Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (47 page)

The longhouse was slightly forbidding: a wide, flat-bellied beast squatting on stilts, like a komodo dragon raised off the ground ready to strike. The side wall was a thicket of branches and split bamboo bound together with rattan, tipping outwards from floor to wood-tiled roof. Every fifty metres or so, a squonky ladder or a notched log worn slippery with the passage of feet ran from the ground up to an open doorway and was swallowed into the darkness. Green gumboots stuck out from the walls at odd angles, as though someone had been catapulted into the building head first and got stuck halfway.

It was eerily quiet. On either side of the end doorway, wooden statues fixed potential intruders with dead-eyed stares. One had the sense of being watched from behind the bamboo wall, but had no idea of where to direct one’s gaze in response. There were people around, definitely; occasionally I’d hear a giggle and catch sight of a flash of colour crossing the dark gulf of the doorway, and I’d know that the children of the longhouse had spotted us, but they didn’t show themselves. Melanie went to try and tempt them out with her camera – a love of posing for photos seems to be a universal trait in Indonesia.

I heard a thumping behind me. A man was crouched over the side of a plastic paddling pool, hitting a lump of earth with a stick. With each thud, a huge dragon tattoo rippled down his back, there were hundreds of tiny splashes in the water, and then a churning and bubbling. He was beating ants out of their lumpy nest to feed to the catfish in the water below.

Pak Anton has just come back after twenty years living across the border in Malaysia. He made more money there. ‘But you spend it all too. In Malaysia you have to pay to fart. You work all the time, you never see your wife, you never play with your kids. What’s the point, really?’

Nowadays, Anton said, it was almost as easy to make money on the Indonesian side of the border. You could grow rubber or oil palm and sell to the plantation companies. Or, like Anton himself, you could build modern, porticoed bungalows for other people who had made a fortune in rubber and who had no interest in living in a longhouse. That brought in around a thousand dollars a month, and no charge for farting. Or for many other necessities of life. ‘Here, I can still go to the forest, slash open a plot, grow as much rice as I need. I can get fish from the river, I can pick vegetables on the mountainside, all for free,’ he said. He was worried, though, about the environment. Between the logging of the Suharto years and today’s rubber and oil palm plantations, Anton now had to go much further to find forest to slash open for rice. He was also anxious that fertilizer and pesticide from the plantations were polluting the rivers so central to Dayak life. He had stopped drinking river water, he said, and was farming catfish in case the river fish died out.

Anton invited me into the longhouse. It was split down the middle, half open, half walled off. Parading down into the distance on the walled side, twenty-eight doors. Each led to the living quarters of a single family; a bedroom and behind that a kitchen. The infinitely long open space was the collective living room.

It was a Sunday afternoon; people were resting from their labours in the forest-fields. Some women were weaving, using back-strap looms. Others did the elaborate beadwork for which this tribe is famous. One woman looped half a dozen cotton threads around her big toe for tension, then rubbed the threads with a big lump of forest beeswax for strength. After that, she picked minuscule glass beads one by one out of a vast multicoloured pile, threading them onto this string or that and plaiting them together in an elaborate sequence which gradually resolved itself into a classic Dayak motif.

A plump woman sewed palm leaves together to make a wide, conical hat that would protect her from the sun as she paddled off to her vegetable garden in the forest. These hats, variously decorated with panels of beading, crochet or embroidery, graced the walls of Kalimantan’s longhouses along with deer antlers, painted sampan paddles and Guns N’ Roses posters.

An old lady, her shrivelled skin elaborately tattooed, her elongated earlobes now liberated from their heavy brass rings, squatted on her haunches weaving intricate, lumpy baskets used to store betel nut. A man with no teeth was repairing spike-toothed fishtraps with fresh rattan while one of his grandsons ran about screaming and pretending to shoot things with a bow and arrow.

I asked the old fellow how many grandchildren he had. ‘Lots.’ He started counting them off on his fingers, then shook his head. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Lots. More than a sampan full.’

