It’s hot and there is a big fat roach in my bathroom. I put a towel under the door and left the room. Hopefully it’s too fat to go through the little vent in the door. I can’t remember sweating so much in my entire life. After 23 years of living in Georgia I’ve only just now learned the touch of humidity. I used to think I had some magical immunity to it but being in Indonesia a month into the rainy season set me straight. I don’t realize I’m sweating that much until I feel the drops of sweat falling down my back as I’m sitting still in the prayer area. It’s oppressive being inside. Umi took her kid’s prayer group outside onto the porch for the first time tonight. They don’t sound like they’re all that focused on reading/recitation. I walked around for a bit out there but it feels just as hot to me as inside.
I think the only cool place is in the upstairs patio where we hang our clothes to dry, but from there the drowned rice paddies look so ghostly with the florescent lights reflecting off the black of the water. Nights like tonight make me believe that I was meant to spend some years of my life in Indonesia. The sounds of singing, the wild shapes of trees in the dark and steady pulse of dangdut music coming up through the floor feels oddly cyclical and familiar. If and when I look back on these nights I will remember the sharp texture of the colors and trees illuminated by the glaring light bulbs covered in cut-off water bottles, hanging from the palms.
Earlier in the evening my host sisters randomly asked me, “Miss Fiona mau masuk ke Islam?” (Miss Fiona, do you want to enter Islam?) Although my host mom Umi tried to swat away their questions with a knowing smile I fancied I saw a gleam in all of their eyes for a second which gave me insight into how tolerant they are to welcome a stranger into their home who is admittedly, “not really very religious at all.” In the beginning I committed all my friends and family to Buddhism or Christianity because I thought that in such a religious country where you have to claim a religion on official documents, my lack of religious sentiments would be met with the same blank stare I sometimes still receive in the classroom. I know I must seem strange on many other accounts, but to live with someone and even let them watch you pray when they only have a general non-committed interest in your activities must be especially hard to grow accustomed to. This is the first time they have broached the subject of my interest in Islam and….it made me feel loved. It made me feel like they care for my spiritual well-being in a way that I haven’t quite felt before. After accepting me into all other parts of their lives without so much as a discussion of whether I want to join (in a spiritual sense) the most important part of their lives, the random timing of this question after we had just finished running around putting grass down the back of each other’s shirts felt bred of love rather than religious zealotry.
The other part which I know worries them about me is that I don’t wear the veil. They seem to adore my hair and love to play with it and are infinitely fascinated that it is red and blonde (no, not brown) but the two times that I’ve worn a veil they seemed ecstatic by comparison. My own female family members and close neighbors (who are counted as family) often don’t wear the veil around the house except when there’s company or men outside of the family who stop by. When my sisters asked me if I was going to enter Islam they immediately followed that question with, will you wear the veil? After wearing it twice when I first got here I thought I’d set a precedent that in my eyes it was disrespectful to wear the veil as a non-Muslim. My logic was immediately accepted by my host mother but not by anyone else. Other ladies in the neighborhood and the other teachers (men and women) at my school tried to convince me that it was not only a religious symbol but also a matter of fashion - that I would look more beautiful if I wore the veil. Despite hearing these words I still perceived that these arguments were more playful and not to be taken in a serious light. I consider this another point of everyone's tolerance.
In other news....
School is winding down and I am still trying to get the guts to tell one of my counterparts how useless and used it makes me feel when he is absent (either mentally or physically) from our classes. I've succeeded in getting him to help me give instructions to the students, but after a whole semester I feel like I should have made more headway on that count. Otherwise, the students are really getting into the review games we’ve been playing. I found out on Friday that our exams have been pushed back a week so instead of doing two more weeks of review we need to come up with another week’s worth of material sandwiched in between our two review weeks (we being my female counterpart and I.)
Today two students came into the teacher’s den, one with a big box marked Holland Bakery and the other with two bags of lunch boxes. This is a custom I’m still getting used to: whenever it is someone’s birthday they buy food, cake, snacks, you name it for everyone. The amount of food that was brought in today (for the all the teachers – I didn’t see if she brought stuff for her friends as well) was staggering. I worry that these students, some of whom have told me don’t have money to buy lunch, go broke when it’s their birthday. In addition to emptying out your piggy bank (or your parents’ piggy bank?) to shower your loved ones with gifts on your birthday, these same loved ones will often play tricks on you all day long like throwing eggs at you or splashing you with water. Not two weeks ago another student came up to me before English club with a wet skirt and her veil askew. I asked her what happened and she explained to me, laughing, that it was her birthday and her friends had splashed her with water. I dig the giving of gifts to those who have helped you become the person you are on that day but the tricks are not a custom I will encourage my friends back home to adopt any time soon.
