Javant Biarujia


Krawang Town Square

Krawang is a large dirty town famed for its prostitutes. Saïd’s shop, with dwelling behind, faces onto a small square in the middle of town, which is nothing more than an open paddock surrounded by streets on each edge with low-rise commercial buildings alongside. At the northern end stands a mosque. An attempt to “prettify” the square at this end had been made some time ago by stringing up fairy lights along a broken barbed wire fence that once formed a border around all four sides; no doubt, the residue of a religious festival. A shepherd tended his flock during the day, while a small number of geese were penned in where the fence is still intact but too tall to allow for escape. Few, if any, lamps illuminate its depths. Nondescript trees in jumbled clumps afford shade during the day and cover at night for the nefarious goings-on, such as petty transactions for drugs or acts of prostitution. Last night at around nine o’clock, for example, I saw a man who was wearing a black rimless cap typical of the country, but which usually signifies devoutness in religion, standing on the other side of the road by the edge of the square, which was by now swathed in darkness, bargaining with a young girl who was wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts, a white cotton top of the kind schoolgirls wear, and, incongruously, blue leather women’s shoes with a stiletto heel. Although I could not hear them speak, I imagined I could follow the proceedings. At first, the man in the kopiah found the asking price too high; then, after making as though to walk away, the girl beckoned him back and they must have come to an agreement. The man looked a little embarrassed — when the weak light from a streetlamp hit them, I could guess he was aged in his thirties and, judging by his furtive and fidgety behavior, married, while the girl would have been no more than sixteen. A poor girl from the villages. I was a little taken aback by such flagrancy, although, naturally, when they turned into the square together I wondered how long it would take before they emerged once more, and how they would look. I could see all of this sitting on the shop’s porch opposite, as Saïd and some friends of his gathered for a drink and chat!


Hiring a Trishaw
Westerners often feel diffident when negotiating a ride in a trishaw, even if it is not their first time. In the back of our minds, there is always guilt over the master–servant relationship, slavery, exploitation, which we never feel when hailing a taxi at home or abroad. Some Westerners even plan ahead whom they are going to hire: some prefer to hire old men only, for they are often dressed in rags and look as though they could do with the fare. Others feel pedalling a trishaw for such men is akin to torture and leave them alone, preferring the young, muscly men instead. A cough makes us fear tuberculosis — the fear that we will catch it, not any compassion for the men whose bodies are breaking or already broken. Even so, the blue haze of Gudang Garam cigarettes, their cloves crackling with each inhalation, seems preferable to chewing betel, which turns their saliva and spit to red and accentuates their bad teeth. Bargaining, especially in the unshaded heat, is often an unwelcome chore. (How much? Am I being cheated? Though, of course, a Westerner can afford the fare no matter what the asking price. It is the same with beggars: Should I give? What’s a fair alms’-fee? Isn’t it true they disfigure themselves just to get more money?) The trishaw-driver must needs be objectified to overcome the various waves of guilt — and disgust — the Westerner feels. They are pitied by some, reviled by others, none of which is felt in the slightest by the Javanese themselves. The near-nakedness of the trishaw-men (the arduousness of the task demands that they are always men), their taut flesh and bronzed muscles, even their sunken chests, their diseased skin and their tattered clothes, are fetishised (pitiful for the altruist; heroic for the Marxist; even erotic for the prurient — though the outward signs of poverty have not changed). The trishaw-drivers themselves, however, possess a good dose of humor and apply themselves to the practical. They know what their customers want. A bécak komplit, for instance, will get you a trishaw complete with a prostitute.

