Ngabuburit

I’m not sure if I’ve spelled the title correctly, because it’s a Sundanese expression and I’m not good enough at distinguishing the “ng” and “ny” sound (except when I was forced to practice the pronunciation of words beginning with these sounds in Sundanese class, and found “ny” was the much easier of the two to get my teacher’s “eh, good enough” rating on). It’s one of those perfect, delightful expressions where you think to yourself, “I wish there was a word for this,” and, to your surprise, you discover there actually is one.

So, ngabuburit (nyabuburit?) refers to that particular mood during Ramadan, which is wont to wax greatest in the late afternoon, where everyone’s waiting around (hungry and thirsty, obviously) for it to be sunset already.

My relationship with the concept of ngabuburit has evolved over the course of Ramadan, now with less than a week of the month left to us. For at least half the month I experienced ngabuburit very strongly. You don’t notice how much sheer interest value eating can add to your day until it’s not there. No noontime meal to convene around; no option of mindless snacking or, as is more my style, relentless water-chugging. Just when you’re hungriest there seems to be nothing to do to take your mind off of it. After all, food is the usual go-to distraction. Suddenly it feels like there are too many hours in the day, and worse, you’re so low energy you just waste them away. You’d like to get out of the house and go climb a mountain, but doing that in the heat with no prospect of hydration after is a total no-go. So you lie around doing mellow activities, wishing for something like the usual comfort of the clockwork of mealtimes to break up the hours, feeling a dry throat with every swallow and the edge of hunger in your belly, counting down the hours… That, to me, was ngabuburit.

At least for two weeks. Then, thankfully, my metabolism adjusted. I got better at eating a lot at the 3:30 pre-dawn meal, shoveling food into my mouth even though I was a tired zombie. I always get hungry at around 10-12, mid-morning, but that’s it. Any physical exertion helps immensely. One day I went for an hour-long walk and wasn’t hungry the entire day. Another day I went shopping with some teachers from my school in Bandung, and we went to a million different shops for a million different errands, which would have been tiring on any day. With no food or water, it was exhausting, but strangely I was neither hungry nor even thirsty all day.

So over time my awareness of living in a state of ngabuburit diminished significantly. With less than a week of “the fasting month,” as it’s known in Indonesian, left, I’d say I hardly have it at all. There’s no feeling of desperate need to have it be mealtime, and when I’ve finally got all the food in front of me, there’s no feeling of a backlog of missed meals that needs to be accounted for. But I do still have a kind of ngabuburit that kicks in around 3:30 in the afternoon—just a pleasant sense of anticipation. Not of food itself, but of getting to sit down with my host family and enjoy spending time together. The joy of the daily surprise of getting to see what my host mother has cooked for tonight’s meal (especially if I know she’s been baking something chocolatey in the morning—my bedroom is right above the kitchen, and I’ll wake up to heavenly smells of baking brownies, and yeah, that’s a way to make me food-sad!).

Let me back up quite a bit and give a rundown of the Ramadan routine. Ramadan is a month in the Islamic lunar calendar, which means it shifts each year in its timing with respect to the Gregorian calendar. It’s the holiest month in Islam, and considered a very special time of year for Muslims. Extra prayer, giving to charity, and good works are especially encouraged during this time (it’s said that good deeds carry double their usual weight when done during Ramadan); people are not supposed to speak ill of anyone, and are generally supposed to carry a charitable spirit in their hearts. They are also not allowed to eat or drink from sunup to sundown. (There are lots of other activities that are prohibited by religion during daylight hours, such as smoking and sexual relations, but I don’t know the full list.)

I decided to participate in the fasting in part because I’d always been curious about it: fasting is supposed to be good for the body now and then, and it’s certainly a good exercise in willpower. Mainly I decided to try it because my community is very strongly, and to my knowledge pretty uniformly, Muslim. I wanted to send a positive message to my community about how I feel about Islam.

Most people I’ve met here that I know beyond a passing acquaintance have asked me what my views on Islam are, whether I think Islam equates to terrorism, what my views on Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban are, and what discrimination is like for Muslims in the U.S. These questions have yet to get easier for me to answer. Every time I’m asked these I feel an inner wave of anger and hurt, my cheeks flush, I consider my words carefully. The first question is easy enough. I’m happy to speak for myself, assure them I’ve never in my life equated Islam with terrorism, I get it… And as to the rest… What can anyone say? Yes, the president of my country has frequently made outrageous Islamophobic statements and promoted ideologies and policies furthering the same; yes, what he is has attempted to do with the Muslim Ban is illegal and horrendous; yes, discrimination and violence against Muslims in the U.S. is a serious issue which has only worsened; yes, America has some very deep-seated issues with racism and religious discrimination in general…

I’ll admit I always want to somehow end these conversations on a high note: But I have hope for our future! I am in fact optimistic about the American youth, who demographically tend to be much more liberal than their elders currently running the country and who are increasingly non-white and diverse in other ways. That doesn’t mean the systems and institutions they will inherit aren’t broken, weren’t founded on what they were founded on. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a very real, very horrific rising tide of racism and white supremacy coming to the fore socially, especially now. There’s really nothing to say to these questions but “Yes…” and wince. I usually add something like, “It’s a very sad thing, and I think it’s fueled above all by ignorance, by people who don’t actually know anything about Islam, who think in black and white, who want easy answers and accept the messages they’re given, who haven’t looked beyond their own little world.” Obviously it’s more complex than that. It’s also, at a certain fundamental level, as simple as that. Plato’s model of immorality: ignorance.

