With a new preface by the author detailing what has happened in Indonesia since the book’s initial publication, My Friend the Fanatic is the story of an alternately disturbing, amusing, and poignant journey that illuminates one of the most pressing issues of our time.
With a new preface by the author detailing what has happened in Indonesia since the book’s initial publication, My Friend the Fanatic is the story of an alternately disturbing, amusing, and poignant journey that illuminates one of the most pressing issues of our time.
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Overview
With a new preface by the author detailing what has happened in Indonesia since the book’s initial publication, My Friend the Fanatic is the story of an alternately disturbing, amusing, and poignant journey that illuminates one of the most pressing issues of our time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510701410 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 02/23/2016 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 292 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Jakarta
Hotel Borobudur, said to belong to Jakarta's most powerful armybacked mobster, sprawled across 23 landscaped acres in the heart of the city. In keeping with the national love affair with the acronym, the hotel disco was called musro, short for Music Room. Five massive columns in the shape of rampant eagles, wings outstretched, curved around its entrance. Inside it was dim and smoky and my eyes took a few moments to adjust before I spotted the birthday girl. Her hair, usually straight, tonight cascaded to her shoulders in glossy black curls. Her leather skirt fell in jagged waves over spike-heeled boots. A crush of reporters wearing sweaters to ward off the airconditioning surrounded her. Those in the first couple of rows thrust their battered tape-recorders under her nose; behind them jostled camera crews.
Djenar Maesa Ayu appeared unruffled, as though sheathed in an invisible bubble. The scrum parted for a moment to allow me to wish her happy birthday before closing back on itself, and as I made my way towards the salvers of peppered beef, barbecue chicken and fried rice lined up on a long table I heard a reporter shout out the one question they never tired of asking: 'Why do you always write about sex?'
Sometime swimwear model, daughter of an actress and a deceased film director, Djenar was the reigning wild child of Indonesian literature. She had recently threatened to strip before parliament to protest a proposed censorship bill. Her 31st birthday coincided with the launch of her second collection of short stories: Jangan Main Main (Dengan Kelaminmu) or Don't Fool Around (With Your Genitals). The first story, Suckled by Father, was about a girl nursed not on her mother's breast but on her father's penis.
I owed my introduction to Djenar to the businessman and novelist Richard Oh. Richard was the Gertrude Stein of Jakarta, if you could picture Stein as a bald 44-year-old Chinese–Indonesian man with a smoking cigar between his fingers. His QB World bookstores, modelled on Barnes and Noble or Borders, dotted the city, and he owned a small publishing imprint called Metafor. He had established the Khatulistiwa Award, Indonesia's Booker Prize, and surrounded himself with a retinue of poets, writers and journalists. Unusually for the scion of a business family, Richard had studied creative writing in Wisconsin, where he developed a taste for literary fiction. I envied his easy familiarity with Proust and Kafka and Faulkner. Richard constantly urged me to catch up with authors I had barely heard of: 'Read W. G. Sebald. You have to read W. G. Sebald.'
By this time it was January, 2004, more than a year since the Bali bombings. In April 2003, six months after standing in the ruins of the Sari Club, I quit my job with the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal in a fit of bravado on being denied promised book leave. My years of writing about bank privatisation and debt restructuring and the fluctuating fortunes of noodle manufacturers and motorcycle importers were over. A new career as an author beckoned, beginning with the book about the changing face of Indonesia that had first come to me in Bali. Befitting my altered status — a step up or a step down depending on who was judging — I found myself struck off the American ambassador's guest list and welcomed to Richard Oh's entourage. But though my business card now said 'writer' the truth of that claim was tenuous. Once the first flush of purpose had passed, the reality of being unemployed without a bank balance to speak of sank in and my nerve faltered. I sought out a consulting assignment with the World Bank that took me to Aceh and padded my finances somewhat but left no time for other travel or serious writing. I accepted an invitation to the Australian National University's annual gathering of Indonesia experts in Canberra, and agreed to write a paper on ethnic politics and business, an exercise that somehow ended up taking months rather than the weeks I had intended.
