In the last month, my language has taken some kind of leap, which is a little frustrating, since we are about to leave for parts of Asia where I will be as an infant again, except perhaps not as innocent, or cute. (Perhaps?) It's also, of course, exhilarating, a little like the time I stood up for about 10 seconds on the surf board in Pacitan - I've seen a future in which I could actually be something approximating fluent in Indonesian. I'm learning bunches of new vocabulary words everyday now, and the miracle is that they stick in my brain, and when I see them again I know them.
Last week we went camping at the coast with a family we've become close to. Paul is 16 and has become Seamus' closest friend here, and he's a great kid, a climber who has gone all over Java with his two older brothers and now his friends, rock climbing. (Yesterday he took Graham out climbing on cliffs that rise above the most beautiful rice paddies I have ever seen, the ones I've taken all our visitors on hikes through.) His parents run the MCC in Indonesia, which stands for the Mennonite [2 words beginning with C], and they are wonderful people. They are here as missionaries, I suppose, but Mennonites are forbidden to preach. Instead, they just do cool stuff. MCC has been a strong partner in developing interfaith organizations in Indonesia, and they are doing incredible work as well in Papua, where the local population yearns for independence from Indonesia (which they are unlikely to get, given how resource rich the area is - the largest gold mine in the world, an American operation called Freeport, is there - and given how successful the policy of filling up the place with Javanese citizens has been over the years, a program called transmigrasi). They are progressives, educated in Indonesian history and culture and religions, and they have lived here for 10 years and know their way around. So they have been delightful acquaintances. I'm also grateful because they aren't interested in converting us; they just like doing things with us. (In his yearbook, Seamus had a schoolmate write a note that essentially said, "I've been so nice to you all year in the hopes that you would convert to Christianity," which is kind of depressing, really, and just seems strange to me.)
We went to a place called Pantai Siung (Siung Beach) on the south coast near Yogyakarta, which they assured us was quiet and remote. We got stuck as night fell behind a full bus and a small van on the way there, and as we approached closer, and started to see more lights, and more cars, we realized this might not be a normal day on the beach. Indeed, we came around the corner into the parking lot to find hundreds of chairs under a tent, facing a stage on which there was a full gamelan orchestra and a screen for the wayang kulit. We had arrived for a special marathon shadow puppet performance, with the paling terbaik dalang (the most best puppet master) in Yogyakarta putting on, singlehandedly, an eight hour performance of the Ramayana Cycle in Javanese, with a cast of about 200, and full gamelan accompaniment. We arrived at about 6:30, while things were still getting set up for the 10 o'clock performance. So we set up tents and got our camp ready, in the early Javanese deep dark of quick night, to the sound of about 20 gamelan players warming up with several woman singing, a loud and rough surf crashing out an offbeat rhythm that somehow works with gamelan music.
At about 9:30, I wandered back up to take some pictures and check out the scene. By that point, the place was packed. All the chairs were filled, the warungs selling food and cigarettes and countless energy drinks that everyone seemed to be sucking down - it was a scene, everyone decked out in their finest clothes, youth on motorcycles like teenagers everywhere hovering on the fringes, smoking, wandering into the jungle, families. In the front there was a row of seats covered in white seat covers, for the VIPs.
"Om, Om," I heard (this is the Dutch word for uncle, something I am called about every day on the street or in the markets), as I was standing near the front taking pictures. "Silikan, duduk" (please, sit), spoken by one of three men in the VIP section. And so I ended up sitting in my ratty beach shorts and sweaty shirt in the front row, special seating, trying to understand the Indonesian being spoken to me over the increasing volume of the orchestra.
Perhaps the eight hour Ramayana cycle wayang kulit in Javanese is a little more compelling in theory than in actual practice. I really want to be the kind of person who would sit in the front row and watch the entire performance, but there are several obstacles to this, recounted here in no particular order:
- Sri Lanka to go and rescue the princess. Plus everyone has a name that is both completely unfamiliar and seemingly the same as every other character. Everyone else in this audience knows the story deeply, and can come in and out as their favorite scenes appear.
- I do not speak any Javanese, though I can recognize a few words.
- It was 8 hours long, and I had not prepared myself for it, and I couldn't muster up the will to quaff the energy drinks I would need to support myself. I was very tired. One needs to get ready for a such a thing, and we had prepared only to sleep on the beach.
- Perhaps the most compelling obstacle, however, is that there really isn't a lot of action, or at least not a lot of movement. The dalang (who is amazing, by the way, adept at changing voices and remembering a story for eight hours, with full dialogue. I can do this with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but no one celebrates me for it) would bring in the characters who were central to this particular episode, and he would line them up, 2-6 on each side of the screen facing each other, and they would have long involved conversations about Ramayana stuff in Javanese. If you were lucky, a character might move his arm, so that you knew who was talking. There was a moment when the two comic relief characters began hitting each other over the head with their sticks - needless to say that was my favorite part. Mostly they just stood there, with every now and then the static conversation punctuated by a burst of gamelan music and the singing of the women.
I did make it the longest of any of our group (the only bules in the places), about 1 1/2 hours, and I enjoyed it a great deal. I've been to shorter wayang kulit performances on three other occasions, once in Bali and twice in Yogya, in which the point has been for tourists to go and get Culture. Getting Culture, when you are a tourist in Indonesia, is a Very Important Activity, certainly requiring great Seriousness and a recognition that you are seeing something Sacred and that you should be Reverent. However, watching wayang kulit in a public performance on a remote beach with a bunch of Javanese is not like that. People wander around, and chat, and smoke, and text, and drive back and forth through the parking lot on their motorcycles. The musicians and the dalang were smoking the entire time, and the choir of ladies was texting (how, I don't know, because we lost cell coverage). There were babies crying and people heckling the comic relief characters and at some point all the VIPs and the musicians had tea and a little snack box (this is super Indonesian - there is no event without a little snack box with some sweet cakes and fried things in it) delivered as the performance went on. People were sitting all around the stage, and some began sitting on the stage. I looked for it, but I saw no Reverence.
All that night, I would wake up on occasion and lie in my tent and listen to the ocean and the gamelan and the occasionally shrieking dalang, and when I got up to pee I could see from far away the shadow part of the screen, on which some character appeared to be quite angry about something (which anger I could discern because he was screaming very loudly and moving his arm a little). It was an amazing soundtrack, not one conducive to a super refreshing night of sleep, but a marvelous eight hour moment nonetheless. In the morning, when we awoke, the stage had been dismantled, and all that was left was a parking lot full of cardboard snack boxes and cigarette butts.
Such a long entry. As always, I have to leave out more than I can include. My brain feels like it might soon explode.
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