Rosihan Anwar, 89, is a respected journalist and everybody knows it. He started his long career at the age of 21 and keeps on writing until today.
A former chief editor of the influential daily Pedoman in the early years of the Republic, Rosihan is now a regular columnist for some publications and has written a number of books, the latest being Napak Tilas ke Belanda, a memoir of his trip to cover the 1949 Indonesia-Netherlands Roundtable Conference.
Today, everyone is witness to his brilliant memory and unwavering passion in writing. In fact, his life story has an unpleasant beginning: He got a blister! It happened some decades ago when he was still in grade four.
Rosihan recalled the story about the blisters on his legs and shared it with Rudolf Mrazek, a professor of history at the University of Michigan who use it as a material for his remarkable book titled A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of Its Intellectuals.
“I remember one of my Dutch teachers, a young lady, when I was in the fourth grade. One morning during recess I was sitting in the schoolyard, and she was looking in my direction as she talked with another teacher.
They were both looking at me, and I knew that they were talking about me. My lady teacher pointed to me. She was showing her colleague, also a Dutch woman — my legs. All the time I had been aware that they were talking about me, and I knew what they were talking about. I had — you know, here, here and here — there were sores on my legs, what do you call it?”
“Yes, they talked about it; that I had a kind of skin disease. ‘You!’ It meant, ‘You are a dirty native!’ or
‘You take your bath in the river and you shit in it too, this is why you got this’,” I can’t forget it, still, to this day.
Rosihan’s tale was just one of several accounts shared by a number of Indonesian intellectuals being interviewed by Mrazek for this book. The people in this book, Mrazek wrote, with few exceptions are of the colonial and Indonesian urban elites of the 20th century.
Most of the people were interviewed between 1990 and 2000. The old people were interviewed about their youth and childhood. Not many of them are left today.
Mrazek began his project expecting that he would get stories about the country’s transition to modernity, from colonialism to post-colonialism and about the unfinished revolution in Indonesia. It turned out, however, that many of the interviews produced accounts on personal matters. For us, the readers, it becomes more interesting.
In the First Chapter “Bypasses and Flyovers”, Mrazek describes the condition of the capital city Jakarta in the early post-colonial period.
Observing the city’s landscape and the daily life of its inhabitants, Mrazek concludes “as one walks and drives through the avenues and highways of Jakarta, one can feel that the city and the revolution might have been built in the same way. To move through that kind of space and along those kinds of lights brings, kind of, a sense of liberation.
This is true today more than ever. Today, as we drive cars along thoroughfares across the city we all hope for liberation — freedom from the traffic jams.
One outstanding figure being interviewed for this chapter was Professor Roosseno Soerjohadikoesoemo, the engineer and the brain behind many of the city’s landmarks such as Hotel Indonesia, Istiqlal Grand Mosque and the National Monument.
Roosseno recalled how he was ordered by the Dutch authorities to destroy bridges when the Japanese came close to invading Java in 1941. “One hundred and fifty bridges,” he said. Six months later, the Dutch surrendered and the Japanese occupation authorities ordered him to rebuild the bridges. “One hundred and fifty-plus,” he said.
Chapter Two, “The Walls”, recalls stories from some people about their houses and their lives. This chapter offers personal experience from some intellectuals. There are some surprising yet genuine accounts.
For Father Mangunwijaya, the thing he remembered best about his house was the well. He recalled, “I remember a large, yard, big trees, flowers in flowerpots and a well. This I remember best because I always took my bath at this well.”
Professor Miriam Boediarjo said she did not remember the house, but the toilet. “It was a wooden box set over a ditch, with two openings on the top. It was outside at some distance from the house,” she said.
Something common in the past can seem alien today. Some people in the book revealed some of the seemingly odd daily practices of the past. Hamid Algadri recalled how the women in the family should wait for the men to finish their meals before the women could take dishes from the table.
“As long as the men were eating, the women did not enter. Only after the men finished would the women sit down,” he said.
Prince Puger of Yogyakarta described how his family enjoyed European food every day. “Everyday there were European dishes. But on Sunday and Wednesday we ate rice,” he recalled.
All five chapters of the enlightening and entertaining book offer fascinating personal accounts of the people we mostly know from news reports. This book brings us closer to their lives.
In the author’s note, Mrazek writes that hearing the old people in Indonesia, at the end of the military regime and long after the failed revolution, at the end of their own lives, trying to find their voices among the noise, through their speaking, coughing, breathing, falling silent, they were gathering the world — in the post-colonial Jakarta.
A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the memories of Its Intellectuals
Rudolf Mrazek
Duke University Press, 2010
310 Pages