Anton introduced me to a group of men. One was a retired soldier; I teased him about a huge mural I had seen in Sintang which for several hundred metres extolled the virtues of the Indonesian army as development workers. In one section, soldiers were building a mosque and church, companionably side by side. There was an operation against gambling and alcohol, in which soldiers wagged their fingers at villagers, who knelt shamefaced with their hands raised. In the dust in front of them, a bottle rolled around and a fighting cock flapped his wings. To restore morale, we later have the soldiers and ‘The People’ drinking coconut juice together.

The former soldier grimaced:
dwifungsi
, the Suharto-era ‘dual function’ which allowed the military to act not just as a defence force but also as a political machine down to the village level, is deeply out of fashion these days. But he did say that, for most of his time in the force, this had been a peaceful area. ‘Everyone thinks the Dayaks are so fierce, but it’s just a way of putting us down. Really we hate conflict.’

I asked him about the conflict between Dayaks and Madurese in 1997: hadn’t that been pretty violent? ‘Oh, that’s completely different,’ he replied. ‘That’s not conflict, that’s just the Madurese getting what they deserve.’

The reputation for back-stabbing, double dealing and ferocity that I found in Madura itself travelled with the Madurese as they began to settle elsewhere in Indonesia. ‘A Maduran will come and ask if he can cut grass from around your coconut trees and you’ll say fine, just don’t take the coconuts,’ the soldier explained. ‘Later you’ll find him sleeping in a field, and he’s got a big basket of grass, but if you put your hand inside you’ll find that it’s only grass on top, underneath it’s all coconuts. And there he is, sleeping in front of you with his mouth open, pleased with the trick he has played. Of course you have to kill him.’

Later that evening, Danaus – a young Dayak civil servant whom we had met in Sintang – dragged Melanie and me to a cultural dance competition in the district hall. The whole place fizzed with excitement; even the Bupati was there, wearing a shirt made of batik in a Dayak motif. The competition was in two parts, first Dayak, then Malay, the brief to come up with a modern reinterpretation of their cultural traditions. The winner of each faction would go on to compete in the provincial capital, Pontianak. The pride of the district would be at stake. ‘Now you’ll see the real Dayak spirit,’ said Danaus.

In the first dance, a group of women in beaded dresses and broad, conical hats walked very slowly in circles, raising and lowering a stiff plastic doll. The blonde, blue-eyed baby bobbed between heaven and earth receiving blessings for an exceedingly long time. When eventually they trooped off, I clapped weakly and wondered how many competitors there were. Danaus looked embarrassed. ‘They didn’t understand that they were supposed to do something creative,’ he mumbled.

Then an explosion of sound. A young man whooped past my ear, banging a gong. Drums crashed all around; whistles squealed above and an instrument which seemed to be a cross between a violin and a didgeridoo wailed plaintive below. From the side doors, a group of young men, naked but for their loincloths, burst on to the stage, muscles rippling under tattoos. They leapt on one another’s shoulders, balanced on one another’s thighs. Danaus perked up.

Within minutes, their tattoos melted in rivulets down their bodies. Loincloths began to slip, revealing cycling shorts below. Danaus’s pleasure wilted; these ‘Dayak warriors’ were extemporizing on moves taken from Malay dances. The crowd was clapping and shrieking its support but Danaus just shook his head. ‘They might not know anything about their own culture but the judges will,’ he said. ‘Mixing Dayak and Malay – that’s fatal.’

After a few more troupes of Dayak dancers had done their thing, Danaus announced that we were leaving. We’d just watched a group of girls leaping about with flaming oil-lamps balanced on their heads, while bare-chested warriors with hornbill feathers stuck in their hair assaulted a cubicle built of white sheets. This was a celebration, Danaus had said, of the practice of locking girls away from puberty until their Prince Charming, their One True Intended, bashed down the door. Despite myself, I was rather enjoying watching these groups of urban youngsters pour their enthusiasm into reinterpreting a culture that they would have been horrified to be subjected to. I said I’d stay for a bit longer, but no. ‘It’s only the Malays now,’ Danaus said, ‘and there’s someone I want you to meet.’