There’s one other sticky area I run into with Trump here. Indonesians know Trump is behind the Muslim Ban, so they don't tend to like him. When they ask me about him, I’m quick to note I didn’t and don’t support him, and while they are pleased to hear this, they often then ask me “Why?” I have to be pretty tempered in my response to this question. Because while Indonesians aren’t fans of Trump, there’s also a strong cultural value here of needing to respect authority figures, including elected government officials. In deference to this I try to keep my explanations very even-keeled and grounded in examples of policy, and I will sometimes add the caveat, “but I respect the democratic process.” (Which is my shorthand for saying: I respect the peaceful transfer of power and so I accept the outcomes of the electoral system as it stands [even despite the injustices of the Electoral College system, voting obstruction efforts, campaign finance laws, Russian election meddling and more...].)

But back to Ramadan. Actions speak louder than words, so I hoped that fasting was a good way to show my community my dedication to them, their culture, and my openness to their religion. It’s definitely been a good bonding experience. Breaking fast together is so much more special when you’ve actually been fasting. When you’re in the middle of a five-hour meeting and half the room looks pretty low-energy, you feel a lot of solidarity when you’re just as hungry and thirsty and sleepy. Likewise, when people around you seem to have boundless energy and move through their days as though they aren’t hungry and thirsty and tired, you feel a special sense of admiration. Oh, you think you don’t have enough energy to do anything but read? Look out in the fields at the workers who are going about their labors as usual…!

A typical Ramadan day starts at 3:30 am with the sahur meal. At 2:30 the mosque loudspeakers start going off, with very enthusiastic shouting of “SAH-HOOOOOR! Sah HOOOOOR! SAH, SAH, SAH-HOOOR!” I’m not sure why they start an hour early, unless it’s for the benefit of the people who have to get up earlier than the rest of the family to cook the sahur meal (generally the women). As for me, I set my alarm for 3:15 and get up at 3:20. I go downstairs at 3:25 and am always the first one in the living room. As I pass the kitchen I say good morning to my host mother, who’s always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, finishing up the cooking with something crackling in oil in the big wok on the stove. I sit in the living room in my usual place, back resting up against the wall, sipping at my water. We eat all our meals on the floor. By 3:30 the rest of the household has found their way to the living room, and someone’s turned on the TV, which is helpful when you’re all way too tired to talk and need to wake up a little. We always watch Ini Sahur. This is the special Ramadan edition of Ini Talkshow (“This is a talkshow”), one of the most popular shows on TV whose best American analog would be something like Jimmy Fallon, except with two hosts and usually at least five guests, plus a never-ending cast of characters who dress in wild costumes for laughs.

At 4 o’clock I go back to bed; the rest of the household stays up till around 5. I could instantly drop off to sleep, except 4 o’clock is also exactly when the mosque right next to our house starts its broadcast of Quranic recitation. It’s too loud to sleep through even with earplugs in a very sleepy state, so I just lie in bed with my eyes closed and wait. It goes for about 35 minutes, and then it ends with the just-before-dawn call to prayer. This is the sound that lets everyone know the fast has officially begun: if you’re still eating after this time, you’ve already broken the fast for the day. I think that’s why most people have sahur a whole hour earlier than they technically have to, to just to be on the safe side, have absolutely no food left in their mouths, etc. As for me, once the azan has finished, signaling the mosque’s loudspeaker has finished, I quickly drop off to sleep. While I was still going to school, I would then set my alarm again for 6 am. It didn’t feel awesome. Now that school is finally out, as of this Friday, these last couple of days I’ve been sleeping in until 7 or 8, and it’s beyond luxurious.

If during the day I walk to the town square (it’s a basketball court ringed by vendors and minibuses a minute from my house) it feels busy enough, with lots of people out and about. The market, further down, is always bustling. So many people are buying and selling foodstuffs there you would be forgiven for not realizing these same people aren’t eating anything. But people still have to cook and stock up food for the house for the evening hours, so there’s still business to do. Small food stands, however, seem much more infrequent than I imagine they are at other times of the year. (Many of these are very small, just the width of a single person, and many families have one which can just be parked, empty, in front of their house until they want to sell out of it.)

In other areas you can immediately see that it’s Ramadan. When I visited a mall in Bandung recently, the restaurants and eateries were ghosttowns. Similarly, I stayed with my principal at his home in a tourist town, and the huge market was all bolted down tightly for “the fasting month.” But then, at midday we went to a nearby tourist attraction called “the floating market” which featured a long stretch of food stands on a boardwalk over an artificial lake, and the tables were packed with families chowing down for lunch—assumedly non-Muslims.

