Karawang: “My Indonesia” Photo Series (3)

 

Desa Batu Jaya. Karawang, 26 December 2010

 

This is truly a step back in time, ten years ago, my first visit to Indonesia in 2010. 

Arriving in Jakarta, I spent two days and one night in this village in Karawang, West Java, a name which in Sundanese language has different meanings. The word "karawang" can mean “full of holes”, since in the past this area has a surface marked by pits. Cornelius de Houtman was the first Dutch man to put step down this area in 1596 and write about it.

But, going to the origin of the words in Sundanese language, the name was derived from “kera” (“monkey”) and “rawa-rawa” (“swamp”), because at the time it was a swampy area inhabited by many monkeys. Not surprisingly that there are many names in this area using the term "rawa": Rawa Gabus, Rawa Monyet, Rawa Merta.

 

Desa Batu Jaya. December 25, 2010

I have in this kampung all my first feelings related to Indonesia, which later became my first book Kampungku Indonesia, because although I visited the Philippines in 2006, it was here that I experienced the strongest emotions of a land which entered my blood. And many funny and intense memories are linked to it, like the first time I saw the sunrise on the rice fields, with that intense blue that has no equal.

 

Desa Batu Jaya. 26 December 2010

Here, and in Majalengka, which I visited at the same time, I heard the children for the first time call me “bulè”, which means foreign white man, a term that I have always hated and forced to never pronounce. But then I was totally happy, with all the clumsiness of those who arrive for the first time in an Indonesian village.

I will never forget when, early in the morning, alone with my camera and excited for the new experience, I saw a man walking and entered into a small bamboo house on the edge of a stream that ran alongside the road. “Wah! Fishing in the morning!” I thought, going immediately to photograph him, and looking inside I saw the wide eyes of the man intent on attending to his bodily needs in the morning; then I realized that this was the bathroom. What a shame!

 

Just as after a while I saw some women going towards the rice fields, and after photographing them and talking (little, at the time I didn't know Indonesian well) I asked them where they were going: to work, in the fields, to plant the rice. “I'm going with you!” I replied, asked them to go ahead while I went to take the camera. So, I caught up with them and started walking with sandals on the earthy edges of the rice field, while I saw the women who made signs with arms from afar, I smiled thinking they were showing me their position. Well, they were just telling me to be careful to walk, but I understood this only after my feet sank in the muddy ground of the dike between the rice fields, as if it was quicksand, and there I left one of my sandals, lost forever in the bottom of the dense and spongy earth. The women were laughing like crazy, and I went home red with shame and angry with the miserable stupidity of “white man”.

 

Desa Batu Jaya. 26 December 2010

Put aside the wounded pride, I spent wonderful moments running with the children who had become accustomed to me, observing the routine of the locals, between washing the morning clothes, and fishing.

As I wrote earlier, in the villages everything flows in a different, slower time, but the always smiling faces suggest that there are many ways of living our lives, and before considering ourselves better than others we should try the simplicity of others, understood as a virtue.

I did not want to put too much hands on these old photos, even if I often look at them and think that today I would have taken them in a different way, with different angles, but this speech doesn't make sense.

 

Today I would never walk on the muddy paths of rice fields with sandals; you live to learn from the past, but this can't be changed, so it doesn't make sense to edit these simple photos from ten years ago.

In the end it's still me.

Desa Batu Jaya. 25-26 December 2010

About the city (from Wikipedia):

Karawang (Kota Karawang or Karawang Kota) is the capital of the Karawang Regency of West Java, Indonesia. It is 32 miles east of Jakarta.
Karawang is known as a major rice production source in West Java.
In March 2010 Karawang suffered severe flooding with 10,747 houses flooded; 11,540 families and 44,071 people were affected.
Karawang Regency is a regency (kabupaten) of West Java, Indonesia. The town of Karawang is its capital. The regency has an area of 1,652.2 km2 and census population of 2,127,791 people in 2010; the latest official estimate (for 2015) is 2,273,579 for a density of 1,376 people per km2. The regency borders Bekasi and Bogor regencies in the west, the Java Sea in the north, Subang Regency in the east, Purwakarta Regency in the southeast, and Cianjur Regency in the south. The regency lies on the eastern outskirts of Metropolitan Jakarta, just outside the Jabodetabek region, and is the site of industrial activity (like factories).
The area continues to grow which marked the establishment of new factories by domestic and multinational companies in industrial areas. However, due to ever expanding Jakarta (primarily from the eastward expansion of the Jakarta-Cikampek Toll Road and the Cikampek-Palimanan Toll Road), it has seen a heavy influx of housing developments as well and a surge of people.
Most of Karawang Regency consists of broad coastal plain; it lies on the northern coast and is the result of the deposition of sedimentary rocks formed by loose materials, especially marine sediments and volcanic alluvium. While in the middle of the regency are hills mostly formed by sedimentary rocks, in the south there is a mountain (Sanggabuana) with a height of about 1,291 metres above sea level. The regency is roughly equidistant from Jakarta and Bandung, and the two metropolitan areas have a combined home population of over 40 million people.

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