It was 9.30 on a Sunday night, but Danaus was determined to take me to meet his mentor, Pak Askiman, who had recently been appointed head of the district public works office. We waited for a while in a reception room painted bright green with orange cornicing; it was lit by a chandelier that looked as though it had hunched its shoulders up to fit into the narrow space at the top of the stairs. A large tank full of exotic fish occupied one wall; the others were graced with paintings of wild horses stampeding through mountain streams.

After a little while a flunky came in and said: ‘You can go up now.’ Instead of climbing past the chandelier we banked off to the right into a vast new wing, less than half built but perhaps three times the size of the original house. After three floors of cement dust we spilled out into a cavernous games room, railed in with shiny chrome bars interspersed with the Mercedes logo. A group of men sat around a ping-pong table, smoking, drinking coffee and paying court to Pak Askiman. They were talking about flip-flops.

It was a subject I was up to speed on. While I was below decks on a Pelni ship a couple of months earlier, someone had switched on the television. The sound was poor and the image was a snowstorm of static, but it seemed we were looking at a mountain of flip-flops. The mountain sprouted from a bustling crowd, and it seemed to be growing. We speculated about what was going on. ‘Modern art,’ suggested one fellow passenger. ‘It’s a protest against made-in-China’ said another. ‘Hah!’ retorted a third. ‘If everyone joined that protest, all of Indonesia would be barefoot!’

In fact, a fifteen-year-old boy had been arrested because he had stolen a pair of flip-flops which happened to belong to a policeman. The cop’s first reaction was to beat the boy up. The boy’s mother reported the policeman for brutality. That angered fellow cops, who arrested the boy. Now he was facing five years in prison. Meanwhile, people accused of stealing tens of millions of dollars were bribing judges and getting off scot-free. At worst, the bigger criminals were sentenced to just a year or two. Flip-flops quickly came to symbolize Indonesians’ disgust with the arrogance of the law.

Fuelled by waves of sweet coffee, we sat around Pak Askiman’s ping-pong table solving the problems of the world until late into the night. There was a lot of talk about mob ‘justice’ as a substitute for proper law enforcement. Pak Askiman laid the blame for Indonesia’s putrid legal system on the Dutch, who made different laws for different people.

In the early colonial years the government of the Netherlands East Indies had not bothered much with justice at all. As long as commercial transactions were safely subject to Dutch law, they saw little reason to interfere in the various systems of adat that governed how most people lived. Over time, these adat laws were codified. Dutch scholars collected adat laws the way Alfred Wallace collected beetles, capturing them live, cleaning them up, pinning them down between the covers of forty volumes and then classifying them into nineteen broad systems.

By the end of the nineteenth century the Netherlands East Indies had several overlapping legal systems. The first, a Western legal code that defended the rights of the individual and required qualified judges, was reserved for Europeans. Then there was indigenous law. ‘Natives’ went to one of three courts. Issues related to sharia law were heard in Islamic courts. Adat courts governed by local luminaries were for matters of marriage, inheritance and so on. For criminal cases, there were shadow native courts staffed mostly by bush lawyers with no proper legal training. ‘Foreign Orientals’ – mostly Chinese but also Arabs – were considered ‘natives’ except when it came to commercial law, when they turned European.
*

Final appeal on cases that went through these native courts was heard by the European courts, effectively subordinating the local judicial system to the state.

‘We still have three laws, just like in colonial times,’ snorted Pak Askiman. ‘Nowadays, senior officials like me are the equivalent of the Dutch class, businessmen have swapped in for the Chinese, and ordinary folks have taken the place of the “natives”. How the hell can you run a country properly when the law depends on your class?’