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Jakarta has a long history, but does it have nostalgia? The city moves forward at an increasing pace; at the same time, fewer and fewer residents look at old photos as part of the story of their lives. In Jakarta, generations, buildings and maps keep on changing.
We have our poet Chairil Anwar (and perhaps he is the only one) who briefly sketched a scene of modern Jakarta in the late 1940sthe Capitol theater screening American films, youth riding the tram from Kotabut no one looks back at what is left behind. Sadly or not.
What was it about Picasso? Or Sudjojono? Some time in the early 1950s, when Sudjojono was not yet 40, he decided to do something unusual: He and other artists rode their motorbikes from Yogya to Jakarta. Their aim was to convince President Sukarno to agree to the idea of Sticusa, the Dutch foundation for cultural cooperation, to mount a large exhibition of 20th-century European painters: Picasso, Matisse, Braque.
I found this story in the account of Willem Mooijman who was working at Sticusa at the time, as retold in an interesting book about the history of art and culture in Indonesia between 1950 and 1965, Heirs to World Culture, edited by Jennifer Lindsay and Maya H.T. Liem.
A sad aspect of history is when there are no longer any innocent people. If it is true that an imam in Queens, New York, was shot in the head at close range merely because he was a Muslim or in Middle Eastern dress, then he was seen as someone implicated in crime, even cruelty, in another place, in another time, carried out in the name of Islam. Maulana Akonjee was an imam, a gentle man, but the man who shot him decided he was part of a political force of evil people. The label was fixed. Revenge could be wreaked upon him.
These days, people talk about the spread of 'Islamophobia' in Europe and America. The word 'phobia'as in 'communist phobia', 'xenophobia' and various other negative rejectionsis not entirely right. What is going on is not just symptomatic of social psychology. It is perhaps more like the echo of a long history of political conflict, involving people at large, when the flag of religion is furled in conviction and hate.
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