A letter to my lover – the shadow play of half-won affection

Address:

Sewer number 552

behind the mall

just next to the warungs

in the shadow of some great erection of a monument

to some dictator

or perhaps just To Hope

just down the road from that shiny international hotel

next to the kampong with the barefoot kids

and the hollowed out little men

wearing SBY t-shirts with blue sleeves.

Under the yellow-orange light of the almost-dark

- because it never gets dark here, never -

there lies my Jakarta.

A nondescript afternoon during the quiet of Ramadan 2009, looking out over Bundaran HI with its rigidly hopeful figures symbolising the optimism of tomorrow.

To my Jakarta,

I’m not sure if I ever told you. But I almost left you. A few months back I was offered a job living in Bali and travelling to eco-lodges in some of the most beautiful places in this country – places that are easy to love. When I was offered that job my mind whirred with new possibility. I was so excited I felt like my skin might rupture and erupt with starbursts; I was so charged with hope and opportunity.

My job would have been to inspire people to visit these incredible places, to help them reconnect with what drives them, with what feeds their souls. After living in Jakarta for some months, I could appreciate how important it was to escape to a naturally beautiful place – to appreciate the wondrousness of the world and remember why life is such a gift. I remember digging my fingers into my thighs and emitting a little screech with my eyes shut tight. It was all a little too exciting. I even had to do a couple of handstands to get rid of some excess excitement. Yep, it was like New Love.

And then, there was you. I felt that I had given you a fair go to show yourself to me and it appeared that we were not really hitting it off, and that most likely we would never really hit it off. Every day you muffle my skin with your smog and your heat and trip me up with your broken pavements. You gave me an eye-ulcer, blurring your beauty; you fractured my kneecap so I had to hobble across you, you infested my digestive tract with warring bacteria and parasites and then pumped me full of antibiotics that made me feel that I was dying and eating nails at the same time - but somehow didn’t kill the nuclear-resistant amoeba.

I know you’re trying to tell me I’m not made for this place; that I’m too fragile to exist here. And you’re looking to poison me from the inside out. Last night my stomach warped and bubbled and I threw up black sludge that looked like the rancid stuff that pumps through your sewer canals - your lifeblood, carrying whispers of corruption and unmet expectations across the skin of your city. Well, it’s not my life-blood. My body thinks that stuff is poison and to be honest, I’m inclined to agree. Do you think you’re fooling anyone, pumping poison through your veins every day and pretending it is blood? After a while people can tell poison from blood and they want the real thing.

Sometimes it’s hard to love you. Sometimes I need tequila shots just to get a laugh out of you.

But. We had our moments. Like that time when I was walking home with my idealism dribbling in my wake and I looked up and you’d made the moon full and bright and yellow, and a breeze skipped up my spine and with Feist in my ears you gave me goose-bumps into the thick night. I thought of you fondly then. And that time I was really sick and just needed to get home, and you opened up the magical skyways of the city and flew me home with no macet at all. And all the times when one of your people – one of the 18 million beating hearts throbbing within you – has reached across the chasm between us and handed me a little piece of understanding, with a gaze or a conversation or a brush of fingertips.

I want you to know that I notice. Every time you rustle your skirts and show me a bit of beauty, I’m watching.

But I still want more. I want that feeling of lacing my fingers into yours in the middle of the night and feeling the squeeze around my knuckles which says yes, I’m here. I want to fall asleep with the knowledge that when I wake up your beating heart will be within reach of my fingertips. All this I can see in shadows, like the ghostly apparitions of a wayang puppet show. Just beyond my reach, on the other side beneath your cloaks, where other people make the shadow-play of our almost love story. I’m wondering if you’ll ever make it real. I want it to be and I’m willing to suspend disbelief to make it so.

So here we are. I gave up that job in Bali to be with you. And now we’ve got less than 3 months left together and already I’m feeling the nostalgia of losing you. I look out into the glowing clenched-fist night and feel a swell of clarity. I feel like I’m finally starting to understand you, and I can see your fingers unfurling so I know you feel the same. I like to think of you as one of those songs that I didn’t like at first but then I kept hearing it and eventually I fell in love with it, because it’s not as cheap and easy as a pop song. People ask me if I think we can work it out and I say ... maybe. Clear-eyed Sydney calls me home and makes so much sense, like the boy with the clean fingernails and a full time job. And of course Sydney will win in the end.

But I’ll always look for you, blazing and darkening in shadow movements behind the screen. I’ll sit and watch untiringly through the night like Indonesians do; everyone else will be on the side where they can watch the skilful puppet master and the intricately designed puppets, with the gamelan orchestra creating its nightmarish soundtracks. I’ll be alone on the other side of the screen, watching the silhouettes shifting and stirring and embracing and quivering as they love, fight and betray their way through life. And I’ll make it all real with my belief.

