Di Pasar (In the Market)

Yesterday, Saturday (sabtu), we went to the large market in the center of Jogja with one of our tutors, Ari. Those of you who live in Boone, imagine the Farmer's Market multiplied by some orders of magnitude, and you may get a hint. This huge covered market of two stories houses dozens of small shops selling batik clothing, both men's and women's. Upstairs are dozens of stalls with fruits and vegetables on display in large containers. Some sellers specialize in citrus fruits, where we would see large baskets of limes, lemons, oranges, and other tropical fruits. Passion fruit, guava, mangos and other fruits in season greet the eye. And there were many fruits new to us, such as jackfruit, leche nuts, and star fruit. (Some we have sampled with our ample breakfast at the hotel.) The vegetables are familiar ones: carrots, cucumbers, various greens, cauliflower and broccoli, potatoes, eggplant, sweet potatoes, and many others. When we walked into the section housing the spice sellers, the aromas were delightful, coming from baskets filled with ginger, coriander, turmeric, nutmeg, cinnamon, and others. Ari showed us various foods special to the region, gave us advice on bargaining (Maria purchased a shopping basket), and just enjoyed the time with us. We two who enjoy strolling through the Farmer's Market in Boone found the Pasar (think "Bazaar") an even greater feast for our senses, and took pleasure in the crowds of people doing the same.

Afterwards, we treated Are to lunch at a traditional Indonesian restaurant, and in a shop there found some nice batik shirts for Pak Bob and a blouse and kimono for Ibu Maria. We waited out the usual afternoon thunderstorm, returned to our posh hotel, said goodbye to our delightful tutor, and rested. That evening we donned one of our new batik outfits and dined at a very fine restaurant. All in all, a good day.

The Language

Language

We decided to tackle the problem of the language head-on.  So we are here for Bahasa Indonesia lessons twice a day.  In the process of learning the language, we are also learning about the rasa, an almost untranslatable word that means “feeling,” “true self,” or even essence of the people.  For example, we have learned from one of our two excellent tutors that the people of Indonesia prefer using the passive voice to hide themselves behind the subject they are speaking of.  I am sure this goes back to centuries of non-individualism, to a more obeisant way of being in a world of superiors such as the sultans.  They speak indirectly and we must learn to catch this indirection.  We have already learned that Indonesians do not accept food or drink the first (or even second) time it is offered, and we must be more persistent in making our offer.  We also are finding out how words are made, by adding more and more prefixes and suffixes to root words.  The grammar is not hard because there are no tenses, but the words themselves can be tongue-twisters that are impossible to hear in everyday speech.  We are trying though!  

  There is the added problem of not one language but many.  In everyday speech among friends, we often hear they are speaking "Javanese," which is more comfortable but among those higher up and those who are employed by them, it is Indonesian, a language created from "Malay" and related to several other "Austronesian" languages around the Pacific.  Our motivation in learning had to be ginned up simply because this language is unrelated to anything we have learned before.  In many ways, it is a simple language of a more simple, less complex civilization, like forming the plural by saying the word twice.  Thus. "laki-laki" for boys.  I really like how I can speak about my grandsons; they are "cucu laki-laki."  Doesn't that sound sweet?

In the Palace of the Sultan

In the Kraton (Palace) of the Sultan

The Current Sultan and His Wife

Today we visited the Kraton, seat of the Sultanate which began in 1756 here in Yogayakarta, and has had ten  Sultans down to the present one.  The Sultanate actually began while the Dutch were very much a presence here and perhaps in response to them.  Some of the Sultans were depicted arm in arm with the Dutch governors and were educated in Holland.  But in 1945, this city and its Sultan were the first to break away and declare independence, even becoming for awhile an autonomous region of independence.  Today the Sultan is by all reports a rather modest figure. He so loves his wife who has given him five daughters that he would not consider taking a second wife to have sons to succeed him.  So he will  be succeeded most likely by one of his many brothers.  The ninth Sultan had about five wives (I lost count) and 22 children.  Some striking features of the compound that included several pavilions, open-air marble platforms for dances, wayang (shadow puppets) and gamelon performances,  were the ornateness of some of the structures.  The whole kraton is built in a line from Mt. Merapi, still an active volcano, to the kraton to the sea.  In ceremonies such as coronations, women were dressed in noticeably scantier dress than one could find today among women of Islam.  The Hindu influence in ceremonial dress is prevalent.  And many elements of indigenous religion remain as well.  Once a year, on the Sultan’s birthday, there is an offering to the Goddess of the Southern Oceans (Ratu Kidul) where the Sultan and his family make elaborate offerings.

How I Became a Keynote Speaker without even Knowing the Topic

Yesterday, after a harrowing time waiting for a taxi that didn't come, we arrived finally at the Campus "Satu" ("One) that will be my teaching venue, which is about 30 minutes from the campus near our house.  I only knew I was to be part of a "panel discussion."  Imagine my surprise when kind, intelligent Bu (Mrs.) Vina (pronounced "Fina" and not to be confused with wine), told me I was keynote speaker and showed me that next to my name on a banner that adorned the stage, were those very words.  The only way I was saved was that right before that in the few minutes I had before calling the taxi, I opened my email to find a very helpful message from Susan Reed-Kelly telling me about the new Frontline series, "God in America."  That became the subject of my talk, er, keynote address.
 There were two other panelists, one from Spain and one from here in Indonesia, making for an interesting international mix.  Even thought the students, grad students in an M.A. program in Islamic Studies, were not fluent in English, and certainly not I in Bahasa Indonesian, we communicated as they asked terribly difficult questions about the Qur'an burning, why did Islam disappear from Spain, and What is terrorism? and How do you solve it? Also an interesting question about Max Weber's "Protestant Ethic" and whether it could be applied to Indonesia's poverty.  I felt he was wondering if good Muslims could become more like hard-working, thrifty, saving Protestants, the ones who made America the capitalist power-house it is today.  Hmm. . . It was good to get into the minds of these serious students, even if only briefly and with guesses at what they were saying.

