Don’t ruin them, will you?
Babu, wash the clothes!
Then, on page 34, one gets in lesson 13, entitled “Hold the Thief!,” a good look into the psychology of the Dutch as it related to the humanity of the Indonesian. I quote a part of it, thus:
Didn’t you close the window last night?
All the silver is gone.
The drawers of the sideboard are empty.
During the night there has been a thief.
What did the thief steal?
Where is the gardener?
He went to the pawnshop.
He took two spoons and received five guilders.
All the other goods were still in his pack.
He was arrested by the police.
All my stolen property has been returned.
The masterpiece is in lesson 24, page 56; it is entitled “The Master Is Cross.” Here it is, word for word:
Who is it?
Where do you come from?
Where are you going?
Why are you running about here?
What are you looking for?
Don’t pass along here!
You must stay over there!
You are not clever enough.
You are stupid.
You’ll get into trouble in a minute.
Be careful, don’t do it like that!
Think first. Look for ways and means.
Are you ashamed?
I want information.
I don’t understand.
I think you are lying.
I don’t believe it!
Don’t talk nonsense!
Speak straight out!
Don’t be difficult!
Don’t be afraid, answer!
Just why are you silent?
Why don’t you dare?
I don’t want to hear such nonsense! Be quiet!
Now that’s enough!
That matter is already clear.
And today there are Dutchmen who complain that the Indonesians are “Dutch crazy,” that is, when an Indonesian sees a Dutch face, he gets angry…. The mystery is how did it last for three hundred and fifty years? The sentences I have quoted above were designed to maintain “law, order, peace, and tranquility…” A reliable UNESCO official informed me that today the Belgians in the Congo use such methods of communication with their Congo natives and they characterize their attitude as “dur, mais juste…” And there are swarms of European social scientists in Asia and Africa culling for facts to find out why the natives rise suddenly and rush for the throats of Europeans.
One afternoon in Bandung a knock came at my hotel door; I rose and opened it and saw a tall white woman. She smiled shyly and said:
“Forgive me for bothering you. You are Richard Wright?”
“Yes. What is it?”
The woman looked off nervously, then smiled again, and asked:
“May I speak to you for a few moments?”
“Of course. Suppose we sit here on the veranda. Is that all right?”
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “I know I’m intruding—”
“Not at all. Sit down. Now, what’s on your mind?”
Seated, she smiled. Her hands were nervous and she knotted and unknotted her fingers.
“You are a journalist?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she answered. “I want to ask you about something, but I don’t know how to begin. You see, I’ve read your books and felt that you, of all people, could tell me something…”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“You see, my roommate is a Negro girl from Boston—”
“Hunh huh.”
“She’s nice, really. She’s a journalist too. But—I don’t know how to say it—” She broke off in confusion.
I studied her closely, but I could get no clue as to why she was so wrought up.
“You find this girl offensive,” I suggested.
“Oh, no! It’s not that. But—she’s strange.”
“In what way?”
“Believe me, it’s not racial prejudice on my part—”
“You are American?”
“Yes. But I’m not prejudiced. I swear I’m not. I’m liberal—”
“I believe you,” I told her.
“It has nothing to do with race,” she said.
“Just relax and tell me what’s the matter. What happened?”
She edged to the end of her bamboo chair and smiled again. Then suddenly she was serious, dead serious.
“It’s at night. I don’t understand it. She comes in late…. Oh, she’s polite, all right. She pulls off her shoes and walks around in her bare feet; that’s not to awaken me. She is black, real black, you see? Her skin is very shiny. I don’t mind that. When I first met her I thought she was very pretty; I do still. But when she thinks I’m sleeping, she does some strange things…. On her bare feet she creeps around like a cat…. Then one night I awakened and tried to see what she was doing; the room was dark…. I smelt something strange, like something burning…. She was in a dark corner of the room and was bent over a tiny blue light, a very low and a very blue flame…. It seemed like she was combing her hair, but I wasn’t sure. Her right arm was moving and now and then she would look over her shoulder toward my bed…. I was scared…. Now, look, could she have been practicing voodoo, or something?”
“WHAT?”
“Voodoo,” she repeated humbly.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Oh, maybe you think I’m crazy! But I want to understand. Why is she so secretive? Why does she creep around at night on her bare feet?”
I was baffled. A blue light? A strange smell? Was the woman telling me the truth?
“What else has this woman done?”
“Nothing. But she gives me the creeps, that moving around all night and that blue light and that odor….”
“Did you try to get a look into her things?”
She hesitated, then looked off and said:
“I tried to find out what it was she was doing at all hours of the night. But I could find nothing but an empty tin can; it was marked Sterno….”
I gaped as comprehension swept into my mind. Then I laughed out loud.
“Well, calm down. It’s all very simple. The woman was straightening her hair. You said that she was using something that looked like a comb…. That can of Sterno was to heat her metal comb which she uses to straighten her hair. And she did not want you—”
“But why would she straighten her hair? Her hair seems all right.”
