The last time I was in Jakarta for work, my hotel happened to be around the corner from City Hall, a stately compound that takes up an entire city block. It has been the seat of the Jakarta government for over a century, the official office of Indonesian and Dutch governors alike. As I drove by it one evening, our office driver pointed to it and simply said, ‘Ahok’, and for a moment what I felt was pride that someone from my mother’s community had ascended to the pinnacle of a society that once spurned people who looked like me.
But the next time I am in Jakarta, Ahok will no longer be in office. In April, he was voted out following a race- and religion-baiting gubernatorial campaign that the Jakarta Post called ‘the biggest political spectacle the country has ever seen’. Ahok’s loss, the editorial said, ‘shows that a political candidate is now judged by his faith rather than what he has done or will do to improve people’s lives.’ The blasphemy case against Ahok continued, and on 9 May 2017 he was sentenced to two years in prison.
The next time I drive by the Jakarta City Hall, it will not be my mother or grandmother whom I think about, or the status and happiness they have attained. It will be the Rohingya I have listened to from Maungdaw to Aceh, the pain that has turned an old saying of theirs into a stubborn truism. ‘People never change,’ they tell me. ‘The tamarind is always sour.’
*
The first time a Rohingya told me the tamarind is always sour was a month before the US election. I was sitting in a KFC in Penang, Malaysia, after meeting with a nearby Rohingya refugee community, the ‘community’ being a few ramshackle lean-tos by the side of a busy thoroughfare. My colleagues and I were discussing what the community had just told us two days earlier: on 9 October 2016, militants had allegedly stormed Myanmar border guard posts in Maungdaw, killing several officers. In response, the Myanmar military unleashed a full-blown clearance operation to apprehend the militants. The Rohingya we met in Penang were frantic, hearing from relatives back home that entire villages were being scorched, women raped and men shot dead on sight.
It was a devastating development. I had been in Maungdaw earlier in 2016, asking Rohingya if they still had any intention of attempting to reach Malaysia by boat. The consensus was that it was no longer possible; they had seen all the boats – and their relatives – adrift in the Andaman Sea in May 2015. Smugglers were no longer confident they could circumvent increased border patrols.
But there was also a smattering of hope, however tenuous, that things at home might soon improve. In early 2016, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was just about to assume power after her political party overwhelmingly won Myanmar’s first democratic elections in November 2015. One of my Rohingya colleagues, Saw Myint, once told me how he canvassed through Rakhine State in 1988 with young Muslims and Buddhists, spreading the democracy movement spearheaded by Aung San Suu Kyi, shortly before she was placed under house arrest for the better part of two decades. It was a memory Saw Myint recalled with a kind of euphoria, as if it had been a dream, this bygone time when Muslims and Buddhists had shared a common vision for the country.
So when Aung San Suu Kyi came to power in April 2016, though Rohingya had no illusions of instantly being embraced as citizens of Myanmar, they at least felt the tide, so long against them, had turned. I did, too. As a student, I had backpacked around Myanmar when it was still strictly under military rule, and when I returned to law school, I raised money for media outlets exiled from Myanmar and drafted legal briefs contesting the arbitrary detention of Aung San Suu Kyi and other dissidents.
I could not envision then Myanmar’s spectacular transformation in the ensuing decade: first the transition to a civilian government and the freeing of Aung San Suu Kyi; then the end of American sanctions, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton embracing Aung San Suu Kyi on the steps of her house – once her prison – in Yangon; and finally, free and fair elections that gave Aung San Suu Kyi the reins of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar.
When, shortly after coming to power, Aung San Suu Kyi commissioned Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, to find solutions to the issues that beset Rakhine State, there was some optimism that the suffering of the Rohingya might ease. Full citizenship may not have been on the immediate horizon, but at least increased freedom and opportunity, and perhaps an end to segregation.
Then in the small hours of 9 October 2016, a band of armed insurgents no one had ever heard of before carried out a coordinated series of attacks on three border guard posts in Maungdaw. The military’s clearance operation in response has driven 74,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh.