At the end of the trip (flat all the way, we Westerners “pray” under our breath, with no need to consider whether to get out and walk — or even help push the vehicle), the trishaw-driver usually accepts his coins in the same manner: he extends his right hand to accept the fall of coins into his palm, with his left hand resting on his right elbow. He stoops slightly in deference and humbly submits. (It could be mock, but Westerners cannot read Easterners’ faces; nevertheless, we have seen this gesture before, in Ramayana dances we have paid to see on the tourist island of Bali.) This morning, I approached with a sense of dread the glittering row of trishaws lined up in a side street off Jalan Gadjah Mada (even though the city has banned them). I have called these brightly colored carriages with their simple canvas hoods trishaws, though strictly speaking, they are pedicabs, known all over the archipelago as bécak. Inside, on the passenger seat, the drivers snooze until they find a fare; they do not disguise their ominousness, their malignancy. I am uneasy at the way many trishaw-drivers jump out to attention as soon as they catch sight of my skin and the color of my eyes. It is their chance to make a “killing” — they know it and I know it; we have become locked in some form of unspoken and fetishistic combat which, I would go so far as to say is a form of post-colonial East-versus-West struggle for supremacy. Even if it was just my imagination, I fell unconsciously anyway into this way of thinking. (I felt the same way when I was challenged to a game of chess by a Javanese neighbor a while back. To be more accurate, I felt that he felt this way. In neighboring Thailand, where the trishaw is called a samlor and which differs from the bécak in that the driver is seated at the front, this fetishism around white skin seemed more benign to me. At night, for example, when a car or bus approached, trishaw-drivers would often move in their seat — or even get out — so that the lights of the oncoming traffic would show just how white my face was, and show just who they were carrying. I must reflect on the fact that Javanese trishaw-drivers have never recognised any “honor” in carrying a European.)

Trishaw-drivers are thus an enigma to me. They bring out an almost colonial arrogance in me I never knew I had. They are deferent after we have reached a price, but before that, they’re as bold as brass. And so I acted as an enigma myself by hopping into the trishaw at the head of the row without a word of bargaining beforehand. I pretended not to notice the shared signs and smiles between the other drivers. Yes, today, one of them at least was going to make a killing. However, what no one knew was, I knew the standard fee for the trip was a single fifty rupiah coin. I held the coin tightly in my hand until we reached the market. “Stop!” I commanded. I had to repeat myself three times before the driver pulled up right in the midst of the market stalls, letting me disembark by tipping the trishaw up a little. I tried to be as nonchalant as possible as I gave him the coin. Suddenly, the driver’s face lit up in anger — a Westerner who could well afford more, had given him what a Javanese woman who has lived her whole life in the kampung would expect to pay. “A hundred!” he spat out. “Fifty, that’s all,” I curtly replied, then turned on my heels and walked into the morning crowd, trying to ignore the proverbial dagger I could feel lodged in my back.


The Soothsayer of Glodok
The best proof of the accuracy or truth of a fortune-teller’s predictions is time. Unlike some who wait expectantly, sometimes all their life, for the golden moment they have been told is theirs, the sudden riches, the deliverance from their squalor (the staple of prophesying is nearly always money, that is, material success, combined with marriage and progeny), I rarely gave a thought to the Soothsayer of Glodok, in the backstreets of the Chinese quarter of Jakarta, where I was taken more than thirty years ago. I keep a diary — while the memory has dimmed, the ink on the page is just as it was, albeit on yellowing paper. (Remember the old proverb: the palest ink is better than the best memory.) I remember the old man I was taken to see combined letters and numbers to read the future. In between amusing himself on a guitar-like instrument, he would consult a book I presumed was the Qur’an but was actually a philosophical treatise by Avicenna. (The name Avicenna, a Latin corruption of the Arabic Ibn Sina, has reminded me of something I thought at the time but did not write down: How did the old man render the Roman alphabet into the Arabic script, and did such transliteration distort his presages? Another thought: The passage of time alters other perceptions, too. Could it be that the “old man” I visited thirty-three years ago was my age now, or even younger?)

Let me return to what I wrote in my diary on January 2, 1977: “This evening, Saïd and his uncle Fuad (younger than he) took me for some reason through a maze of little alleys behind the main thoroughfare of Jalan Gadjah Mada to visit an old man. His house, if you could call it that (although I had become used to hovels, mud, bodily functions in public, rags, leprosy, amputations), was tiny, with its interior walls and ceiling plastered in sheets of newspaper. We walked right into perhaps the only room (if the old man had a wife, she did not show herself). I was frowsted from the heat. Saïd and Fuad hesitated by the door. As if in his own little world, the old man, sitting on the floor in the middle of the dark room, was playing a musical instrument called a gambus, a kind of guitar from the Arab world, and hardly seemed to notice our presence. Fuad must have taken such silence as an invitation, for he wasted no time sitting down beside the old man and keeping time with him on a drum that must have been on the floor. They sang together. Saïd and I, their audience, took our places on the floor before them. For a moment I forgot the humidity and stuffiness as I listened to the chanting, the drum rhythms and the strings of an instrument I had never seen before. At the end of their session, Saïd explained that the old man was a soothsayer, that he could predict the future. All he needed was my name and my mother’s name. Saïd had come to find out what the future held for him and his bride. The old man started jotting down figures on a scrap of paper and consulting a book in Arabic. We waited in silence. At last, he said that although Saïd would marry several times, he would always return to his first love. Now it was my turn. I was not surprised to hear him tell me (Saïd translated the old man’s Arabic) what everyone says: I am stubborn, I am lazy. I am intelligent and quick to grasp new concepts and meanings. I have many friends, but I get bored easily. I will be rich (before I reach thirty), a high-powered executive. I am altruistic. I love to travel. I have a brother with whom I am not at peace; it would be better to keep some distance between us. He never mentioned marriage. (Saïd later told me the old man did see something else in his cosmological calculations, but stopped short of saying anything, perhaps because he and Fuad were present.).”

