Among the Believers (49 page)

He said, “Talking about banana plantings and the Malay house, I had a little disagreement with my father. I was very much attracted to beautiful flowers and wanted to plant them in front of the house. But my father made a
big
hole directly in front of the house and after a few days of burning some waste, some rubbish—banana leaves, grasses, and other garden waste—he planted a banana. And I was not very happy with it. He said, ‘We will have fruits from banana. We will not be able to have anything from flowers, which we cannot eat.’

“I called my other sisters and brothers to be with me, defending my case, but the banana tree remain there. After a few months banana begin to bear fruit, and my father started to tease me. ‘Look, we have the fruit of our labour. And you don’t have anything from the flower plants you have planted.’ Actually my father dug the hole right where I used to plant flowers. Later on, until now even, I begin to dislike planting flowers because it did not give much benefit except for beauty.”

I said, “What do you think of the incident now?”

“My father was right. Even now, my wife wants to plant flowers in the pot, in the house here in KL, and I insist that we plant some greens, some vegetables instead.”

USURPATIONS

The people here have lost their religion
.

SITOR SITUMORANG

  1
Assaults

S
hafi changed his mind about me right at the end. The morning I was to leave Kuala Lumpur he telephoned to give me the names of some people in the Muslim movement in Indonesia. He said it was harder for them there. The army ruled in Indonesia and the army was hostile to the movement. Then Shafi telephoned again. He wanted me to stop at the office on my way to the airport; he wanted to say good-bye. But when, just over an hour later, I went to the ABIM building, Shafi wasn’t in his office; and he didn’t come down from where he was.

He sent an older man down. This man wore a black Malay cap and he had just come back from Switzerland, where he had gone on Islamic business; these new Muslims travelled a lot. (The news in some quarters in Malaysia was that Europe was converting fast to Islam. Scandinavia, always liberal and wise, had already fallen; France was half Muslim; in England hundreds were converting every day.)

The man from Switzerland talked to me about the seizing of the American embassy in Tehran. He said the Western press reports were so biased he didn’t know what to believe. But he had heard in Switzerland that the Americans had hired some Iranians to attack
another
Western embassy, to discredit the revolution. Revolutionary Guards had found out about the plot and had led the hired band to the American embassy instead.

And it was with a depression about Shafi—and the Islam that camouflaged his cause—that I drove through the rich, ordered plantations to the airport of Kuala Lumpur; and landed later that afternoon in Jakarta.

It had rained. The roads were edged with red mud. Long corrugated-iron
fences (concealing what?); fruit vendors sitting with their baskets in the wet; buses with smoking exhausts; crowds; a feeling of a great choked city—red tile roofs, many trees—at the foot of the scattered skyscrapers; the highways marked by rising smog. After the spaciousness of Kuala Lumpur it was like being in Asia again. Newsboys and beggar-boys with deformities worked the road intersections. Men carried loads in baskets hung on either end of a limber pole balanced on their shoulders, and moved with a quick, mincing gait. (Later, in the inland city of Yogyakarta, I tried a potter’s load. The strain was less on the shoulder than on the calves, which jarred with every weighted step: it was necessary to walk lightly.)

But Jakarta was also a city of statues and revolutionary monuments: a freedom flame, a phalanx of fighting men armed only with bamboo spears, a gigantic figure breaking chains. They seemed unrelated to the life of the city, and the styles were imported, some Russian, some expressionist. But what they commemorated was real: national pride, and a freedom that had been bitterly fought for.

To be in Jakarta was to be in a country with a sense of its past. And that past went beyond the freedom struggle and colonial times. The Dutch had ruled for more than three hundred years; Jakarta was the city they had called Batavia. But the Dutch language was nowhere to be seen. The language everywhere, in Roman letters, was Indonesian, and the roots of some of the words were Sanskrit. Jakarta itself—no longer Batavia—was a Sanskrit name, “the city of victory.” And Sanskrit, occurring so far east, caused the mind to go back centuries.

The hotel was known as the Borobudur Intercontinental, after the ninth-century Buddhist temple in central Java. The ground plan of that great nine-terraced temple was the basis of the hotel logo: three concentric dotted circles within five rectangles, stepped at the corners with a rippling effect. It was stamped on ashtrays; it was woven into the carpets in the elevators; it was rendered in tiles on the floor of the large pool, where the ripple of the blue water added to the ripple of the pattern.

Indonesia, like Malaysia, was a Muslim country. But the pre-Islamic past, which in Malaysia seemed to be only a matter of village customs, in Indonesia—or Java—showed as a great civilization. Islam, which had come only in the fifteenth century, was the formal faith. But the Hindu-Buddhist past, which had lasted for fourteen hundred years before that, survived in many ways—half erased, slightly mysterious,
but still awesome, like Borobudur itself. And it was this past which gave Indonesians—or Javanese—the feeling of their uniqueness.

T
HE
statues of war and revolution in Jakarta were overemphatic; some were absurd. But they commemorated recent history; and that history was heroic and dreadful, and dizzying to read about.

