Ziv looks at Jakarta, warts and all
Ziv looks at Jakarta, warts and all
Bruce Emond, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
When it comes to what brought him to these shores and kept him here, Daniel Ziv doesn't blame Canada.
Unlike those foreign residents who find Jakarta a forgiving place to escape some deep, dark secret back in their homelands, the Vancouver native first came here as a 21-year-old backpacker in 1991.
He returned to Jakarta in early 1999 after earning his master's in Southeast Asian studies from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, setting out to conduct field research for his doctorate on Indonesian social politics.
The doctoral research fell by the wayside as Ziv, who also worked as the Indonesia stringer for the London daily The Independent, decided to establish Djakarta! -- The City Life Magazine.
The bilingual publication was an original: Intensely irreverent and infused with a heavy dose of sarcasm, it was sometimes a bit too cocky for its own good -- and was all the better for it.
Djakarta showed an editorial creativity and boldness rare in these parts, running fascinating, thought-provoking explorations of the capital -- including an informative city guide -- alongside innovative pictorials. An "alternative" publication, it filled a void left by mainstream media (many in the latter have since followed suit with sections devoted to cultural essays and real, critical reviews).
Most of all, it was on the level about the city, treating it with respect and affection while embracing its failings and foibles.
Ziv, in his editorial persona of Dewa Nur Hakim, surrounded himself with a brilliant team of staff and contributors. But he argues that Djakarta was not an example of the Western wunderkind coming in and showing the locals how it's done.
"I'd say that for the most part Indonesians did do it for themselves at Djakarta and that I was simply an instigator providing some structure for ideas and sentiments that were already there ....
"There was all this young, original talent out there and these people eventually found their way to us and adopted Djakarta, not just as their expressive outlet but as their home. Our office on Jl. Kendal had a great vibe ...."
Some considered him a tough taskmaster, a perfectionist intent on doing the best by his brilliant baby.
"I guess what scared me most was the idea of becoming lazy and complacent and producing crap articles that had nothing new or intelligent to say ...," says Ziv, admitting he wishes he had been a bit "calmer and delegated more from the start .... You live and learn".
"The one-man-show argument sounds nice, but disregards all the input the rest of the staff had. Sasa Kralj revolutionized our photography department, and people like Helly Minarti and Mia Amalia and Hasief Ardiasyah and our talented designers had a huge impact on what we produced each month."
In mid-2002, Ziv said good-bye to the sleep deprivation and angst entailed in putting out a monthly magazine. For some readers, the magazine is not the same without him, today reading like a valiant but vain attempt to be cutting edge.
Ziv responds that the current magazine's team is "dedicated, and I think Djakarta still has more to offer each month than any other magazine in Indonesia".
"But the ultimate challenge for any editorial team is to find its voice, to know where it's going or what it's trying to say.
"To achieve this it always helps to attract the most creative minds possible. This requires resources and outreach and imagination, and of course a commitment to quality. I don't know of any shortcuts."
After leaving Djakarta, Ziv wrote Jakarta Inside Out (Equinox, 2002), a collection of vignettes about the city, and now works as a political development consultant in conflict areas. He is also finding time to author Bangkok Inside Out, due out later this year.
In between his travels around the archipelago (most recently Aceh), Ziv sat down for an e-mail interview about his years with Djakarta, his thoughts on expatriates in Asia and whether he is here to stay.
Question: How did Djakarta come about?
Answer: I've always been a fan of cities and of city magazines anywhere I've lived, and was particularly inspired by London's Time Out, Bangkok's Metro and Vancouver's Georgia Straight. When I came here it struck me that there was so much going on, but nowhere to find out about it. And, also, that there were so many unique stories at street level that nobody was documenting. I was lucky to hook up with some exceptionally creative young Indonesian journalists and activists.
Unfortunately they worked best from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m., but they had great ideas, good contacts in Jakarta's art and entertainment circles, and they made me realize how much was possible here. Then I was fortunate to meet some private, forward-thinking investors who were confident and open-minded enough to become partners in what sounded at the time like a pretty wacky concept.
Q: The magazine was such a refreshing, innovative break from what had come before but it must have been tough putting it together ...
A: It was challenging on two levels. First, it was a huge technical and logistical undertaking. We were churning out nearly 100 glossy pages of totally original material on the city each month, and this had to be done with a small staff on a very limited budget.
More importantly, we were trying to introduce the sort of critical, honest, irreverent coverage not seen here in Indonesia before, and we threw in plenty of humor and irony and self- mockery. This attitude had to be "socialized" -- to borrow a classic Indonesian term -- to the public, but it also took time for our own Indonesian staff to "get it".
They needed to grow comfortable with the idea that being "balanced" doesn't mean you cannot be opinionated, that media can and should take a moral stand and have something meaningful to say, that a film review should be more than merely a synopsis, and offer an intelligent argument or intervention no mater how trivial the topic.
Whether we fully knew it or not, we were essentially challenging a mind-set, so what on the surface looked like a trendy, confident magazine was really the product of pretty intense internal debate, trial-and-error and soul searching. We were the first mag to devote an entire issue to Chinese culture, right after Gus Dur (then president Abdurrahman Wahid) lifted the ban. We exposed scandals at the municipality.