The World Bank consultancy lapsed after six months. Shorn of excuses, I made a few desultory stabs at reviving things. I spent an afternoon with Ineke Koesherawati, the erstwhile star of such films as Kenikmatan Tabu (Forbidden Bliss) and Gadis Metropolis II (Metropolitan Girl II), who had seamlessly transitioned from surfsoaked white shirts and flashes of dark lingerie to compering events for the headscarfed new middle class on how to achieve true Muslim womanhood. She seemed insulted when I compared her former screen persona to Jennifer Lopez. 'No, no, I was more like Pamela Anderson,' she insisted. I interviewed Puspo Wardoyo, a 47-yearold fried chicken restaurant magnate who had founded the nation's first polygamy award. His phone rang with the azaan, the Islamic call to prayer; his morose and childlike third wife had little Snoopies embroidered on her chaste white socks and nursed a barely disguised resentment towards wife number four. To balance the pious with the profane, I whiled away a long night with a transvestite dance troupe, the fabulously named Tata Dado and the Silver Boys. 'My body, better than Tyra Banks,' insisted Tata Dado, a rouged middle-agedman with the features of a butcher. But though each of these encounters captured something of the times, I had to admit that they didn't add up to much.
It was not as though I was entirely rudderless. If anything, the logic of the travels I had in mind dictated itself. I would begin in Java, home to half of Indonesia's population, the country's economic and political centre, and the heartland of the culture under siege. Then would come some of the so-called outer islands — Sulawesi, Borneo, Batam and, circumstances permitting, the Moluccas, also known as Maluku. In terms of themes, the broad changes in Indonesian society struck me as far more significant than the somewhat hyped threat from terrorism. Orthodox Islam was equally uncomfortable with the pop-culture present and the pagan past. To get a sense of these conflicts I would write about a massive Islamic reform movement called Muhammadiyah, the popular entertainer Inul Daratista, nominal Muslims who still worshipped the Queen of the South Seas, and the charismatic Bandung-based televangelist A. A. Gym. Only then would I address the question of terrorism. The odds of seeing the country's most famous terrorist suspect, Jemaah Islamiyah's Abu Bakar Bashir, appeared awfully slim, but I could visit the infamous school he founded, and also the prestigious Islamic school that helped shape Bashir's own world view.
Jemaah Islamiyah, though, was only the most prominent of a rash of organisations that shared the common goal of Islamists everywhere: the imposition of sharia law. What set Jemaah Islamiyah, an al Qaeda offshoot, apart was not its vision of an ideal society but its willingness to use violence to achieve its objectives. In parts of the country, such as south Sulawesi, the same goal was being pursued through administrative fiat. Other Islamists, such as the missionaries of the Borneo-based Hidayatullah network, preferred to dot the country with private enclaves run by strictly orthodox norms. Most ambitious of all was the Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS. Modelled on Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and imbued with the same bedrock belief in the need to organise all aspects of society and the state according to Islamic precepts, it was widely seen as the party to watch in parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for later that year.
Of course, my plans were just that, plans. In practice, an innate talent for procrastination reasserted itself. Some days I did nothing at all, on others nothing of consequence. There was always another book worth reading, another freelance magazine article, tempting as much for the familiarity as for the income, to dash off. Against this backdrop, Richard had taken on a certain outsized importance in my life. I had enjoyed his first two novels, which touched upon a subject many people found uncomfortable, the peculiar predicament of Indonesia's wealthy yet persecuted Chinese minority. Richard was at work on his third book. He had an agent in Spain and attended the Frankfurt book fair every year. He invariably made me feel poorly read, but I took a perverse pleasure in this, as though the repeated reminders of my unfamiliarity with the oeuvre of W. G. Sebald and A. L. Kennedy and Banana Yoshimoto, or more precisely that this mattered to me, hinted at an ambition less whimsical than it appeared. I began to think of Richard and Djenar — they were usually inseparable — as a bridge between the world of reporters and the world of writers. Their company strengthened the illusion that I had made the passage from one to the other, and I instinctively sensed that keeping that illusion alive was vital if I was not to simply give up. That both were larger than life figures in Jakarta helped. The glamour of their circle came as a welcome relief from the usual expats with their tired stories about scuba diving courses and bargain spas. This was the other Indonesia, the part whose aspirations belonged in Vanity Fair rather than in the Koran. What set Richard and Djenar apart from elites in other Muslim countries, with the possible exception of fiercely secular Turkey and Tunisia, was not the fact of their existence — who hadn't heard of booze-fuelled parties in north Tehran or the libertinism of the posher parts of Karachi — but that there was nothing furtive about them. In Jakarta, as the camera crews swarming around Djenar underscored, a certain boldness still belonged in the public square.
