CATATAN BUDAYA FERNANDO ROSA

Budaya

I cannot get over the hybridity of language here. 'Fakultas Ilmu Budaya', says the large sign above the entrance door as I walk in to get to the department. Fakultas is Latin, ilmu is Arabic, and budaya is Sanskrit. Even if a classical philologist had been asked to create such a language, I doubt he would have been able to come up with anything so interesting. Faculdade de Ciências da Cultura. The greatest thing about it however is that people are usually totally unself-conscious about their language. Namely, they accept it as it is, not as a philological construction.

I particularly love budaya. It is such a nice-sounding term. It rhymes with Surabaya too. Budaya Surabaya. In fact, I am housed in what is in fact Pusat Budaya Jawa Timur (or something like that). They have made dvds showing local culture all over East Jawa. Last night I watched a couple of them. It is such an incredibly creolized world of Hindu and Islamic and local influences. It is so vital too. In reality, Surabaya is a sea port with a large hinterland that has been historically much more significant than the city itself. The dean of the Fakultas - who differently to other members of the faculty is from here - explained to me that Surabaya is in fact a city where people used to have very humdrum ambitions: being a becak or taxi driver, or a mechanic for motorbikes for instance. The people who went to university here were all from Kediri and other towns inland. These had a higher social standing than Surabayans. In fact, this is the hinterland of the old Majapahit kingdom (and one or two successor states as well, especially Mataram), so Surabaya has for many centuries now played the role of intermediary between the prestigious places in the interior and the vast outside world with which it has had connections. In fact, the local language reflects that: there is a bahasa Surabayo, with heavy Javanese and Malay influence, a kind of hybrid language if I am to believe my colleagues. It is used in local television and, I assume, also in radio broadcasts. There is even a dictionary of it. I would love to look into it, as it must have evidence in its vocabulary of many of its connections to the very extensive Indian Ocean world where Surabaya emerged centuries ago. I wonder whether there are marginally more Portuguese words in it, for instance, than in standard Bahasa Indonesia, or perhaps more Chinese ones. I also wonder about the links between Bahasa Surabayo and Bahasa Betawi. I ask the dean about Semarang, the third important Javanese large port on the north coast (the port of the old principalities in Central Jawa, in fact). It is yet another world, however, and apparently one that is less heterogeneous - and therefore to me somewhat less appealing - than either Jakarta or Surabaya. I wonder however whether it might not perhaps also have its own language just as its two sisters.

Right to the north of Surabaya - now in fact only half an hour away across Indonesia's longest bridge - lies Madura. Not a hinterland, as it is a much smaller island, but all the same another place that is closely linked to Surabaya just as the comparatively vast interior of East Jawa. Everybody has told me - in fact, even warned me - that Madura is a different world altogether though it is close by. It is peculiar that what is in fact almost the end of Jawa - and therefore the beginning of a frontier space - is also one of its most culturally vibrant and ancient regions. Just to the east lies Bali, another world of its own (and a slightly larger island than Singapore, I am told), and then Lombok and the rest of Nusa Tenggara and Eastern Indonesia. I know the geography, of course, but it is the first time it really makes sense to me in a very direct and personal way. It is for instance more than a little intriguing that Surabaya lies so close to both Bali and Madura and yet it is another place altogether. The reputedly very Islamic character of Madura as well as the very Hindu one of Bali also make for an interesting contrast. We could think of Surabaya and Jawa Timur perhaps as an intermediary area where all kinds of influences and creolized worlds have come up between the two poles of a strong Islamic society and a strongly Hindu one. As a matter of fact, I find East Jawa even more intriguing than the Central Javanese heartland I have arrived from a couple of days ago.

