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ALONE It's
a very odd thing -- Whatever soaring sins I have ever committed, un-democraticism was never one. Or so I used to think. I have a good reason: How could I be anything but a democrat, since I hate everything evenly and equally? But I was dead wrong. I was the most un-democratic of all. I had been infected by speciesism, and this disease proclaimed its glorious victory after holding me hostage for a very long time. And this was not my fault. "Thy rule the world", thus spake the mighty Jehovah to a couple of goofballs who would be my ancestors (you know them -- they are yours too). So from the peak of humanity I looked down, with squinted eyes, watching over other creatures, my command is what we are talking about here, since God's words are God's words, and who is to say he needs Roget's Thesaurus? He did not notice how human is the most discriminative word ever. But this is now, and that was then. From the height of my humanity, I was convinced that Darwin has made a towering error. Grammar would not allow us to have ancestors who, even as we speak now, are attending zoos as hosts. Darwin was wrong and God was right. Then imagine my horror when I discovered the truth: I was a snail. The divine revelation came at high noon, when the sun put on airs, when it intimidated this planet, when it fried everything down here. I was sixteen and at a train station three hundred kilometers away from the place where I used to live. The breeze of Malang, the small cool town, kicked me from every direction. I could be in Mars or Jupiter or on the set of Babylon 5. Anywhere at all. Things would still feel the same: an unfamiliar train station in an unfamiliar little town and an unfamiliar mouth next to me uttered these words: Are you going home? 'Going home'. That time, it meant total impotency at Math classes, it meant boring old tapes of Kiss and Deep Purple, a chronic stomach cramps whenever the time to go to school approaching. 'Going home' echoed a great human blackhole I have never wanted out of yet couldn't stand being in. But still -- it was 'going home'. It was better than merely 'going'. Which was exactly what I was doing, being alone among strange faces and exposed to fears that had no name. Everyone was a stranger to anyone there. They did not know who the other was. A flock of older schoolgirls were there. Lovers held hands. Parents with nagging kids. On my left, a Goliath with his mother-in-law. They know who Everyone was in their own tiny specks of existence, but anybody else -- and God, for the purposes he would not reveal, as is his generic m.o. in everything, had invented so many Anybody Else -- was a total stranger to each. Suddenly I was acutely conscious of my four-year-old leather sandals. Of my ancient bluejeans. Of my brave old U.S. Mariner jacket, which was decorated lavishly with cigarette burns. Of my host's toothbrush that was accidentally smuggled. I was aware that nobody around me wore the same sandals, the same pants, the same jacket, the same mistake, the same regret, the same being as I did. I saw 'I' written in bold across every face in the crowd. Every person I could scan carried different luggage named self. There were the pinkest ribbons I have ever seen, on top of a young girl's head, trying to negotiate truce with the whirling wind. There was a man slept on yesterday's papers. Had the sandals and bluejeans and jacket and toothbrush be somewhere else, they would have spelled some other 'I', not my 'I'. Where did all those 'I's come from? Where would they go? Home. And homes never go anywhere. We were at the train station, taking homes with us to go nowhere..... Someone has a fortress. Another has a nest. Still another owns a sty. A cave. A cage. A garage. A little something that is conventionally called 'a house'. A cell. A palace. Somebody is erecting defensive walls around him and calls it home. His neighbor is nesting. Another is parking. There are homes with tons of locks. There are homes so widely open they blend with the landscape. But I noticed this: nobody is homeless..... Into hotels we carry our homes. Into dormitories. Into theaters. Into prisons. Into cars and planes and ships. Into restrooms, along the streets, up to the moon we carry our homes. The very modest of homes merely preserve the old furnitures as they were handed down to them. Homes at the middle layer absorb some of the inheritance and put forth new things by themselves. Grander homes preserve and distribute, give birth to and dig graves for, ideas of others and their own. We, the smashing human race, inherit history as a furnished house. It is our choice, though: will we let it bear our