Hidden Indonesia

Jakarta, September 2016

David Jiménez is a Spanish journalist sent by the newspaper “Mundo” to Asia where he has documented the most important conflicts since 1998. In 2007 he published the beautiful book: “Children of the monsoon. Being children in Asia: ten stories of courage and survival,” published by Tropea Editore.

Lately I've been looking for books that collect short stories or articles because it's the literary genre I've been exploring as a writer for a few years.

This book struck me because it talks about Asia and children.

Reading it did not disappoint me at all.

It is clear that he has a thorough knowledge of the subject he is talking about and is also empathically close to the subjects of the stories.

But it is the story about Indonesia in particular that made me think a lot.

It is the story of Teddy, a young student of Atma Jaya University, killed by the military in Jakarta during student protests in 1998 to send away President Habibie, right-hand man of the former dictator Suharto. One of Indonesia's darkest pages, which went down in history as the “Reformasi” period, but capable of gradually leading the country to true democracy.

Beyond the story itself, some of Jiménez's words made me think.

First of all, of all the countries he has visited and documented, from Afghanistan to the Philippines, the journalist confesses that Indonesia is the one that has remained closest to his heart.

“Perhaps it is possible to fall in love with a country as with a person, to see things in that place that for some reason you cannot find elsewhere; establish a special bond with it, feel attracted by its character, experience it with a particular intensity. They are countries that take advantage of your state of ecstasy to hide their shortcomings from you and always highlight their virtues, places where you think of returning when you haven't left yet. For me, Indonesia is this. When I arrive I know I can't be anywhere else: they could take me there blindfolded and as soon as I set foot in one of its airports, in any of its cities, I would know where I was just by the scent of frangipani and the sweet smell and pungent from clove cigarettes. Indonesia has a hidden and primitive side that always makes its people unpredictable, a side that baffles and fascinates me at the same time.”

Of the many books I have read about Indonesia, few times have I found myself in total agreement as in these lines.

It has often happened to me, in the more than ten years that I have visited Indonesia, that I have been asked why I was so deeply connected to this land.

As Jiménez writes, “it is possible to fall in love with a country as with a person, to see things in that place that for some reason you cannot find elsewhere; establish a special bond with it, feel attracted by its character, experience it with a particular intensity.”

Just as people have that something that makes us fall in love with them – and sometimes it's not at all easy to understand what it is – the same happens with places, cities, countries.

For example, if I had to instinctively answer why I viscerally love Dhaka or Bangladesh I would certainly say: the colors.

It may seem trivial but it's not like that for me. In Bangladesh there is a song called “Ronger Dunia”, the world of colours.

Here, Dhaka for me was, in my only trip of just a month, the world of colors that contrast and fight against the harshness of life, its greyness, its dust, its smog. As if an epic and symbolic battle was constantly taking place that fascinates and intimidates.

Answering about Indonesia is much more complicated because it is an answer that has been stratified over the years.

It is also true that certain things are understood better when a lot of time has passed.

But since the first trip, in 2010, I have had exactly the same feeling described by Jiménez, using the same words as him every time I was asked in the past.

“When I arrive, I know I can't be anywhere else: they could take me there blindfolded and as soon as I set foot in one of its airports, in any of its cities, I would know where I was just by the scent of frangipani and the smell sweet and pungent of clove cigarettes.”

These could easily be my own words. It's amazing to read from other people thoughts and emotions that we thought were our own.

For me Jakarta is its airport. Not the new one that opened a few years ago, but the old and smaller Soekarno–Hatta International Airport that opened in 1985. The first time we landed there, walking out into the street through the glass doors, I was overwhelmed by that unforgettable mixture of smells that sticks with you forever.

The rain, the sultry humidity, the sweat, the sweet smell of “Sampoerna” cigarettes. Each element chemically thickens into a smell that becomes the whole of Jakarta, encompasses it, as in the magical essences narrated in the book “The Perfume” by Patrick Süskind, in which the protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, in 18th century France, succeeds – through the art of enfleurage – to extract the perfume that will drive the inhabitants of his city mad.

And everyone knows the incredible power that smells have on our emotional memory: they are what we remember best and longest.

For better or for worse, once hit by that smell we can never get rid of it again.

I know that reducing Indonesia, or Jakarta, and the love we feel for them to a smell may seem crazy.

“Indonesia has a hidden and primitive side that always makes its people unpredictable, a side that baffles and fascinates me at the same time.” Jiménez writes.

The contradictions.

The photograph that made me famous in Indonesia for a period of time told exactly this. Two children looking across the Jakarta river, in the rubbish of the Petamburan slum, intent on admiring the profile of the skyscrapers on the opposite bank.

And then the music. That melody that came through the window, in 2010, in the kampung in Karawang, “lagu Sunda”, the Sundanese songs with a fast rhythm and a melancholy and slow voice. I couldn't understand it, the friction between the music and the voice was jarring, but it was as if it came from a memory of a previous life. I knew her perfectly, she was in my past. From then on they called me “Kang”, the Sundanese brother.

Wherever you look, in the end you always come up against contradiction.

Like that of women, of cities and villages, who walk down the street calmly with their hijab wearing pajamas to sleep.

Maybe this is its secret. What gets under your skin and never lets you forget it. Its soul is perpetually contradictory.

But I don't think it has the same effect on everyone. Only on those who live, in their soul, those same contradictions. Who doesn't stop fighting against himself from birth. Who can't find peace.

And in this secret and tragic struggle he manages to always keep his smile and laughter. Like a mask, topeng, another famous art in Indonesia.

So here is that music with a pounding rhythm is cloaked in melancholy by the voice that seems to slow down the whole world, here is the cigarette that burns and releases not the acrid smell of tobacco but the sweet one of herbs, here is the child who in the street completely flooded by the flood comes out smiling to play football among the splashes of water.

Loving Indonesia is loving the bipolar part of ourselves, the most intimate and secret one, which starts from the nerves of our past, our fears and happiness. And not in the streets known from the first day of life of the neighborhoods in which we were born, but over ten thousand kilometers away.

To this day, for me this is the reason why Indonesia is the land that never abandons me, even when I don't think so or try to ignore it.

Because it is impossible to escape from the smells of your soul.

Italian version