The contrast with Malaysia's port cities is also very intense to me. Surabaya is a far cry from Penang and Melaka, and not only because it is clearly larger than both. I try to reason with myself that this is not only another part of Nusantara, it is in fact another sea too: not the Straits and the Sea of Andaman any more, but the Sea of Jawa, in fact a small ocean in itself surrounded by (is) lands on almost all sides. This is also a place that is much less colonial than either of its West Malaysian counterparts. Its history stretches back much farther than the fourteenth century, for instance, when it seems to have been already a very lively and bustling seaport. The first reference to it seems to be almost as a matter of course in a Chinese record of the first half of the thirteenth century (the Chinese were often the first chroniclers of places in Nusantara). It is therefore older than Melaka. Of course, colonialism has shaped and reshaped it more than once (the Dutch took it in the mid-eighteenth century) as the old Dutch colonial architecture still extant shows in abundance. My first link to Surabaya was through reading Bumi Manusia in Rio de Janeiro a long time ago (first in the Dutch translation and then, painfully slowly and never completely but only in excerpts, in the Indonesian original. There is still to this day no Brazilian translations of any of Pram's works as far as I know, though some of them have been translated in Portugal. Portuguese books in Brasil are, though not a rarity, not necessarily common either, especially if they are literary translations. They are hideously expensive and the distribution network for them is quite poor). Johny in fact points out to me the former MULO school - a Dutch colonial school originally - where Minke, Pram's main character in Bumi Manusia, is supposed to have studied. Minke was in fact built on a real life character of the time. That was Surabaya but a hundred years ago or more. Minke was in love with an Indo - a mixed woman - born of a Javanese woman and a Dutchman. Of course, that being colonial Jawa, the relationship never advanced, and his beloved was sent to the Netherlands so as to get away from the dangers of miscegenation in the colony. I find this literary imagining of the impossibility of real mixing quite interesting as it comes through the presence of a character that is in fact mixed. Surabaya is portrayed therefore, we could venture, as the place where the Dutch and Javanese both mixed and did not mix.

This colonial ambiguity of mixing and not mixing is perhaps also mirrored in the fact that Surabaya, as an Indonesian postcolonial city, is somehow less heterogeneous than either Melaka or Penang. The image of mixing and unmixing however is  mostly only present in Melaka, but it is nonetheless a very powerful presence there: it is linked to the orang Portugis, the Chitties, the Peranakan, to name but three communities that are still very much visible there. I don't know how to think about Melaka and Surabaya comparatively. It seems very tricky. They are both in a way colonial trading posts, but Surabaya's link to both Majapahit and Mataram were so strong and so important that they must have shaped the port to a fairly large degree. The interior of the Peninsula is of course another territory altogether. After the fall of Melaka, the closest sultanate must have been today's Negeri Sembilan (in case it already existed back then), a largely Minang polity under Bugis leadership. That is however a far cry from either Majapahit and Mataram and even from any remains that must have survived the demise of either. Therefore, though both Melaka and Surabaya have had important maritime connections that have largely shaped them into what they now are, their interiors were vastly different in terms of size and demography. In fact, it is little wonder that they now are very disparate postcolonial cities. Also, intringuingly, the Arabs - so important in Penang but so comparatively little visible in Melaka - seem to have been much more active and numerous in Surabaya. In fact, this last is historically probably the easternmost important port in the whole of Nusantara with such a large Arab community, Aceh being of course the westernmost port (and Penang is just across the Straits from Aceh). Aceh was also the first port of call in Nusantara for steamships coming from Europe, and Surabaya the very last.

