What is cultural awareness? Is it about knowing the habits and languages of other people? These are good intentions, but there is a lot more work to be done
Victoria Winata
Trigger warning: this article includes mention of rape and sexual assault
I am an Indonesian taking Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne. Most people, especially other Indonesians, find that strange and ask me why?
The answer I give is: ‘to get a new perspective on Indonesia.’ But that is only partly true.
The real reason is far more complicated.
My positionality
I was born in Semarang, Central Java, where I was raised until the age of eight before moving to Bali. I lived there with my family until I was 13, when my mother married my Australian stepfather, and we moved to Melbourne.
I have been a minority throughout my life. I am a Buddhist, Chinese-Indonesian woman, which made me a triple minority in Indonesia whose inhabitants are majority Muslim, and whose Chinese population is its biggest ethnic minority. By 2021, Indonesia was home to 7.7 million ethnic Chinese: 3.3 per cent of its total population. Indonesia also has the world’s biggest Muslim population at 84.35 per cent, while only 0.73 per cent of its inhabitants are Buddhists.
When I moved to Australia at the age of 13, my status as a minority remained unchanged.
My family made me acutely aware of my minority status even when I was a child. My mother repeatedly insisted that we were neither Indonesian, Javanese or Chinese: we were Peranakan. The term Peranakan refers to Indonesians of Chinese descent who have mostly integrated or assimilated into local Indonesian societies and cultures. Chinese-Indonesians are generally categorised into either one of two groups: Peranakan or Totok (Chinese who still maintain a strong tie to Chinese culture, society, and language).
Intergenerational trauma
My mother’s resistance to identifying as fully Javanese or Indonesian can be attributed to her life-long struggles with racism in Indonesia. As a child, a group of non-Chinese Indonesians stoned her parents’ house, and out of fear for her safety, my grandparents sent her to Singapore. When she returned to Indonesia as a high school student, she experienced discrimination at school and continued to experience racism as an adult.
Racism against the Chinese in Indonesia can be traced to the country’s time under Dutch colonisation. The Dutch, to fuel division amongst its subjects, separated Indonesian society into three basic categories: Eropeen (Europeans) at the top, Vreemde Oosterlingen (Foreign Orientals, including Arabs and Chinese) in the middle, and Inlander (‘natives’) at the bottom. The Chinese were used as middlemen by the Dutch, granting them special economic privileges that fuelled resentment amongst the ‘natives’ against the Chinese - who were seen as oppressors. The Chinese, from that moment onwards, became scapegoats to be used by Indonesia’s succeeding governments, especially under Suharto’s New Order Regime.
Under Suharto’s rule, Chinese-Indonesians were forbidden from practising their culture in public spaces. Chinese New Year celebrations were banned, and so were the use of Chinese characters in public. In addition, Chinese-Indonesians were forced to give up their Chinese names and take on Indonesian ones. Despite the Chinese having no political power in Indonesia, Suharto, in a similar way to the Dutch, granted the Chinese elite great economic privileges. The most infamous example is Liem Sioe Liong, one of Suharto’s wealthiest cronies and founder of Indonesia’s biggest conglomerate, the Salim Group. Eventually becoming sick of the regime’s blatant corruption, Indonesians ran out of patience in 1997, after the Asian Financial Crisis plunged Indonesia into dire poverty. This boiling pot of economic strife and resentment culminated in the May Riots of 1998, orchestrated by the Indonesian military specifically to target ethnic Chinese.
The Riots saw rampant violence and destruction, with Chinese owned businesses, stores and homes being attacked, looted and burned down. The worst atrocity was the mass rape of over 400 Chinese-Indonesian women and girls.
Across the archipelago, Indonesia’s biggest cities fell victim to the riots. At this time, my mother and grandparents were living in Semarang, which was tense but relatively safe from the riots - most likely due to its majority Chinese population. However, the riots continue to scar Chinese-Indonesians to this day, existing as our collective trauma. One of my uncles, who grew up and is still living in Jakarta, remembers exiting his hair salon to see a row of burned cars along the street. Nor were these the only riots against Chinese-Indonesians he had witnessed: ‘I’ve seen several riots in my lifetime. Do you think I can just get that out of my system?’ he told me. When my mother finally started speaking to me about the riots, which she had never mentioned until I was 19, she recalled the terror of living through those days, hearing stories from relatives and family friends.
A story she heard stuck with me: about a daughter of a family friend who was mentally scarred after she was raped by a man who put an object up her vagina. Stories like this exist as lived experiences and memories for many victims, their families, and our communities.