fingerprints, or are we going to let it be just as is? I know, many people are dying in the state you call 'homelessness'. I know, billions do not taste the feeling you call 'at-home-ness'. I know, legions want to embark on something you call 'a journey back home'. But what I thought was: there might be, there has to be, something wrong with the homes they have been carrying all along. You could pick up the wrong home and since then you go astray. You might discover the home that is meant for you when you were actually looking for something else. Maybe you have found the home but it was not what you wanted. Therefore you went on exploring, wandering, trying to get around it or to fly over it, but you have never attempted to do what you should: head straight to the door and get inside it. We are islands floating on the surface of the ocean we dub 'life'. To find homes there, we do not have maps. And many of us do not have the flair to swim. Many of us do not have the interest to dive. Many of us do not possess the true grit: to acknowledge that we are homes. I know Teddy wants to move out. He wants a new home. He had hunted high and low. He had found many things. But not the home he left himself to look for. And to him I have to say: you will never find it. You have been scanning the wrong premises. However, homes can be deconstructed and reconstructed. Homes can be robbed until naked and can be heavily made up. But the only way to convert time and space into a home is by living it, not just living in it. Home is never a matter of where you are. It is much about who you are. It is definitely something about how you are to be. No one would feel home alone in the common negative meaning of it once he grabs the truth. To be home is to be alone. Home is a journey into the interior, it is unkown by anybody but yourself, even you still need a flashlight with fresh batteries to discover your paths inside. Yes, you might stumble time and time again. True, the walls around you might collapse. But remember this: it is your voyage to the bottom of yourself. So, Ted, my advice: ignore anyone's suggestions about how, where and when. Even mine. Footnote
GETTING
USED TO DYING I was having a terrible toothache -- one of the many neglected ex-white kind of bones of mine demanded a reform last night. Like hell you won't, I said in between fitful sleeps, and it said fine-I'll-just-rot-here-and-see-what-you'll-be-with-me-dying. Typical threat. Un-typical ache. I seldom feel the problems inside my mouth unless you count my spoken words. The tooth has no business dying. I feel like a dictatress saying this, but it really shouldn't so selfishly be dying while I'm still around. Compared to the gigantic necrology some regimes have amassed for the last 2000 years, it is, of course, nothing. It isn't even worth sculpting. Yet we are getting used to dying. No grand discourses are needed; just live this mundane daily life and you would -- I hope -- catch my drift. You know, when I was a kid in the early 1980's, suddenly came a thing called 'the juicer'. You couldn't escape that thing. It's everywhere like a boring namesake. There was one woman, then three, then eleven, then it reached the number of "God-they-are-pests!", who each dragged a small table out of their front-doors, bought a pineapple, several tomatoes, mangoes, avocadoes, and ice-blocks, and small clear plastic-bags with drinking straws, got the thing ignited, and went wrrrrrr to business. For one cent (US$) you could get a plastic-bagful of some bad-looking cold liquid called (since this is an English word gone Indies) "jus". It was impossible to live without the thing. Nobody wanted the old kind of colored ice to be licked all the way through the afterschool hours. I used to buy a bagful of avocado juice every time Grandma napped. I forgot how was life before that thing came, and couldn't imagine the time when the thing's gone. The thing, of course, didn't go away. It never would. But we couldn't see it in front of somebody's door on a small table anymore. It went private like it was intended to be by the Western (Japanese are "western" enough for some of you, right?) wizard who first created it. Sure, we thought it was invented to stay there on the small table. It's too much of a public luxury to be kept in Mrs. X's kitchen table. My mother and many other mothers have never had that thing of their own. But gradually the thing vanished from sight and we didn't rush to buy the juices anymore after school. I went out playing football with the boys next door. Grandma went napping. Before, during, and after the thing made its moves. So she didn't miss the thing a bit. I didn't either. There are too many things that we