How to Raise a Voice: A Metonymic Approach to the Private/Public Dualism

Twee screams of children echoed throughout the locker room, and after the pain in my ears calmed, I traced the intensity to the shower stall next to the one which I occupied. The screaming continued, gaining layers and volume as the father contributed complementary chords. It shocked me that rather than creating a “teachable moment” by explaining the difference between “indoor” and “outdoor” voices, the father seemed to revel in the play of testing out the strength of one’s voice. Had he no shame, awareness, sympathy, or concern for humankind?

The experience -- showering in silence while accosted by the radical, aural experiments of my neighbors – inspired me to think back to my youth. If it was not a teachable moment for my neighbor, rather than begging for mercy, I decided to re-evaluate my own perception of socially-appropriate noise levels.

I wasn’t the quietest child, nor was I apprehensive about speaking to strangers. Yet, the flustered responses of my parents and random temporary guardians imbued in me the value that public spaces are shared spaces, and it is disrespectful to those with whom we share the space if our voices compromise the peacefulness of the space. So while I might not always withhold my passive-aggressive judgements of strangers' behaviors, I voice my expressions is a manner where at least the volume can be described as unoffensive.

Remaining silent, I began to think further about the experience of growing up in a household often filled with silence. We were never one of those fabled singing families, and as I accepted the silence, growing to appreciate prolonged moments of silence, I've struggled internally to negotiate my love of conversation and shared social analysis with my discomfort at breaking silences. While listening to the child scream proudly from the stall next to me, and his father seem to encourage his child's voice, I wondered whether my discomfort with speaking out and singing is due in part to something inherited from my family and community. We are not afraid to speak out about our social concerns, but, perhaps, we also do not find comfort or joy in the sound of our own voices. My talkativeness is symptomatic of my curiosity, but it has never filled the vast space of my family's home.

Having grown up in a house that provided private spaces for each member of the family, my comfort with silence is bolstered by my appreciation of personal space. We often moved through the house quietly, crossing each other's paths. Here, as soon as I drive into the entrance of the boarding house, the children who live at the front shout my name, "Om Colin!" (or Uncle Colin), and the guys hanging out by their rooms ask where I am coming from and what I am doing. They ask out of politeness, and the polite chit-chat has a way of affirming our concern for each other. Already comfortable with the continuous conversation, they lean in  the open doorways of the rooms as they relax, while I quickly shut my door and soak up the silence and stillness. Despite my immersion here, the closeness and intensity of noisy bodies continues to challenge me.

Indonesia's quickly growing middle class is providing more spacious, private, family homes, where children and parents are experiencing new kinds of silence in urban spaces. But traditionally, children are raised without much -- if any -- private space. They are always with at least one adult or a pack of peers, and the presence of such companionship is enhanced by physical affection. Holding hands, draping arms over shoulders, and rubbing arms, backs, and thighs are common ways of expressing friendship and they are carried over into adulthood. It felt odd when an acquaintance massaged my shoulder while inquiring about my experiences in Jogja, and I was initially shocked when a friend grabbed my thigh to get my attention while listening to live jazz and drinking beer with a group of friends.

In contrast to my expectations for privacy and silence, the vast majority of my friends here grew up without privacy or silence and find comfort in physical and sonorous contact. Standing in my stall, in the gym where I usually find respite from the chaos of Yogya's streets, I was reminded that the financially-exclusive gym is still a public space, despite the sense of privacy I derive from the quiet, calm atmosphere. I associate my intolerance of closeness, touching, and noise with the degree of privacy which I was given as a child, and I think there are links between exposure to bodies and noise and the degree to which one is part of a "public". And maybe this is a problem, because I'm suggesting that a public only exists beyond a critical mass -- there must be a certain number or density of people to require a management of shared spaces to a degree where individuals lose privacy and must compensate with tolerance for those around them. A shared enjoyment of voices and physical affection will make life easier when one does not have access to private, personal space, but that does not mean that everyone who lives without privacy is comfortable with constant noise and touching...

As I am confronted increasingly by social inquiries by voices which demonstrate their strength over the constant growl of motorbikes, and unexpected physical affection, the difference between private and public is articulated as being able to escape the contact of others versus tolerating -- or maybe even learning to appreciate -- the contact of others. To me, a public space offers an unlimited possibility of interactions with individuals from every possible background, and I contrast it with private space where I am allowed to be alone and offered as much calmness and stability as my mind will allow. Standing alone inside the shower stall, the screams of the child tore down the four walls around me, re-situating me outside of a private space. Although I wanted to shower, change, and get ready to go back out into the heat, traffic and noise in silence, I challenged myself to tolerate and maybe even enjoy the liveliness and potential chaos of a public space.

