A question of Identity

A question of Identity

By Richard Mann

Budi was a news reader with the state television company in Jakarta, Indonesia's teeming capital city. After university it was a job he very much wanted. His father was an ambassador so he had been able to use his parent's connections to try to get the job. Although he was only a reporter, reading the news gave him a sense of power over his listeners and viewers. From him and from him only they learnt something that they had never known before. To him they looked not only for news but also for explanation. He was their link to forces which were affecting and shaping their lives.

Budi was not so young any more, already 40, but the program directors liked him because he had an authoritative voice, look and manner peculiarly appropriate to the government broadcasting station. Sometimes he allowed himself a faint smile but mostly he was grave and dignified.

Broadcasting had changed out of all recognition since he had started work 20 years ago. The people covered by the broadcasts had changed too.

You could say that Budi was at an age where he was receptive to reflection. It wasn't reading the news that unsettled him, yet he felt unsettled. Every day, as he queued in traffic, looked at the shops, read magazines or just looked at people passing by, he felt unsettled.

What finally identified the problem was the television monitor in front of him in the studio and on which, every night, he could see his performance.

The news had ended and, as usual, there were a few seconds when he just sat still gathering his papers, waiting for the cameras to stop rolling. On this particular night, instead of looking down to signify the end of his broadcast he looked at himself in the monitor, a full color image.

Who was it on the screen in front of him? He saw a brown skinned man with sleek dark hair and a moustache, wearing a white Western style shirt with a perfectly tied Western style tie with the whole ensemble framed by the lapels of a Western style suit, he had become a brown Westerner.

When he first started work, he didn't feel nearly so Western because almost everyone wore safari suits. Before that there hadn't been a government television company. But before that there had been his grandparents. They wore sarongs and thong slippers which were more often on than off. The women of those far off days wore kebayas and the men loose jackets. Tops and bottoms were of different colors and of designs peculiarly Indonesia, often characteristic of a specific area or even of the rank of the wearer.

Budi felt irritated by what he saw on the monitor and he went moodily to the washroom, ignoring the usual comments from colleagues. He looked at himself in the washroom mirror. It was true. He had lost his identify. He was no more than a brown Westerner.

With uncharacteristic anger, he pulled loose the tie and flung his tailored jacket onto the wet floor. In the West, at this point, he would have stormed into the boss's office and roared "I quit" but being Indonesian he simply left the building and went home.

Budi was in a strange mood that night. He told his driver to go home while he took a bajaj, a little three wheeled vehicle like a motor bike with a canvas or plastic covered cabin at the back, big enough to seat two or three people.

What a difference it made. No glass and metal box to keep him from the sights and sounds of Jakarta, the warm night air on his hot face, the engine spluttering with almost human frailty, clouds of smoke belching from the exhaust.

A few blocks from his house he told the driver to stop and he walked the rest of the way through streets lined with dimly lit houses, looking cool and full of life and activity rather than silent with the onset of night.

In the cool of the night, neighborhoods, like villages, come to life. People flood onto the streets. They sit under trees. They play chess in groups. Girls giggle together. Up and down the dark but busy roads flow a procession of hawkers pushing little wooden barrows perched on huge bicycle wheels selling meat on sticks, fried chicken, all kinds of noodles, all kinds of rice dishes, many kinds of soups, spicy food, plain food, favorite food, fruits, fruit drinks, cakes and buns, cigarettes and drinks. Each vendor had his own characteristic call or noise to single him out from the many others. Here he passed through the choking smoke of sate fires. There the perfumed aroma of clove cigarettes wafted on the night air and with it the distinctive almost Oriental sound of music that sounded as if it came straight out of an Arab or Indian bazaar.

This was the real Indonesia, thought Budi. Not the glass skyscrapers of the "Golden Triangle" of the gleaming new business center in whose shadows a few old houses still stood. They were festooned with potted plants to remind the occupants of their villages long ago, with white walls, red tile roofs with a bird cage under the eaves and chickens in the garden. Simple, credulous, friendly, hard working villagers -- they were the real Indonesians.

He stopped at a warung, ordered some soup and, kicking off his shoes and socks, sat cross-legged on a bench. He was enjoying himself to the hilt. This was the real Indonesia, not the fancy, air conditioned restaurants he so often went to and which everyone was crazy to try. People were crowding into brightly lit Western fast food restaurants to stuff themselves with junk while traditional eateries stayed dim and nearly empty.

It was late when Budi got home. Try as he might, he couldn't sleep for thinking about the image he had seen on the TV monitor.

An atmosphere had been building up around him for some time. Every day, in Jakarta, he sensed another piece of Indonesia's traditional culture had been washed away in a tide of Western films, Western clothes, Western habits, Western fast food, Western music, Western technology, Western skyscrapers and architecture and Western products.