don't miss. That's the scary part. We don't even feel sorry that now it's gone. The symptoms of dying, for the kids, were all there to see and we grasped them without blinking, without anticipating, and when it finally died on public spots we have already forgotten about it. Then came the days of the new decade, the beginning of the 1990's. I was in the red-hot-college-days. I couldn't recall when it was started, nor by whom, but one by one there came small carriages, with gas or coal stoves, big frying-pans, small black plastic-bags, and tiny light-brown cakes with small slices of bananas inside their little tummies, called mollen. At first you could get one with two cents. Then the prices moved up to four cents. Everybody bought the tiny fried cakes. In campus people ate them. In house-parties they did too. And in every semi-public meetings. Everywhere. No one noticed when there came the dying days. One day all mollen vendors vanished into thin air. Nobody cared either. The scary chapters of the juicers' life-story was re-written once again. And again and again, for we all know how fashion goes. Thus the source of all that I know about 'collective memories'. I think somebody is still making and eating a mollen right now, and in ten years I'm sure the juicer-owners have been vastly multiplied. But that doesn't matter -- because the general public doesn't have anything to do with any of them anymore. What matters is the next fashion. A people, as usual, is united by the future rather than its past, especially this kind of people -- who are so getting used to dying. Death can only be a theme in the realm of the living. Fear makes the predictable curiosity whenever an artist takes up the theme. Is there any difference between death in your very own bed and death that you inhale in a gas chamber? Is there a difference between a regime that celebrates death and one that fears it so much? The two could be intermingled and coexist in one and a single throne. One who fears death can't take it off the mind, not even for a second, not even in dreamless nights. In the end kibitzers could drag the person to the nearest shrink, the popular verdict being suicidal. And worse, he or she would eventually come to believe that it is love, not hatred, of death. The scary thing death has become, planted and cultivated by the cultural desperation to nail a reason to live, an attempt to make sense of life, has implanted amnesia within us all - we forget that it is just life, cosmetic surgeries aside, and so it is death. They are one and the same thing. If death or the alleged celebration of it seems scary, it is because life is. The Unknown, the Meaningless, the What-the-heck-is-this-for-ness - is there a difference, whether the subject is death, or life? Or maybe this doesn't matter, doesn't matter at all. In such a loud age we would scarcely notice our own deaths - let alone other people's. By the way it explains a lot about the phantoms that we dub 'politicians'. Footnote
GETTING
USED TO DYING 2 I
Indonesia is full of artists and collectors and art dealers and God knows what else of the kind, and once every blue moon someone suddenly announces the finding of his or her very own art gallery, hosts an exhibition, and before we have a chance to blink both the gallery and the owner have been slumbering back to oblivion. Since 1980's, this has been a routine on our calendar. 1980's means something big in the Indonesian artsy talk. It was the decade of 'painting boom'. The vulgar expression is, so people said, coined by the nationwidely venerable art critic Sanento Yuliman. It came to summarize a phenomenon as ungainly as the term itself: out of the blue, everyone sold and bought paintings. Prices became stratospheric, painters enrolled to the Newly Wealthy club, and unreported suicides were probably rampant -- of artists historically miscalled to dabble in arts other than oil on canvas. Art galleries, by then, started to visualize themselves in brick and mortar in all larger Indonesian cities. A probable heart-warming sight for the initiated -- but a boom is a boom, at one point or another the fusilage would be found dead. So most of the galleries didn't even have another day to announce their existence to anybody outside the founders' families; yet humans are equipped with the apparatus to learn from experience to dismiss the experience, and that's why today in the year 2002 we are witnessing the same rapid birth and the same death toll. What sticks on the minds of aspirants is just this: as the 1980's has watertightly proven, it is so easy to make an art gallery. Most galleries, including the ones which are still more or less alive today, consist of the following: 1).
