Raja Jawa di Amerika
Yuswadi Saliya
No drama, King Obama
In Javanese culture, a ruler must stand chivalrously above strife:
cool, intelligent and self-contained. Sound familiar?
By Edward L Fox | 2,800 words | Read later or Kindle
Illustration by Richard Wilkinson
Edward L Fox is a writer and associate lecturer in creative writing at the Open University.
His latest book is River Spirits: An Amazonian Fantasy (2012).
Like a lot of people
in the autumn of 2012, I
watched the TV debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
It was the last
big performance in that interminable presi-dential election
campaign in the
United States. Every now and then, as Obama did verbal battle
with his ad-versary,
I noticed something I didn’t expect to see. It was a gesture
he made with his
hand: for emphasis, he would point at Romney with his thumb. I
wasn’t the only
one to have seen this. In a short piece on the BBC website, a
reporter wrote:
Featured in the three presidential debates were Romney, Obama,
and Obama’s
thumb. At the debates, the presi-dent frequently jabbed his
hand, with his
thumb resting atop a loosely curled fist, to emphasise a
point. The ges-ture —
which might appear unnatural in normal commu-nication — was
probably coached
into Obama to make him appear more forceful…. And pointing the
index finger is
simply seen as rude and too aggressive.
But I’d seen this gesture before, and Obama hadn’t learned it from a debating coach. Whether consciously or not, he was revealing his boyhood in the Indonesian island of Java, where it is considered impolite to point with your index finger. Seeing Obama point with his thumb in the debates confirmed something I had sus-pected for some time. Whatever else he might be, Obama is America’s first Javanese president.
Some time ago, I devoted a significant period of time and study to the traditions of Javanese kingship. I was writing a book called Obscure Kingdoms (1993) about traditions of kingship in non-Western societies, and I spent a period of time in Indonesia. One of the book’s chapters was about kingship in Java and, in the course of my research, I had become well-acquainted with a certain Javanese mannerism. I was struck to see that mannerism once again, uncannily echoed by Obama during the televised US presidential debates.
Unlike most political analysts, I see the imprint of Java in Obama far more than the imprint of Hawaii (where he was born and later went to high school); more than the imprint of Chicago (where he began his political career), and certainly more than Kenya (a highly popular notion that is particularly far-fetched). Indeed, it was in Java that Obama spent his childhood, had his primary educa-tion, and where his mother made her career. It was the country where his step-father and his half-sister were born, and which he visited several times in his early adulthood. Obama still speaks some Indonesian.
Considerable time and energy has been spent speculat-ing and theorising about Obama’s Kenyan background. There is a ridiculous book called The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2011) by Dinesh D’Souza. It’s a piece of popular controversialism which suggests that the key to under-standing Obama — as a man and as a president — lies in his Kenyan background. Obama’s father, whom he barely knew, was a government economist in the early days of Kenyan independence. D’Souza argues that Obama inherited his father’s Kenyan anti-colonial mind-set, and that this is what motivates Obama politically and informs how he sees the world.
Traditionally, the Javanese ruler triumphs over his adversary without even appearing to exert himself
Naturally, the idea caught on in the loony blogosphere, and as a result there are now millions of people in Ame-rica who hold the view that Obama’s political approach is somehow ‘Kenyan’, and that by the end of Obama’s term of office the US will be governed according to a pernicious form of Kenyan socialism. Absurd, certainly, but then again there are also Americans who believe in black helicopters and alien abduction.
It’s true that Obama has written comparatively little about his time in Java in either of his books. His first autobiographical book, Dreams from My Father (1995), is principally about his search for Barack Obama Snr’s Kenyan roots. In fact, he only went to Kenya to research this book. The search for his African roots was impor-tant to him in his journey of self-discovery and self-invention, a process that was completed in his adoption of African-American cultural and social identity, and his choice of the black neighbourhoods of Chicago as the place where he began his political career. Part of the process of forging his own identity and his own path in life involved distinguishing himself from the world view of his mother, Ann Dunham, which was based on her international development work in Java. Most telling of all perhaps, when it comes to Obama’s own downplay-ing of his time in Java, was a comment in his second book,The Audacity of Hope (2006), in which he wrote: ‘Most Americans can’t locate Indonesia on a map.’
While Dreams from My Father was about the father who returned to Kenya when Barack was a baby, undoubted-ly the strongest influence on Obama throughout his childhood was his mother. A truly extraordinary person, Dunham was an anthropologist, who devoted her life to the study of small-scale industry in rural Java, while also working as a development economist and raising two children. When Barack was six, he and his mother moved from Hawaii, where he was born, to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, where he spent the formative years of his childhood. It was in Java where Obama learnt and adopted the cool, calm, unflappable personal and presidential style that has earned him the nickname ‘No Drama Obama’. It’s a genuinely Javan ideal.
Anyone who has visited the island of Java will know what great value the Javanese people place on maintaining a serene demeanour, harmonious social relations, and not appearing visibly angry. Acutely aware of local norms of behavior, Dunham made a point of ensuring that her son adopted Javanese manners. In his memoir, Obama recalls how his mother ‘always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia. It made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well-mannered when compared with other American children. She taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterised Americans abroad.’
