Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani

telephone to let you know that this week’s boat has been cancelled so your parcel won’t leave for another ten days. ‘When Indonesian institutions have to line up at the gates of heaven, the post office will be let in first,’ one old postmaster told me, and I agreed.
    The chicken and I found the Waikabubak post office crowded. It was payment day for the families with poverty cards. The key to Indonesia’s nascent social security system, these cards provide access to subsidized rice, free medical care and cash payments. They are highly prized, and because of a little payment here or a small favour there, do not always go to the poorest families. Still, today’s queue was made up mostly of people who looked like they came from the traditional villages that were dotted on the hilltops around town. Since it was the end of Wulla Poddu, they were mostly dressed for the festivities to come, the women in woven sarongs, the men in waist-cloths and head-ties; none of them batted an eyelid at me and my squawking chicken.
    Then in walked Fajar, the Javanese doctor whom I had met in the share-taxi from the airport; I’d since had supper with him once or twice, and I was pleased to see him. I greeted him enthusiastically. He looked me up and down. Like most of the other clients in the post office, I was dressed for the party in Tarung. I was wearing my best sarong. Slung from my shoulder was a palm-weave pouch containing sirih pinang , betel nut and limestone powder. This combination stains mouths into scarlet gashes, rots teeth into black stumps, and is the common currency of polite interaction in rural Sumba. You can’t climb on to someone’s veranda without being offered sirih pinang , and you shouldn’t climb on to someone’s veranda without having some to offer in return. In one hand, I held a parcel I wanted to send to Jakarta. In the other, I gripped a flapping chicken by its ankles. Fajar turned away, embarrassed.
    It was as though I had joined the other side. It was not just that I was ridiculous, that I had so quickly ‘gone native’. It was something worse. Along with all the other dangerous, ignorant peasants who were sitting quietly waiting for their social security payments, I was sullying the post office. We were bringing that distasteful old world of arcane traditions and primitive beliefs into the space inhabited by modern, functional Indonesia. I began to feel positively uncomfortable. The upside-down chicken somehow contrived to shit on the post office floor.
    I’d get a similar reaction whenever I went into one of Waikabubak’s many photo shops to get prints made for my new friends. I’d hand over my USB drive to a spiky-haired Chinese boy or to a teenager in a purple jilbab. They’d open up portraits of Mama Bobo and her family, photos of me with a group of rato , pictures of chickens or buffalo lying in pools of blood, and they’d look at me quizzically. ‘These photos? Really, you want prints of these ones?’ It was okay to take pictures of the quaint traditional houses and of the megalithic tombs that dot the villages and the landscapes of Sumba, but these people, these rituals . . . They are relics of a primitive past that we’d rather not think about. They are nothing to do with our Indonesia.

    I thought back to my first encounter with Fajar, when I had laughed at all the men wearing their machetes under the banner reminding us of a ban on machetes. Since then, I’d seen machetes used to slaughter animals, to make drums, to hack open coconuts, to sharpen pencils.
    I had also realized that the dismembered corpse in the photo Fajar had shown me was not an isolated case.
    Violence seems to be woven into the fabric of this island, despite the best efforts of the soldiers, missionaries and bureaucrats who have trickled through since Dutch times. It’s one of the reasons the people of Sumba still cling to their fortified hilltop villages; inconvenient for the women who have to spend three or