At around 5:30 pm everyone starts making their way to the living room to break the fast. The Arabic term for this is the iftar meal, but in Indonesian the term is “buka puasa” (“to open” the fast). This is by far the best part of the day. There’s a lot more food, and a lot more variety of dishes, for each of these post-sunset meals than for usual dinners, and it’s always exciting to see what will be spread out on the floor.

There are usually quite a few sweet dishes, which is what people start by eating. (Traditionally, the Prophet broke fasts with dates, and so dates and other dried fruits are typical for iftar meals around the world, but at least in this household we only had dates the first night.) Often that means sugary “soups,” like fruit soup, which is delicious fresh fruit in a sweet, milk-and-fruit liquid with ice; or a room-temperature sweet milky soup with soft chopped nuts and a mild ginger flavor. My host mother often has little baked goods too: chocolate cookies or brownies or tiny powdered-sugar cakes. Palm oil makes for a delicious flaky texture in baked goods that’s addicting. There’s usually fresh fruit, too, like pineapple, oranges, bananas, watermelon, papaya or mango. Currently there’s breadfruit in the fruit bowl downstairs. A couple days ago I tried mangosteen for the first time. Mangosteen looks interesting on the inside: there’s a layer about ¾ of a centimeter wide of soft, rather mushy reddish-purple pulp, and then sitting in the midst of that is a star-like formation, lobed like garlic, that’s pearly white. You only eat the white part. While it looks perfectly intact, like it was pressed in a mold, when you actually try to pull out one of the lobes they usually squish and get deformed instantly. The taste is delicious, a little sour and surprising.

(A funny linguistic note. So, in Sundanese, one of the more common everyday words is “mangga,” which means “please,” as in, “please sit,” “please eat,” “please come inside,” and so on. The word for “mango,” the fruit, in Indonesian is “mangga,” however. So what is the word for “mango” in Sundanese? It’s simply “buah”—“fruit.”)

Also on the iftar platter are lots of savory dishes, of course, and “gorengan,” (“fried things”) and rice. Talking on the phone with my dad about Indonesian food recently, he interjected, “You haven’t said a single word this whole time about rice. I mean, I’m assuming you eat rice, right?” My response: “Well, I don’t talk about drinking water, either.” The point: yes, rice is the staple food. Culturally rice is always the main dish, and everything else is a side dish. I’ll confess that while I of course eat rice for every meal, I don’t think I’ll ever view rice this way. For me it’s just the base layer that you can then pile other things onto. (My teacher in Sundanese language class had to repeatedly correct me as I betrayed my own cultural view of rice. I would be listing out food I had eaten for lunch and would always forget and tack on rice at the end, as an afterthought. No, no, no, you have to say “rice” first, he’d instruct. It’s not spinach with rice, it’s rice with spinach.)

You’ve heard me say before, and I’ll say it again: Indonesian food is great! Every meal is a pleasure, and that’s a gift I never take for granted.

Sometimes after dinner I join my host mother for tarawih, which are special extra, optional prayers performed during Ramadan, either 11 or 23 sets. (A once man asked me which I had done; I said, “I don’t know, but it takes an hour,” and he said, “Ah, that’s 23, then.”) Tarawih starts just after the isya (last of the five daily prayers) azan, around 7 o’clock currently. We usually go to the small neighborhood mosque right next to our house, though a couple times we went to the largest mosque in the village a couple minutes away, next to the town square. Women bring personal prayer rugs and their prayer robes (I forget the word for them) and sit in a section behind the men separated by a curtained partition. An imam stands in front, facing ahead in the direction of Mecca like everyone behind him. 

The imam keeps the pace of the prayers: his “Allahu akbar”s determine everyone’s timing of the sequence of motions. Prayers are in sets of two. You start in a standing position, and then bend at the waist in a bow. Then you return to fully upright. Then you go from standing to kneeling with your forehead touching the floor. Then you move from that position to sitting upright, legs bent beneath you. From there you once more bend forward so that your forehead touches the floor. This is one set. Then you immediately stand upright again and go through another set. At the end of the second set, there is a short break where you remain seated. As a way of distinguishing the first set from the second in a cycle the way the imam intones “Allahu akbar” is different: at the end of the first set, there’s a little pressure behind it, like an unfinished sentence; at the end of the second set, he says it with a sort of exhale.

After tarawih, as people are standing up to leave, everyone “shakes hands” with the people around them and tells them “peace be upon you” in Arabic. I put “shakes hands” in quotation marks, because Sundanese hand shaking is different than what you’re probably imagining when I use that phrase. It entails holding your hands out in front of you, fingers extended and pressed together, as in Christian prayer, bent at the wrist so your fingers are pointing towards the other person, who is doing the same. Then you very lightly bring the tips of their pressed-together fingers between the tips of your fingers. You then bring your hands, still in the praying-position, up so that your fingers point up to your chin. I know Javanese “hand shaking” is slightly different, but I’m not sure how.

(Note, actual shaking of hands is also common here, but it’s extremely light, barely touching the tips of someone’s fingers in your hand, and then bringing your right hand up to touch the middle of your chest: you have “brought the person into your heart.” Once some students at my school were asking me about cultural differences between Indonesia and the U.S.: do students in America also salim* their teachers? they asked me. No, I said, there’s no salim’ing; not between parents and children either, for that matter. And handshakes are very different. I demonstrated my usual American handshake, which I’ve gotten praised for in the U.S. for its firmness, and my student was positively shocked.