But this formative period entailed more than a process of pragmatic acculturation. In Janny Scott’s biography of Obama’s mother, A Singular Woman, one of her inter-viewees maintains: ‘This is where Barack learned to be cool…if you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.’ What the young Barack had to take was being taunted by Indonesian children — his classmates and the children he played with in his Jakarta neighbourhood — for his dark skin colour. At first he was often thought of as an Indonesian from one of the outer (racially Melanesian) islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Yet of this period in Jakarta, Obama’s biographer David Maraniss wrote that the young Barack ‘had become so fluent in the man-ners and language of his new home that his friends mis-took him for one of them’.
The Javanese have a word for this kind of bearing. They call it halus. The nearest literal equivalent in English might be ‘chivalrous’, which means not just finely man-nered, but implies a complete code of noble behavior and conduct. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who wrote some of the most important studies of Javanese culture in English, defined halus in The Reli-gion of Java (1976) as: Formality of bearing, re-straint of expression, and bodily self-discipline… spon-taneity or naturalness of gesture or speech is fitting only for those ‘not yet Javanese’ — ie, the mad, the simplemind-ed, and children.
Even now, four decades after leaving Java, Obama exemplifies halus behaviour par excellence.
Halus is also the key characteristic of Javanese
kingship, a
tradition still followed by rulers of the modern state of
Indonesia. During my
period of study in Indonesia, I discovered that halus is
the
fundamental outward sign or proof of a ruler’s legitimacy. The
tradition is
described in ancient Javanese literature and in studies by
modern
anthropologists. The spirit of the halus ruler must
burn with
a constant flame, that is without (any outward) turbulence. In
his classic
essay, ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’ (1990), the
Indonesian scholar
Benedict Anderson describes the ruler’s halus as: The
quality of not being disturbed, spotted, uneven, or
dis-coloured. Smoothness of
spirit means self-control, smoothness of appearance means
beauty and elegance,
smoothness of behaviour means politeness and sensi-tivity.
Conversely, the
antithetical quality of being kasar means lack of
control,
irregularity, imbalance, disharmony, ugliness, coarseness, and
impurity.
One can see the clear distinction between Obama’s os-tensibly aloof style of political negotiation in contrast to the aggressive, back-slapping, physically overbearing political style of a president such as Lyndon Johnson.
Traditionally, the
Javanese ruler triumphs over
his ad-versary without even appearing to exert himself. His
ad-versary must
have been defeated already, as a consequ-ence of the
ruler’s total
command over natural and hu-man forces. This is a common theme
in traditional
Java-nese drama, where the halus hero effortlessly
triumphs
over hiskasar (literally, unrefined or uncivilised)
enemy. ‘In the
traditional battle scenes,’ Anderson notes:
The contrast between the two becomes strikingly appa-rent in
the slow, smooth,
impassive and elegant move-ments of thesatria [hero],
who scarcely
stirs from his place, and the acrobatic leaps, somersaults,
shrieks, taunts,
lunges, and rapid sallies of his demonic oppo-nent. The clash
is especially
well-symbolised at the moment when the satria [hero]
stands
perfectly still, eyes downcast, apparently defenceless, while
his demo-nic
adversary repeatedly strikes at him with dagger, club, or
sword — but to no
avail. The concentrated power of thesatria [hero] makes
him
invulnerable.
Even to seem to exert himself is vulgar, yet he wins.
This
style of confrontation echoes that first famous live TV debate
in the election
of 2012 between Obama and Romney, in which Obama seemed
passive, with eyes
downcast, apparently defenceless (some alleged ‘bro-ken’) in
the face of his
enemy, only to triumph in later debates and in the election
itself.
Like a Javanese king, Obama has never taken on a political fight that he has not, arguably, already won
But such a disposition is not just external posturing. Halus in a Javanese ruler is the outward sign of a visible inner harmony which gathers and concentrates power in him personally. In the West, we might call this charisma. Crucially, in the Javanese idea of kingship, the ruler does not conquer opposing political forces, but absorbs them all under himself. In the words of Anderson again, the Javanese ruler has ‘the ability to contain opposites and to absorb his adversaries’. The goal is a unity of power that spreads throughout the kingdom. To allow a multiplicity of contending forces in the kingdom is a sign of weakness. Power is achieved through spiritual discipline — yoga-like and ascetic practices. The ruler seeks nothing for himself; if he acquires wealth, it is a by-product of power. To actively seek wealth is a spiri-tual weakness, as is selfishness or any other personal motive other than the good of the kingdom.
