Ibu Sawitri and the A/Occidental Oriental

Ibu Sawitri and the a/occidental Oriental Monica Wulff, University of Technology, Sydney This paper represents a companion piece or supplement to Dancing in the Contact Zone. In that paper I introduced Ibu Sawitri, her dance, and my experience of our embodied cultural encounter.1 The first part of this paper is also devoted to Ibu Sawitri, but is specifically linked to the ideas raised in the Ibu Box camera from the installation. Here I tell ‘my’ insights and interpretations of Ibu Sawitri’s life, which traverses a multitude of colonial and local patriarchies. The story is interwoven with transcripts of Ibu’s voice as presented in the installation and a range of other historical Indonesian women’s voices drawn from books and archives. In the second part of this paper I look at what it means to leave what Pratt terms the ‘contact zone’ (1992) with a body that is informed and shaped by this experience. Here I will discuss some of the main issues addressed in my camera box and the wall projection. I look at western audience reactions to the contemporary work I do in Australia with the dance and performance techniques learned in Indonesia. Based on these reactions I speculate about western perceptions of traditional and modern Asian art forms and what that says about our current western perceptions of Asia. 1 For more background information about the installation, which represents a cross-cultural collaboration between Sydney based director Deborah Pollard, video artist Sam James, sound artists Gail Priest and myself as concept devisor and performer, as well as Indonesian based sculptor Hedi Heriyanto, and explanation of the term ‘contact zone’, please refer to my other paper in this special issue of PORTAL. PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies vol. 3, no. 2 July 2006 ISSN: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal Wulff Ibu Sawitri Bapak Sumitra, Ibu Sawitri's father (Family photograph, date unknown) Ibu Sawitri’s dance with history The thing that impressed me most about Ibu’s life was that it spanned a period of incredible political upheaval and social change. My name is Sawitri. I am 75 years old. I live in Astanalanggar, Losari, in Indonesia. She was born some time around the mid1920s in Losari, Cirebon under Dutch colonial rule. When I asked her what she remembered about that period she told me that she did not remember having had contact with Dutch people in the village or the local surrounds, but occasionally she saw them at a distance closer to town. It was still the era of Queen Wilhelmina, I was a little girl then. The Dutch ruled through a regional bureaucracy, which reached the villages via the tentacles of government in the form of Gubenur, Bupati, Lurah, RW (Rukun Warga) and RT (Rukun Tetangga). 2 This local government/villager relationship was based on fragile trust and exploitation, the parameters within which Ibu learned, in the course of her life, to negotiate with considerable skill. The Dutch featured in Ibu’s 2 Governor, regent, village chief, administrative unit at the next-to-lowest level in a city consisting of several RTs, and the neighborhood association, the lowest administrative unit (Echols & Shadily 1992). PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006 2 Wulff Ibu Sawitri life through their absence, but affected her life directly through the system of top-down rule, which at times involved forced labour in government-owned rice fields and local industries. As Pak Wastar, one of the oldest gamelan Topeng Losari musicians remembers, as verified by Sulastiyano: ‘“Tahun 1930-an merupakan masa sulit pangan, karena sawah-sawah tidak ditanami padi melainkan tebu.” Kenyataan ini disebabkan karena pemerintah Hindia Belanda menjadikan Cirebon sebagai pengekspor gula terbesar’ (cited in Masunah 2000, 47) [‘“The 1930s were a time of scarcity because the rice fields were not planted with rice but with sugarcane.” This situation was the result of the Dutch East Indies Government making Cirebon its largest sugar exporter’]. This historical condition is confirmed by Soekesi: ‘Daerah pesisir utara banyak terjadi penyewaan desa-desa atau daerah kepada orang partikulir yang kebanyakan orang Tionghoa (Cina). Mereka berkuasa atas tanah beserta penduduknya terutama dalam menentukan pajak dan wajib kerja bagi penduduk guna keperluan pabrik atau perusahaan gula mereka’ (cited in Masunah 2000, 48). [‘In the north coast region there was much renting out of villages and regions to individuals, many of whom were Chinese. They were in charge of the land and its occupants in particular in the role of demanding land tax and forced labour from the residents to satisfy the demands of their factories and sugar companies’]. Ibu Sawitri sitting amongst the gamelan, Losari/Cirebon 1999 Close government control through the local bureaucracy was a constant throughout PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006 3 Wulff Ibu Sawitri Ibu’s life, given that the Dutch system of law and government was maintained in independent Indonesia. Ms Kurnianingrat, known to her friends as Jo, an educated, Indonesian woman from a noble background who did have direct contact with the Dutch, tells how she experienced Dutch rule: So far my life had been so protected that I did not notice the injustices around me. I did not know there were certain swimming pools with the notice: Dogs and natives not allowed entrance. I had no idea that it was difficult for Indonesians to be accepted at the European Primary School, which paved the way for future good schooling. I did not realise that for most Indonesian children it was made difficult to get a good education and I was oblivious of the fact that the masses were kept ignorant and poor (Thompson Zainu’ddin 1997, 169). The Japanese occupation (1942-1945) and the hardships experienced during this time were vividly and frequently recalled during our conversations. From Ibu’s stories it emerged that the Japanese were present in the village and deeply resented. When the Japanese landed here, I could already dance. All the bridges were bombed, so if you wanted to cross the river you had to go by raft. Ibu told of how she and other women would rub their faces, arms and necks with mud before venturing out into the village. If they saw Japanese in the distance they would turn around and insert their round enamel bowls called baskom used to carry rice and other goods from the markets under their sarongs to give the appearance of pregnancy. The dirty appearance and pregnant bodies were supposed to repel the Japanese soldiers and guard the women against rape. That was my experience when I was young. I wasn’t afraid of anything. When the Japanese were walking in the streets, they never let you pass, wherever they were, they would hit people with wooden sticks. So, that’s my experience, I don’t understand anything about politics, I just know what I saw. One day when we were coming back from the market Ibu greeted a neighbour and then proc (...truncated)