Budi supposed it had to be like this because the West was modern and the East was backward. There was no point in the East re-inventing wheels. It simply had to take what others had already invented. But how then to develop one's own culture? Did modernization inevitably mean the death of all that generations of Indonesians had held dear?

Suddenly he had a tremendous yearning to see rice fields and fruit and vegetable gardens. He decided that tomorrow the whole family would go to the farm, and he fell instantly asleep.

"You're not going to work?" his wife queried, with doubt and alarm very evident in her voice. He had announced his decision to take the trip. "At least call and tell them you're sick," she pleaded.

Budi called, in hushed, almost whining tones to say that he was sick but then animatedly hurried everyone into the family minibus for the trip to the country.

It was a three hour drive but by lunchtime they were in the thick of Indonesia's farms.

The countryside itself was green and rich, and, in its own way, clean. But how squalid and dirty some of the villages looked. And how poor. They pulled off the road and Budi forced the whole family to walk through a cluster of tumble down bamboo huts with atap roofs -- much to the loud and pressing curiosity of the villagers. The dirt. The smell. He tried to imagine himself defecating and bathing in the water from an irrigation canal, as he saw some of the villagers doing.

In the midst of all this he and his family looked like people from outer space. He was wearing sports trousers and a shirt but each garment was immaculately clean. His daughter was wearing Doc Martin's and over the knee leg-warmers beneath culottes. His son had an American baseball hat on backwards, a T-Shirt bearing the logo "Chicago Bulls" and shorts so long that they made long trousers look short. His wife too was only wearing slacks and a blouse but her make up and jewelry made her look like a princess beside the dowdy and penniless country folk.

No, country life was definitely not for him. And his family had made it very clear that it definitely wasn't for them. As they climbed back into the "Kijang" the whole family had "we told you so looks on their faces".

But so what? Something was wrong. He was an Indonesian. Indonesians had fought a war to be Indonesians. Had they done it all so that they could end up living like the Westerners they threw out?

Budi decided that he had to hang on to whatever made him feel Indonesian. But it was difficult. The great forests of the Ramayana had long gone and with them their secrets, their spirits and the world they protected. Modernization was wiping aside a whole way of life. Local beliefs, developed and followed in isolation, were now crumbling before the impact of television and world marketing.

He took a day to rest after the trip but on the third day he arrived at the television station, as usual, but dressed in a loose traditional jacket, patterned sarong and flip flops.

As he drew near to the elevators, he began to see people that he knew. The elevator was crowded with people that he knew. All of them were laughing uncontrollably at his dress. One or two of the girls mixed worried frowns with their mirth. Poor Budi. How his wife must feel. Maybe he has gone mad.

By the time he reached the studio quite a crowd was following him, eager to see what would happen.

Disbelief was the first reaction. Then panic -- someone else would have to read the news at short notice. Then a friendly chat in the boss's office.

The boss was very patient and spoke slowly, like a father to an errant child. He understood what Budi was feeling but the station had to project a modern image, an image of achievement, above all an image of development and progress. It had to support the national effort to motivate people, to induce them to have wants and aspirations so that the economy could grow and, as a result, there need not be any poor farmers any more.

While such a situation might have been clarified in a few hours in the West, especially in the United States, Budi's strange behavior led to him remaining employed but being off the air for weeks. He was reassigned and reassigned until he had almost the lowliest job in the studio -- one where he was totally invisible to television viewers. Indonesians are rarely fired but they are shuffled around until sometimes they just quit and the problem disappears.

But Budi liked his old job and he decided to get it back. He wore the hated Western suit, the badge of modernity, the passport to personal and national acceptance in the emerging monocultural global world.

Soon after he started reading again, Budi began attending the local Mosque. He talked to the Imams and read the Koran. He loved going to the Mosque because he could wear his sarong and thongs. Before prayer he washed his hands and feet and in doing so he was overcome with an intense feeling of cultural cleansing. Western suits, skyscrapers and fast food couldn't reach him in the Mosque. As he knelt on his prayer mat, facing the Holy city of Mecca, with his hands spread in supplication he felt himself in another world. It was his world, a unique part of his Indonesian identity, here in the Mosque with bare feet and wearing a sarong. And Allah was somehow specifically his God. He knew perfectly well that anyone could turn to Islam is they wished but in practice, the majority of Westerners were indifferent to Islam and a few even feared it.

Every day, Budi prayed that Allah would show him how he could enjoy a better life and still remain Indonesian. And every day, he had the feeling that just being in the Mosque was a big part of the answer.

Born in Buckinghamshire, UK in 1942, Richard Mann is a journalist and broadcaster as well as an Asian affairs specialist. He first visited Indonesia in 1978 and began promoting trade and investment in Indonesia in his magazine Trade Asia published in Canada since 1982. He has also promoted Indonesia at seminars organized at cities across Canada. Both he and his wife Jenny Mann own and operate Gateway Books.