Based on interviews with these refugees, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported ‘mass gang-rape, killings – including of babies and young children, brutal beatings, disappearances and other serious human rights violations by Myanmar’s security forces’, and that ‘hundreds of Rohingya houses, schools, markets, shops, madrasas and mosques were burned by the army, police and sometimes civilian mobs.’ The Myanmar government has denied any wrongdoing.
At the KFC in Penang two days after the initial attacks, my colleagues and I were discussing what this would all mean for the Rohingya. It was a bleak conversation. At one point, Saw Myint and another Rohingya colleague exchanged a few words in their native dialect. They interpreted for the rest of us: ‘The tamarind is always sour,’ they said. ‘It means what’s sour will never be sweet.’
*
In humanitarian work, or maybe just in the ubiquity of everything in our internet age, we are necessarily desensitised by this still-common brutality. But what I can never seem to get over is how medieval, even ancient, it all seems. Shakespeare wrote four centuries ago of our ‘mountainish inhumanity’ towards refugees and still today, across the Straits of Malacca, human beings are sacrificed and starved men cut each other down on the high seas. Wayfarers seeking new lives in the Antipodes are marooned without end on all but deserted islands thousands of miles from nowhere. The demagogues of North America and Central Europe want to raise great walls to keep intruders at bay. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, refugees flee war on airplanes but steal away with life vests in preparation for navigating the same whale road Ulysses sailed to Lesbos. And a little boy we lose along that road – or really just at its start – forgets to strap his sneakers but lies softly in repose, his spirit evaporated.
These moments, these movements, are as anachronistic as they are timeless. We are by our nature both territorial and mobile, creatures of comfort and aspiration. And I don’t know whether that makes me feel hopeful or hopeless. I don’t know if there has been another moment when so much of the world is concurrently wrestling with the same question: to close doors or open them, to turn out to the world or away from it. Germany has answered in one way, and Australia, where I was born, has answered in another. In South-East Asia, where I work, countries trying to open up are constrained by neighbours who have known for so long only how to be closed. And in America, where I was educated, the self-proclaimed Leader of the Free World clamours more (or at least more loudly) than anything else over how free that world should be and who gets to be a part of it.
I thought we would all get to be a part of it. I thought that was the point of freedom, of struggling to improve one’s lot: so that the entire world could be your children’s. What is wrong with aspiring to be global and elite, to be worldly and the best at what you do? My parents outran the war lords of China and the bigots of Indonesia to seek out somewhere and something better, for themselves and for me. They bussed dishes in Chinatown and faced down lecherous men in boardrooms to raise me in international schools and on three continents, so that I could work for the United Nations, trying to help those who don’t have what I had. This was the right trajectory, was it not? My whole life I was led to believe I could feel at home anywhere. My UN passport made it official, but I thought all along I was a citizen of the world.
‘But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world,’ Theresa May said recently
, ‘you’re a citizen of nowhere.’
If that is what I am, if I was not so much a prototype as a fleeting diversion, the last of an experimental line soon to be discontinued, then what was it all for?
The tamarind is always sour, the Rohingya say. They should know. They know better than I do, better than anyone, what it is like to be a citizen of nowhere, in danger of being discontinued.
The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of UNHCR or the United Nations.
Bonfire of the Narratives
Richard Cooke
‘Novelties’, bookmakers call them. That’s where you can wager on an Elvis sighting or alien contact event, usually at long odds. ‘Donald Trump is elected president’ was once a novelty, but not any longer. At first, the Irish betting site Paddy Power rated him a 66 to 1 chance to become the Republican nominee, then a 150 to 1 chance of becoming president. By May that was 2 to 1. What odds would you take now, on some other former novelties? A candidate drops out during the campaign. Mass civil unrest on polling day. Armed insurrection after it. In Pennsylvania, I met a woman who was voting based on the vice-presidential candidates alone. Whoever won the presidency, she believed, would be irrelevant: they would either be impeached or assassinated in their first three months in office. In current conditions, that’s starting to seem like a value bet.