Blizzard or Monsoon??

Once I'm on my motorbike, I have a stubborn momentum which will not be re-routed. As the rain intensified, dropping in what felt like solid sheets, I stayed the course. I had scheduled a meeting with colleagues at the Center for History and Political Ethics, and I won't let the weather control my schedule. If my colleagues were in the same position, they would never have left their home. It is a fact here that the chill and dampness accrues against and within our bodies as we travel through a rainstorm. Thus, the decision to go out is paired with the fate of "catching one's death", a "cold", or "masuk angin" -- the entering wind. When the wind enters one's body, it results in chills, a fever, sniffles, and fatigue. Countless meetings have been cancelled because of rain; nobody wants to risk being vulnerable to that wind. I often feel like the only risk-taking individual with the audacity to challenge the wind.

The ride quickly grew dangerous as the roads filled with water. The backed-up drains burped up brown waste, and water began flowing across the platform on my motorbike where I rest my feet. Anxious about the height of my tailpipe and the rapidly rising floodwaters, I accelerated, sending waves across the street. The water continued to rise as I approached the campus, and the large speed bumps served to slow the current of water as it reached the height of each, eventually spilling over into the next low section of macadam. Dropping off each elongated speed bump felt like diving recklessly from a sandbar into an unknown depth of water.

I made it safely to campus, and 3 hours later, I'm still sitting in the office, listening to the rain.

I can't wait for dry season!

The Afternoon Matinee

Thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk
bang babangbang bang... babababang bang
pow tchiiii-thunk

Blood pulses quickly from the gunshot wound, and I keep jogging, my feet padding along the path, thunk-thunking. Somehow I keep running, neither towards nor away from the violent scene. The CIA operatives were attempting to disarm some Muslim extremists, and they started shooting right in front of me during my daily run -- on a treadmill at the posh Jogja Plaza hotel.

A major perk of working out in the hotel's gym is the projection screen in the cardio room.  Everyday, as I jog, I'm anesthetized by premium American television: HBO, Cinemax, and E -- except when the remote is wrested away and the channel is changed to the local news, which, mimicking Jerry Springer, seems to focus on weird outbreaks of girl-fights in high schools. The American shows and movies are a welcoming respite from Indonesia's slapstick humor, though the quality oscillates, and only on lucky days am I delivered engaging cinema.

I've been fortunate to catch some intense movies, which have provided surprisingly great running-entertainment. Yet, the movies I appreciate aren't universally enjoyed in the gym. It was difficult to watch the violent shooting scenes of No Country For Old Men amongst my fellow cardio-fanatics. I couldn't watch without wondering how the film might be accepted as a representation of life in America, and, thus, if any of the story accurately portrays the experiences of real people. The relatively slow, intense tempo, which for me is oddly similar to certain gamelan music, doesn't seem to be a natural workout stimulant, but I maintained my tight, anxious, neocolonial grasp on the remote control.

Similarly, earlier today, I watched The Kingdom as I jogged. I wasn't familiar with the movie prior to my workout, and was a bit surprised to find an action/drama dealing with terrorism in the Middle East. Indonesia has an active film censorship board, and some strange things get cut out of the viewer's consciousness. I wasn't sure how the portrayal of Islamic fundamentalism-related terrorism would be received in Indonesia. Although the government takes a staunch anti-terrorist stance, usually siding with the US government and military in the "War on Terror", I imagined that an Islamic-majority nation might be concerned with vilifying Islamic conservatism.

Indonesia experiences its own rare expressions of irrational violence, which is quickly rationalized as religious-fundamentalist terrorism. While there are factions of extremist, conservative Muslims in Indonesia, and some may resort to violence, the government -- with its odd, long history of friendly relations with the US -- is often quick to categorize violence as a terrorist act, and to further classify it with the "enemies in the War on Terror".

Now I'm just a kid from the suburbs, so I'm not privy to the same documents as the FBI, CIA and Indonesian Military. I must bow to their exclusive knowledge, and hope that they are portraying things as accurately as possible. In a way, I need to keep the representations created by the government separate from those crafted by Hollywood. As I run on my treadmill watching anonymous Islamic fanatics shoot and bomb Americans -- harbingers of Democracy or Neocolonial-Totalitarian Militia? -- I can focus on the quality of entertainment and stop thinking about the complexities of the society in which I find myself daily.