This background of intergenerational trauma, intertwined with my mother’s memories of personal and state violence, led me to pursue Indonesian Studies. As I grew older, I became more critical of my mother’s, sympathetic, if overly negative picture of Indonesia. Racism against Chinese-Indonesians is layered, complex and complicated because they also hold racist sentiments against non-Chinese Indonesians. Even as a child my mother would criticise any behaviours that she would label ‘Indonesian.’ Once, she saw me eating with my hands, something commonly done in Indonesia, and remarked disapprovingly, ‘You’re trying to be Indonesian, aren't you?’
It was not until I attended university that I began to realise the racist nature of these comments my mother had been making .
I understand her fear of being in Indonesia and her apprehension towards non-Chinese Indonesians. However, since I have not experienced anti-Chinese racism to the same degree as my mother, I have more positive experiences with other Indonesians and with the country itself. My mother, though she rarely admits it, doesn’t totally hate Indonesia as she has expressed how much she misses it, especially our home in Bali. She also doesn’t give enough credit to the non-Chinese Indonesians who have been good to her. When my grandparents’ house was stoned, it was their non-Chinese Javanese neighbours who protected them. My mother dismisses this altruism as being due to the fact that my grandmother could speak Javanese, and insists that ‘good’ Indonesians are a rarity.
I’ve often felt that this was an unfair judgement, and though I have been raised with a very negative view of my birth country, I found that I was never able to bring myself to fully hate Indonesia. As I explained, I didn’t experience the same level of racism as my mother. I did try to hate Indonesia, and for a long time distrusted it. However, I couldn’t help but feel a deep longing for it. This is not easily explained, but most migrants could relate to such a feeling. It isn’t nationalism, but unconditional love. It is inextricable from my diasporic nostalgia: a Lebanese migrant once said that nostalgia for your homeland was like longing for something that was once there.
When I entered university, I was determined to make up my own mind about Indonesia.
The classroom
My experience with Indonesian Studies has been overwhelmingly positive. Through these studies, my eyes have been opened to both the good and the bad of Indonesia. I have met a wonderful community of students and teachers, who have never failed to support me. It has led me to opportunities I previously never thought of for myself and has cemented my passion for academia.
However, a certain level of discomfort has never left me–specifically, the discomfort of being amongst a majority of students of Anglo-Celtic descent. In recent weeks, I have interrogated this discomfort more deeply and questioned its roots.
Before I go any further, I want to make a disclaimer that I am not attacking any students, nor do I want to deter anyone from studying Indonesian. I fully support cross-cultural learning and think that it is something that can be very beautiful. As a theatremaker and creative, I collaborate with multicultural teams and invite them into projects that have often explored my Indonesian background.
Rather than act as a deterrent, I want my piece to act as a word of caution and an encouragement to interrogate one’s positionality. Gaining cultural awareness is not enough. This is about power and decolonisation.
Decolonisation
In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said wrote that ‘Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient…is an Orientalist.’ He points out that, even though we now reject the term ‘Orientalism’ because it is at once ‘too vague’ and connotes the attitude of 19th and early 20th century European colonialism, Orientalism, ‘even if it does not survive as it once did...lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient (what we would now describe as the Middle East and Asia) and the Oriental.’
I have observed new forms of Orientalism in the classroom and in everyday life. There are people who praise Indonesians as being so ‘hospitable,’ ‘welcoming’ and ‘willing to share their culture’. On the other hand, there are also people who denounce Indonesia’s corruption, history of violence and supposedly failing democracy. Many of these people are Anglo-Celtic or of other European descent.
Everyone has a right to their opinion; however they must first acknowledge their position of power. The individuals I have just described are in a position of power through their very race and ancestry. They are orientalists just by studying, researching and describing ‘the Orient’ as Said explains. These are mostly non-Indonesians passing judgement on Indonesia, and they must acknowledge and be aware of both their status as non-natives, as well as white, Anglo-Celtic people. This also includes an awareness that their judgement exerts influence in our biggest institutions, including universities.
I am also critical of Indonesians, however, for self-Orientalisation. In Indonesia, orang bule (white people) are glorified. For example, Indonesians of mixed European heritage are praised as ideal beauties, and many go on to become some of the country’s most popular celebrities such as Nicholas Saputra and Cinta Laura, who are both half-German. It is common in Indonesia for many locals to take pictures of or with bule tourists, gushing with awe and admiration.
Because of this, Indonesians promote themselves as incredibly hospitable people, with an ‘exotic’ culture filled with beautiful sights, and diverse, delicious foods that foreigners can feast on. This self-Orientalisation caters to the Western view of ‘the Orient’ as a place of desire, and where Western desires can be fulfilled. Since antiquity the Orient has been ‘a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.’ Said argues that this is a European invention, where the West shaped the image of the Orient to their wants, regardless of what the Orient actually was. I argue that this has also been perpetuated by the East (‘the Orient’) itself. When I visited Indonesia this year, I also visited two of my white Australian friends who were taking a semester abroad at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM). Wherever I went with them, Indonesians would look at them with awe, and some would approach me to ask questions about my white friends: ‘Could they speak Indonesian?’ ‘Where are they from?’ ‘Are they studying?’ None of them were interested in getting to know me. Why should they be? I was just another native. It was the bules who mattered.