*Salim: when a younger person bows over an older person’s hand and brings it up to touch their face, usually their forehead or cheek. It’s a sign of respect. At school, students must salim their teachers, and usually every time they pass a teacher. Children salim their parents, in lieu of hugging and kissing between parents and children; wives sometimes salim their husbands. Personally, I’m often unsure of when I should be salim’ing. I salim much older people without a second thought, but I’m unsure with middle-aged people. I’ve been salim’d quite a lot at school, and the most fascinating thing about it for me is that every person has their own style with how they do it, and there’s quite a range. Some people will even kiss your hand.)

After Ramadan it’s Lebaran, the Indonesian word for Eid al-Fitri, the holiday that ends the month. I’ll have a lot more to say about Lebaran once I’ve actually experienced it in a few days, but I’ve heard a lot already about some of its most salient features. Namely, there’s a lot of food and eating, and getting together with extended family is important. It’s traditional to “mudik,” or return to your childhood home, to be with your family during this time. Since a lot of people move to big cities from rural areas, during Lebaran time and the weeks leading up to it the mudik-related traffic gets insane, especially between big cities like Jakarta and Bandung and the surrounding countryside. Someone told me 30 million people are going between Jakarta during this time. Needless to say I’m trying to hold off on travel until after the holiday is over.

Ramadan Mubarak, everyone!

Kediri dan Jawa Timur pada umumnya

[Word of note: I wrote this post back in April, but never got around to editing it because I was so busy during training. It’s interesting to look back on it from here in West Java (I will hopefully have a post coming soon about my impressions of the same), which is quite different from Kediri, with a few more months’ of experiences under my belt. But in the course of editing I’ve tried not to add in too many new bits in order to retain the spirit of my thinking at the time the post was originally composed.]

I want to talk a bit generally about what I’ve seen of Kediri and East Java.

First, the landscape. The very first thing I noticed about Indonesia flying in to Surabaya on the plane from Singapore was the color: green everywhere! On the ground, green is also by far the dominant color. I’ve never been to a place that’s more lush than here. Even in the middle of Surabaya, one of the largest cities in the country, I was struck by how much vegetation there was everywhere.

Before coming to Indonesia I’d read about how Java is the most densely-populated island in the world, and how therefore the term “rural” is a relative one here. It’s true that so-called villages feel more like neighborhoods as they all bleed one into the next; but I have yet to get the urban fatigue I felt sure of. Between human fauna and natural flora, the latter definitely seems to have the upper hand. However, most of the greenery has (somehow!) been tamed—rice paddies stretch on forever, trees are planted in neat rows, and exquisite gardens abound.

All I can think of is how much work has to go into beating back those hardy vines in a place that’s essentially a enormous, fabulous petri dish: warm and humid forever. It’s actually a process I got a front-row seat to, when once during language class, where we would sit on the terrace facing the garden at my friend’s host family’s house, his family undertook the task of clearing up their enormous, exuberant garden to prepare for the arrival of an important personage. Language class was slow that day, and we all found it much more interesting to watch men with very long poles with metal rods on the end of them shimmying up nearby trees to drag down the vines. The vines pulled free easily, but they were just so thick and ingrown and so obviously reveling in their ideal climate conditions. No doubt about it: they would be back, stronger than ever, and soon—some distant brethren of the ever-swallowing kudzu.

Despite the hard-won landscaping, the land still feels wild enough to fill my need for nature. In Kediri on any semi-clear day you’ll always have one mountain or another in view. Most salient, of course, is Mount Kelud, which actually erupted spectacularly (seriously, look up the images on Google at once!) only a few years ago and buried the city of Yogyakarta, 500 km. away, in thick ash. It’s usually too hazy in the distance to see Kelud well, so my friend and I have made a game out of trying to glimpse its peak. The only times I’ve been successful are once in the early morning, and a couple times at sunset when it turned dramatic silhouette against a deepening orange backdrop, like something out of Monument Valley.

To get to Kediri initially we had a three-hour drive from Surabaya by bus, and one of the most fun things about it (besides knowing I’d never be seeing all these things with the same fresh eyes of initiation again) was the sudden reveal of enormous volcanoes in the near distance. Of course one of the things I was most excited for about Java is the volcanoes, so they shouldn’t have come as any surprise; but still, actually seeing them there, ruggedly climbing up to scrape the clouds, was astonishing.

Something else I love is how omnipresent water is. I’m not referring to the obvious ocean that surrounds the island, but rather the million streams and vast rivers everywhere. So many villages feel like canal towns, with crisscrossing bridges connecting the roads at every few meters. There’s also the daily downpours (we’re just coming out of the rainy season) and the thick wetness of humidity in the air that makes me sweat even though I’m usually not actually that hot (but it makes my skin look fabulous!). The incredible green itself is probably the best reminder of what a wet place this is. I wonder what will happen in the dry season. Will everything turn to brown? Are there problems with fires?