“Her hair is all right. But it’s not straight. It’s kinky. But she does not want you, a white woman, to see her when she straightens her hair. She would feel embarrassed—”
“Why?”
“Because you were born with straight hair, and she wants to look as much like you as possible….”
The woman stared at me, then clapped her hands to her eyes and exclaimed:
“Oh!”
I leaned back and thought: here is Asia, where everybody was dark, that poor American Negro woman was worried about the hair she was born with. Here, where practically nobody was white, her hair would have been acceptable; no one would have found her “inferior” because her hair was kinky; on the contrary, the Indonesians would perhaps have found her different and charming. (In fact, there are some Indonesians in some of the islands who have kinky hair!)
“So that’s why she changed color so often,” the woman spoke in a tone of quiet wonder.
“What did she do?”
“She would go into the bathroom, lock the door, and stay for an hour or more…. And when she came out, she’d be much lighter in color. When she went in, she was black, naturally black; but when she came out, she was much lighter, pale, sort of grey—”
“She uses chemicals on her skin,” I told the woman.
“But why?”
“Negroes have been made ashamed of being black. Dark Hindus feel the same way. White people have made them feel like that. The Amer
ican Negroes are black and they live in a white country. Almost every picture and image they see is white. The Hindus have been conditioned to regard white skins as superior; for centuries, all the authority and power in their country were in the hands of whites…. So these people grow to feel that their lowly position is associated with their being black. They have been told time and again that they are inferior. And this woman, your roommate, is trying to make herself look as white as possible. Can you blame her? It’s a tribute that she pays to the white race. It’s her way of saying: ‘Forgive me. I’m sorry that I’m black; I’m ashamed that my hair is not like yours. But you see that I’m doing all that I can to be like you….’”
“That’s horrible,” the woman breathed. “She crucifies herself—”
“Every day that woman commits psychological suicide,” I tried to explain. “That is why twenty-nine nations are meeting here in Bandung to discuss racialism and colonialism. The feeling of inferiority that the white man has instilled in these people corrodes their very souls…. And though they won’t admit it openly, they hate it.”
“Now I remember something—”
“What?”
“One night she passed my bed; she stopped and said: ‘I’m walking softly so that I won’t awaken you.’ And, you know what I said? I was half asleep and I mumbled: ‘Don’t bother, I see everything.’ After that, she acted like she hated my very guts….”
“She felt that you’d been spying on her shameful ritual of hair-straightening and skin-lightening.”
“But what can I do?”
“Nothing,” I told her. “This is much bigger than you or I. Your father and your father’s father started all this evil. Now it lives with us. First of all, just try to understand it. And get all of that rot about voodoo out of your mind.”
The woman stared and tears welled into her eyes.
“I’m ashamed,” she whispered.
“The whole world ought to be ashamed,” I told her.
She rose, reached out her hand to me, then she jerked it back. I wondered if I’d offended her with my frank talk about what the black woman had been doing.
“What’s the matter?”
“That woman was telephoning today and I overheard what she was saying…. Say, now it comes clear. She was begging some Negro reporter to try to find a can of Sterno for her. And she wore a cloth about her head. She begged and begged for a can of Sterno….”
“Maybe her Sterno is all gone.”
“That’s what she told the man—”
“Then that means that she cannot now straighten her hair. This heat and humidity will make it kinky again. And she doesn’t want anybody to see her hair in its natural state—”
“God in Heaven, why doesn’t she forget her hair? She’s pretty like she is!”
“She can’t forget it. The feeling that she is black and evil has been driven into her very soul….”
The woman stood and stared off into space for a long time. I saw sweat beads on her forehead and nose. Then I heard the scream of a siren as some car belonging to the delegation of some Asian or African colored nation sped down the street, followed by a truckload of white-helmeted troops armed with Sten guns and hand grenades. The woman shook hands with me abruptly and said:
“Thank you. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” I said. “And tonight, for God’s sake, try to sleep.”
“I shall,” she said and was gone.
Even among Indonesian intellectuals I found strong racial feelings. I spent an evening with a group of artists, poets, and writers who spoke of their attitudes toward the West quite freely. To my surprise, I was told that even in the city of Jakarta there were not many contacts between intelligent Indonesians and Europeans and Americans. White missionaries had established some areas of contact; businessmen had created relations of a commercial nature; and of course the Communists maintained the closest and most intimate contacts of all….
The only two public places where Indonesians and Europeans can meet on a basis of informal intimacy are the city’s two main bars, but since Indonesians, because of religious reasons, are not great drinkers, they rarely frequent these bars. This lack of routine and steady contact stems, no doubt, from the heritage left here by Dutch rule.
