkable, but it turned out that everyone else in the hotel also had a tap in the bathroom sink that didn’t work – “the false tap,” one of the participants called it. My room, alone among the rooms, also had a window in the back, and when I opened the curtains to let in the sun, I found that it actually looked out into the housekeeping closet, where the staff gathered at about 5 in the morning (one hour after the loudest and earliest and most ardent call to prayer in the entire Muslim world) to tell what were apparently highly amusing jokes with lots of sound effects.

            I have come to think of the false tap as a sort of metaphor for some of the Indonesian hotels we have visited, in which some feature or another just doesn’t add up. There was the hotel in Flores, where we arrived after three days on a very bouncy and fairly crowded boat. None of their towels were dry, so we couldn’t shower. There was the hotel on the coffee plantation with lovely rooms and clouds of mosquitoes hovering above the bed at night. There was the hotel in Borobudur with the massive cockroach walking on the wall behind my wife’s head. (Moral dilemma: do you say something? Or just let it be and let her remain unaware? I said nothing, and the cockroaches scurried around for a little and then disappeared. But it was really big, and still scurries across the corners of my dreams from time to time.) The false tap reflects the sort make-shift nature of a lot in this country. In our house, we have two bathrooms, each with small hot water heaters, but if we plug in both of them, the power goes out.

            It is near the end of the semester here, though I have just began a series of faculty workshops that will last several weeks, in which I am working with faculty across the university on their English writing. I’ll write about that later – it’s already been quite fun and engaging – but now I must stop and sleep. Good night.