Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (23 page)

Wallace was certainly right that the people of Kei are abundantly welcoming. I had been in these waters before, in 2004. My boss in Jakarta had made a snap decision to close the office over Christmas and New Year and I had simply headed off into the wilderness. I ended up in Tual, the main city in the Kei islands. After just a few days my attention span for the spectacular beaches south of town was spent, and I had gone down to the port. A broad-beamed wooden passenger boat all loaded up with people was just about to raise the gangplank. I had jumped on board and settled down on a bench. The ticket collector came along and asked where I was going. ‘What are the options?’ I had replied.

The huge, shaven-headed man sitting next to me was immensely tickled by the idea that I had got on a boat without any idea of where it was going. ‘She’s coming with us,’ he had declared. And that was that.

Pak Bram and his family were heading home to his native village of Ohoiwait in the thinly populated island of Kei Besar, just a couple of hours distant from Tual where they now lived. They were visiting his mother and a dizzying array of siblings and other relatives.

A battered jeep was waiting for us at the dock and the whole family poured into it, squirrelling homecoming gifts in every corner: sacks of rice and cement were lashed on the roof, cakes were pushed under seats, trays of eggs were held in laps. We climbed an unpaved road that wound along the spine of the island through forest and farmland scattered with undistinguished villages. Then the road dropped down to the far coast and came to an abrupt halt. We had reached Ohoiwait.

The upper part of the village tottered on top of a cliff. A wide avenue paved with polished coral blocks led from the church at the summit down to the edge of the cliff; simple wooden houses clung on either side. The houses were well kept, shutters and doors painted in contrasting colours, clean cotton curtains flapping in the salty breeze. Then, in a waterfall of 120 steep steps, the avenue tumbled down the cliff to the beachside. For some reason the flat lower village seemed to have let itself go, like a teenager who makes a point of drifting between unkempt and downright slovenly. Offshore, fish in a variety of technicolor costumes flitted around a beautiful coral reef referred to dismissively by the locals as ‘coloured rocks’.

Bram, the youngest of thirteen children, had taken me straight to his mother, who was referred to by everyone, regardless of generation, as ‘Oma’, the Dutch term for grandmother. She welcomed me without question, and my place in the village was secured. Family members had already colonized most of the floor space in Oma’s house with their sleeping mats, so I was stashed across the way at a cousin’s house. The family made room for me at mealtimes, and wove me effortlessly into daily life in the village.

As Christmas loomed on my more recent journey, I thought with great fondness of that holiday seven years earlier. I had stayed in touch with Bram for a year or two after that visit in 2004; then he’d changed his phone number and I had no way of calling. Damn it, I thought, I’ll go to Ohoiwait anyway.

In Tual I printed up several of the portraits I had taken on my first visit – Oma elegant in a white kebaya, Bram and his wife Maria and their kids in the wrap-around sunglasses that teenagers wear when they want to impress village cousins with their big-city cool, ‘Mrs Dormitory’ with whom I had stayed, ‘Mrs Kitchen’ in whose house the whole clan ate – and headed for Ohoiwait.

There were around 300 people squashed into 200 seats on the coffin-shaped speedboat across to Kei Besar. An old lady folded herself into half of my seat, fragile as a plucked quail. The boat lurched wildly; it reared up the face of one wave and slapped down on the next. The old lady squawked with each lurch. She grabbed my hand, pressed it until my knuckles went white, then threw up on my foot.

The road to Ohoiwait, still unmetalled, runs through forests edged with wild orchids. I sat on the back of a motorcycle taxi, thinking how odd it was that I should just turn up, two days before Christmas, at the home of a family I hadn’t seen for seven years, people whose real names I couldn’t even remember, and expect to be welcomed in.

My confidence in Indonesia’s unstinting largesse was not misplaced. I had hardly got off the motorbike in Ohoiwait before I was scooped up by Bram’s sister-in-law Ona and bustled off to Oma’s house. The matriarch had died the year before, aged over ninety. Now Ona and Ince (pronounced Inchay – aka Mrs Kitchen) lived in the house with their husbands and one remaining small child.