“The Dutch, the Americans, and the English do not know us,” a young and well-known poet told me. “Where can we meet them? In those two bars? No! We don’t like night clubs. And our experience in meeting these Europeans has always turned out badly. When they leave Indonesia, they write false things about us. We are exotic children to them. Why, one white woman journalist went away and wrote an article saying that we grew banana trees in our homes! Can you imagine that?”
On many occasions I found that the moment a European or a white American entered a room in which I was talking to Indonesians, a sense of constraint and awkwardness at once came over the Indonesians, and the conversation would veer quickly from intimate descriptions of their personal feelings toward general topics.
In an intimate interview with one of the best-known Indonesian novelists I asked him point-blank:
“Do you consider yourself as being colored?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I feel inferior. I can’t help it. It is hard to be in contact with the white Western world and not feel like that. Our people are backward; there is no doubt of it. The white Western world is ahead of us. What we see of the white West is advanced; what we see of Asia is backward. So you can’t help feeling inferior. And that is why I feel that I’m colored.”
This writer heads a powerful cultural organization; he is devoutly religious and is highly respected among his colleagues. Yet he holds the most violent attitudes toward the Japanese.
“Those yellow monkeys!” He spat as he referred to them.
“But they are colored too,” I reminded him.
“But we Indonesians are brown,” he told me proudly.
Since all progress and social change are measured in terms of the degree to which Asian and African countries resemble Western countries, each tiny alteration wrought in the traditional and customary habits of the people evoke in them feelings of race consciousness. Said a young Indonesian bureaucrat to me:
“We Indonesians are just discovering the weekend. We used to hear about people going away for the weekend, but it was an experience we had never had. We saw American movies in which people went away from the city to the seashore or the mountains for weekends. Now we are doing what we saw those white Americans do in the movies…. Funny, isn’t it? Under Dutch rule there was no such thing as a weekend for us. Either we were too busy working to make a living or we didn’t have enough money for a weekend. Now we Indonesians can go and enjoy a cool weekend in the mountains like the Americans.”
Even mild-tempered Buddhists echo this attitude of defensiveness toward the West in religious matters. Said U Mya Sein, Chargé d’Affaires of the Union of Burma Embassy in Indonesia, in an address before an audience of the Islamic University:
“When Western colonialism annexed Burma about a century ago, nearly one per cent of the then population were bhikkus or Buddhist monks. Gradually, however, Buddhism suffered a decline through neglect under conditions of colonialism. As a matter of policy, colonialists introduced non-Buddhist missionaries into Burma on the one hand and on the other deprived Buddhist monks and monasteries of the status enjoyed during precolonial days.
“Today, after regaining its independence from colonialism, Burma is returning to the traditions of Buddhism in everyday life. The Constitution of Burma provides for a Secular State although it endorses that Buddhism is [the religion held] by the majority (i.e. 90 per cent) of the nation.”
Still another result of the Western impact upon the temperament of the Asian is the mushroom growth of a race-conscious and chaotic literature born of inferiority feelings; self-criticism runs rampant; extreme attitudes, smacking of omnipotence of thought, take the place of calm, constructive plans or pr
ojects. It is as if the Asian, smarting under his loss of face, were trying to offer to his new god of industrialization a sacrifice of ultramodernity of attitude and idea to redeem his state of racial degradation and humiliation. One hears the most abstruse ideas being debated by sweating brown or black or yellow men in sweltering bamboo houses…. Deprived of historical perspective, feeling his “racial” world broken, the new Asian makes a cult of action, of dynamism, to fill the void that is his; hence, motives for action are neurotically sought for. Racial insults, slights, and offenses, no matter how trivial, are hugged and nursed. If the past is shameful, and the future uncertain, then the present, no matter what its content, must be made dramatically meaningful…. Rendered masochistic by a too long Western dominance, carrying a hated burden of oversensitive racial feelings, he now rushes forward psychologically to embrace the worst that the West can do to him, and he feels it natural that the West should threaten him with atom or hydrogen bombs. In this manner he accepts the dreaded bombing long before it comes, if ever. Europeans told me that if an atom or hydrogen bomb ever fell on Asian soil from Western planes, every white man, woman, and child in sight would be slain within twenty-four hours.
The most racially pathetic of all the Asians is the Eurasian, those black-white men of Asia…. The West created this class as a kind of buffer between themselves and the illiterate yellow and brown and black masses, but now they want none of these Eurasians in their ordered Western societies. And the brown and yellow and black masses will have none of the Eurasians, for they, with their European dress, attitude, and manners, remind the masses too much of the white Europeans who once held them in subjection. Hated by both sides, shunned by all, the Eurasian ends by hating himself, alone in a lonely world.
“But why,” an internationally important official asked me in worried tones, “do these people keep on talking and feeling this racial business when they are now free?”
“They can’t forget it that quickly,” I told him. “It lasted too long. It has become a way of life.”
The Western world set these mighty currents in action, and it is not for that Western world to say when and how these currents, now grown turbulent and stormy, will subside and flow again in the normal channels of human intercourse.
Black Power Page 54