I have been thinking of home lately, in the abstract mostly, as if from on my own small planet looking at it from afar. This is perhaps both because of my nearing visit to the States and my having been at my site for more than six months now. I wrote this the other day:
A home is a place where you are so integrated with your environment you notice every small change. When, in the midst of weekly routines, you can spot a new shaft of sunlight somewhere, or can tell the difference in the changing skyline by the way a shadow falls differently at 4 o’clock in the afternoon; otherwise stated, when the subtle changes a new day brings quickly pierce your consciousness, then that place can be called home. Whereas, in a place you have not yet internalized, the shadows and sunlight patterns are uniform in their differentness. Every Wednesday at Tajemalela practice the practice field looks the same to me. That is, until two Wednesdays ago when I was staring off towards the parking lot and was suddenly struck by how clearly this bold strip of sunlight fell across the lawn. I hadn’t realized before that the leaves parted in such a way as to let the sunlight through like that.
Perhaps there had been other moments like this before but none that stood out so starkly in my memory. It was a disruption to my comforting generalization of the place. Its little things like that that make you realize how much you rely on this broad categorization of a new environment to cope with change.
But the de ja vu feeling of awareness has come in waves at different stages of my internalization. It hit me not even a month after moving to Karawang. I was walking with my host sister down a road that couldn’t be more different than any road I’ve ever walked down before. Here we passed fruit stalls, motorcycle shops and batik shops, with the the call to mahgrib prayer falling around us with the violet twilight. As we walked home, I was on that street but I was also in many similar moments that had been forgotten, remembered and forgotten again and then shaved down to a memory of a feeling, only to hit me now with the feeling that I was undergoing one of the first stages of internalizing a place – relating it to my past.
I also wrote this a while ago, when the rain was starting up back at the end of October, around Halloween.
They stand on a rise, a colorful funeral party
Holding a moment of well-timed silence before the maghrib prayer.
Some people wait watching by the gate,
Minding their rightfully-owned business.
Schoolgirls shuffle by, hand in hand, unaffected by the wind, the people and the sun burning ribbons Through the field.
The majority of the landscape is a stretch
And then a group huddled conspiratorially together against the dim gray.
Down on the road, people are actually outside, in the warung, on the road, boys leaning on their parked motorcycles.
No one is holed up inside with only the light from the tv to illuminate the walls.
They mill around the food stall
As flocks of chickens claw through blooms of translucent trash
Growing wild like weeds in their black beds of ash.
In this vast undisrupted space you are never alone,
There are always voices beckoning and cajoling you forward and back
Away from that peaceful in between.
The scenes fit together seamlessly:
When the chatter finally fades beyond the receding bend
And you sit to take out your pen
Another scene starts up again
With hardly a wind's breath in between.
Even through the muted green of the second season’s rain,
The relaxed busyness continues with daunting pace.
Even the ghosts hanging around above their pink-tiled graves
Hold their ears out for something to talk about.
I think the only cool place is in the upstairs patio where we hang our clothes to dry, but from there the drowned rice paddies look so ghostly with the florescent lights reflecting off the black of the water. Nights like tonight make me believe that I was meant to spend some years of my life in Indonesia. The sounds of singing, the wild shapes of trees in the dark and steady pulse of dangdut music coming up through the floor feels oddly cyclical and familiar. If and when I look back on these nights I will remember the sharp texture of the colors and trees illuminated by the glaring light bulbs covered in cut-off water bottles, hanging from the palms.
Earlier in the evening my host sisters randomly asked me, “Miss Fiona mau masuk ke Islam?” (Miss Fiona, do you want to enter Islam?) Although my host mom Umi tried to swat away their questions with a knowing smile I fancied I saw a gleam in all of their eyes for a second which gave me insight into how tolerant they are to welcome a stranger into their home who is admittedly, “not really very religious at all.” In the beginning I committed all my friends and family to Buddhism or Christianity because I thought that in such a religious country where you have to claim a religion on official documents, my lack of religious sentiments would be met with the same blank stare I sometimes still receive in the classroom. I know I must seem strange on many other accounts, but to live with someone and even let them watch you pray when they only have a general non-committed interest in your activities must be especially hard to grow accustomed to. This is the first time they have broached the subject of my interest in Islam and….it made me feel loved. It made me feel like they care for my spiritual well-being in a way that I haven’t quite felt before. After accepting me into all other parts of their lives without so much as a discussion of whether I want to join (in a spiritual sense) the most important part of their lives, the random timing of this question after we had just finished running around putting grass down the back of each other’s shirts felt bred of love rather than religious zealotry.
