Tolerance and other relics
I watch a lot of news. Earlier today the focus on CNN was a rally in Rome. I remember Rome from my 20s as a place where ancient history mingled with a crossroads of cultures: African, Middle Eastern, Eastern European. But the reporter - a good friend, Atika Shubert - spoke of growing intolerance in this great city and intolerant policies towards ‘the other’.
Familiar story. I am a believer in the continuum of progress and that highs may be followed by lows. The essay below, written last year, describes an ebb in my own country, my beloved Indonesia. I am waiting for the tide to turn. I hope many others are also hopeful.
Tolerance and other relics – a moment in Jakarta
The air-conditioning in my room rattles. Only occasionally turned on now that I have moved out (again) of the family home, it often cannot remember what it is supposed to do. Sometimes it lets out cold air, sometimes just air, and sometimes it just returns to quiet.
The air-conditioning in my room is much like the rest of my house: a gathering of relics from years past that struggle to keep up with the present and future.
The walls of the living room, which serves as a museum rather than occupied space, includes photos of Indonesia’s Presidents. For a country with only one President for 30-plus years, the selection is not slim. That these heads of state of divergent world views share one wall here in this quiet corner of South Jakarta highlights the tolerance that my parents continue to teach us. To them, Indonesia is an amalgamation of its myriad experiences.
I fear that tolerance may start rattling like the air-conditioning in my room, rattling into irrelevance.
Yesterday was a shock to many Indonesians, at least in my circle of upper middle-class contemporaries. Governor Ahok, as beloved for his quirks as the city he leads, was ushered unexpectedly from a courtroom into criminal detention. His alleged crime is, in layman terms, shooting off his mouth without more careful consideration – an offense that many of us are guilty of several times daily by lunchtime.
We can talk about the details of the case and the present quandary. But the narrative that will be remembered is not his but ours. The Governor offers us a look into our past and our future. Dare we confront what we have been? Dare we confront what we may be?
We are often dismissive of the past. My house is a fraying scrapbook of memories, but most pockets of Jakarta have little patience with history. Upkeep of centuries-old edifices is haphazard. New car models whizz by the dilapidated former banks of old Batavia. Museums storing precious cultural heritage barely survive the wilting humidity.
Novelty sells amongst a select few, which explains the erstwhile popularity of sepia coloured postcards or coffee houses with Dutch names. But step into the everyday market – a sprawling wet market or the newer models with too few fire exits – and you see the gimmicks for what they are. Here at the market, where more than half the merchandise are ‘modest’ clothes, the future is evident. A woman in short sleeves with free flowing frizzy hair, I am a minority.
The expansion of growing conservatism has been slow but sure. And, as is our habit here in Indonesia, we have been tolerant. Why not? Like the many Presidents on the wall of our living room, we accept Arabic culture as part and parcel of the country’s tapestry.
Increasingly, however, that approach to tapestry is making way for something unfamiliar. For an increasingly vocal number of Indonesians, it is all or nothing. ‘My way or the highway’. They see our rich past as quaint punctuation in our ‘journey’ to ‘enlightenment’. I use quotation marks to underscore the subjectivity of these opinions.
They dismiss the indents throughout our shared history, the periods of tensions and violence stirred by grievances to our respective identities. Through dialogue and negotiation, we have managed, with varying levels of success, to come together again after each confrontation.
It is often not easy, not at all. That tapestry on the wall, we have woven it together, not apart.
That tapestry needs all of our creativity and commitment, young and old. But increasingly we disparage the elders. The attitude of my parents towards past Presidents – that we can learn from all of them as much as we can learn from all among us – is perceived as weak. By factor of age, the experiences and views of my octogenarian parents, who have weathered colonialism, a world war, revolution, civil strife, authoritarianism, and democratisation, are becoming those of the minority.
I am also becoming older. The experiences that inform my principles – surviving curbs to freedom of speech, the street protests of 1998 – are unfamiliar to the younger generation. Their experience of tapestry is not the same as mine, and I worry. The rattling of the air-conditioning in my room sounds dimmer, its energy sputtering with each passing day. I still hope that the future of tolerance in Indonesia does not follow suit.