Ona and I were looking at the photos I had brought when Mama Ince appeared. She spotted the photos. ‘Those photos are from when Eliz was here!’ she said. I nodded, waiting for a greeting. She, in turn, waited for me to explain how I had come by the pictures. Mama Ona looked at her feet, embarrassed. ‘It’s her,’ she grunted. ‘It’s Elizabeth.’ ‘Wah! Bu Eliz!’ Ince threw up her hands in delight. ‘But you’ve grown so old!’

Within a couple of hours, Ona, Ince and I were squatting together in the kitchen peeling vegetables that we’d just picked from behind the house, as though they’d expected me all along, as though it hadn’t been seven years since I had flitted in and out of their lives. ‘You’ll stay for Christmas,’ Mama Ince declared, and I felt all sunny inside.

Ince reeled off all of my social obligations for the Christmas period, many of which were churchy. Ohoiwait is largely Protestant, though I noticed a mosque in the lower village that I did not remember from my previous visit. I saw too that a trickle of girls in jilbabs joined the groups of kids who went door to door over the Christmas period, singing, clapping, rattling maracas made of Coke cans and dried maize. They made up verses designed to shake sweets and coins out of adults. ‘
Ibu Eliz manise . . .
’ they chanted: ‘Sweet Ibu Eliz, Where are you hiding . . .?’ It was impossible not to reach for the wallet and dole out 1,000 rupiah notes all round. When I commented to Mama Ince on the ecumenical mix of the Christmas trick-or-treaters, she said that some of the Muslims were visiting Christian cousins. In clannish south Maluku, she told me, the ties of the extended family outweigh differences of faith.

First on my dance card was the Ladies and Gentlemen service, for which the adults of the village put on their traditional best, the women elegant in long kebayas and batik sarongs, the men in shirts of batik or more local woven
ikat
fabrics. Mama Ince and the other female church wardens were distinguished by black silk sashes, the men by white scarves. The benches had been rearranged so that we faced one another across the central aisle, women on the left, men on the right.

I was shooed into the front row, so I couldn’t let my mind wander too obviously. For over an hour I prayed, sang and pretended to listen to an impassioned sermon from the female priest – there are now more women than men in the ministry of the traditional Calvinist church in Maluku. Then we reached the candle-lighting ritual. First up was the ‘The Honourable Village Secretary, whose wisdom guides us all’. He walked slowly up the aisle, solemnly lit a candle, then trooped slowly back to his seat. Oh God, I thought, now we’d have the teacher and the midwife, and the head of the Family Welfare Union and everyone else with any kind of position, which in a village like this is almost everyone, and we’d still be here at midnight. My mind wandered off to consider local fashions in make-up: on dressed-up occasions such as this, dark-skinned village women puffed their faces with whitening rice powder, then smeared lipstick over mouths prestained with betel juice. The effect was vaguely menacing.

Suddenly, I felt Mama Ona dig me in the ribs. ‘Now we call on Ibu Eliz,’ intoned the celebrant, ‘who through her visit reminds us what it is to love the country of Indonesia and the village of Ohoiwait.’ And despite myself, I was moved. I walked slowly up the aisle and solemnly lit a candle, then trooped slowly back to my seat, just like everyone else. Such pageants do, after all, give everyone a sense of belonging. It is not a feeling one has very often in London or Jakarta, in the vast, anonymous spaces that shape the lives of an increasing proportion of human beings.

During the reading of the administrative notices, the church warden announced that there was a new
sasi
, a taboo, on collecting sea slugs, while the
sasi
on Pak Okto’s mango tree was lifted.
Sasi
(or
pomali
further south in NTT) works as a traditional form of resource management. Most often, the taboo is declared by village elders to prevent overfishing in the breeding season or to husband communal resources.