Chaos in the Streets

Chaos in the Streets

One of the first things our Fulbright director in Indonesia told us was that the most dangerous thing for a foreigner was not a terrorist attack but trying to cross a main street on foot. You literally take your life in your hands. We discovered the truth of this dictum as we settled in Malang.  The main streets wind in various directions about the city, and without a compass it is very difficult to determine which direction you are going.  Off the main streets are warrens of neighborhoods with narrow streets (except for our upscale Cemara Tujuh).

On the main streets, traffic flows in a never-ending stream.  Countless motorbikes weave in and around autos and trucks in a ceaseless and unpredictable pattern. The vehicle emissions are nothing to breathe, and the cacophony of sounds, including the revving of motorbike engines and frequent honking of horns, is constant.  Our friend and Director of International Programs Pak Parto says that he drives by intuition, and added, “Don’t try this at home.” Once in the midst of a early evening traffic jam, he said, “What are you thinking, Bob, when you see this?” “Crazy,” I replied, and we all laughed. There have been a few times when we gasped as a motorbike suddenly cut in front of us; the driver took it in stride. But you would have to put a gun to my head, or I would have to be faced with an emergency, before I would get behind the wheel here.

Yet, somehow it all works. We’ve yet to see an accident, and what we would think of as a close call is merely part of the ordinary flow of traffic. Someone expert in Chaos Theory should undertake a study of traffic flow patterns here; she would have a great time working out formulas that might end up visualized as a “strange attractor," with a beautiful set of fractals.

And, we are learning how to cross the streets on foot, weaving our way through traffic, or awaiting those rare moments when a break in the flow occurs and we can move expeditiously.

The Topeng Mask Dance

Thursday evening we drove to a village outside Malang and attended what turned out to be one of the most amazing performances we have ever seen.  The villagers acted out an ancient drama using masks and costumes they had made themselves.  The dancers were acting out an ancient story of a princess whose hand is sought by several warring groups. The artistry of the costuming would have been enough to captivate us, but it was the grace and beauty of the dance itself that was so incredible.   None of us Westerners, including an Australian family that had been there earlier for the making of the costumes, had seen anything like it.  Here I am going to quote from a description of Javanese dance found in Clifford Geertz' well-known book on The Religion of Java:  "Eyes must be kept fixed in one place, directly forward and a little down, giving a trance-like effect to the dance, an effect heightened by the frequent use of the 'waves of the sea' step, which is merely a gently rocking motion while standing in one spot, a motion that seems to be hypnotic for both the performers and the spectators.  The set expression, the carefully controlled motions, give a feeling of inwardness, of concentration on the self, and of a conception of a perfection of self-contained grace which each dancer is trying to reach independently of the others."  The whole of the dance was accompanied by the traditional Javanese gamelon orchestra, an experience in itself.  But no description does it justice, so I will try to insert a clip of the performance below.

Evening with a jihadist, Ali Fauzi

An evening with a former jihadist

Last evening our Indonesian Fulbrighter friend, Habib, arranged an amazing encounter, one that will probably stay with us for the rest of our lives.  This university is engaged in a research project on terrorism, a project some seem to be approaching with some trepidation.  As part of the project, Habib went to Surabaya, a city on the northern coast of Java, to interview a man whose name is Ali Fauzi,  whose three older brothers were among the 2002 Bali bombers.  And this week when there was an attempted suicide bombing (a man on a bicycle who managed only to injure himself) in a town near Jakarta, aimed at the police, Ali was interviewed several times on television.  He dismissed the bombing as “a silly bomb.”

Last evening we sat in a café, and he gave us several hours of his time to answer any questions we might put to him.  Beginning at the age of twenty Ali was thoroughly trained as a jihadist fighter in camps in Mindinao, the Phillipines, and he went on to train others in Thailand, where he was caught and sent to prison for more than a year.  Somewhere along the line, he gradually came to change his understanding of jihad, which is often mistranslated as “holy war,” but really means “striving in the way of God.”  For his three older brothers, jihad meant terrorism, yet when they killed over 200 people in the Bali bombings, Ali Fauzi disagreed with their methods and felt jihad should only be waged in a real war, such as that in the war between Christians and Muslims being fought at that time in Ambon.  Even though it was Fauzi who had to collect the bodies of his three brothers and see that they were given burial once they were executed for their crime, he appears to harbor no bitterness about this loss.  Instead, a serene smile often brightens the face of this handsome man, now forty.

Ali wages a new kind of jihad, now dedicated to educating young people in his school and supporting his brothers’ widows and their nine children (he has four of his own).  When Maria asked him if he feared for his life in dealing with his former comrades in the Jamail Islamiyah movement, he said no; he has continued to be in dialogue with them, and sees them moving from violent jihad to what is called dakwah, which can be translated “preaching” but also includes showing others through example what is God’s way through peaceful means.