Around me UB40's 'Red Red Wine' rose thickly above the clink of beer glasses. The gathering's sense of style showed on its feet: slim black stilettos, heavy buckled dress shoes, red canvas Adidas sneakers. I crossed a landing colonised by the star of the film Ca-baukan (in curly-toed cowboy boots) and his fans, and found Richard on a dim balcony in earnest conversation with a somewhat scruffy man he introduced as an up-and-coming writer. Richard held forth on his newest discovery, a Spanish existentialist of apparently vast profundity. Were we familiar with his work? We didn't know what we were missing.
The second floor of the disco formed a thick U-shape overlooking the dance floor. From where we stood we could see Djenar, on the opposite arm of the U, autographing books with a silver pen. She paused, broke the seal on a pack of Dunhill menthols, and lightly tossed the crumpled foil to one side. She lit her cigarette almost in slow motion before turning to accept a bouquet of marigolds and spiky green bulbs from three svelte women in black; each received a light peck on either cheek.
A makeshift stage on the dance floor below was decorated with naked white mannequins arranged like crash-test dummies, their arms and legs and necks at impossible angles. The cover of Djenar's book, a bright red background with PlayStation controls superimposed on a blurred pair of breasts, filled a large screen above them. After a few minutes the music died, the red on the screen faded, and an amateur video came on. It began with a man at a urinal, his pants down, his arse partially exposed; then it cut to a long-haired man in a denim jacket seated on a toilet.
'Who is that?' I asked Richard.
'Moammar Emka. He wrote Jakarta Undercover.' It was a bestselling exposé of sexual hijinks in the capital.
The rest of the brief film continued in a similar vein, a blur of urinals, toilet seats and frothing beer mugs punctuated by testimony from Djenar's friends and admirers. Then the birthday girl made her appearance onstage. The audience hushed and the sounds of clinking glasses faded. Djenar arranged herself artfully on a spotlit chair, one side of her leather skirt falling away to reveal a length of black-stockinged thigh, and began reading aloud about sucking thirstily on a penis.
By this time I had lived in Jakarta three years, but my relationship with the city went back further. Between 1980 and 1983 my father, a diplomat, was posted at the Indian embassy and I had spent a year here in 1981 when I was twelve. That Indonesia was better off than India was obvious even then. In Jakarta, Levi's jeans or Boney M cassettes didn't carry quite as much cachet as they did in New Delhi. The cars, mostly Toyotas and Hondas with the occasional Mitsubishi, showed up the backwardness of Delhi's ancient Fiats and Ambassadors. On the badminton court you saw Yonex in carbon graphite instead of Pioneer Sports in crude steel. Even the maids were better dressed, and for the most part better humoured as well.
I was homesick — evidence of Japanese industry didn't quite make up for friends left behind — and glad to return to India after a year. Over time Indonesia faded from my consciousness. As a student of journalism and international relations in America, and later as a foreign correspondent in India, I couldn't claim to have paid events in Indonesia particular attention. The country occupied only marginally more of my mindspace than, say, Malaysia or the Philippines. Nonetheless when the Far Eastern Economic Review's editors in Hong Kong broached the idea of moving me from India to Southeast Asia in 2000 I agreed almost without thinking. The prospect of living in Jakarta, not Manila or Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, was behind this alacrity. It wasn't merely misplaced nostalgia. With 220 million people Indonesia was the one country in the region that mattered. It was also at the cusp of two of the world's most important debates about Islam. Was the faith compatible with democracy? Was it compatible with economic development?