one person The gallery's owner, secretary, printer of catalogs, art dealer, lawyer, office-boy, front-desk officer, debt-collector and accountant is condensed within that one person. Healthy business management, as the increasingly frontierless world has known it, never exists beyond imagination. And this, in Indonesia, is normal. Just an example, a rather well-known gallery in Jakarta, of which certain art dealers in Singapore might have heard, is located in one room, around 3 meters square, with one phone line (joint with approximately six other users), and another room crowded by 10 computers hooked to the internet -- but this one, being about 200 meters away from the gallery, isn't an official part of it -- it's a public cybercafé owned by the gallery owner's distant cousin or so; whenever the gallery's owner checks business emails, he does it among a dozen of students who are busy downloading nude starlets' pics. When it is time to hold an exhibition, the gallery's owner hires two or three involuntarily-leisured men to clean some rented rooms up and put the artworks there. One of them also makes coffee for everyone in the opening night of the exhibition, if he happens to be in a good mood. Since the distinctive style of management of the galleries is like that, you never missed one when it died -- unless the owner owed you a chunk of money. They always die quietly whether it rains or dry, day or night. In most cases the appointed night to launch the gallery's existence into this world, and the first exhibition it is to hold, is also the last night it ever enjoys on earth. Like an endless Broadway show but to the opposite significance, the same scenario has been replayed so many times year after year for the past two decades and more. If you're really determined to deal with Indonesian artsy folks, your best bet is with just one or two galleries that really are striving to be galleries -- and individuals whose power and eminence are worth a hundred galleries altogether. That has been an ironic prelude of anything epistemologically possible about this country's fine art; for the last two decades and countless episodes of migraine, the rise and decay and fall and demise of galleries have been a routine, but individual authorities -- it isn't even healthy to attempt to name this unnatural phenomenon with some meagre possession of English -- stay as robust as ever and keep putting people in reasonable awe. Commonsense clearly says these are the real thing when artificially-induced 'cultural centers' rot and those that flutter the banners of anti-establishment never grow up. 1990's saw the emergence of galleries that never call themselves such; this was supposed to be, at the dawn of the riotous era, an emblem of avant-garde-ness; of being outside the mainstream. Postmodernism played a noisy part there at least within locked rooms amidst some dense nicotine haze and churning geniuses geared toward anything dangerous (for instance brewing homemade crack) and intellectual disdain directed at the mainstream (such as lunching at the McDonald's). The pioneers have all been deceased now but a few survivors, nonetheless the tradition of dissent has always been found reincarnating on long-foreseen spots. Younger and infant members of this league keep on insisting that gallery -- the term -- means 'commercial establishment', so they alienate the word and adopt various self-styled nouns to call their compounds, sometimes bordering on real self-parody in the attempt to deviate from the rest of the gallery-finding flock. I have no place for whatever illusion concerning these spots that are lyrically overpraised, poetically overhyped, factually mismanaged, financially deprived, misty-eyedly called 'alternative art spaces'. Most of the time, anywhere at all, this self-conferred term denotes nothing but alternative to art, alternative to space, or even commoner still alternative to both -- it happens when the initiator failed to blackmail his dad for at least the first year's rent, and the only stuff exhibited are purloined ingredients of what we normally dub 'trash'. No continuity is promised there. No regeneration because they never forget to submit to internal strife and split in some racing-car speed. Individual little bosses emerge as in any other field. Plus they all subsist on unhealthy diet. And all the bull about 'bringing art to the public', 'providing choices besides the mainstream', 'facilitating a forum of exchange and interaction', all these are nothing to bother so much about -- unless, of course, you are a foreign researcher paid by some huge grant-giving foundations. What public, to begin with? These places are habitat of, say, five or six kids with nowhere else to go, and that's all about it. Each and every one of them is simply a very small, very exclusive, yet very loosely tied community. No public wherever your eyes roam. Today, scattered all over this main island plus Bali, the latest 'rebels' of the kind are still available, not for anything artistic in relation with the public, but mainly and for some even solely as foreign researchers' specimens. A chunk live by foreign grants that besides being converted into house rent, baby food and daily beer are also used to finance a thin newsletter or an art discussion attended by five of six members of the gang. Others enjoy their local or national 15 minutes under spotlight, when they do something another way, like, first of all, calling themselves non-galleries and such. Cutting-edge stuff is scarce if any. 