My friends felt uncomfortable with the attention. It was the Indonesians who glorified them. I have seen these attitudes towards white foreigners since I was a child, as my family upheld European culture, media, and literature. My mother told me, ‘Indonesians treated us Chinese-Indonesians badly and it was the Dutch who treated us well.’ When I visited UGM, I met a student from Lombok who told me that she got along better with the international students, because she thought they treated her better than her fellow Indonesians. She felt that her Indonesian classmates didn’t consider she was worth associating with, since she didn’t have anything to offer them - economically, socially, etc. It seems many of us Indonesians continue to cater to foreigners, rather than our own. We continue to conjure up images of our country as an ‘exotic’ paradise – one has only to look at Bali - but not for ourselves.
We can understand this self-Orientalisation and self-exoticisation through the lens of double consciousness. Double consciousness - first coined by African-American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois - is the state in which an oppressed, marginalised or formerly colonised peoples view themselves through the oppressor’s lens. It is ‘measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.’ I argue that we Indonesians continue to measure our ‘souls’, our self-worth by the coloniser’s tape, by their standards. Other scholars have expanded on Du Bois’ theory by proposing the idea of triple consciousness, where other elements such as gender and class intersect with race.
Our psyches have been imprinted with the colonial gaze. In reading about Dutch efforts to control Indonesians, I was struck by Kartini’s account of a young Javanese man who was forbidden from speaking Dutch with his European superiors. The young man had spoken Dutch with his peers at school, and naturally felt that he would be permitted to speak Dutch with an official, but was mistaken. His punishment was being assigned to work for another official who was of a lower class. The young man was forced to use High Javanese whenever he spoke with his superiors. For centuries, the Dutch used the natives’ cultures against them as a method of psychological, cultural and social subjugation. We were forced to practise our culture in service to our oppressors. This mentality continues to this day as we self-Orientalise ourselves in line with Western imaginations of our country.
There have been times when I’ve spoken to white friends as to why they chose Indonesian Studies, and several have described Indonesia as if it were an escapist fantasy: a place more interesting, more exciting than their own. I have had friends say that the Indonesian classroom was a happy place. There is nothing wrong with this, and I am glad my friends and other students have had pleasant experiences, but listening to their stories has always made me uneasy.
I only realised that this uneasiness arose because those students’ comments were similar to those of Europeans who were astounded by the beauty of the East. The French poet Charles Baudelaire described 19th century Batavia (now Jakarta) as a place where ‘we should find, amongst other things, the spirit of Europe married to tropical beauty.’ In her interrogation of depictions of travel and the privileges that come with it, writer Intan Paramaditha perfectly captures how white Europeans have gazed at the East, particularly the so-called ‘Third-World’:
‘We have always been the place traveled, the people written about, the picture painted. We are the bare-breasted Balinese women in paintings, a paradise, a heart of darkness…
…we became the exhibits in the colonial expositions.’
Amongst these discourses and various imaginings of Indonesia and ‘the Orient,’ the voices of natives often get lost, including my own.
Sometimes, in all-white classrooms, I feel like my experiences go unacknowledged as I sit there listening to foreigners describing, analysing and dissecting my country. I always appreciate foreign views. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have taken Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne, nor would I even be writing this essay for an Australian-based magazine. All I am asking is for non-natives, especially white people, to do a better job at acknowledging their power. Most Australians think that just because they are studying another culture, it is enough because they are gaining cultural awareness, but that is the bare minimum.
Anyway, what do we mean by cultural awareness? Is it knowing about the habits, the languages of other people? To make us more empathetic, more sensitive, more ‘aware’ human beings? These are all good intentions. However, people must know that there is a lot more work to be done. When we study another culture, we need to decolonise ourselves. Otherwise, we simply perpetuate the legacy of our ancestors.
And decolonisation begins with an interrogation of perspective. Many of us mistakenly believe we live in a postcolonial world, but that is a lie. Colonies both physical and abstract continue to exist physically in the form of violent occupations, and abstractly through mindsets and implicit biases. Questioning these biases is a must before we begin to talk as equals.
Victoria Winata (victoriawinata@gmail.com) is a Naarm-based theatremaker and creative. She previously interned with Indonesia Forum and is now volunteering with Indonesia Council as one of their Digital Engagement Editors. She acknowledges the Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrong people of the Kulin Nation on whose land she has written this essay.
