Making a Rare Connection in East Java

The Suramadu Bridge

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe 04/01/11

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/making-a-rare-connection-in-east-java/415023

“You know, I used to work breaking stones,” says Sutia, a 25-year-old Madurese woman, as she reclines in the shade of her little tented cafe beside the approach road to the Suramadu Bridge. “Really, just that, just breaking stones into little pieces for building. Now I have a warung. Nice, right?”
A steady stream of cars, buses and bikes roars past, heading south for Surabaya from the Madura hinterland. Every so often a vehicle pulls over beside the long rank of warungs and souvenir stalls, and a gaggle of perspiring sightseers clamber out, squinting in the hot sun, looking for a length of Madurese batik, a bowl of soto, or a kitsch tee shirt commemorating the enormous bridge they are about to cross.
Eying the potential customers, Sutia grins. “Madura is getting business from Suramadu,” she says.
Sutia and dozens of her compatriots from the villages around Kwanyar are reaping the rewards of an unlikely little tourism boom, a windfall of one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in Indonesia in recent years – the Suramadu Bridge, 5.4 kilometers of steel and concrete stitching two of the archipelago’s most uneasy neighbors tightly together.

The great green loadstone of Java and its unruly outlier, the long, low island of Madura, are separated by a narrow channel. But the gulf between the two islands is enormous, for Madura has a decidedly unenviable reputation.
In centuries past it was a wellspring of rebel princes who ransacked royal Javanese courts or turned mercenary for the Dutch East India Company. In more recent years economic migrants from its poor, dry countryside have crossed the straits to bring their gritty work ethic, their tasty soto and sate to towns and cities across the archipelago. But according to myths touted by many Indonesians, especially those from Java, the people of Madura are uncouth, uncultured, and possibly dangerous. Their homeland has always been a place to avoid at all costs.
But in June 2009 all that changed with the opening of the long planned, long delayed Suramadu Bridge. Comprising 28,000 tons of steel and 600,000 tons of steel alloy, and requiring an estimated outlay of Rp4.7 trillion, the bridge joins the northeast suburbs of Surabaya to the south coast of Madura (the name – Suramadu – is a contraction of Surabaya and Madura).
Suramadu was intended to encourage economic development in Madura, which was previously connected to the outside world only by rickety, rusty ferries. But the bridge is such a striking piece of engineering – with enormous suspension spans and a fine view from the apex – that it has become a tourist attraction in its own right. And with travelers from Surabaya and beyond now making tentative weekend outings across the water to discover that all those awful stories about Madura were wild exaggerations, locals have experienced a business bonanza.
Within days of the bridge opening to traffic the first stalls had sprung up along the sides of the four-lane northern approach road that connects the crossing to the nearby town of Bangkalan. Now, 18 months later, there’s a linear city of tented cafes and stalls stretching some two kilometers inland on both sides of the highway.

A little way up the road from Sutia’s warung a 34-year-old local man called Ayub is minding his stall. “If you come here on Sunday it’s so crowded,” he says; “there are tours from Surabaya, from Central Java. There was even a tour from Lombok the other day.” According to Ayub some of these travelers are heading for the sacred Muslim tombs at Bangkalan and Sumenep; a few might even be venturing for the untouched beaches and beautiful countryside of the island’s far northeast. “But most of them just want to look at the bridge. They come across, turn around and go back,” he says.
All of the stalls are owned by people from the immediate vicinity, and the whole network has been set up informally.
“You don’t need to pay anything to build a stall here,” says Ayub’s friend, a young woman called Juli; “this is the people’s land!”
And with minimal outlay on a few lengths of bamboo and a few strips of tarpaulin, a whole new world of opportunity has opened.
“Locals here used to work as various things,” says Ayub; “some were farmers, some had no job; a lot emigrated.” Ayub himself spent two years working in Malaysia, another two years as a food hawker in Jakarta, and more time crewing a cargo boat plying the waters of the Java Sea. But now, with a wife and two children in a village within walking distance of his new stall, he has happily come home. “Suramadu gave me that chance,” he says.
Outside more shiny SUVs and are pulling up. Housewives from Malang and families from Sidoarjo are bargaining over take-home trinkets.
“Java people used to be scared of Madura,” says Ayub, “because they never came here, they didn’t know. It used to be rare for anyone to come here without an important reason because it was slow and expensive. It cost more than Rp100,000 for a bus on the ferry; it’s only Rp60,000 now. They can come just for a look, so they know Madurese people aren’t so bad!”

The only losers have been the hawkers who once worked the vehicle ferries that slithered between Surabaya’s Tanjung Perak port, and the old gateway to Madura at Kamal, several kilometers west of the bridge. A few ferries still make the crossing, but traffic has slowed to a trickle and some of these traders have shifted their attention to Suramadu, and now wander between the stalls as they used to ply the decks of the ferries.
The prime spots have long been snapped up, but the expansion continues with new warungs popping up far inland. According to locals both sides of the road have their advantages – the inbound northern side is where most visitors stop to eat, but the outbound southern side is the favored spot for souvenir shopping and photo opportunities.