'Alternative' places like these are in truth and nothing but the truth not yet galleries or if you want to appear generous galleries in the making or they are on their way to be galleries -- though this also involves getting in our way, in real galleries' way, in everybody's way, because that's the trademark of rebellion. 'Non-profit' mostly means you have some gullible sponsors overseas, which 'pay' you to bash commercial galleries and everyone else across your street. 'Non-commercial' means you haven't succeeded yet to sell any of your piling-up artworks. So, for the last time here, what alternative? Alternative to success, yes; alternative to good management, to good marketing, to -- saddest of all -- good art. It is against the natural course of all things to expect something 'alternative' to stay alternative forever -- but amazingly the number of spokespersons of the Indonesian art world who conceded this as true is so scanty. It isn't a ridiculous gag for a 43 year-old art critic to condemn an 18 year-old gallery as "turning against itself because now it is no longer an alternative space". Someone of this inclination even wrote in a journal nobody ever get so stupid to read (except me): "X Art House, in its 15th birthday, has become an establishment. It is time for requiem for the dead of X Alternative Art House." [faithful quote, only anglicized]. I could have split my sides but I was choking on the ridiculous illogical lament. If your gallery has not been established yet in fifteen years, I would say your destined job is probably insurance-peddling. Fifteen years is enough for anything to have its foundation solidly standing. It is an achievement, not something to wail so loudly about, though fortunately not in public (remember that there is no public). And it doesn't seem like a wholly folly act for 'undiscovered' artists from the 'alternative' gangs to not just hope and aim for but actually compete against each other to get gigs -- i.e. exhibition chance -- at the none other but the 'mainstream', 'capitalist', 'old schooled', real-life galleries they so loudly despise even in dreams. Why? Because nobody ever made it without these galleries. No chance to sneak in there, no sale, no food (or vodka) on the table. Now you catch my drift, I hope? It is only natural that 'alternative' places grow among the younger aspirants in the art world; they should grow up and get out of there the first time they could. No need for today's fanfare. In general the whole lot of Indonesian art galleries still have lightyears to go before they attain the minimum standard to pass the fit-and-proper test in, for instance, Singapore; and so far to pass as a lucrative partner for, say, a gallery in the United States, they still have countless homeworks to get over with. My point is, art gallery management isn't a child's play and is certainly never a lonely housewife's hobby; it isn't intended by God to be something you do merely because you love paintings and you are not qualified to be a member of the Parliament and you got dropped-out of the Geology Dept. in college and your Dad left you some hard cash to waste. A professional art gallery has to fulfill a long list of necessities before it dares to thrust its nose into the world in broad daylight. Getting used to dying isn't living. Footnote
II
As Ronnie Reagan once said, deficit is big enough to take care of itself; but artists and art galleries are so modest that they believe they are of some inconsequential size, that someone else knows everything about them while they, implausible as this may seem, never will; so they stay in a perpetual pupilage and they gladly, for it, pay real hard cash. There was Sanento Yuliman, then there was Agus Dermawan T., and there is virtually nobody now. Or, if you chance upon some of his personal enemies, you would dig Jim Supangkat up. Colleagues who never like Supangkat always drag his name in any sort of conversation including with the grocer. That's what I like about personal enemies -- free advertisement. But for the so-called Art World we should have been grieving since there are countless artworks in circulation today and there are loads of art critics and there are so many art curators and there is no Yuliman. What is is some migraine. There is a curator who never refused jobs that would necessitate him to travel a long distance; he always arrived on time for the cheques and nearly missed the opening night of the exhibitions; he rarely started to write his mandatory curatorial essay until after the day before the last. Gallery owners know this, artists know this, and overworked gallery staffers got this replayed in slow-mo in their worst nightmares; nonetheless the so to speak curator still gets jobs today. There is another curator who, in earnest we must say, writes really crunchy essays -- not winding and boring and is choked by endless repetitions of uselessness like most Indonesian curators are accustomed to write and as a body believe it as the right sort of writing; this curator just writes -- like a writer should. Studied, yes, but still enough original zest in his lines, and usually his pieces