Sometimes villagers who wanted their own crops protected from theft would slip the elders a small fee to declare a taboo. Pak Okto’s mango tree hung heavy with fruit right over the coral thoroughfare that runs through the upper village; small boys passing up and down would certainly have stripped it of most of its mangoes had they not been cowed by the taboo. Now, with the
sasi
lifted, Pak Okto could go home from church and harvest what was rightfully his. That afternoon, his whole extended family gathered on the veranda, sticky with juice, gorging on the harvest.

In Timor a century and a half ago, Alfred Wallace noted that these bans carry a powerful charge:

The custom of ‘tabu’, called here ‘pomali’, is very general, fruits, trees, houses, crops and property of all kinds being protected from depredation by this ceremony, the reverence for which is very great. A palm branch stuck across an open door, showing that the house is tabooed, is a more effectual guard against robbery than any amount of locks and bars.
*

Nowadays, taboos are even being used by politicians. Wanting to demonstrate who controlled the city during a squabble over local elections in Tual in 2003, one faction put a
sasi
on the only bridge over a wide rivermouth that bisects the city. Makeshift ferries popped up, charging extortionate prices. Kids had to get up an hour earlier if they happened to live across the river from school; government officials grew even less likely to make it to the office. For weeks, petrol, kerosene, rice, everything had to be unloaded on one side and ferried across on sampans to the other side. Prices skyrocketed. Though it made everyone’s life a misery, no one dared violate the sasi; it required the intervention of the Governor of Maluku to get it dropped.

The weather over Christmas was foul. Every afternoon, and often in the mornings too, the wind whipped up off the sea, barrelled up the cliff and assaulted the little wooden houses of Ohoiwait. The tops of coconut palms danced histrionically, a Pina Bausch ballet in the air. Rain crashed in visible waves on to the corrugated-iron roofs, then blew in gusts through the open verandas. People closed their shutters, retreated inside, and waited out the storm by the light of kerosene lamps; the electricity had been blown out the day I arrived and was not restored by the time I left; only the church generator provided light.

No sinetron, no phones, no passage out by flooded road or angry sea: the village was cut off from the world. All we had was the radio. I remember the first time I was in Ohoiwait sitting with the village head listening to a special channel that passed on instructions from the central government down through its provincial and district networks to the villages. There were new restrictions on dynamite fishing; candidates were invited to apply for a village midwife programme. Every day the village head tuned in, took notes, went out to spread the news.

Now, every evening, Mama Ince turned on the radio to learn what was going on in the world immediately outside the village. There were endless Christmas greetings from various high officials. Then we learned of the shipping schedule. Pelni announces that the Ciremai ship will arrive in Tual on the 30th, two days late. Government offices will be closed on Monday January 2. After that, Family Radiograms: The Zain clan in Tual wishes to inform their Bugis relatives in Banda Eli that because of bad weather they will not be coming to visit. The Matutu clan in Tual asks Bapak Jafar in Waur to come to town immediately on important business.

Almost all the radiograms use the phrase
keluarga besar
, literally ‘big family’, a baggy phrase which I translate as clan. One rainy afternoon, I asked Mama Ona’s husband Jopy who was really included in the concept of
keluarga besar
. He pulled out a piece of paper and started sketching just the clan that started with Oma, the elegant matriarch who had welcomed me into the family on my first visit.

There was Oma and her husband, their thirteen children, their forty-three grandchildren, twenty-eight great-grandchildren and the one brand-new fifth-generation baby. That’s eighty-five direct descendants from a woman who had died only the previous year. It doesn’t count the spouses, the in-laws, the cousins various times removed, just the bloodline. ‘But if we really mean the whole clan, the wives or husbands, the relatives by marriage, and we go back to even my grandparents’ generation, then it’s hundreds and hundreds of people,’ Jopy said. He pulled out another nice clean piece of paper so that I could draw my own family tree.