'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.