Let’s talk about design and architecture. I know I’ve been using a lot of superlatives thus far in the blog, but I can’t help it. I really, really like this country. I think it’s awesome. It’s beautiful and has a rich culture and I feel so lucky to get to stay here. So, to add another semi-superlative to the list, Javanese architecture and design is some of my favorite I’ve seen anywhere in the world. How to describe it? Houses tend to be plaster, with beautiful wood features—large, wood-framed windows; ornately-carved doors; thick, gorgeously-carved benches and chairs on porches—surrounded by ornate, often colored, wrought iron gates. There’s a lot of color in general, and it all looks great: houses that are a pleasant shade of orange or green, or even an unusual pink-and-yellow combo I saw today that was really easy on the eyes. Besides wood, there’s a lot of tile. Out of all possible flooring choices, given the climate, tile just makes sense. But tile is also used in creative decorative ways, where I’ve seen some buildings with colorful, tiled exteriors that are mosaic-like. There’s a huge cultural value of design here, and I honestly can’t think of a single house or building I’ve seen that I found distasteful. Everything seems functional, but functionality is by no means the sole aim, with lots of care given to other elements whose sole purpose is to be aesthetically pleasing. I appreciate that. Every street is a feast for the eyes.

To totally switch subjects, Indonesia has some interesting links with India. Sure, everyone knows that Bali is majority-Hindu, which is truly fascinating (after a recent Hindu holiday—which constituted a day off for people of all faiths, by the way, because every major holiday for each of the five government-recognized religions is a national holiday—I enjoyed watching an animated children’s show on the public broadcasting channel about the tales of Krishna); but that seems like a more historical tie. So too does the fact that some Indonesian words are Sanskrit-derived. How about modern-day connections across the ocean?

Well, Bollywood films and Indian soap operas are very popular here. I’ve also seen some Indian actors in Indonesian dramas. My host family often watches the channel on TV that’s solely dubbed Indian soap operas—Anandhi is their favorite. (From what I can gather, the eponymous heroine is a sweet, rich girl who has suffered more than her fair share of cruelty at the hands of the people around her. Also, major love triangle drama.) As an aside, there’s some lowkey TV censorship here, such as the blurring of ladies’ necklines that are deemed to dip too low (I once saw Heidi Klum on an episode of American Idol subject to this, and so too an animated female on the Japanese anime series Naruto), and this also extends to the Indian dramas, where thuggish men will whip out their menacing guns…which are just blurs in their hands.

There’s also a number of Indonesian dishes which taste purely Indian to me: different kinds of curries and turmeric rice, for instance. Actually, my host family were the ones who first called these foods “Indian foods in Indonesia” to me. One dish that’s popular archipelago-wide is Nasi Padang, and though it’s from the city of Padang in Sumatra, it tastes Indian to me. For the record, it’s one of the most delicious Indonesian foods that everyone should try: dark greens with a spicy curry and baked chicken over rice. There’s also nasi kuning, literally “yellow rice,” which is turmeric rice, usually paired with goodies like fried noodles, bits of sweet tempe, and cucumber slices. Out of a long buffet I’ll choose nasi kuning any day. Interestingly, it’s the food traditionally eaten at birthday parties. (Imagine a giant platter of yellow rice sculpted into the shape of a bear for a child’s party, or tiered like a cake for an adult’s.)

The single biggest modern tie between Indonesia and India that I see, which relates back to the popularity of Bollywood here, is dangdut. Dangdut is, to my knowledge, the most popular music in at least Java, if not all of Indonesia. It’s impossible to go a day, let alone a couple hours, without hearing it blasting from somewhere. I have somewhat mixed feelings about dangdut, but they overwhelmingly skew positive. Dangdut sounds exactly like Bollywood music and, surprise surprise, that’s what it’s derived from. (I know nothing about the history of when and how this came about, though.) I’m sure if I didn’t hear dangdut in context I would never guess it wasn’t Indian, despite the fact that it’s sung in Indonesian. The singers mimic that Indian style (it’s not exclusively a Bollywood one) exactly—high-pitched female singers, a certain kind of warble, etc. You know what I’m talking about. Dangdut’s also got the “Indian” wood flute going on, the thick tabla in the background…

Anyone who knows me knows I love Indian music. (Okay, pretty much anything Indian whatsoever.) Give me a wood flute and a tabla and a high-pitched female singer dueting with a deep-pitched male singer and I swoon. This is why my feelings about dangdut are almost all positive. However, not all dangdut is created equal. A lot of dangdut, rather than feature actual tabla, uses an electronic tabla sound that I find grating. It just sounds too processed to me and makes my heart race. But the more traditional stuff, yeah, sure, I’ll happily listen to that for a few hundred hours. I have a hunch by the end of two years I’ll have listened to it for a lot longer than that.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise, but there’s also a ton of Arabic influence in Indonesian culture. Of course it’s due to the Islamic connection. As in other Islamic cultures, certain religious-derived Arabic expressions are common: Assalamu aleikum; insh’Allah; Alhamdulillah and so on. The phrase “Assalamu aleikum wa rohmatulohi wa barokatuh,” which means “peace be upon you” and a few other polite blessings which I don’t recall, said with a very precise rhythm and cadence, is used by people of any faith to open an address to an audience. Many people also say it simply to enter a room, and in many classrooms, the students must say it to the teachers at the start of the lesson. The required response, which must always be provided, is “Wa-aleikum salaam wa rohmatulohi wa barokatuh.”