Surabaya can also be seen as the last major important southern and eastern harbour for Chinese coming from Fukkien or the Pearl River Delta. In this sense, though of course maritime connections stretched well beyond Surabaya in all kinds of directions, both in pre-colonial and colonial times, this is the very last harbour-cum-metropolis for people coming from Europe, Western Asia, and China. Interestingly but revealingly, differently to both Penang and Melaka, there is no visible Indian community here (though as elsewhere in Jawa there must be lots of Indian clothes shops owned by Indians). The Indian influence here is actually much more visible in the interior, and is therefore Indic, not Indian. Surabaya in this way can be seen as a point at which the important Indic past of Jawa would be watered down by Arab, Chinese and colonial influences of various kinds, whereas in the interior the Indic-derived but in fact largely local culture could be kept to a greater degree. Of course, I am reading the situation here from the perspective of my poor historical knowledge: I doubt for instance that there ever was a pristine, Hindu Javanese or later Islamic kingdom in the interior in contrast to a very creole, very heterogenous coastal harbour such as Surabaya. Only I have been much better trained - also because I am a Brazilian scholar - to look at creole cultures of colonial origin than look at them in settings that are not necessarily colonial. Therefore, East Jawa's interior is much more difficult for me than Surabaya. However, Surabaya can also seem deceptively simple in comparison to its interior when in fact it is not. I just don't know how to read this counterpoint made up of 'cosmopolitan' port city and 'indigenous' polity in a creative way. That the interior of Jawa, the interior of Peninsular Malaysia, and the vast interior of Brasil and South Africa arre very different places also doesn't help much: namely I have trained my gaze to look at things that are difficult to compare and hard to theorize about in a connected way. Brasil and South Africa therefore seem to me somehow closer to each other in that regard, whereas Peninsular Malaysia and East Jawa are closer to each other than either of them is to either Brasil or South Africa. However, as all this is very much virgin territory in terms of a connected reading of different histories, I am not sure how to further my argument here.

In Yogya however it has become clear to me that reading the Javanese principalities as indigenous polities is in fact a very problematic way of looking at them that is full of pitfalls. Reading them however as mostly colonial constructs is equally complicated. They are to me however societies of colonial origin just as my own, even though nobody would readily agree with me if I put both Brasil and Jawa together. Only, their origins and colonial history is different so they now seem to be incommensurable with anything Brazilian almost by definition. That incommensurability however is largely rooted in the historical gaze that I cast at them, and is therefore not necessarily a quality that they possess in themselves - say, a Javanese essence that makes them different (as the historical-philological mode has taught us to look at them). In fact, looking at Central Jawa as a Brazilian scholar (and as a Brazilian scholar who also happens to be very much an individual scholar with a specific trajectory and therefore not only a member of a nation-state) I feel puzzled. That is because everything seems at the same very new to me and also strangely familiar as I also come from another former colonial society.

This happens in fact happens to me all the time in Jawa: for instance, the student who was my guide for a time in Surabaya took me to a local public hospital to visit one of his cousins who had been operated. People were lying on the floor on matts and the general look of the place was fairly poor. He asked me whether I had seen a hospital such as that one in Brasil. In fact I have, though now hospitals there generally look somewhat better than what was before my eyes. He seemed slightly surprised when I said Brazilian hospitals could be similar to a Javanese public hospital. I was not. My skin may be white and I may be wealthier but in fact I also come from a postcolonial society. In fact, I have even more than once used a public hospital in Brasília that at the time was probably not much better than the one I have just visited in Surabaya. I remember I was fairly disappointed at the general shoddiness of the place though the treatment I got there at the time was in fact not bad at all.

I therefore don't know how to describe, theorize, and think through difference here. Our precolonial histories are supposed to be incommensurable, our colonial pasts vastly different and our postcolonial presents at variance. And, of course, our languages mutually inaccessible as well as incomprehensible. Yet I have learned Bahasa Indonesia in Rio, not in Holland, let alone in Indonesia. In fact, Sukarno opened an Indonesian embassy in Rio already in the 1950s - and it put forth pamphlets and booklets about Indonesia in Brazilian Portuguese; that was also when the famous chinês da Barra, a wealthy Chinese immigrant from Indonesia, arrived in the city and built an entire neighbourhood in a then godforsaken place out of town that has become virtually another city, namely, Barra da Tijuca. Rio is also the place where exactly one hundred years ago Lima Barreto wrote and published one of the most famous short stories in Brazilian literature, namely, O homem que sabia falar javanês, namely Seorang pria yang bisa berbicara basa Jawi. Of course, the man in the story could not really speak Javanese. I consider him however my intellectual ancestor - namely, both Lima and his character.


Sumber: http://melakabrasil.blogspot.com/2011_01_30_archive.html