Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (16 page)

He was born in 1940 in a small fishing kampung. In 1946 his father was killed in the Dutch war (but Goenawan bore no grudge). His mother, who couldn’t read and write, brought the children up. Such money as she made came from dealing in eggs. She bought the eggs in Central Java and sold them in Jakarta. Goenawan’s orphaned background was like Mariman’s (though for different reasons, and in a much more unsettled time); and, as with Mariman, there would have been more to the family than poverty and struggle. Goenawan’s family was clearly uncommon. Both of Goenawan’s sisters became teachers; a brother became a doctor; and Goenawan worked through, as journalist and writer, to being very much his own man.

He stayed away from the communists in the 1950s and early 1960s, as he was staying away now from the religious people. This independence would have been more than a political or personality quirk. It would have been related to Goenawan’s quality and self-respect as a writer. Good or valuable writing is more than a technical skill; it depends on a certain moral wholeness in the writer. The writer who lines up with any big public cause like communism or Islam, with its pronounced taboos, has very soon to falsify. The writer who lies is betraying his calling; only the second-rate do that. In a country like Indonesia the true tragedy, the lasting corruption, of the lost post-war generations, communist once upon a time, and now fundamentalist, is that kind of second-rateness.

Goenawan said, “I don’t think educated Indonesians speak any language which can be used to express and develop their thinking. In Sukarno’s time the language was steered into a totalitarian use, and in Suharto’s time it has been bureaucratized. I wrote poetry in the 1960s, and I discovered that all the language had big abstract connotations—nation, people, revolution, socialism, justice. I was so lonely. When I was sitting in the old gallery I saw birds, sparrows. I had forgotten this thing, the small, transient thing. Everything fits into this. Even some adopted liberal ideas. Like free market. They are dead, not derived from experience, the soil, the street.”

The surviving local traditions were not strong enough to deal with these borrowed ideas. “People have moved very fast. There is no
city
life. People have the brain, the fear, the trauma, the attitude of their past. They will go back trying to find a community. That is why religion is important—the number of young people going to the mosque, the church! The old local traditions—not Islamic or Christian—have been eroded.

“My brother-in-law was getting married into a Javanese family. They wanted a wedding done in the Javanese fashion. But he didn’t know anything about it. So what did he do? He hired a consultant. There are a number of these wedding consultants. They’re making a lot of money now. They remain—the old traditions—like a beautiful memory.

“My wife has an uncle, half-educated. He spoke Dutch. A military officer in the old days, just after the revolution, in the 1950s. He read English. He read Dutch. But what he presented as his thinking was a confused mumbo jumbo. Like: three or four or five years ago we had this total eclipse of the sun, and people went to see it at Borobudur.” The seventh-century Buddhist pyramid. “Borobudur under a total solar eclipse. And this uncle—I call him my uncle—told me that people went to Borobudur to find a book there which has the secret of life. Can you believe it? There are many like that.

“This uncle was not exactly prepared. He never did any critical thinking about people. Democracy is not about voting. It is about debate, the quality of intellectual life. The narrowing of the mind is not orchestrated by Habibie or anybody else, but by this new influx of students coming from provincial backgrounds who want some certainty in this confusing time. The regime offers no ideas. So there’s no debate. Ideas fall into their own boxes, and remain there, undeveloped.”

6
 

I
WENT TO
the old royal city of Yogyakarta in the south of Java to see Linus. Linus was a poet whom I had met in 1979. He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight then; and though (as I understood) he hadn’t yet published anything important, people knew about him. The culture and spirit of old Java were said to be his inspirations, and he lived in a village not far from Yogya.

One of Linus’s older encouragers was Umar Kayam, an academic and writer and a tremendous attender at seminars and conferences; and it was Umar Kayam (not a pen name: Umar had been given the name by his father) who took me one day to Linus’s village. We went to Linus’s house and met Linus’s mother and others; and then for the rest of the morning Linus walked about the village with us and introduced us to people.

Linus was deferential with Umar, who was about twenty years his senior, and I had the impression that Linus was just about making a start as a poet. It wasn’t absolutely like that. I learned now from people in Jakarta that at the time of that meeting Linus had in typescript a very long narrative poem, “Pariyem’s Confession.” And I was also to learn now, from Linus himself, that Umar, who had been reading the poem as it was written, had been worried about the length. At one stage he had said, “Enough. It’s quite
long enough already. It’s getting like an old nineteenth-century Javanese poem.” Like many other writers looking for encouragement, Linus had preferred to follow his own heart and had written on. A year or so after our meeting in his village he had published his poem. It had had a great success; it had sold twenty thousand copies; it was still Linus’s best-known work.