Aside from the five-times-a-day call to prayer, mosques broadcast quite a bit more from their speaker systems as well. At any time (I can’t pin down a schedule if there is one) there will be Quranic recitations or chanting, often by children. Some chants are short; some seem to go on for an hour. I can recognize well all the familiar voices and know the chants by heart. It’s much more often that I hear some chanting in the background than not, especially given the sheer number of mosques and mushollas (smaller prayer halls/places for prayer), at least two per street where I live in Kediri.

Maybe it’s the fact that Kediri is a conservative Muslim city, maybe it’s that I live just a block from a large Islamic university, but I’ve met so many people here who have studied Arabic to a very high level. It feels like most men I’ve met have had a very solid religious training at the least, which includes proper Arabic pronunciation and training in Quranic recitation. What this probably means is they went to a pesantren for high school, an Islamic boarding school. Obviously I love this. All my energies are going to studying Indonesian right now, but I’m really hoping after a year or so I can start taking Arabic lessons as well from someone in my community. Arabic knowledge seems to be so widespread and commonplace. It’s really exciting.

 

Abdi diajar Basa Sunda salami dua minggon wae

I’ve been meaning to write this post for weeks now; it’s a topic I find pretty endlessly fascinating. A month and a half ago I found out that my permanent site placement was in West Java, and immediately after the announcement I was shipped off for a visit. During site visit, one of the first things almost every person I met asked me is “Do you speak Sundanese?”

There are several ethnicities and local languages on the island of Java. The Javanese people, and naturally their language too, are the most numerous (someone once told me 40% of Indonesians speak Javanese), comprising a majority in East and Central Java; but the second-largest group, at least on Java, are the Sundanese, who dominate the West. That’s not to say everyone in West Java is Sundanese. Actually, in many areas, especially the closer you get to the central part of the island, it’s quite a mix of Sundanese and Javanese people/languages; but certainly where I am it’s almost entirely Sundanese. Just as living in Kediri I experienced the Javanese pride of their language and culture, so too at my site is the pride in the Sundanese language and culture. Sundanese is even taught in schools (just as Javanese is taught elsewhere).

In Peace Corps training, we were taught Indonesian for seven weeks and then we had a Language Proficiency Interview. If we passed at an Intermediate Low level or higher, we then moved on to studying a secondary language, dependent on what region we’d been placed in. Indonesian (also known as “Bahasa Indonesia,” the name for it in Indonesian) is the national language and the language of instruction in schools. In theory, all Indonesians have at least one language in common, and you can island-hop freely and use it everywhere.

The vast majority of Indonesians are fluent in Indonesian, but their relationship to the language varies wildly. For instance, I’ve met some older people who did not speak Indonesian, though I don’t know how much they may have understood. (When I talked to the elderly ladies in question, they just kept slapping my arm laughing, telling me over and over to speak Javanese. Sorry, I can’t oblige with what I don’t have.) I’m guessing in more remote areas, probably especially on other islands, there are more people who don’t speak Indonesian.

A lot, probably most, of the people I’ve known prefer to speak their local language over Indonesian. Some speak pure Javanese/Sundanese, while others speak a thick blend of Indonesian and the other. It can feel like Spanglish: rapid and unconscious code-switching. That’s what I experience most commonly at my site, especially among teachers at school.

That said, I’ve met some people who are fluent in one or more local languages but who prefer Indonesian, for whatever reasons. I’ve met people whose “native language” is Javanese/etc., but who are much more fluent, and therefore comfortable, in Indonesian. There’s a full range of attitudes and abilities. What I’ve seen so far most commonly, however, is Indonesian will get you most anywhere, but if you speak a local language, that gets you serious points with the people. As Nelson Mandela said, “If you speak to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you speak to a man in his language, that goes to his heart.” It’s such a profound statement, and resoundingly true.

That said, Indonesian is one of the easiest languages out there. And Sundanese…is one of the hardest. (I’d heard for years about how hard Javanese is, and then I finally got the chance to ask a man who was fluent in both Javanese and Sundanese which was more difficult. His answer? Sundanese.) Sundanese fascinates me, and I love the sound of it, and it makes people so delighted when I use it; but I have finite energy, and becoming fluent in Indonesian is still my priority. It’s the language I’ll be able to use not just on other islands, but also on the other two-thirds of the island I’m on, including when I hopefully go back to visit my host family in Kediri later on; it’s the language of government, the media—really, everything formalized, at least beyond the smallest local level. (On that smallest level, on the other hand… There are plenty of signs around my school, including the huge decorative “welcome” lettering by the entrance, which are either mostly or exclusively in Sundanese. Wilujeng sumping!)