Killing Them Softly (Part of the "Secrets We Shouldn't Share" series)

 Two dark, hollow eyes stared at me -- well, one open mouth stared at me, and two dark, hollow eyes stared out, one to the east and one to the west. Like the remora to my whale shark, I thought that our symbiosis was simple -- I maintain a relatively soap-free environment in the water basin, and the beta fish eats any foreign matter that falls, jumps or wriggles into my bathing water. But looking around the sharp edges of its hungry mouth into the sorrowful corona of its convex eyes, I realized it needed more out of our relationship -- namely, a more consistent source of food.

I know, it seems so obvious: feed your fish. But I bought this sucker because I had an infestation of larvae in my basin, and when I was told to buy a beta fish, no one told me that it would greedily eat all of the larvae, leaving itself in an isolated, foodless environment. I don't want my fish friend to go hungry, but manufactured fish food does NOT smell good, and there is noooo way that I'm sprinkling a new, chum-scented cologne into my bathwater. My dislike of antiperspirants provides enough of an olfactory challenge in my daily life -- I don't need to also smell like a dingy aquarium shop. And so I watched my fish get skinnier and skinnier, until I could no longer plead innocent obliviousness. Fish? What fish? Skinny? What do you mean? Well, slender, maybe... but, really? Too skinny? I don't know...

Determined to feed my aquatic-friend, and unwilling to purchase and release additional mosquito larvae into my water basin, I've taken up an unsavoury practice:

murder in the form of insecticide.

It is rainy season here, and there are a lot of mosquitoes buzzing around. I'm going to kill some anyway, as I attempt to stop the theft of my blood. Rather than wiping away the remains, I tenderly nudge them with the tip of my finger until they stick, hanging loosely. I walk into the bathroom, careful not to shake loose the corpse, and tap the tip against the meniscus, simultaneously loosing the body onto the surface of the water and sending out the Morse code for "Dinner's Ready". For a moment, I feel like a daring Paleontologist hired to hand-feed goats and sheep to the Velociraptors* in Jurassic Park -- except that I am feeding smashed insects to a scrawny fish in my boarding house bathroom. Rather than resembling a bronzed, rugged scientist, I've developed a pale, nerdy-likeness with Rick Moranis's Seymour from The Little Shop of Horrors -- his doppelganger in an Indonesian alternate universe.

Now, I do have some standards for this process. It is, after all, still my bathwater, and while I may let a fish swim through it, I won't throw just anything into the water. Two laws guide my practice -- the insect body must remain intact, and it must be a dry kill. We've all had that moment where we catch a mosquito during -- or recently after -- a feeding, and the smack of the palm is met with a bloody splat. And while I have accepted that my bathwater might not be so sterile, I can't bring myself to drop a blood-soaked carcass into the water. So the second rule keeps foreign fluids out of the water, and the first minimizes the number of legs and wings floating around in the aftermath of a feeding.

And now for the scariest details: Having watched my fish regain its health through our continued feedings, I am determined to maximize these feedings. Thus, I've softened the impact of my slap against the mosquitoes, hoping to minimize the number that are smashed or that splurt blood. It is with a newfound tenderness that I hunt the mosquitoes across my bedroom, seeing them not as pests or enemies, but as tiny teammates who sacrifice themselves for the health of my fish. Cue the bongos: I've entered my own twisted version of The Lion Kings "Circle of Life", where I encourage mosquitoes to enter my room so that I may kill them softly and feed them to my beta fish, ensuring that he will live on to eat any of their larvae, should any of them survive long enough in my bedroom to reproduce and violate my water basin with their squiggly young.

*Can you believe that the spell-check function disagrees that this is a valid word?

Structural [Dys]functionalism

{ERROR}
Page unable to load {ERROR}

For a moment, blinking at the screen, frustrated and cloudy-minded, it is as if the maelstrom of ideas and disjointed schedules in my mind escaped through osmosis into the hotspot ether, tempering the quality of my connection to the internet. Webpages will only half-load before failing, or offer up an error message before continuing to load in a plain text version. The less structured my world becomes, the more rigid my body becomes, tensing in its stress response.

Drivers here are often described as passive, since they seem to flow, relaxed, through the streets, seemingly as unconcerned with traffic signs as with schedules. The drift of motorbike traffic undulates, floating in a rapidly shifting current, around cars, horse-carts, rickshaws, and conversationalists who stop their vehicles to practice their skills. Amidst the chaos and pollution, peoples' faces seem placid, if not serene.

