Review of Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani
Originally published in the Asian Review of Books, 22/06/14
Indonesia is vast,
stretching more than 5,000 kilometers from top to toe and home to almost
quarter of a billion people. And yet for much of its recent history it has had
an international media profile far smaller than its status as the world’s
fourth most populous nation deserves. Newspaper readers in America, Europe, and
even much of Asia could be forgiven for thinking that Indonesia is a place
where little happens besides the occasional natural disaster. When it comes to
English-language books, meanwhile, Indonesia has largely been the preserve of
scholars and specialists. The last general travelogue about the country was
probably John Keay’s Indonesia: From Sabang to Merauke, and that
was nearly two decades ago.
But
in the last few years there have been hints of a change. With its burgeoning
middle class and impressive growth figures, some commentators have begun
proclaiming Indonesia a rising economic superpower, set to take to the podium
alongside India and China. If such a rise to prominence really comes to pass it
may well prompt a rush of books attempting to explain the place to outsiders,
and Elizabeth Pisani and her publishers have got in ahead of the field with Indonesia,
Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation.
* * *
At first glance Indonesia,
Etc. looks like a book of the familiar sort in which a Western travel
writer descends on a far-flung country for a few months to produce a “portrait
of the nation” complete with potted history and pithy descriptions of grueling
bus rides – and probably a certain amount of oversimplification. But unlike
some travel writers of the past Pisani is exquisitely well-qualified for the
task in hand.
Her
relationship with Indonesia, the country she regards as her “bad boyfriend”,
has been a long one. She first lived there as a Reuters journalist under
Suharto’s New Order government, and then as an epidemiologist working on HIV
for the post-New Order Ministry of Health. These qualifications, and her
decision to draw inspiration from the epidemiologist’s principle that “the best
way to get a picture of what’s going on in a large population is to draw a
sample at random”, have enabled her to produce a formidably insightful and
engaging book on Indonesia for a general readership.
Beginning
at Sumba in the southeast, Pisani traced a meandering route north through
Maluku and Sulawesi, onwards to Sumatra and Kalimantan, before finally
descending on Java. She travelled hard and light, and in gloriously informal
fashion, often boarding ferries with no particular destination in mind. She was
on the road for just over a year, and along the way she took up any number of
offers of a place to stay with chance-met strangers.
Pisani’s
fluency in Bahasa Indonesia, the Indonesian national language, gives the
encounters with village school teachers, fishermen and minibus drivers a depth
that would be missing if they had to pass through the warping prism of English,
and they form the foundation of the book. She uses these encounters to explore
many facets of modern Indonesia – corruption; environmental issues; separatism;
poverty and more – and she is able to bring to such topics the deep knowledge
of someone who has worked within Indonesian government and society, but who
retains the objective eye of an outsider.
Occasionally
the blend of travelogue and critical assessment creates a slight tension: an
armchair traveler might feel a little left behind by a lengthy discussion of
political patronage, while a reader seeking serious insight might be rather
nonplussed when the latter segues into a description of New Year celebrations
with backpackers on the Banda islands. But for the most part Pisani’s brisk,
journalism-forged prose—and her sense of humor—will carry readers from both
sides of the coin happily from island to island. The descriptive passages on
markets, landscapes and boat trips are thoroughly convincing, and she captures
perfectly the peculiar mix of torment and pleasure that marks a five-day ferry
trip through Maluku – with bad karaoke and perfect sunsets.
* * *
Throughout Indonesia,
Etc., Pisani adds helpful notes of caution to all the recent talk about the
country’s economic ascendency, drawing attention to the new layers of
corruption and inefficiency created by devolution of power to the districts,
and highlighting the chronic infrastructure problems. She pulls no punches in
criticizing Indonesia’s woeful educational deficiencies. This is a country with
near-universal literacy—a legacy of the paternalistic New Order regime—and
smaller average class sizes than the USA, but which routinely comes close to
the bottom in international league tables of numeracy and reading skills.
She
also highlights the phenomenon of credit-fuelled gengsi—a concept often
translated as “face”, but which Pisani calls “showing off, keeping up with the
Joneses”—in which Indonesians of the nascent middle classes lumber themselves
with crippling debts to build ostentatious houses and buy the most fashionable
motorbikes. It is, Pisani writes, “a habit that most Indonesians say they
despise, and many engage in with great enthusiasm”.
A
writer with a less intimate knowledge of Indonesia might miss these problems or
shy away from addressing them – or alternatively descend to petty sneering. But
Pisani deals with them clearly and honestly, without ever being patronizing or
condemnatory.
While
tempering hyperbolic predictions of economic glory on the one hand, Pisani also
skewers prophecies of doom on the other. Indonesia, she convincingly argues, is
unlikely to fragment, bound by many threads of collectivism, patronage, and
migration.
Perhaps
most refreshing of all is how little emphasis the book gives to Islam.
Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, and some more
hysterical foreign commentators have conflated the disparate phenomena of increasing
public observance of Islam, the emergence of Islamist parties at the ballot
box, and a smattering of suicide bombings against Western targets into a single
sinister whole, proclaiming an inexorable slide towards intolerant theocracy.
Pisani deftly dismisses all that, arguing, for example, that the PKS, the
Partai Keadilan Sejahtera or Prosperous Justice Party, one of the most
discussed of the Islamist parties, has been effectively stripped of its
ideology by the nature of Indonesian politics:
The Muslim Brotherhood-inspired PKS ... has been thoroughly
Indonesianized, its formerly idealist members woven tightly into the country’s
deeply transactional political system. Patronage is proving an effective way of
taming religious extremism.
Pisani also points out
that the FPI, the Front Pembela Islam or Islamic Defenders Front, a
sporadically violent rabble of Islamist activists, is really little more than a
traditional Indonesian street gang under a Muslim flag of convenience. Islam in
this book is for the most part simply a background fact of life—as it is for
most Indonesians—rather than a dynamic political force.
Given
the fact that Pisani leaves Java—the lodestone of Indonesia, home to its
biggest cities and most of its population—to the very end of her journey, the
island does become something of a brooding, unseen presence during the course
of the book, the place from which all political power and television soap
operas emanate. In this there’s a danger of giving credence to the simplistic
notion of a “Javanese colonialism” dominating the country, but Pisani is
careful to counterbalance this effect once she actually reaches the final
landfall.
She
also winds up on a note of quiet optimism, amongst the local collectives that
have turned Surabaya—Indonesia’s second biggest city—into a remarkably “clean
and green” place.
* * *
If Indonesia’s economic
advancement does continue, and if the attention it then receives does create a
rush of explanatory books about the place, then Pisani’s excellent offering
will provide a high benchmark.
On
another level, meanwhile, the book also provides a model for “portrait of the
nation” travelogues fit for the 21st-century, in which properly qualified
authors like Pisani produce not tired misconceptions and glib generalizations,
but authentic insight and real understanding.
© Tim Hannigan 2014
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