Now, in an English-language anthology,
Menagerie,
I read a translation of a section of the poem that would have been on both Linus’s and Umar’s minds as we had walked through the village. The poem—which had a village heroine, and a village setting perhaps like the one we were in—was elegiac about the ways and private calendar of old Java. Even the good and painstaking translation (by Jennifer Lindsay) showed—away from the inevitable erotic passages—how very hard it was for Linus’s elegiac sense, and all the cultural particularities it implied, to be understood outside its setting. Only Javanese words could describe certain Javanese things, and only those words could unlock Javanese sentiments.

A different climate, a different use of the hours, different associations of music and theater and time and landscape: all this was to be extracted from a description of something as well-known as the Javanese shadow play. There would certainly have been more intricate reaches of sentiment and belief and ritual which were beyond translation, where only Javanese could speak to Javanese. And it was perhaps for a similar reason that in West Sumatra a rice culture as rich and complete and organized as this—and without the need of record—had, after a thousand or two thousand years, left no trace apart from the taboos and the clan names. Once the old world was lost, its ways of feeling could not be reconstructed.

In 1979 Java had given me—perhaps too romantically—the feeling that it was of itself alone, still a complete civilization. Linus’s village had contributed to that pastoral idea; and over the years fantasy had elaborated on the details: the rice fields coming up to the houses, the village vegetation where everything had a purpose, the shrines of the rice goddess, Linus’s elegant
mother. In my memory she had remained as she had been that morning, returning in her finery from an expedition to the town, a woman of a high civilization, exchanging long courtesies with Umar Kayam, in the old language of the court (as Umar said), talking with her head thrown back, complaining in a well-modulated torrent of speech about Linus’s idleness, refusing to take the business of his poetry seriously, since in her mind (as part of the perfection of her world) all poetry had already been written, and new poetry was an absurdity.

It was that pastoral morning that I wished to experience again. And then I learned that Linus had recently been in trouble with the Muslims of Yogya. They had objected to something in a column he had written and had wanted his blood. Linus signed his name
Linus Suryadi AG,
and the
AG
was not a local decoration, as it appeared to be, but an abbreviation of
Agustinus,
which was Linus’s way of announcing that he was Roman Catholic. I would have known that about Linus in 1979 but wouldn’t have been able to give it its proper value or understood its context: the competition between the two great revealed religions for the soul of the half-converted, colonized country that had lost touch with its own beliefs, its own wholeness.

The Linus affair had created a stir; the army had had to offer Linus its protection. Matters had settled down now. But I knew that the earth had moved in Eden.

Linus had no telephone. But he said in his letter, after I wrote to him, that there were two Yogya friends with telephones who would take a message. I telephoned one of the friends; and when I arrived at the Meliá Hotel there was a message from Linus, a computer printout, saying that he would come for me after nine the next morning. That “after” was ominous. He came at two in the afternoon.

He was in a light blue denim suit. At forty-four he was broader and sturdier than he was in my memory, and not as tall: hard to find in him the slender young man in khaki trousers and white shirt who had listened carefully in the house when his mother or Umar talked, and had, deferentially, when we began to walk, offered us his village and its ways and its people.

He had come on a motorbike (that no doubt explained the denim suit), and he had had some trouble with it. He said that the message the hotel had stylishly printed out for me hadn’t come from him, but from his younger brother. He would not have known that I was in town if he hadn’t, purely by chance, met this brother in the street a short while before.

We took a hotel car to go to his village. With Linus’s recent trouble in my mind, I thought as we drove through the town that I saw signs of the new Muslim aggressiveness: in the new Muslim school, with the girls in white headdresses that emphasized their Mongoloid appearance, denied them individuality, and made them, when they were in groups, look like little shoals of blanched big-headed tadpoles; in the many shops dealing in building goods or materials that displayed silver-colored or tinny domes topped with the star and crescent in their front yards; and in the very big sign above a building saying in English in plain red letters:
MOSLEM FOOD
. Linus told me later that the use of the English words meant perhaps that the food had come from Arab or non-Indonesian countries.