To contrast, I sit rigidly on my seat, shoulders tense, gripping the handles of my bike with anxious intensity. I speed not so much to keep my schedule, but to weave my way through the mass as fast as possible. Struggling to get around the clusters of passive motorbikes, puttering down the avenues, my eyes seem to register the same messages typed across their backs: {ERROR} {
ERROR} {EFFICIENCY COLLAPSE}

Only after arriving at my destination, tense, pulse-beating -- with only a marginal sense of success at having navigated my way as efficiently as possible -- that I realize the {ERROR} message is in my mind. I may be driving effectively, ensuring a better schedule and minimizing my participation in what I have seen as chaos, but the stress incurred on my body is my punishment.  It is because of my inability to accept the roads as they are and just drive as another passive motorist that I will actually take years off of my life.

I don't have to love erratic internet service and chaotic traffic, but I must at least learn to accept it. If I can stop myself from tensing-up, and learn to relax a little, I can slowly shut down the remnants of my Nationalist, Xenophobic character.
So, no more : "This wouldn't have happened in America", or "In America, it would function this way..."

Up the hill?

It has proven tenuous, my situation within this training. When Megan mentioned the multifaith workshop on supporting LGBT individuals and people living with HIV/AIDS, I wasn't sure how to feel. I was nervous about the combination of the two communities, and I wanted to make sure that the workshop did not replicate earlier cultural narratives about LGBT as illness, HIV/AIDS as Gay diseases, and HIV/AIDS as death sentences. At Haverford, I was able to take courses on Gender, Queer Movements, Identity and Representation, as well as courses on HIV/AIDS. My experiences in Cape Town increased my awareness of the two topics, so I decided to offer my perspective, and hope that I could contribute something that isn't already over-represented.

The workshop takes place in Kaliurang, a hill resort town nestled on the side of Mt. Merapi, the volcano that puffs away on Yogya's horizon. The workshop consists of six days of lectures and discussions, followed by four days of live-ins where the participants move in and live with LGBT individuals and people living with HIV/AIDS. I am responsible for a series of presentations about gender and queer theory, and I've spent too much of the last week preparing powerpoint presentations (I HATE POWERPOINT). Yesterday, after stopping in the office, I grabbed a change of clothes, my toothbrush, hopped on my motorbike, and drove straight north, going up and up and up and up. The drive is beautiful, exiting the heat, traffic and pollution of Yogya, heading further into forest. Finally, after a grueling hour ride (for my bike! it wasn't so bad for me!), I pulled into the driveway for the Inn and stumbled into a room full of motivated, young activists representing the six government-approved religions (Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Confucianism).

Coming to the end of the second day, and knowing that I will leave in the morning to head back to my life in Yogya, I'm exhausted yet happy to have met some interesting, engaging individuals. It has been interesting watching them grapple with social-constructionist theories of sex, gender and sexuality, and it will be a relief to return to my research, which feels much calmer in comparison.

time time time

time for an update. proof that I'm still pitter-pattering around Yogya. I've reached an apex of local responsibilities, and haven't seemed to manage the writing and energy required for these projects in balance with the writing and energy to narrate my experiences to friends and family. I've greatly appreciated the time people have shared in reading my blog, and doubly appreciate any responses. Selfishly, I'm trying to maintain this as my most substantial mode of contact with the people I care about in America, so as to minimize time spent re-writing update email, or mass emails which gather odd response branches in my gmail inbox.
Wah. okay, so in this brief excuse-post, I'm already accumulating some stream-of-consciousness gravity.

final note (before I return later to compose something more thoughtful):
I've been missing:
friends and family!
good beer!
crispy french fries!
falafel
all-you-can-eat vegan dimsum
Philadelphia!
bicycling
farmers markets
costume parties
fromageries (philly cheese heavens!)
spring-summer-fall in the city
transbridge buses from frenchtown to Oli
the Lovin' Oven
local yogurt
philly art

But I still love here:
$1.50 current movies at the super-nice, fancy theater
TEMPE
my motorbike
extensively-intellectual city (academics and students over-run this place)
$1.50 haircuts, including pre- AND post- washes and scalp massages
new friends
workouts with Lolly at the Yogya Plaza gym (including swimming and laying by the pool)
rolling my R's
the Arrrrt Arrrrrchives!
getting paid to do rrrrrresearch!
endless summer and a smoking volcano on the horizon
Milas and everything on their menu!
Conferences and trying to compose abstracts
marrrrtabak telurrrr
yogya art

wow. feeling slightly split-personality right now.