are adorned with novel ideas and as a side effect are also entertaining. But what he lacks in age, prominence and real power in the Art World, he makes up for by being, in person, a complete ass. That way you could hardly miss him in the crowd; there he is, the one with the loudest noise. But his worst feature relates to banknotes. This local Mirabeau aims his roar only at those who don't pay for peace. And he is not alone there in the temple of Mammon; one of his senior has even been acknowledged by far as the priest therein. This curator would cash in on anything, for real. I was born with a great defect; it takes ages and lots of stuff to make me nail anyone to respect. But most people out there are blessed with nothing of the sort, so in the vacuum of an all-powerful deity they erect tiny shrines for whichever lesser god happens to be available at the time. Thus was the story of the contemporary (as in 'contemporary', not like the way it is forced to foolishly mean in the Art World) existence of art curators in every town that has (even those that don't have) art galleries. All you need to equip yourself to be a curator nowadays is a lot of acquaintances. That's the cornerstone of your self-reconstruction. You must know gallery owners (it is they who would pay you) and artists (they, too, might do). If they are sufficiently impressed -- and as I have outlined above, they surely tend to be -- you'd get the gig and a week in Bali. Gallery owners are of course the one with the last say on any exhibition plan or project; understandably so because you surely cannot argue against cash. It is they who factually select who is to exhibit what. But this power, that should have been enough to get a Formula 1 race car speed on a hundred laps, is never used. They simply think that they are somewhat at the mercy of art curators -- even if only because the curators could cite something in French (his lunch menu on a free overseas trip, for which the gallery owner paid). Let's briefly begin at the beginning -- a gallery is usually established by just anybody who loves fine art enough to imagine the thing as something fun to fuss about; this Anybody is, therefore, to realize the ideal in his mind, compelled to secure some rather huge chunk of money to start the biz. So a collector could easily transforms himself into a gallery owner, provided he is broadminded enough to be that stupid, and young enough to lose that big. An averagely successful businessman whose joint makes several hundred million IDR on a monthly basis by manufacturing herbal tea, for example, or a man whose furniture-assembling company has caught thousands of dollars a week, they could get tempted to switch into -- or, in the case of the more cautious ones -- double-function as -- managers of art galleries. Within the snobbish realm of Indonesia, if your background did not incorporate assumed vast reading and useless sedentary activities such as writing for newspapers which I and millions of other Indonesians use to wrap garbage in everyday, then you would automatically feel like you are somehow an idiot. That way you would never ever dare to reveal your own judgment -- the very judgment that has been keeping your gallery alive. You would let curators reap all the credits for discovering and exposing talents, and believe that God truly intended to reward the super-smart persons like that by at least five major credit cards that you, the idiot between the two, must pay for. Artists, i.e. those who are into the visual, are commonly seen as never brainy either, though not as filthy in monetary terms as gallery owners are. It is the popular view that the only way to cleanse your soul -- if you are a gallery owner -- is to get stone-broke; some gallery owners I knew seemed like striving to achieve this purification by insisting on undergoing the rite of holding third-rate or 'art for art' exhibition in the very first night of being in existence. Anyway, the artists themselves, at least the majority of them, accept this view without even a sigh of protest. That's why there have been physical brawls during art discussions, or duels between artists that involved the E.R., all over the country. Curators are the ones with ticking brains, they'd never do anything like that. Their reciprocal malice is at most flung via emails. So, the myth of numbskullness of artists and gallery owners stays on, inclusively believed by all players in the field. So once upon a nightmare a tiny little fish landed there on the scene, a fish nobody would ever notice back there in its own homeland, but see what happened when the fish entered the Indonesian artway -- lo and behold it was ushered into palaces as Moby Dick of the business. It is true though I suspect we are just too Indonesian to invite 'unnecessary' conflicts with the people involved in the tale: a European kindergarten teacher has splashed in here as a nationwidely-famed art curator. Nobody knew who the person was, for real; all the so-called public was told that this was an authoritative judge of artistic merit; evidenced by the fact that the kindergarten teacher stood in a row of most well-known Indonesian curators, in a group art project sponsored by prestigious European foundations and executed by one of the so-called best Indonesian art galleries. The teacher did, as a matter of