Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (18 page)

It wasn’t all lounging around watching TV at Mama Lina’s. Now that the rains had started, it was planting time. We each took a sharpened stick, stabbed it into the ground in the most easily accessible spots, tossed in a couple of dried maize kernels, kicked the earth over with our feet, moved on. It seemed impossible to me that the earth would reward our paltry effort with something edible, but Mama Lina texted me a couple of months later to report that she was cooking the maize I had planted.

My farming duties were not over. ‘You’re coming with me to the
kebun
get food for the pigs,’ declared Lina’s aunt Susannah, a graceful lady with white hair and smooth skin. She obviously used her Indonesian rarely: it came careful and correct from where her front teeth should be, and spoke of improbable things. She didn’t know her exact age, but thought she was ‘about 200’. She slung Lina’s youngest on one hip; the hefty three-year-old wanted to come with us but was just too stubborn to walk. Then the old lady balanced an unsheathed machete on her head, and set off on a vertical course up the mountainside. ‘
Kebun
’ is a vague word – it can mean anything from plantation to flower garden, from farm to back yard – so I wasn’t sure what to expect. In this case it turned out to be a patch of tangled vegetation a couple of kilometres further up the slope, full of good things, though not obviously planted or tended.

Lina’s two other children came too. The boy, bright, smiley and fond of geography, would climb a tree, pick a mango, throw it half-eaten to the ground because he needed his hands for catapulting. When he got peckish again, he would just climb another tree. The girl, with whom I had been sharing a bed, was in her monosyllabic post-pubescent phase; her purpose was to get high enough up the mountain to get a signal on her cell phone so that she could check Facebook.

Mama Susannah was absolutely tireless on the way to the
kebun
, but once we got to the family plot we did a lot of resting. We’d pick some cassava leaves, then sit down and eat a mango. Dig up a cassava root, then break for a bit of
jambu air
or rose-apple, a crunchy, bell-shaped fruit that hung in great clusters on the trees overhead. ‘
Istirahat dulu
,’ she would say every few minutes. ‘Take a rest first.’ The cassava leaves were to feed to the pigs. ‘Can’t we have some too?’ I asked. We had not eaten anything green in two days; indeed I’d barely had any fresh vegetables in weeks. Though plants seemed to spring out of the ground with no husbanding at all, many Indonesians, especially in the eastern islands, seem to feel that green vegetables are not real food. The result is that fertile Indonesia has astoundingly high levels of malnutrition. According to the Ministry of Health, more than a quarter of children under five in Indonesia are anaemic and 11.5 million Indonesian kids of that age – well over a third of the total nationwide – are significantly shorter than they should be for their age. Once I’d expressed an interest in eating pig food, however, Mama Susannah did show me how to pick the leaves tender enough for us; the ones whose stems had not yet toughened from green to red.

When we had finished working and resting, the 200-year-old balanced a cassava root about the size of a grown man’s leg on her head, then heaved a sack of pig-leaves on top of that in preparation for the journey back down to the village. I carried a smaller sack of people-leaves and the stubborn three-year-old, and the three-year-old carried the unsheathed machete. Long before we finished the two-kilometre hike back to the village, I began to see that
istirahat dulu
was perhaps not such a bad way of maintaining your strength for the long haul.

Would we have had a better maize crop if we had been more methodical, chosen better seeds, spaced the plants more systematically, dug and refilled the holes more carefully? Probably. But if we could meet the family’s maize needs with just fifteen minutes of stab, toss, kick, stab, toss, kick, what would be the point of doing more?

It’s not that Mama Lina has no aspirations. She herself spent four years working as a housemaid in Malaysia; her cousin put in eight years. They got up at 4 a.m., worked until 10 a.m., rested until 3, then cooked and served supper. Room and board were given free, so the salary of US$90 a month went straight into their pockets. It is six times what Mama Lina now earns as a part-time teacher. But neither wants to go back. It’s a question of what life-coaches would call ‘work-life balance’. ‘Here, there’s no salary, but there’s free food in the garden,’ said the cousin. ‘I can work when I feel like it, sleep when I don’t. It’s great.’

Ironically, the trek to drudgery in Malaysia has probably done more to foster pan-Indonesian nationalism than almost anything in the post-Suharto era.

The entrenched antagonism between giant Indonesia and its smallish northern neighbour is in part a hangover from President Sukarno’s anti-Malaysia grandstanding of the early 1960s. And in part it’s good, old-fashioned envy.