A kilometer from the bridge on that southern flank, where the road rises over the first bank of limestone hills, stands Pak Imam’s warung. Twelve months ago his was the final stall, but today it merely marks the halfway point of the strip. Pak Imam, who worked as a motorbike taxi driver in a nearby village before the bridge opened, has watched the burgeoning city of stalls grow around his recently refurbished warung where he sells tea, coffee, and traditional Madurese soto – yellow soup with rice and meat.
“Madura used to be an isolated place,” Pak Imam says. “The people here didn’t know anything; we were just farmers – or fishermen if we lived by the sea. But now we have the bridge we will know about the world; we won’t be ignorant anymore.”
From the threshold of the warung, with its rickety bamboo benches, steaming soto cauldron, and luridly colored soft drinks, the high-rises of central Surabaya show through the haze to the south. Pak Imam, noting the speed of development that has met the arrival of the bridge, acknowledges the potential downsides.
“Of course, if Madura becomes like Surabaya there will be traffic jams and pollution and we’ll all be stressed like city people,” he says, “but if nothing changed we wouldn’t know anything and we’d just be farmers and fishermen.
“There’s no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. What I mean is nothing is all good or all bad; every good thing brings some bad with it, but as far as I’m concerned this bridge is mostly good, not just for Madura – for everyone...”

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Truth and Fiction on a Dutch Colonial Plantation

Review of The Tea Lords By Hella S Haasse

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 27/12/2010

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/arts/truth-and-fiction-on-a-dutch-colonial-plantation/413787

The Tea Lords by Hella S. Haasse “is a novel, but it is not ‘fiction’”, writes the author in a vital note, tucked away at the very end of the book.  Factual histories often focus on the big figures – princes, revolutionaries and governors-general – and leave the lives of the bit players to writers of historical fiction.  The Tea Lords, straddling the strange gap between these genres, focuses on the “side-lights” of Indonesia’s colonial past – the lives, loves and losses of a dynasty of Dutch tea planters in the uplands of West Java.

            Hella S. Haasse is the grande damme of Dutch literature.  Now 92, she was born in Batavia (modern Jakarta) and spent the first two decades of her life in what was then the Dutch East Indies.  During a sixty-year career she has written many novels, some drawing on her own background in Indonesia.  But in The Tea Lords she has done something a little different.

            The book – originally published in Dutch in 1992, but only now available in a crisp English translation by Ina Rilke – spans the lifetime of Rudolf Kerkhoven, scion of an established family of planters in Java.  The book opens as the young, idealistic, and ambitious Kerkhoven completes his studies in Holland in the 1860s and returns to Java to be inducted into the mysteries of the tea trade.  But the core of the story lies in Rudolf’s struggles to establish his own remote plantation, Gamboeng, in the damp uplands south of Bandung, and in his marriage to Jenny, daughter of another old-established Dutch dynasty in Java.  

            All this makes for the bones of a conventional family saga – and indeed, that is how The Tea Lords is arranged, with a galaxy of cousins and uncles scattered over the green Javanese mountainsides, with sibling rivalry, overbearing patriarchs, and dark secrets.

            But Haasse did not simply invent these people.  A man named Rudolf Kerkhoven really did found a plantation at Gamboeng (tea is still grown in the area today), and really did marry a woman called Jenny, and the book is driven by large excerpts from their own letters and journals.  This original approach at times makes The Tea Lords a frustrating read. 

In her afterword Haasse notes that the quotations have not been invented; rather they have been “arranged to meet the demands of a novel”.  But this can lead to confusion – how much has the author meddled with the chronology? How often has she edited what appear as verbatim excerpts?  And in its attempts to combine aspects of both fiction and non-fiction, the book sometimes stumbles.  Passages about the technicalities of tea growing and the background of the main families, which in a history book could have been comfortably described, here have to be forced unrealistically into the mouths of the characters.  Thoughts and emotions, hinted at in the original letters, take a strangely flat tone when Haasse expands them, and the blurring of the line between real quotations and invented dialogue often leaves the drive of the narrative hidden behind a mist of ambiguity.  It’s hard not to feel that The Tea Lords would have been stronger as either pure fiction, or pure history.

            But despite this, the disjointed strangeness of the book’s structure manages – perhaps unintentionally – to convey the disjointed strangeness of the lives it depicts.  Whole generations of Dutch men and women – like the characters in this book – were conditioned to think of a far-off Holland as “home” while living out most of their lives on some steamy plantation in Java.  They did not consider themselves the active agents of a colonial project as we might regard them now, and in detailing their private concerns, their petty arguments, and their fears Haasse conveys this idea convincingly.  It is unfortunate that the Indonesians who feature in the book are little more than crude caricatures of loyal retainers and devoted maids, but the author didn’t have their letters and diaries to draw from, so this was probably inevitable.

            The greatest strength of The Tea Lords is in its atmosphere: if the conversations are sometimes stilted, the descriptions of the landscapes are anything but, and a powerful sense of the sheer, overwhelming greenness of the Javanese countryside pervades the book.  The portrayal of Jenny Kerkhoven’s fears, frustrations and eventual descent towards madness, meanwhile, offers an unsettling glimpse into the darker currents beneath the petty world of the colonial social scene. 

In the final third the book subtly changes pace.  Haasse begins to quote ever larger chunks from the archives, often without bothering to embed them in her own prose.  Yet as the 20^th century opens and the key characters move towards old age they suddenly take stronger shape and become more sympathetic, and the terrible toll that plantation life has taken on their relationships and their happiness becomes clear. 

The Tea Lords’ unusual nature does at times make it a difficult book, and readers may well be left with many frustratingly unanswered questions about the real-life people who inspired it.  But by the time the book reaches its quietly sad closing scene – in the cool, green forest of Gamboeng – it no longer really matters whether it is truth or fiction.

© Tim Hannigan 2010