Page 82 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

problem’ has been found. They cannot dissociate themselves from Indonesia, the 1
country in which their lives are profoundly embedded. Much less would a dis- 2
embedding gesture of virtual belonging to a deterritorialized Chinese diaspora 3
provide them with useful resources of power in their day-to-day efforts to make a 4
living within the territory that is Indonesia. As one news report notes somewhat 5
dramatically, quoting an ethnic Chinese businessman during the riots in Medan: 6
‘If you’re rich, you leave the country. If you’re comparatively well off, you go to 7
a hotel. If you are poor, you stay and fight’ (Gopalakrishnan 1998). But given the 8
precariousness of racial and ethnic relations in Indonesia, this ‘fight’ is not likely to 9
be of a confrontational kind. Instead, an ongoing politics of hybridity, of cultural 0
collaboration, mixings and cross-overs, is desperately needed, a tactical politics 11
‘associated more with survival and the ability to articulate locally meaningful, 12
relational futures than with transformation at a systemic level’ (Clifford 1998: 367). 13
This doesn’t mean of course that systemic, structural change – articulated in, as 14
Hutnyk would have it, ‘a more explicitly radical language’ – should not be fought 15
for, on the contrary. Indeed, in the wake of the May 1998 violence and the fall of 16
Suharto political activism against the discrimination of Chinese Indonesians has 17
surged (Kwok 1999). Importantly, much of this activism was a collaborative affair, 18
undertaken by Indonesians of mixed ethnicities, genders and religions and involving 19
many intellectuals, artists, religious leaders and politicians (Heryanto 1999). At 20
the official level, steps have been taken to abolish the distinction between pribumi 21
and non-pribumi – a distinction that tends to essentialize differences and to sharpen 22
the dichotomy between ‘real’ Indonesians and ‘Chinese’ – and more generally, 23
to remove the ban on Chinese cultural expression. 15 In other words, it would be 24
mistaken to believe, as one would were one to rely uncritically on the impression 25
produced by Huaren and other similar global information providers, that there 26
are no political forces within Indonesia who work in solidarity with Chinese 27
Indonesians to improve their situation. 28
It would be unrealistic, however, to expect that change in official politics and 29
representation would automatically lead to change in everyday attitudes and popular 30
common sense. The undoing of a divide that has been so entrenched in the 31
Indonesian national imaginary since colonial times, and that has only been further 32
solidified in postcolonial Indonesia, can only be slow process, involving the longue 33
durée of cultural change and gradual reconciliation in ordinary social relationships. 34
In short, it is a matter of the micro-politics of everyday life as much as the macro- 35
politics of structural change. 36
Hybridity is crucial to such micro-politics. A politics of hybridity which empha- 37
sizes an accommodation of cultures and peoples at the local level is a necessary 38
condition for the very possibility of larger social and political transformation. After 39
all, the latter can only be based on a belief in the continued viability of Chinese- 40
Indonesian interconnections and mutual entanglements in the face of pressures 41
which stress the mounting incommensurability between ‘Chinese’, on the one 42
hand, and ‘Indonesian’, on the other. What is at stake in a politics of hybridity 43
is neither a submission to the misguided and impossible idea of assimilation, nor 44

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