fact, work a little bit to earn the instant transformation; namely writing articles in the Indonesian largest daily newspaper, all about how good one certain Indonesian artist was. The artist was, of course, in real life, the teacher's spouse. Considering there are thousands of Indonesians who have been trying to get their articles into the newspaper without even a dash of luck, a chronic ignoramus said that the teacher must have written really good stuff so those passed through the editorial desk. But most people knew the teacher got there by knowing an editor; that was no sweat at all since in public gatherings in the Art World people literally flock around any foreign person at the vicinity. Personally I think the teacher's writing was stale like the usual fine art tome -- only in worse Indonesian than most. Until today, 5 years away from the happening and a myriad of headaches forward since it occured, I still meet artists who asked "Actually who the heck was X?". It could be warranted that a lot more out there have been asking the same question. And there has never been a logical answer to why the supposedly best artistic mammals with the biggest brains of all, the local curators, didn't even raise an eyebrow. Cynics around the area would say it was because they were all paid the same high sum of curatoring fee, so what's the use of spoiling the financially good show for something so trivial like truth. Or they might say the local curators really didn't care a fig about who the kindergarten teacher was (kindergarten teacher), since they all were so self-centered and the only emotion extended to colleagues is detachment. Or they could also say our homemade curators loved the thing; working with a 'foreign art curator' looks good on their CV's, even if the only true thing is the 'foreign' part and the 'art' was fake and the 'curator' was scam. These poor cynics really had no choice. There was simply no un-cynical option available by circumstances. The entire episode was bizarre to several ears that have heard it told the first time. Like always, the simple truth tends to sound far less convincing than outrageous lies. We still have this scar left by hundreds of years of colonialism and half a lifetime of being misgoverned by a (t)ruthless Army General. It is unlikely that we could, in a day, cure what we perhaps not so consciously do continously: applying the apartheid system in guessing somebody's worth. It is so easy to concede, accolades, when it concerns some caucasians. Doors that never open for average Indonesians always crack a welcome to Mr. and Ms. Nobody from wherever caucasian country. We assess people's merit the wrong way for longer than eternity; we used to be, so (foreign) anthropologists kept telling us, a society that took community as larger than life and individualism as heresy. If you can read, speak, write (no 'and' but 'or' replacing the commas) at least one foreign language, then you are seen as somewhat intellectual. You got respect out of feats like that, even if you never understood what Donald Duck quaked about (nothing at all). Now, a foreign person is guaranteed to be able to speak if not read and write at least one foreign language, right? Well? Why so odd that he or she then commands respect? My boyfriend couldn't even write a meaningful sentence in his native tongue -- which is the simplest language of all, English -- but of course he spoke it like waterfalls since he was, like, 6 months old, and that was already enough to get him undeserved nickname 'Intellect'. A local writer who was about to submit his first story in English for a Singaporean paper asked him to edit the stuff -- he declined, surely, but not for the reason that he never knew how to spell 85% of what is inside the Webster's. He excused himself by inventing the woe of periodic flu. When an American spraycan artist added his art to the accumulated Jakartanese dirt, he got a nationwide coverage, and featured as the headline news of a big newspaper -- on a business day -- while Samuel Indratma and his kith has been doing public murals etcetera and never managed to sneak into the place this tourist has gotten; they had to make do with a little speck at the twelfth page on a Sunday paper -- and got no closeup snapshot of them grinning from ear to ear (of course the American grafitti-maker got every reason in the world to get amused by the photographers!) A man I know (this is another case in the book) slept in the best chambers of Indonesian celebs' homes by saying that he was a novelist -- while a few hours of flying over the waterways would have instantly yielded the correct info that he was a midwife in a small maternity ward of a tiny public clinic in Southern Australia. Nothing but bushes exist around the area, and the particular things don't need help when reproducing their brand of ugliness -- that's why he got so much leisure time to waste in Indonesia, as a novelist. In two years he had managed to finish one and a half page of his first novel. In the third year he got back to midwifery. This man had helped our Snobbery to give birth to Gullibility. Its father, Inferiority Complex, was so happy it jumped parachutelessly off Cliff Sanity.
Footnotes
Written for Falcon, Ayr & Montrose Press, Scotland © 2002-2003 Nin. |
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