'Warung' as a place for reconciliation

'Warung' as a place for reconciliation

By Degung Santikarma

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): As evening approaches a village in the
south of Bali, the routine begins. The soft tones of cowbells
fill the narrow lanes as the animals are led back to their pens.
Farmers exchange friendly greetings as they pass each other on
the way home from their rice fields.

The laughter of children bathing in the river is broken by the
sound of their mothers calling them to eat their supper. And at
the local warung, a small food stall lined with wooden benches
and filled with the savory smell of cooking food and the sharp
tang of betel nut, a woman begins to prepare for the night's
business.

Soon, after the hoes and sickles have been hung back up on
their hooks and the sweat washed off the hard-working bodies of
the farmers, the warung will be filled with people gathered to
eat, to drink and to discuss.

This peaceful rural scene might, at first glance, seem to
confirm the idyllic images of simple community life that fill the
typical tourist brochures advertising Bali's traditional culture.

Yet in this warung each evening, as the talk rises and flows
in a heated stream of opinions, the stereotypical image of the
Balinese as a passive, polite, apolitical people whose only aim
in life is to roll out a soft welcome mat for their foreign
guests becomes just a little more cracked and tarnished.

The naive peasant immortalized by the colonial painters of the
Mooi Indies school and by the picture perfect postcards sold in
the shopping galleries of the plush hotels turns out, in fact, to
be a skilled political orator.

Those who fill the small space of the warung this evening are
convening in their own kind of seminar on the topic of political
violence, translated into the idioms of their everyday life. The
talk turns from crop failures, to the rising price of fertilizer,
to the land of their ancestors that has been sold for a
nonnegotiable price to a tourist developer looking to turn a
nearby stretch of grassy green hill into a prize-winning golf
course.

They tell tales of their problems paying for medicine for
their children, and of their wives falling ill after using the
contraceptives recommended by the government family planning
program.

They speak of their difficulties in obtaining all the personal
documents mandated by the bureaucracy -- an identity card, a
family card, a driver's license, and the infamous "clean
environment letter", certifying that oneself and one's family are
free from involvement in the tragic events of 1965, when Bali's
rivers ran red with the blood of purported members of the
Indonesian Communist Party.

While the warung might appear to be a quaint remnant of those
bygone days before the Balinese started building restaurants and
nightclubs to cater to the tastes of tourists, this particular
warung is, in fact, a product of a history that goes unmentioned
in most tourist guidebooks and that, until recently, was
dangerous to discuss in Indonesia's public meetings or mass
media.

For the popularity of this place is not merely a result of a
strategic location or the excellence of the arak (palm liquor)
and coffee it serves. Many a customer is also drawn to the
special charisma possessed by its owner.

This woman, although she is already in her 60s, still bears
the signs of the stunning beauty that made her famous in her
youth. Her skin is still soft, her body still slim, her smile
still full of enigmatic promise, she flirts with the patrons,
making jokes full of teasing innuendo.

Seeing her laugh as she serves the men who are gathered around
the scarred wooden tables, one would never guess that this woman
is a widow, a victim of the violence of 1965. According to the
local gossip, she was once known as the "flower of the village",
with a silvery singing voice and a swaying walk that drew suitors
from near and far to her door.

Finally, one local farmer won her heart. But her happiness was
short lived. One night, as the heavy rains of the monsoon season
battered her small house, a group of men came to pick up her
husband.

She never saw their faces, but as they drove away she
recognized the voice of one man whose love she had rejected in
the past. Her husband never returned, but the man with the
familiar voice has been, ever since that night, a loyal customer
of the small warung that she opened to support herself in her
widowhood.

Tonight at the warung, the patrons begin to debate the meaning
of the just past Oct. 21, already immortalized as Kemis Kelabu or
Ash Thursday, when smoke blanketed Bali after supporters of
Megawati Soekarnoputri, angered by her failure to rise to the
country's number one post, burned tires, tree trunks, cars and
buildings in protest.

For many, this outpouring of violence evoked the events of
more than 30 years ago, when gangs ran rampant across the island,
leaving a trail of blood and broken families. Their tongues
untied by the smooth potency of the home-made brew and the
relaxing atmosphere the owner of the warung provides, their talk
turns to the past.

One elderly man, well known as a former thug who took a number
of lives during the violence of 1965, begins to speak about his
role in the killings. He still cannot understand, he says, what
made him so willing to murder. He says he was just following
orders, but he says his actions still haunt him.

Before he nods off in a drunken sleep in the corner of the
warung, he utters one last comment: "Ius gumi" he says in
Balinese, "The world turned to chaos."

Sukarno, the founding father of Indonesia, once said that the
Indonesian revolution began in the nation's many warung. As a
self-proclaimed populist, Sukarno was willing to see the masses
-- those "little people" who toiled as traders, farmers or
fishermen in villages far removed from the presidential palace,
the parliament, the courts or the universities -- as capable of
creating meaningful social change.

The fate of the country, Sukarno felt, was too important to be
left solely in the hands of the elite. In the village warung, the
farmers gather, far from the ringing of portable phones, free
from the pressures to possess the perfectly printed business card
or the latest designer watch that plague their urban compatriots
wining and dining in the cafes.

And the warung provides not just a place to gossip, or a
relaxing retreat from worldly cares. It also -- without the need
to form an organizing committee or a national commission --
offers a space to restore collective memory and ask for
forgiveness.

Lacking formal schooling, the warung's customers are
nonetheless educating themselves politically, debating their
present, planning their future and beginning to remember their
past. In this village, at least, the warung offers a small space
to start a reconciliation.