After I passed the Peace Corps language test for Indonesian, I had two weeks of Sundanese class. The first week was brutal. We were learning Sundanese in the morning and then we had Model School, where I and a fellow trainee coteacher planned and taught classes, in the afternoon. Model School took a lot of out me, for whatever reason; and Sundanese was its own exhaustion. We learned Sundanese in Indonesian, which really was the right way to do it, so that we didn’t entirely lose our Indonesian in the switchover, and because a lot of the basic grammatical structures are similar; but this also had the effect of being really confusing and sort of repressing my Indonesian, as I had to struggle against using Indonesian in the classroom. It also effectively put on hold the deep studying I’d been doing in Indonesian to learn more complex vocabulary, bringing me back down to the beginning in a new language again: “My name is _____ , I am from ________.”

I was so tired with Model School that I didn’t have any energy to study Sundanese at night when I finally came home, and that would make the next day of Sundanese class that much harder. But I did my best to concentrate and try to pick up what I could. I knew it would absolutely come in handy. Even within a couple days I was able to remember things that people had said to me during site visit that I had thought were simply Indonesian words I didn’t know, but which I was able to now realize were actually Sundanese. (For example, everyone had kept asking me “kawit ti mana?”. That’s Sundanese for “where are you from?” And then there was the matter of that “welcome” sign out front at school…)

I also enjoyed secondary language class because Sundanese is just cool. I loved listening to my teacher speak it. We all agreed it had a kind of ancient quality about it that Indonesian doesn’t have. Some of the sounds are so different: ng, ny and eu are the hardest for me to pronounce, though there are also difficult near-silent ‘t’ sounds and others. “Ng” is a nasal sound that is kind of like the “ing” sound in English, except you make it without using your mouth whatsoever, and when it comes at the beginning of words it’s tough. “Ny” is also nasal, though slightly less difficult. “Eu” is just enjoyable to make a stab at; it’s super guttural in the back of your throat.

I don’t know enough about Sundanese grammar to comment on how difficult it may be, but one huge reason Sundanese is so tough is because it has three different levels. There are three different words for almost everything that Indonesian (and English) only uses one word for, dependent on whether you’re speaking to someone older than you whom you want to treat very politely, someone at the same rank as you, or someone younger (or whom you want to insult). So for instance, there are three words for “to eat,” dependent on the three levels. There are also different words for whether you are talking about yourself or someone else. I can say “abdi hoyong emam” to mean “I want to eat,” but then I say “anjeun bade tuang” for “you want to eat.” (Compare hoyong vs. bade for “want,” and emam vs. tuang for “eat”, dependent on if I’m referring to myself or to another person. Also, I’m using “tuang” because it’s very polite, but I have two other options I could use in reference to your eating, dependent on what I think of your status in relation to me.)

Sundanese and Javanese are different languages, but both have some words they share with Indonesian, and there are a few words they share between themselves (though they’re not remotely mutually intelligible). An interesting linguistic note is that in Indonesian, the words for the names of languages are the word “Bahasa” (“language”) followed by the name of the country or people that speak it. So “English” is “Bahasa Inggris” (“language of England”), while Indonesian is “Bahasa Indonesia.” In Sundanese and Javanese it works the same way, and the word for language is bahasa, with one exception in each: The name of the Sundanese language in Sundanese is “Basa Sunda” (basa, not bahasa); while Javanese, in Sundanese, would be called “Bahasa Jawa,” and so on. Similarly, if you say “Javanese” in Javanese, it’s “Basa Jawa,” while all other languages are Bahasa-whatever—Bahasa Sunda and so on. Like Sundanse, Javanese also has three levels (I’ve heard there’s a fourth, which was only used to speak to the Sultan with?), and even the numbers are different between levels. (My friend was also telling me there’s no pattern to the numbers up until 25, and even after that there are exceptions. Yikes!) Entertainingly, in Javanese the words get longer the more polite the level you use. I remember overhearing my host father in Kediri talking on the phone with his mother, using all very long, very-polite words.  

One of my favorite things we did in Sundanese class was our teacher taught us little songs. He taught us four in all, and I love them! I’ll include the lyrics so you can see the way the language looks (there is a Sundanese script, but we weren’t taught it—nowadays it’s just written with the Roman alphabet) and appreciate the sounds and rhyming structures:

   Oray-orayan luar-leor ka sawah

Tong ka sawah parena teu sedang beukah

Oray-orayan luar-leor ka leuwi

Tong ka leuwi, di leuwi loba nu mandi.

This song talks about snakes who can’t go into the rice paddies because it’s harvest time, and then can’t go into the river because people are bathing there. It’s a song to teach children caution, that they shouldn’t play in the rice fields or the river. There’s a game to accompany the song, similar to London Bridges or the “oranges and lemons say the bells of Saint Clemmons” British nursery song. Children put their hands on each others’ shoulders and twine like a snake around and under the arms of two children who have their hands clasped together to form a bridge; when the song ends, one child gets “caught” when the bridge is brought down on them.

   Cingciripit tulang bajin kacapit

Kacapit ku bulu pare

Bulu pare seuseukeutna.

Jol pak dalang mawa wayang

Jek jek nong!

This is less a song and more a kind of chant; you try to say it as fast as you can. The last line is sort of onomatopoeia for the sound of a gong being rung. Noooonnnggg!

