A Beginner’s Guide to Hating Indonesia
Photo by Rizki Arrida, kiddiesm.deviantart.com
Four Tips on Managing that Symptomatic Love-Hate Relationship with Your Country
“Of
course it ends up badly,” said a friend, toying with his paper cup of
overpriced coffee. “This is Indonesia, what do you expect? The people
are dumb and stupid, they’ll never be able to appreciate such a thing.”
The friend was Indonesian.
If
you’re anywhere involved with the general political or cultural talks
of Indonesia with the locals for just more than a week, one thing
becomes clear: We love to hate the country.
We
love to laugh things off cynically, say that things will never work
here. We laugh at hyper-patriotic people, people who are actually in
love with the country. They are naive and stupid and pretentious and
what have you.
#IndonesiaBanget
We
love to claim how much potential we have. And yet this claim always has
to be supplemented by something like, “But sadly there are too many bad
things in this country, we need a lot of work, but the government is
unreliable and the industry is too conservative,” and so on.
Because we love hating so much, I thought I’d give a few handy pointers about healthy hating.
DON’T: Hate to Excuse Failures
A
lot of people do this. They work their asses off in their early
twenties, hoping to achieve something new, different, and edgy in
conservative, plain Indonesia with creative experimentation — only to
find that their years of hard work gets rewarded by lazy claps of like
eight people on a good day.
You
know the story. They become jaded 30-year-olds who keep claiming that
Indonesia sucks and cannot appreciate talent, and how the industry
refuses to evolve. All that shit you’ve heard a million times before
from every other 30-year-olds.
There
are facts here. Many Indonesians do suck ass big time when it comes to
appreciation of the arts and sciences (funding, anyone?). Many parts of
the industry are conservative and resistant to change. All of those are
true.
But if you waste the remainder of whatever you have to pursue your creative career on this hatred, will you ever get anywhere?
Also:
if you’re too used to cynically hating society when things go wrong,
who’s to say you won’t blame the Japanese or the Australians when you
finally get that big break to move out of the country, but still find
yourself stuck in the rat race, somehow?
Shit happens, you know. And it’s not always in Indonesia.
DON’T: Hate to Substitute Thought
Here’s
something that might surprise you: I hate political satire. There are
some really good ones out there that make us think, but those are few
and far between. Most are designed to make us laugh — and feel good
about ourselves, as if we already did some critical thinking.
Laughter
against the government and the politicians has become so prevalent that
it has become ingrained into its functioning. There is nothing
subversive about them.
Are you aware which TV channels produce them? Exactly.
What
I have noticed is that all this inverse racism against Indonesia
functions in exactly the same way. Go on, try and enter a conversation
and bring up some critical point, a critical social symptom currently
happening.
And then, out of the blue, just say something like “Yes, it happens because we live in Indonesia.”
There
is hardly a more effective way to end what otherwise could have been a
critical conversation. We hate Indonesia because we don’t want to think
critically about its problems.
DON’T: Hate to Escape Love
You’ve all heard the story: A guy walks up to the stage and preaches about how Indonesia is awesome, and everybody claps.
When
he gets down, he whispers to his friends, “What I said was bullshit.
How can I love Indonesia when the reality is so terrible?”
It’s
too easy to read this cynically, how all our love is really a fake. But
if that were true, would we really be so prone to anti-Malaysia
sentiments and hyper-patriotic chain text messages?
But
what if it’s the hate that is often faked? What if you really love
Indonesia, but are too ashamed to admit it because the reality is too
terrible, so you whisper to your friends just to come across as not
naive? Which is why, at the first sign that it’s okay to show love (in
racism, in chain text messages, in patriotic creative gatherings), you
get really excited?
Look: I
know hating is trendy, but really, don’t do it for the sake of looking
cool and critical. It’s true that hyper-patriotism is a terrible
right-wing attitude — a whole other topic of discussion — but at least
those right-wingers are brave enough to be honest about themselves.
DO: Hate What’s Happening — Not a Name that Stands for It
When
you live in Indonesia, there are so many things deserving of your
hatred. But there is one critical distinction we must make. Is it racist
to say that most Indonesians suck? No — of course most Indonesians
suck, because most people on Earth suck.
What’s racist is when we say how most people here suck because they are Indonesians. What’s chauvinistically racist is when we say we are awesome because we are Indonesians.
Similarly,
all the terrible things that’s happening around us are not happening
because it’s Indonesia. Sure, most happen to be the faults of some
horrible Indonesians in power under a corrupt system, but they are not
horrible and corrupt because they are Indonesians, are they?
And
don’t think I’ll let you off easy: When we say we love Indonesia and
the amount of talent it has or the kind people, let’s face it: Those
people are not full of talent, kindness, and compassion because
they are Indonesians. They made some correct decisions in life and had
some good luck, and they just happen to be Indonesians. Big surprise!
Let
me say this again: Living in Indonesia, there are so many things
deserving of hate. And hate can be good— it can make you take to the
streets, it can make you strive to build better alternatives.
It’s
just that, you know, be straight with what you’re hating. Don’t just
slap on the name “Indonesia” to everything and call it a day. That’s
lazy thinking.
The idea of a culture, a nation, a society, is a fluid terrain borne of the tensions of the multiple meanings we assign to it, each and every day. Each action we take in its name, each curse under our breath against it, each passage we write about it redefines it in the greater dynamic of the world.Don’t love a name and mask it with false hatred because you are unsure of the world. Love precisely this uncertainty, the endless potential of the empty name, instead of some nonexistent transcendental essence.
Hate, but hate healthy. Hate against the system, not some abstract name. Hate without prejudice and dogma. Hate with a critical mind.
