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...