The other part which I know worries them about me is that I don’t wear the veil. They seem to adore my hair and love to play with it and are infinitely fascinated that it is red and blonde (no, not brown) but the two times that I’ve worn a veil they seemed ecstatic by comparison. My own female family members and close neighbors (who are counted as family) often don’t wear the veil around the house except when there’s company or men outside of the family who stop by. When my sisters asked me if I was going to enter Islam they immediately followed that question with, will you wear the veil? After wearing it twice when I first got here I thought I’d set a precedent that in my eyes it was disrespectful to wear the veil as a non-Muslim. My logic was immediately accepted by my host mother but not by anyone else. Other ladies in the neighborhood and the other teachers (men and women) at my school tried to convince me that it was not only a religious symbol but also a matter of fashion - that I would look more beautiful if I wore the veil. Despite hearing these words I still perceived that these arguments were more playful and not to be taken in a serious light. I consider this another point of everyone's tolerance.
In other news....
School is winding down and I am still trying to get the guts to tell one of my counterparts how useless and used it makes me feel when he is absent (either mentally or physically) from our classes. I've succeeded in getting him to help me give instructions to the students, but after a whole semester I feel like I should have made more headway on that count. Otherwise, the students are really getting into the review games we’ve been playing. I found out on Friday that our exams have been pushed back a week so instead of doing two more weeks of review we need to come up with another week’s worth of material sandwiched in between our two review weeks (we being my female counterpart and I.)
Today two students came into the teacher’s den, one with a big box marked Holland Bakery and the other with two bags of lunch boxes. This is a custom I’m still getting used to: whenever it is someone’s birthday they buy food, cake, snacks, you name it for everyone. The amount of food that was brought in today (for the all the teachers – I didn’t see if she brought stuff for her friends as well) was staggering. I worry that these students, some of whom have told me don’t have money to buy lunch, go broke when it’s their birthday. In addition to emptying out your piggy bank (or your parents’ piggy bank?) to shower your loved ones with gifts on your birthday, these same loved ones will often play tricks on you all day long like throwing eggs at you or splashing you with water. Not two weeks ago another student came up to me before English club with a wet skirt and her veil askew. I asked her what happened and she explained to me, laughing, that it was her birthday and her friends had splashed her with water. I dig the giving of gifts to those who have helped you become the person you are on that day but the tricks are not a custom I will encourage my friends back home to adopt any time soon.
I have been thinking of home lately, in the abstract mostly, as if from on my own small planet looking at it from afar. This is perhaps both because of my nearing visit to the States and my having been at my site for more than six months now. I wrote this the other day:
A home is a place where you are so integrated with your environment you notice every small change. When, in the midst of weekly routines, you can spot a new shaft of sunlight somewhere, or can tell the difference in the changing skyline by the way a shadow falls differently at 4 o’clock in the afternoon; otherwise stated, when the subtle changes a new day brings quickly pierce your consciousness, then that place can be called home. Whereas, in a place you have not yet internalized, the shadows and sunlight patterns are uniform in their differentness. Every Wednesday at Tajemalela practice the practice field looks the same to me. That is, until two Wednesdays ago when I was staring off towards the parking lot and was suddenly struck by how clearly this bold strip of sunlight fell across the lawn. I hadn’t realized before that the leaves parted in such a way as to let the sunlight through like that.
Perhaps there had been other moments like this before but none that stood out so starkly in my memory. It was a disruption to my comforting generalization of the place. Its little things like that that make you realize how much you rely on this broad categorization of a new environment to cope with change.
But the de ja vu feeling of awareness has come in waves at different stages of my internalization. It hit me not even a month after moving to Karawang. I was walking with my host sister down a road that couldn’t be more different than any road I’ve ever walked down before. Here we passed fruit stalls, motorcycle shops and batik shops, with the the call to mahgrib prayer falling around us with the violet twilight. As we walked home, I was on that street but I was also in many similar moments that had been forgotten, remembered and forgotten again and then shaved down to a memory of a feeling, only to hit me now with the feeling that I was undergoing one of the first stages of internalizing a place – relating it to my past.
They stand on a rise, a colorful funeral party
Holding a moment of well-timed silence before the maghrib prayer.
Some people wait watching by the gate,
Minding their rightfully-owned business.
Schoolgirls shuffle by, hand in hand, unaffected by the wind, the people and the sun burning ribbons Through the field.
The majority of the landscape is a stretch
And then a group huddled conspiratorially together against the dim gray.
Down on the road, people are actually outside, in the warung, on the road, boys leaning on their parked motorcycles.
No one is holed up inside with only the light from the tv to illuminate the walls.
They mill around the food stall
As flocks of chickens claw through blooms of translucent trash
Growing wild like weeds in their black beds of ash.
In this vast undisrupted space you are never alone,
There are always voices beckoning and cajoling you forward and back
Away from that peaceful in between.
The scenes fit together seamlessly:
When the chatter finally fades beyond the receding bend
And you sit to take out your pen
Another scene starts up again
With hardly a wind's breath in between.
Even through the muted green of the second season’s rain,
The relaxed busyness continues with daunting pace.
Even the ghosts hanging around above their pink-tiled graves
Hold their ears out for something to talk about.