It was the Japanese who, when they occupied Indonesia in 1942, abolished the Dutch language. They ordered all Dutch signs to be taken down or painted out; and overnight, after three hundred years, Dutch disappeared. The Japanese established Sukarno and other Indonesian nationalist leaders (imprisoned or exiled by the Dutch) in a kind of Indonesian government during the war. The Japanese organized the Indonesian army. This was the army that fought the Dutch for four years after the war, when the Dutch tried to reassert their rule. And this was the army that afterwards, during the twenty years of Sukarno’s presidency, held the scattered islands of the archipelago together, putting down Muslim and Christian separatist movements in various places.

Independence was not easy for Indonesia. It didn’t come as regeneration and five-year plans. It came as a series of little wars; it came as chaos, display, a continuation of Sukarno’s nationalist rhetoric. Sukarno’s glamour faded. The army’s power grew. It was the army that eventually, in 1965, deposed Sukarno. The army claimed that the communists were planning, with Sukarno’s passive support, to take over the country. And after the chaos and frustrations of independence, there was a terror then greater than anything the archipelago had known.

A hundred thousand people were arrested. There was a massacre of Chinese (resident in Indonesia for centuries, and traditional victims of pogroms: the Dutch themselves killed many thousands in Jakarta in 1740). And it is said that in popular uprisings all over the archipelago half a million people thought to be communists were hunted down and killed. Some people say a million. Indonesians are still stunned by the events of 1965 and later. When they talk of 1965 they are like people looking, from a distance, at a mysterious part of themselves.

Now the army rules. The khaki-coloured army buses are everywhere; and Jakarta is dotted with the barracks of
kommando
units (strange, that this particular Dutch word should be retained) that fly the red-and-white Indonesian national flag. The army has made itself into
a political organization, and it has decreed that it shall be powerfully represented in every government.

It is the army that holds the archipelago together. And army rule—after the Sukarno years of drift and rhetoric—has given Indonesia fifteen years of rest. In this period, with the help of Indonesian oil, Jakarta has sprouted its skyscrapers; the main roads have been paved; the beginnings of services appropriate to a big city have appeared. In this period of rest there has also grown up an educated generation, the first generation in fifty years to know stability. But the army rule chafes. And already—the trap of countries like Indonesia—with stability and growth there is restlessness.

The restlessness is expressed by the new Islam, the Islam that is more than ritual, that speaks of the injustices done to Allah’s creatures and of the satanic ways of worldly governments: the Islam that makes people withdraw, the more violently to leap forward.

I
T
is dizzying to read of recent Indonesian history. And to look at it in the life of one man is to wonder how, with so little to hold on to in the way of law or country, anyone could withstand so many assaults on his personality.

Suryadi was in his mid-fifties. He was small, dark-brown, frail-looking. He was born in East Java and he described himself as one of the “statistical Muslims” of Indonesia. He had received no religious training; such religion as he had was what was in the air around him. He wasn’t sure whether he believed in the afterlife; and he didn’t know that that belief was fundamental to the Muslim faith.

He belonged to the nobility, but in Java that meant only that he was not of the peasantry. The Dutch ruled Java through the old feudal courts of the country. But Java was only an agricultural colony, and the skills required of the nobility in the Dutch time were not high. Suryadi’s grandfather, as a noble, had had a modest white-collar job; Suryadi’s father was a bookkeeper in a bank.

It was possible for Suryadi, as a noble, to go to a Dutch school. The fees were low; and Suryadi, in fact, didn’t have to pay. The education was good. Just how good it was was shown by the excellent English Suryadi spoke. And recently, wishing to take up German again and enrolling in the German cultural centre in Jakarta, the Goethe Institute,
Suryadi found that, with his Dutch-taught German of forty years before, he was put in the middle class, and he was later able without trouble to get a certificate in an examination marked in Germany.

Early in 1942 the Japanese occupied Java. The message from Radio Tokyo was that the Japanese would give Indonesia its independence, and there were many people willing to welcome the Japanese as liberators. Suryadi was in the final year of his school. The Dutch teachers were replaced by Indonesians, and the headmaster or supervisor was Japanese. For six months classes continued as they would have done under the Dutch. Then—and it is amazing how things go on, even during an upheaval—Suryadi went to the university. The lecturers and professors there were now Japanese. But the Japanese simply couldn’t manage foreign languages. They recognized this themselves, and after a time they appointed Indonesians, who worked under Japanese supervisors.

The Indonesians used the classes to preach nationalism. Already much of the good will towards the Japanese had gone. It was clear to Suryadi that the whole economy was being subverted to assist the Japanese war effort. Thousands of Indonesians were sent to work on the Burma Railway (and there is still a community of Indonesians in Thailand, from the enforced migration of that time). Radios were sealed; the radios that had once brought the good news from Radio Tokyo could no longer be listened to.

Two incidents occurred at this time which made Suryadi declare his opposition to the Japanese. The university authorities decreed that all students were to shave their heads. It was the discipline of the Zen monastery. And Suryadi felt it as he was meant to feel it: an assault on his personality. And then one day on the parade ground—students were given military training—a student was slapped by a Japanese officer. All the Indonesians felt humiliated, and Suryadi and his friends held a protest demonstration in the university. Thirty of them, teachers as well as students, were arrested by the Japanese secret police and taken to jail.