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"In juxtaposing Indonesian and European voices from the 1930s to the 1990s, Rudolf Mrazek compels us to reconsider the unsettling because of contemporaneous origins and effects of modernity in the colony and metropole alike. In his highly textured and brilliantly edited interviews with aging urban revolutionaries, he shows how remembering the past entails recalling its traces archived and activated in voices animated by the noise of the street and the neighborhood, the music of salons and cinemas, the stuttering bursts of translations and trains, the routine hum of prison camp and classroom. They thus convey the force of a certain history that remains bound to yet irreducible to narration and analysis."--Vicente Rafael, author of" The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines"

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A CERTAIN AGE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

PREFACE: Promenades.............................ixTechnical Note..................................xvONE Bypasses and Flyovers.......................1TWO The Walls...................................25THREE The Fences................................73FOUR The Classroom..............................125FIVE The Window.................................187POSTSCRIPT Sometimes Voices.....................235Notes...........................................253Bibliography....................................293Index...........................................303

Chapter One

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Riding, riding, riding, through the day, through the night, through the day. ... And courage is grown so weary, and longing so great. There are no mountains any more, hardly a tree.... Alien homes crouch thirstily by mired springs.... And always the same picture. One has two eyes too many. -Rainer Maria Rilke, The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke

ARCHITECTURE, HISTORY, AND THAT WAY OF TALKING

Already in the late colonial era "the road network in Jakarta had been asphalted and many trees cut down to make way for electricity and telephone wires and poles. The effect was to make it much harder on the eye." In the time of independence, after 1945, the Sukarno era, the poor and untidy quarters around the axes of the metropolis were progressively (albeit slowly) cleared, and cleared out. Since the 1970s, in the post-Sukarno years, the tempo quickened. Jakarta has been officially called BMW-bersih, "clean," manusiawi, "humane," wibawa, "ordered." It became a correct feeling (if there is such a thing) that one might ideally comprehend Jakarta in one glimpse: "Jakarta can be immediately seen on the map. The shape or layout of the city is marked by the flyovers and motorways running east, south, and west, cutting through the metropolis and heading out into the countryside." 4 Not yet, but almost, postcolonial (and postrevolutionary) Jakarta has become a postmodern metropolis, like Los Angeles, for instance, "whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant unreal circulation-a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension."

The traffic lights of Jakarta throughways and avenues, after the sun sets and the still remaining poor neighborhoods disappear in the dark,6 offer a perspective that is geometrical and logical. The straight lines, abstract and thus pure, meet at vanishing points. They are like the continuity of a political task, or like the "rails of revolution" that Sukarno, the president and the engineer, talked about: "Do you want to live forever? So pull back to the moment of the Proclamation of our Independence ... back to the purity of our souls, ... back, and straight on, to the moment when our Revolution began!"

The rows of lights-of traffic and of revolution-as in Siegfried Kracauer's vision, "create an appearance of a plentitude of figures from zero" as they "progress in one-dimensional time"; this logic, the geometry, and the politics "work hard to reduce everything to the level of the zero out of which [they want] to produce the world." The lights in straight or correctly curved rows, indeed, dazzle the observer and mold his memory as they "emerge from the past without substance, purged of the uncertainty of existence, [and] they have the stability and outline of algebra."

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:

The Indonesian Republic can live 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 30 years, 300 years, and, straight on, till the end of time....

One year since the Proclamation of our Independence became 2 years, 2 years became 3 years, 3 years became 4 years, 4 years became 5 years, 6 years, 7 years, 8 years, 9 years, 10 years, 11 years ... and God Willing these 11 years will become 110 years, 1,100 years, maybe 11,000 years!

Today we experience the 17th anniversary, 17x17 Augusts of freedom! 2x, today, we experience August 17th, the Proclamation of Independence Day, the reckoning that is great and holy!

To move through that kind of space and along those kinds of lights brings, kind of, a sense of liberation. Trying to observe and absorb this post- Palladian, postcolonial, and almost postmodern metropolis, one might almost convince oneself that "the community of human destinies is experienced in the anonymity of non-place, and in solitude." Almost, thus, one might comfort oneself that in a non-place like this, any "spectator," acceptably and correctly, "is a passerby." The omnipresence of the hard surface, of the asphalt of the roads and of the concrete of the walls, may, almost, bring satisfaction to a scholar.

Not being able to penetrate, not seeing much beyond reflections (the walls are not just of concrete but of glass as well, and the wet asphalt is like a mirror), may cause a pleasing sensation: "There is no sub-text.... The enunciative domain is identical with its own surface." By the very contours of the metropolis, the view and the thinking of the passerby is "drawn close to the surface of the architectural frame.... This relationship [is] further pressured [by] reducing the foreground elements of architecture while emphasizing the horizon itself as an object, maintaining the spatial hierarchy of perspective by bringing it up to but not over the limit." This kind of architecture, of horizon, and of counting, it has been argued, is built as a "monumentalizing of age." To live and die through this space, as well as merely to pass by this space, it may become (it may be reduced to) "an act of remembrance."

* * *

I think of Mrs. Sosro as the most beautiful apparition. She was a woman of a little over ninety when I met her in 1992. She was my first (memorable) interviewee in Jakarta on the metropolis project. She could not easily walk anymore. She received us sitting in her bed, a big brass structure, with a single long, hard pillow and a mosquito net half pushed aside. The gauze of the net softened the light coming from the outside. Thus Mrs. Sosro's face, as well as the whole space around her, was blurred. This was the late colonial beauty of fading photographs that we postcolonial scholars do not wish to admit. It is difficult for us to convince ourselves that, perhaps, "different concepts touch here and coincide over a stretch. But you need not think that all lines are circles."

Mrs. Sosro received us in her house "in a native neighborhood" (one would say "native" if it still were the colonial times), a poor area, off the highways and promenades of Jakarta, yet very much in the center of the metropolis. I could easily imagine her, if she were not bedridden, waiting for us looking out of her window with her elbows on the sill. She had a wrinkled voice.

Mrs. SOSRO: I used to sell herb drinks, prohibited herb drinks. Thus they call me Siti Larang [Lady Prohibited]. I used to sell them on the street, and I announced my ware by the chimes of a bell. They used to ask me, "Where do you stay?" I...