The city I returned to was barely recognisable. The Jakarta of my childhood had boasted no airport of glazed brick and plate glass, no straight and wide toll road to the city, no malls stocked with Australian wines and German toasters. The once-posh Hilton now looked drab beside the flash of the Grand Hyatt and the hushed opulence of the Dharmawangsa. I remembered the British Council library building, with its broken eggshell exterior, as imposingly modern; now it looked a runt dwarfed by giants.
By this time India's economy had been unshackled nearly a decade while Indonesia's was yet to recover from the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. Yet the gulf between the countries I had sensed twenty years earlier had only widened. It was most conspicuous in those totemic symbols of the Suharto era — the skyscrapers on Jalan Sudirman. But I experienced it in smaller ways too: in the crisply airconditioned taxi that took me to work, in the efficiency behind the cash register at the department store, in the muted sophistication of Cinnabar where my colleagues in the foreign press corps gathered in the evening for a drink. Indonesia's rich were richer than India's; its poor, despite the setback, were less poor. Even the beggars, back since the crisis, were different from Indian beggars. Their limbs weren't mutilated. They wore thongs or scuffed sneakers; some carried guitars. They retained a few shreds of dignity.
This record of having done relatively well by its people was one of the things I admired most about Indonesia. Here was proof, if any were needed, of India's folly in extending the shelf life of Nehruvian socialism through the 1970s and much of the 1980s, and of the wisdom of Indonesia's market-friendly policies and back-to-basics focus on literacy, health care and family planning. Not long after my arrival, a local activist in Pekanbaru in Sumatra took me to a village outside the city to show me poverty. He pointed at a one-room concrete shack with a tin roof. 'Look at how our people live!' he said. He was keen to make the case for greater autonomy from Jakarta, but I couldn't take my eyes off the row of small shoes lined up neatly outside the door. In poor Indian villages the children went barefoot, their bellies distended, their eyes dulled, their hair orange-brown billboards for malnutrition.
At Cinnabar the foreign correspondents and NGO expats complained about slumming it in Jakarta but, fresh from New Delhi, I could never empathise. Put simply, the city I had moved to was more civilised than the one I had left. The elevators in the foreign ministry did not stink of stale sweat; the taxi drivers weren't always out to cheat you; a foreign woman could walk the streets without the constant threat of being groped or accosted by a stranger saying, 'Hello madam, you want to fuck?' Relative prosperity explained this only partly. I had spent three months in Kuala Lumpur, which was far wealthier than Jakarta yet at the same time somehow coarser, and had come to attribute this difference to culture. Below the emblems of Malay achievement — the Petronas Towers and the monorail — lay a terrible confusion. A Yemeni or a Pakistani might show up today and his children would be considered sons of the soil and given preferences in everything from college admissions to business contracts. The children of a Buddhist or Christian Chinese or of a Hindu Tamil who had lived there a hundred years remained foreign. The new Malaysian administrative capital, Putrajaya, was a Disneyesque conception of Araby, gaudy domes and soaring minarets and a copycat bridge from Isfahan in Iran.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "My Friend the Fanatic"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Sadanand Dhume.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Map,
Preface,
Prologue Bali October 2002,
Part 1 Java,
1 Jakarta,
2 A Brief History of Indonesia,
3 Jakarta,
4 Nationalists v. Islamists,
5 Garut/Tasikmalaya,
6 Yogyakarta/Parangtritis,
7 Jakarta/Bandung,
8 Jakarta/Yogyakarta/Solo,
9 Ponorogo,
Part 2 Sulawesi, Borneo, Riau, The Moluccas,
10 Makassar,
11 Makassar/Bulukumba,
12 Balikpapan,
13 Batam,
14 Jakarta,
15 Jakarta,
16 Ambon,
Epilogue Jakarta February/March 2007,
Organisations,
Acknowledgments,