We ran the city's first ever gay listings section. We had an insane fashion section that was a thinly disguised parody on the fashion industry. And our Valentine's Day cover photo showing a close-up of a steamy kiss had truckloads of radical Muslim groups tearing down our posters all over town. I'm often still amazed at what we got away with.
Q: And then you resigned, a bit abruptly, or was it a long time coming? It was rumored that the grind got too much, that it became too difficult to put together with all the intensity and pressure to put out the next, best issue.
A: It's true, until the very end I obsessed over every small detail and the magazine was pretty much my life. The first few months, I even used to cruise along Jl. Sudirman in the office van at like 3 a.m. and personally glue promo posters on to bus stops under the veil of darkness.
I was pretty obsessed. But my resignation wasn't so abrupt. I was just totally burned out, physically and mentally. For much of the first year I put in 16-hour workdays and slept at the office seven nights a month to meet deadline. So after more than two years of madness, I just felt like I wanted my life back. I also felt the magazine needed to have a life outside of me.
How did the book Jakarta Inside Out come about? In writing it, what did you learn about the city and your relationship with it?
I guess I just had all these odd stories and anecdotes in my head about a city I loved, but from a contemporary perspective they weren't yet represented in existing books.
Jakarta always seems to be depicted in one of two ways: First, the nostalgia-driven, romanticized takes on "colonial Batavia", which focus on Dutch architecture, old legends and the sort of ornamental stuff that doesn't really resonate in the chaotic reality of today's Jakarta.
Then there's all the "political turmoil" literature -- the stuff on riots and presidential palace coups and politically metaphorical Javanese shadow puppetry babble.
Both genres can be interesting at times, but neither addresses contemporary Jakarta as a real place, in all its quirkiness and speed and trouble. And both genres basically ignore the presence of ordinary people when discussing the city. So I wanted to offer an honest, contemporary, pop culture snapshot of Jakarta, researched quite literally at street level.
Writing the book "de-chaoticized" the city for me. You begin to realize that even in a big bad urban context, chaos is comprised of many little parts that can be really interesting, logical and accessible.
Take a "chaotic" traffic light intersection in Jakarta, for instance. The noise and pollution and traffic and beggars and musical street buskers and kretek (clove cigarette) hawkers admittedly combine to create a pretty mad, confusing scene. But when you set out to understand the subculture of musical street buskers, you spend three days hanging with them and hearing their stories and perspective and suddenly it isn't so chaotic anymore, because their world begins to make sense and has all kinds of self-governing rules that we don't notice when we see the chaos as a whole.
So I guess I focused on "systems" that combine to create Jakarta as we experience it. To try and summarize a city like this through a sweeping bird's-eye view, or through some sort of cultural "analysis", inevitably leads to cliches and generalizations that are way off mark.
Q: What's the biggest pitfall when a Westerner is trying to understand Asia? Is it a reflexive need to compare Asia with the West, or whichever country the writer came from?
A: I think the biggest pitfall is not the tendency to compare things to the West, but rather the opposite -- by which I mean our annoying tendency to exoticize Asia and portray it as more different, more extreme, than it actually is.
In trying to capture something of the "real" or contemporary Asia, I think it's essential to take the Western or perhaps more pedestrian elements into account as well.
Isolating so-called "Eastern" elements misrepresents the story, because like it or not a big part of Asian culture today is shaped by Western influence and pop culture and tacky boy band music and ugly name-brand products, and that's part of what makes this part of the world such a funky, unpredictable, dynamic place.
To zoom in on so-called "Asian values" or to only talk about temples and rituals and noodle dishes misses a huge part of the picture. I think a lot of foreign observers want Asia to stand still for them so that they can paint it in a way that suits them and their imagination. But Asia doesn't stand still, and it doesn't always leave that much to the imagination.
Q: As Jakarta turns 476, what do you love about the city, what confounds you about it and what do you wish for the future?
A: Jakarta feels like endless theater to me, a place where stories unfold every day -- absurd, hilarious, touching, infuriating stories -- that run the whole social gamut from working class becak (pedicab) drivers to glamorous celebrities and corrupt senior government officials.
And for all the filth, Jakarta has many beautiful sides to it. I move around this city and encounter such amazing people and I love just watching them do what they do, because they do these incredible things, whether it's some kid who each evening after school drags his tired body on to public buses and recites political poetry to commuters, or rich folks who show up at neighborhood posts to contribute emergency rations to flood victims, or the social and political activists I've had the privilege of working with, who speak their minds and do the right thing even when it means paying a huge price.
So for me it's not about official anniversaries or monuments or theme parks, but the human energy and resolve of ordinary people, which is everywhere. I hope that in the future Jakartans can enjoy just a bit more control over their own lives.
Q: So will you stay here?
A: I'm happy here, but pretty certain I'll move on. Coming from one of the most beautiful cities on earth, there's the lingering temptation to move back there at some stage and pretend to be excited by all the different types of granola bars.