September 23, 2014 edition
Imagine, there is no country.
Sometimes people get fed up with borders. I think most Indonesians entering another country feel that every immigration booth is placed to convey suspicion. The officers look at us, without a smile, as if to decipher something from the shape of our nose or ears. Usually they will sigh and fiddle with their glasses, as if to say: I will allow you into our country, but actually you are a nuisance.
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More Sidelines articles in other editions
September 16, 2014 edition
There is a Malay word that has changed along with history: daulat.
In times gone by, Malay subjects would accede to a request by the sultan with the phrase, 'Daulat, Tuanku', meaning 'My Sovereign Lord'. In that phrase, the word 'daulat' implies a relationship with His Highness. But today the word daulat is used as an idiom to refer to the opposite direction: to the people. "The head of the group is requested (didaulat) by the audience to come up on stage and sing."
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September 9, 2014 edition
A stranger arrives on horseback at a homesteading community in a Wyoming valley in 1889. His appearance is unusual. He had a 'haunting' look, a child who was watching him says, "chilling in his dark solitude."
The man is not armed, but looks as though he is familiar with pistols and guns. He does not talk much. Always on guard. Always alert. Danger implicit in everything he does.
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January 1, 1970 edition
Revolution always rages before curfews. With fervor. Once the revolution is over, the raging stops. The fight, even the violence, has borne fruit; it is over, and now an order and sovereignty is established: a cold construction with straight lines.
I am reminded of the film Lewat Jam Malam (Past Curfew) for which Asrul Sani wrote the scenario. It was produced just a few years after Indonesia's fight for independence. In it, an ex-guerilla fighter named Iskandar feels alienated when he returns to normal life after the struggle is over and the Republic has started to work as a government.
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August 26, 2014 edition
There in that former internment camp, I stepped into the yard of the old prison that the colonial government built for political prisoners in the 1920s: it was narrow, barbed wire on the walls, and with underground cells where the most difficult prisoners used to be locked up. Under the hot sun and in the stifling heat of Boven Digul, which in no way resembled a 'pretty village', how did those prisoners manage to survive?
I trembled, for a moment. Was my father once locked in this very prison? I could not imagine it. I never heard his story. He was exiled to this godforsaken place along with my mother having been imprisoned and held under house arrest after the 1927 rebellion. I was born nine years after they were sent back to Java. Father never got a chance to talk much to me about his past: he was executed by Dutch soldiers when I was only five. Mother was too busy bringing us up. What stuck from Digul in our family was something wordless: one of my older brothers was born in that place of exile.
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August 19, 2014 edition
The sun can be bright, but distant and indifferent to human suffering. Les Misrables, which was first published on April 1, 1862, wanted to be closer to the earth, and sensitive to French weeping. As its famous phrase says: "Those who do not weep, do not see."
Victor Hugo wanted our eyes to be moist and for them to see, sensitively, around them. In general he succeeded in this, at least for his readers of two hundred years ago. There is a story that the publishing in Brussels of the first edition of his novel was delayed because the printers sobbed so much when reading the manuscript.
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August 12, 2014 edition