Yogya's Earthquake

The recent 6.2 Richter scale earthquake that ripped through southern Yogyakarta in Bantul was simply devastating, not just in the general sense of the word, but more so to me on a personal level. Yogya has always been my most favorite city in Java: a laid-back university town (where Universitas Gadjah Mada is at) and most importantly, the nerve center of Javanese culture, where the descendant of the Mataram kingdom, Hemangkubowono IX, still reigns in his kraton. The news of the earthquake hit me hard especially after my cousin's house/electrical shop on Jl. Godean was decimated into piles of rubbles. It was the place I always stayed at whenever I was in town. Fortunately, my cousin, Ade, decided to evacuate the house as it shaked and trembled before finally succumbed to the unforgiving force of nature. Everybody, including her husband, Yohan, and her worker, Ijah, managed to escape unscathed. But the damage was done. Their livelihood was gone and has to be built from scratch again.

Adding insult to injury, my distant cousin was stabbed to death in Jakarta around the same time as the earthquake. He was just a high school kid for God's sake! I don't really know the details of the murder but was informed of it by my brother, who was in Jakarta at the time doing his multi-level marketing whatchamacalit. I don't really know him all that well but I am quite close to his mom, Wak Umi. What I do remember about him is that he always picked up his mom at Wak Neng's house in Kelapa Gading on his motorcycle back to their house in Mangga Besar. A skinny and lanky lad, somewhat introverted, who seemed to love playing FIFA game on PS2 with Rendy, Wak Neng's youngest son.

I cannot even begin to imagine how hard these two devastating news hit my dearest aunt, Wak Neng. I forgot to mention that Ade, my Yogya cousin, is the daughter of Wak Neng. Talk about a serious double whammy! I wish I could be in Java right now offering whatever little help and comfort I could muster. I tried calling both Ade and Wak Neng for news but to no avail, but I'll keep on trying. To make matter worse for the denizens of Yogya, the volcanic Mount Merapi, which has been active these past couple of months, has been brewing even more furiously like a woman scorned. So far the scalding hot gas that spewed out of Merapi has only managed to sweep through unpopulated areas of the mountain-side. But who knows how long before it engulfs the poor villagers like it did back in 1994 and claimed the lives of hundreds of people. A lot of the villagers simply refuse to leave the mountain-side and abandon their land and livestocks. Spiritual offerings are made consistently in an effort to appease the spirits of the mountain. To what extent this will translate into good fortune, we shall find out, though I hope that we really don't have to.

Javanese worldview, its weltanschaaung, is predicated on harmony, equilibrium and order-tranquility. Major natural disasters signify disruptions in ecological balance, which also includes the human societies. The ability to hold the environment in equilibrium is the mark of a divine king; any natural calamity could be seen as the weakening of the king's centripetal power to hold the cosmos in balance, de-sacralizing his divine status, and thus, making himself vulnerable to challenges from pretenders to the throne. This might not be relevant in modern-day Indonesia and I might be reading too much into Ben Anderson's classic, "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture," but this cultural assumption certainly held some grains of truth back in the pre-colonial days.

How would these disasters affect President Yudhoyono (SBY) nascent democratic government? I seriously doubt that there's any spiritual correlation between the earthquake and the impending Merapi eruption with SBY's effectiveness as a leader. At most, he will be judged by his effectiveness in disaster preparedness and his handling of the crisis. While the response has been quite woeful, plagued by lack of medical supplies, food, fresh water, etc, it could have been worse. SBY's administration is still riding high on its somewhat successful negotiation with Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) last year in defusing the decades-long conflict in Aceh, and in giving Indonesia a semblance of hope in becoming a nation of one. To what extent will he be politically affected by the natural disasters is hard to gauge. My take is the impact is negligible. People are too rational to think that these are the signs from the gods that the country's leadership needs to be changed, unless if SBY fails to alleviate the suffering of the people.

The idea of a divine Javanese king is obsolete and died a violent death when Suharto stepped down in May of 1998. Still, I have the utmost confidence in the Indonesian people to persevere through this trying time as the courageous and steely people that they are. We in Malaysia will always have you in our prayers.