We’re the lucky ones, because we know ahead of time that we are ending; we can say everything we’ve always wanted to say. So let’s just enjoy the time we have left together. I know you’re not big on beginnings and endings (more on that later), but I am – so try to think of something meaningful for our farewell.

Love, (that’s right- love, don’t be malu)

Ali xx

Peering across the divide - a few little notes on faith

I’ve wanted to write about faith since I moved in Indonesia. But finding words to talk about faith is difficult and feels fraudulent, like saying I love you just because someone else says it and you want it to be true.

It’s necessary to think about faith in order to understand this country; without religion, life here is confronting and confounding. Faith is everywhere, operating in tandem with every life experience, informing so much of everything that happens. Every day, no matter where you are, you can hear the sound of a nation of believers as they are called to pray. The faith of this country wakes you up in the morning with devoted humming that creeps through the crevices of your apartment.

Five things I have learnt about faith, from the faithful and the faithless:

1. Faith needs nothing earthly. Mosques are great empty spaces with shiny marble surfaces, where the faithful join together to bounce their prayers off the walls and hear them back again. Here, the faithful don’t require anything to help them believe. Their belief is bottomless and nebulous in its expansiveness; but hard-surfaced in its strength.

2. Faith is about being grateful and expressing hope and asking for help and saying you’re sorry. These are the things that people have trouble doing every day of their lives.

3. Faith finds meaning in the things that happen to you and gives reasons for the moments that bring joy or distress and provides comfort when the world is loud and unhearing. These are the things that people want from the moment they’re born.

4. Faith requires trust in the intangible, belief in the unfathomable and loyalty to something that is everywhere and nowhere. These are the struggles of life and have nothing and everything to do with a God or Gods. These things are hard for everyone, every moment, every day, no matter where they live or who they love or what they believe.

5. Sometimes it’s sad not to believe, but you can’t just choose to have faith. Sometimes it’s just too difficult to believe in things that you can’t hold in your fists or prove with facts.

I recently edited a report for the Indonesian Commission on Violence Against Women, about horrific human rights abuses against women in May 1998, when riots raged across Jakarta and other cities of Indonesia. Amid the chaos, mass rapes and other appallingly violent acts were carried out, predominantly against Chinese Indonesian women.

Editing the report was excruciating not just because of its content but also because it was so poorly translated – words had been changed from Indonesian into muddled English that tripped over itself often nonsensically. Every so often while editing the report I came across an indecipherable paragraph of translated English, and would have to refer back to the original text in Indonesian. Using dictionaries and online translation tools I constructed paragraphs – bundling words together like hellish building blocks to form awful sentences. Finally emerging with meaningful sentences like: the research indicated that mass rapes were conducted almost simultaneously, in a manner that was organised and widespread across a number of different riot locations. Going over and over the translation and hoping that I somehow got it wrong.

Almost at the end of the editing, I was finally presented with a gift. So Indonesian this is: to receive a small piece of clarity and beauty at the end of a dismal journey.

The final appendix of the report: the prayers. It was a strange thing, after wading through the report’s jumble of lost meanings, to find that suddenly everything makes sense in verses of prayer. Reading the lines of the prayers was like discovering the code for understanding the report – there it was tucked away at the back, only to be found by those who persevere to the end. This elusiveness of meaning is so typical of Indonesia.

It’s a simple truth: you will never understand anything about this pocket of the world until you listen to its people pray. In this land where everyone believes in something, it makes no sense to attempt to comprehend it without grasping the way its people believe.

In prayer, the translated phrases about May 1998 are achingly poetic.

The prayers speak of immaculate flesh with blood gushing all over; of sacred wombs, torn and tattered; of lives, dying and exhausted; of brutal, foul grips of anonymous villains. The prayers speak of tears that wither; they appeal for help to show truth as truth, and to give strength to Indonesia’s leaders who must scale their way righteously. The prayers ask that the souls of their loved ones may rest in Your Most Consoling Gardens.

And then, making the most sense of all:

We could not sigh our pains to anyone but You
... this misery is beyond our possibility

Indonesia is a collection of thousands of islands with lots of dark corners where unspeakable things are often left unspoken, where issues that might cause offence or distress are rarely confronted, where - only if absolutely necessary - hushed tones are employed to tenderly dab at awful things. In this world, there are countless souls who could not sigh their pains to anyone.

And from another world, the faithless are left to peer across the divide, struggling to deal with the miseries that are beyond our possibility.