3

Colenak beuleum peuyeum digulaan (x2)

Awas bom batok (x2)

Rebu-rebu randa montok

Leupangna dicentok-centok

Bisi nincak tai kotok.

This is a very fun sort of marching song. The lyrics are very funny. The beginning talks about delicious fermented cassava (also known as “tape” in Indonesian, I’ve had it a few times—it has a very soft texture, almost like durian, and a very strong flavor. I like it, but only in very small quantities). The ending describes a thousand beautiful widows sashaying in high heels, stepping carefully so they don’t step in chicken poop. Who knows what it means, but the imagery is great, the tune is addictive and the words are fun in the mouth. A couple nights ago I had colenak itself for the first time, and it was great! My host mother and I sang the song while she served it. Strips of fermented cassava—“peuyeum”—are grilled—“beuleum”—and then drizzled (or lathered) with dark brown liquid sugar, which makes them “digulaan” (“sugar’d”). The proper adjective to describe this combination is right there in its name: “enak!” (delicious).

4

Cingcang kaling manuk, cingkleung cineten

Plos ka kolong bapa satar buleneng.

This one is short but has an incredibly haunting melody. It was initially hard for our teacher to teach us the melody just because it sounded so unexpected and foreign, the way it changes keys or something (I don’t know music theory, I can’t explain why it was so surprising to our ears). It’s really beautiful. The lyrics say something about a kind of bird, a “manuk,” which perches underneath…a chair, maybe? Or am I making that up?

One of our last days learning Sundanese our teachers put on a very fun afternoon for us with the aim of having us appreciate Sundanese culture. They came dressed in traditional clothing, which was for the men, black jacket and trouser combos that were very simple (and comfortable-looking) with batik-patterned head bandanas all tied in different ways (there are something like twenty different ways to tie these, each with its own name); and for the women, skirts and shirts with transparent silk and very detailed beadwork. One of the teachers gave us a performance of a traditional Sundanese martial art that was later turned into performance, sort of like a dance; most striking was the bulging, intense, unblinking stare he held his eyes in the entire time—utterly inimitable.

Traditional Sundanese dancing reminds me of Javanese dancing (I don’t know enough to tell them apart), with ornate hand and shoulder movements. Our teachers also demonstrated the particular kind of nearly throat-singing that Sundanese rice farmers do in the fields; it was haunting and gave me chills. The afternoon ended with our teachers setting up a mock “pasar” (market) for us, with real fruits and fake money, so we could practice our Sundanese bargaining skills. It was such a fun day, and it really increased my interest in learning more about Sundanese culture and the language. Even if learning Indonesian is a higher priority for me, I really respect how important their language is to Sundanese people. It’s wonderful it’s a flourishing, living language, not to be overrun when Indonesian was installed as the national language. So much is lost when a culture loses their language.

Probably the most helpful thing our teacher made us do during our short study with him was to keep a daily, page-a-day diary in Sundanese, which he would then check and correct. That was the best way I learned new vocab (any word I didn’t know in Sundanese I would write in Indonesian, and then he would tell me what the actual Sundanese word was) and then practiced it, and got to practice writing sentences; and my progress in five days was huge. It’s a routine I should consider taking up in Indonesian, or even Sundanese, at least once I find a dictionary for the latter. (I’ve been trying to buy one, but have yet to find one in a bookstore.)

For our “final exam” in Sundanese class our teacher had us each monologue for three minutes, and then as a class we had to perform a short play he’d written. There were four of us in the class, but one girl was sick that day, and in our teacher’s play she had by far the most lines. I was given her role instead, and had to memorize over sixty lines in an hour or so. I ended up being glad that our teacher insisted that we memorize our lines, though (even though he could have easily had us just read the script), because I did feel like I got to know the words and expressions and constructions more intimately through memorization, and when I then spoke them they felt much more natural in my mouth. Our teacher studied Theater in college; I’m sure he knows full well the wealth of difference between reading versus memorizing your lines. After a little practice we performed the mini-play together and he recorded us on his phone. It was a really fun experience.

Peace Corps will reimburse us if we want to get language tutors at site, and you are allowed to study either Indonesian, a local language, or both. I haven’t entirely ruled out looking for a tutor for Sundanese (I absolutely want one for Indonesian). Even if I just travel to East Java I won’t be able to use Sundanese, but it’s still such a cool language, and I’ll never have this opportunity again. I’m certainly grateful for the two weeks of Sundanese I got under my belt. It’s so useful to be able to tell when people are switching between Indonesian and Sundanese. (And interesting: I love noting how one pair of conversants may speak mainly in Indonesian, with just an “atos” or “muhun” thrown in there, while another pair speaks pure Sundanese. I’ve ever heard people switch between the languages when reading a string of numbers: “genep empat,” that kind of thing.)

There’s also a couple things I know in Sundanese that I don’t know in Indonesian, like this extremely useful phrase: “abdi bade permios.” This is the polite thing you say when you are ready to leave someone’s house. Not only might you want to say it because you feel ready to leave, it’s also polite on your part to not overstay your visit, and keep it just to fifteen minutes or so, because your hosts are probably busy with other things to do as well. I have no idea if there is such an expression in Indonesian. Wilujeng tepang deuy!