Most of what the old man had to say was not strictly prognostication, in my book. His flattering generalities could easily have been gleaned from any book on astrology, or his sizing me up when we arrived, or from his assumptions about all Westerners. In that way, he was no different from the portly Englishwoman Mrs Sykes (in my mind, whenever I hear her name, I always read: psychs!) in Melbourne, whom my mother regularly consulted. (When she was told one of her sons had a “black heart”, I declared that I was the guilty one, if only to illustrate my cynicism.) Toward the end of our visit, the old man said not to worry, that my happiness would grow with each coming year. “He smiled, exposing a row of yellow teeth. The teeth of a philosopher.”

It was when I read in my diary the old man’s having said each year for me would happier than the last that I remembered I have often found myself repeating this very sentiment over the years. Is it true, or have I merely been mouthing what had once been said to me on my travels by an Eastern fortune-teller? And the thing the fortune-teller saw but did not mention; was it the spectre of AIDS?

spalpeen experiment
oh joy amyls vesper fezzes ironer yet
hieratic in forenamed damascene you
engulf Yom bespeaks no Kippur frenetic
rarely the seas rigged aquanautic dead

fermented seamens new Yanks resolved
yorked in a popularised arenas asperse
ancient populous Homer our your home
aerated buttes ferns resipiscences res

ipsa loquitur icier tees referents seen is
ampler Publilius traversed arrayed blooding
viler than your syrian acumen or tutus

wet with soma your femur surer your
Siracusa seizure your savored malcontent
the perorated aspersions of patinated arenas



Three Translations from Baudelaire
(Les Petits Poèmes en Prose)

THE STRANGER
“Say, enigma, who do you love the best, your father or mother, or your sister or brother?”
“I have neither father nor mother, sister nor brother.”
“Your friends?”
“You’ve used a word whose meaning to this day is unknown to me.”
“Your country?”
“I don’t know what latitude it sits on.”
“Beauty?”
“I would have gladly loved her, goddess and immortal.”
“Gold?”
“I hate it as you hate God.”
“Um, what do you love, then, extraordinary stranger?”
“I love the clouds, scudding clouds, down over there … down over there, those marvellous clouds!”


INTOXICATION

You should always be intoxicated. It’s the only thing that matters. So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time crushing your shoulder and pushing you down to earth, you should be unrelentingly drunk.

But with what? Wine, poetry or virtue — please yourself. But be intoxicated.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, the grassy slopes of a ditch, or in the dismal solitude of your room, you should wake up and the intoxication has diminished or worn off, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, birds, clocks, everything that flees, everything that sighs, everything that rolls, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, waves, stars, birds and clocks will all reply: “It’s time to get drunk! If you don’t want to be martyred slaves to Time, get drunk, get unceasingly drunk! Wine, poetry or virtue — please yourself.”

CONNECTIONS

Nature is a temple where living pillars
sometimes breathe confused words;
we pass through forests of symbols
that eye us off with off-hand looks.

Like long echoes merging in the distance
in a dark and deep unity,
vast like night, like light,
perfumes, colors and sounds connect.

There are perfumes fresh as children’s flesh,
sweet as oboes and green as meadows —
and there are others, corrupt, rich and exultant.

Having the expansion of infinite things,
like amber, musk, benzoin and incense,
singing of the transports of sense and spirit.

This translation is dedicated in memoriam Jeanne Conn.

poem

Javant Biarujia is represented in more than 20 anthologies including Contemporary Australian Poetry, whilst his Spelter to Pewter was published by Cordite books in 2016.

 
 
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