When Malaysia finally got shot of Britain in 1957, the country was on a par economically with Indonesia, which had by then been independent for over a decade. By 2011 Malaysia earned over three times more per person than Indonesia. And – here’s where Malaysia’s perceived superiority creeps into the consciousness of people even in the remotest parts of Indonesia – Malaysians are spending lots of that extra cash importing people like Mama Lina from deepest Adonara to sweep floors and tap rubber. Between 2006 and 2012 an annual average of 150,000 Indonesians travelled to Malaysia to work on official government-registered programmes, and many thousands more did so illegally. ‘It’s just embarrassing,’ I would hear over and over, sometimes from people who were living on money sent back from relatives in Malaysia.

Nothing gets Indonesia’s Facebook millions chattering more quickly than an attempt, real or imagined, to claim that batik, or spicy beef rendang, or even some obscure regional dance, originated with Malays that live on the right-hand side of the straights of Malacca (the bit that is now called Malaysia), rather than on the left (Sumatra, part of Indonesia). Their outrage is ironic, given that Sukarno laid notional claim to the whole of Malaysia based on the fact that the culture of the region was indivisible, but it is real nonetheless. Just in the months I was wandering the islands, young Indonesians felt the need to burn Malaysia’s flag, stone its embassy and/or send the #IhateMalaysia hashtag soaring up the Twitterboard at least three times because, they thought, those upstart Malaysians were laying claim to some of Indonesia’s cultural icons.

On Monday morning, Mama Lina pulled on her beige teacher’s uniform and we careened off down the volcano on the family motorbike; Lina’s foot was slammed down on the brake the whole way, but gravity was the greater force. It was not yet six in the morning when she dumped me at the dock of a tiny fishing village, told me she’d text me when she needed money to replace the roof of her house, hugged me goodbye, and sped off.

Also waiting for the rickety wooden boat that crossed once a week to the neighbouring island of Lembata was a group of women wearing jilbabs. They sat surrounded by big woven baskets of dried fish and desiccated squid. The ‘salt-fish ladies’, Mama Lina had called them.

I’m not a morning person (inconvenient in a nation that tends to rise before dawn), so I kept my good mornings to a minimum and sat quietly, reading a book. The salt-fish ladies were definitely not quiet. They were not speaking Indonesian but they were clearly talking about me, and the discussion was growing heated. Finally, when one of them jabbed my nose, I was forced to engage. ‘What is it, Mama?’ I ask of the jabber. ‘Ya, we’re confused. We don’t know if you are a Westerner or a Javanese.’

I couldn’t help but laugh. I asked which side she came down on. ‘
I
think because of your long nose, you must be a Westerner. But they think that because of the way you talk and act, you must be from Java.’

These ladies were originally from Buton, the sultanate off the south-eastern tip of Sulawesi that produces a disproportionate number of the nation’s fish traders. These Muslims had replanted themselves in the soil of Catholic Adonara; over several generations the Butonese have built villages and have invested their capital here. They are in Adonara but not really of it. ‘They’ll sell us food, but they’d never share a meal with us,’ said Mama Lina, laughing. ‘They’re scared we’d feed them pork.’

These women speak Butonese at home, and when they sally forth in their jilbabs to sell salt-fish and cream biscuits to the people of Adonara, they use Indonesian. In lots of ways, they are emblematic of what it means to be Indonesian. And yet when they were speculating about my nose, they wondered if I was Western or Javanese. To these ladies who live not all that far from the geographical centre of the nation, Java-foreign was every bit as foreign as Western-foreign. The concept of ‘Indonesian’ was not even in play.

As I put-putted across to the island of Lembata with the salt-fish ladies and their dried squid, I began to wonder whether I was trying to write a book about a country that has ceased to exist.

*
Unless you count the Dutchman Christiaan Eijkman, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1929 for his work on beriberi in the Netherlands East Indies, or the two East Timorese who were technically citizens of Indonesia when they were awarded the Peace Prize in 1996, largely for opposing Indonesia’s rule. The next largest country in the world with no Nobel laureate is Ethiopia, at number fourteen in terms of population.

*
Alfred Russel Wallace,
The Malay Archipelago: the land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature.
London: Macmillan, 1869. Vol. 1, Chapter XIX.

*
For the duration of my trip, 2011–12, the rupiah hovered between 9,000 and 9,500 to the dollar, between 14,000 and 15,500 to the pound. While the book was being written, it crashed to 11,500 to the dollar, 18,000 to the pound. Conversions in this book are given for the time of travel.

Map C: E
AST
N
USA
T
ENGGARA
P
ROVINCE
(NTT)
AND THE
S
OUTHWEST OF
M
ALUKU