That’s the theory, though highly simplified. The modern Republic of Indonesia is in many ways the direct succes-sor and continuation of the ancient Javanese kingdom. Java remains the political centre of an empire of islands. The first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, was inaugu-rated in 1945 in Yogyakarta, the Javanese city that re-mains the capital of the Javanese kingdom, in the very spot in the royal palace where the Sultans of Yogyakarta were crowned. Yogyakarta was briefly the capital of the Republic of Indonesia, and the Sultan of Yogyakarta was its first vice president. Sukarno began his term as president with a policy that combined communism, Islam and nationalism, a weird combination in Western terms, but one that makes sense in Javanese terms: in claiming ownership of these political forces, Sukarno was seeking to subjugate them and harmonise them under his own king-like authority.
I can’t help but feel the parallels with Obama are strik-ing. He dismayed many liberals in the first term of his presidency, by persisting in a political approach that sought to absorb the Republican Party — his political opponents — into his policy-making, just as Sukarno sought, at first, to absorb all political forces in Indonesia, and as the Javanese king absorbed all natural and human forces. Four years later, of course, with political dramas such as the fiscal cliff behind him, one can see an Obama that has adjusted to American political condi-tions; he is now playing American, not Javanese politics. But then again, like a Javanese king, Obama has never taken on a political fight that he has not, arguably, al-ready won.
There is, however, another reason why I persist in looking at Obama in the context of traditional Javanese kingship. After Barack left Indonesia to attend high school in Hawaii, his mother Ann Dunham moved from Jakarta to the very cradle of Javanese civilisation, the compound of the palace (Kraton) of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, in central Java. The Kraton is the past and present home of Javanese kings; in recognition of the role of Sultan Hamengkubuwono VIII in the struggle for independence from Dutch colonial rule, the area around Yogyakarta was given special political status inside Indonesia, and the sultans retain political status within the Indonesian republic. Not only does the sultanate of Yogyakarta represent the theoretical and cultural model of government and political power in the modern state of Indonesia, the Kraton is the home of traditional Javanese culture. The Kraton’s walled compound — essentially, a densely populated urban village — is traditionally the residence of members of the royal family and of palace servants and officials. Foreigners are forbidden from living here, but Dunham secured the unusual privilege of being allowed to live there because her mother-in-law, Eyang Putri, the mother of her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, was believed to be a distant relative of the royal family and lived in the compound. Although the old lady was in very good health, Obama’s mother was allowed to move into her house in the palace compound for the nominal purpose of looking after her.
Let your opponent yell and scream, and listen politely
Now it might or might not be true that Dunham’s mo-ther-in-law — Obama’s step-grandmother — was a blood relative of the Sultan. Maraniss, Obama’s biogra-pher, found no evidence either way. But Obama’s step-father believed it, as did Obama’s mother, and so did their daughter, Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. This belief or family myth is by itself significant. It places the family firmly within the system of Javanese kingship. Growing up, in Java or back in Hawaii, Obama would have known about this connection and its mean-ing.
After leaving Java for his education, Obama visited his mother regularly over the years. The palace compound (bekel, in Javanese) is a beautiful place. While I was re-searching my book on non-Western traditions of king-ship, I would walk around it in the evenings, glimpsing the interiors of the houses, with their green and pink glowing aquariums, and blue and grey glowing televi-sions. Stars could be seen through the palm-tree branches, the air was filled with birdsong. I looked back at my own book and found the following reflection of the place: ‘Tourists are forbidden from staying here, but a few academic researchers had managed it, and I envied them.’ I didn’t know then about Dunham.
As Obama entered
adulthood, he sought to create
a new identity for himself that was based on an American and,
within that, a
black American identity. He distanced himself from what he saw
as his mother’s
‘internation-alist idealism’. But the influence of Javanese
ways remained,
unconsciously perhaps, a crucial part of him. When he was a
community organiser
in Chicago, working with black churches and local
institutions, people noticed
his unusual tendency to prefer harmony to confrontation, to
bringing all forces
together under his quiet leadership. Maraniss quotes an
informant who was
present at a meeting of church leaders when one of the leaders
attacked Obama
as a ‘do-gooding outsider’:
To Barack’s credit, he didn’t get up from the back of the room
and come to
defend himself. He left it there and let the guy say what he
needed to say….
Barack absorbed it. But then, as soon as it was over, he
waited until the guy
left, and said, ‘Now, what just happened? Let’s make sure we
understand what
just went on so we can go from here.’ Civility, being
respectful, was always
very important to him.
He would use this same technique again and again in later political conflicts: let your opponent yell and scream, listen politely, and then, when your adversary has exhausted himself, somehow end up winning. Indeed, that is halus through and through.
________________________
Published on 4 February 2013
Eko Purwono
Saya kirimkan di Facebook.
Salam hormat,
EP
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Sandi Siregar
From: Yuswadi Saliya <yewe...@gmail.com>
To: ls...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 4, 2013 10:46 PM
Subject: [LSAI] Raja Jawa di Amerika
Mohamad Muqoffa
| pak Yus ysh; matur nuhun, '...jangan2 obama lbh "njawani" ya... ijin sy forward ke "komunitas jawa" di solo ya.. /salam muqoffa |
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Juliastono Harrysiswanto
salam
From: Yuswadi Saliya <yewe...@gmail.com>
To: ls...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 4, 2013 10:46 PM