Separation, Re-connection

It's the last day of an 8 day visit, and we are relaxing in Ubud before my parents fly to Melbourne. We visited a Hindu temple surrounded by monkeys, clutching the cliffs at the Southern tip of the island, and we had drinks surrounded by people in bikinis and speedos at Tommy Suharto's (the son of Indonesia's former military dictator) new development project carved out of those same cliffs. We were harassed by con-men in a dismal Lombok port, and had a run-in with a sea snake. We visited a town flooded with egrets who are considered to be the reincarnation of victims of the mass killings that took place in 1965, and then we had a family spa day. Everything seemed to work out, and we had some great meals and plenty of rest in some snazzy hotels.

It is a privilege to receive the funding and support to live abroad, and it is always interesting to share this experience with my family. I'm sad to see them leave, since there is always more that I want them to see, but it is also time for me to focus on my research.

Resolutions

No more:
-visiting schools here. I'm done with performing in front of classes and being begged to "be our native [-english speaker]".
-eating an entire, deep-fried martabak telur by myself. eek.
-impulse-buying clothes! ahhhh.
-eating an entire roll of oreos. eek.
-being afraid to put myself first.
-feeling sad when I see curious people staring at me with angry faces.
-speaking English

More:
-photography
-talking to strangers
-speaking Bahasa Indonesia
-Going out when I feel tired and just want to lay in bed.
-eating fruit -- especially jackfruit!!

Jalan Jalan

In a community where it is polite to ask everyone you meet, even if just passing by, "Where are you going?" or "From where are you coming?", it isn't expected that one actually delineate all of their daily activities. And as a Bule (literally "albino", but in common use it refers to foreigners -- Caucasian foreigners or Japanese in particular) with skin that stands in contrast to the masses, I receive an excessive amount of attention. With this attention comes what feels like an oppressive number of inquisitions about my comings and goings. This polite expression of curiosity and concern begins to feel like surveillance -- especially if one still feels as if he must respond comprehensively to each. One of the earliest and most-practical phrases a person can learn in Bahasa Indonesia is the generic jalan-jalan, which literally translates to "pathway-pathway" and carries the same meaning as "hanging out" with a touch of "wandering". And it is a perfectly acceptable answer with minimal demand for further information. When I first arrived in Indonesia in 2004, I was overwhelmed by the questions, but the words "jalan jalan" seem to escape my mouth before the inquisitor even finishes his "Mau ke mana?" (Where do you want to go?) or "Dari mana?" (From where are you coming?).

While I welcome the phrase as a brisk response, in a city full of students, it takes on the character of a casual, aimless lifestyle. As I meet more contacts for my research, and people ask me what I am doing -- and this time they are really asking -- I want more and more to say something that expresses the opposite of jalan-jalan. I want to say, "I'm being productive", but that isn't really something one can say without explaining how one is productive. And rather than experience the mangling of a foreign language as I attempt to explain that I've been, haha, studying the language, reading important texts that aren't available in the part of the world from which I came, and gathering contacts, I feel the shy, insecure urge to mutter, "oh, jalan-jalan aja" ("oh, just hanging out, here and there").

Tonight, at a book launch for an Australian academic who translated and edited her BA thesis on a "radical", local art collective into an Indonesian text, I bumped into a researcher from PUSdEP, my sponsor institution. He had been a member of the collective, and as someone familiar with the artists, curators, critics and academics present, he was happy to walk around introducing me to everyone. While it was inspiring to meet such interesting, intelligent individuals, I felt a pressure to reciprocate those qualities of character and to exude them while explaining my presence. Yet, as both a critical thinker and a prisoner of humility, my initial desire is to say, "I'm just a kid trying to catch up and figure things out here". Gradually, I'm getting better at quelling my desire to belittle my research and reduce it to an extended jalan-jalan, and I can explain that I'm carrying out extensive literary and ethnographic research on the topic of public art as an attempt to understand how "public space" is created and understood in Yogyakarta, and how it reflects local, complicated, multiple "publics". Even when explaining it in English, it can sound confusing or useless. While people from academic backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences tend to grasp the importance of understanding how a "public" is created in the image of a universalistic ideal, which often overshadows a reality plagued with exploitation and marginalization, I've drawn quite a few blank stares, asking "what is the point?".

At this moment, I cannot adequately delineate the point. My hypothesis is that a number of inequalities exist, latent in the various productions of a "public" in Yogyakarta, and I hope that my analysis will lead to a critical awareness with the use of the term "public" and the potential for greater equality in the creation of public spaces. We will see if my jalan-jalan-ing leads to any of this...