After all, so many outside chances have conspired already to get us here. ‘Here’ is a place where the Republican candidate has not been endorsed by a single major newspaper. He has in fact been disendorsed by more than 160 leaders of his own party, including a third of its sitting senators. The GOP speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, refuses to campaign with him in person. Even two items of confectionary – Skittles and Tic Tac – have made public statements distancing themselves from the nominee.
Donald J. Trump is the most unpopular major political figure in the divined history of politics in the United States. He has been attacked by virtually every establishment institution in the country, and traditional political donors have shunned him as well. And yet he survives, within sight if not striking distance of the presidency, thanks to grassroots donations that broke records and an unshakable bedrock of support that encompasses almost half the country. Even as he slides towards likely defeat, the best estimates are that he will win more votes than any Republican nominee ever. The two ‘sides’, Republican and Democrat, now occupy not just different positions, but different realities. There is, though, a rare point of concordance: if Trump is here, something has gone disastrously wrong for America.
It’s not easy to correctly diagnosis societal decline. We’re all mortal, so the prospect of everything flourishing as we age and excelling after we die is a natural one to resist. Besides, like all big, chaotic things, America always seems to be on the brink of some breakdown. It’s almost a tradition for writers to tar each Republican presidential candidate as uniquely idiotic and dangerous, someone ‘justly famous for his howlers, blind spots, mangled statistics and wishful inaccuracies. Each time he goes up to speak, you sense that the pollsters are reaching for their telephones, the aides for their aspirins.’ (That’s not some ‘On Trump’, but Martin Amis talking about Ronald Reagan in 1979.) We forget all the times the doomsday clock was wound back, the peasants who wandered out of St Peter’s Basilica on New Year’s Day, 1000 AD, unraptured, the bunker merchants tending rusting cans in lieu of Armageddon.
Perhaps things are not as bad as they seem, and we’ve just forgotten how high and dangerous the social fevers of the ’60s and ’70s were, when there were 370 bombings in New York in two years, Detroit burned every Devil’s Night, convention riots were routine, and Kissinger had to talk Nixon out of dropping an A-bomb on Hanoi. But in more recent history, American political careers were ended by sighing loudly at a debate opponent (Al Gore) and yelling during a speech (Howard Dean). This year, it was possible to watch the second presidential debate, see the moderator directly accuse one candidate of sexual assault, and find that a footnote in the subsequent reporting.
Stories that in any other era would have been definitive – the widespread re-emergence of anti-Semitism, WikiLeaks morphing from darling of the left to darling of the right almost overnight, a former CIA director accusing campaign staff of collusion with Russian intelligence, ‘America’s Mayor’ Rudolph Giuliani saying live on television that everyone commits adultery – became incidental, half-buried subthemes of a rangy, monstrous metanarrative. The 2008 presidential election is often described as the first social media election, but the full toxicity and speed of that mode of communication has taken its time to leach into the political fabric of America. Here we are.
There’s an under-subscribed theory that all this is a good thing, well disguised. That underneath the coarseness and vulgarity and strangeness of this election are secret signs of hope, a reality where Trump is not only the most extreme GOP candidate in decades but also the most moderate: anti-war, anti–Wall Street, anti-globalisation. He would have been a different kind of unacceptable candidate not long ago.
It does not feel that way, though, when the cab driver from J.F.K. airport shows you an all-points bulletin text message for a jihadi bomber still at large. (A touching New York detail: the plot was twice foiled by accident, when two separate bags containing bombs were both stolen.) On the ground, this political moment announces itself as the end of something massive, a bonfire of the narratives, where the agreed understandings of how democratic politics should work have disintegrated, replaced by something no-one is in control of, not even the protagonists. No matter how bitter the partisan rift of the past, at least one side had optimism and the other had authority. Both qualities have gone.
‘How did this happen?’ is a question I hear many times in America, from the candidates, from the press, from voters. Its variation – ‘What is happening?’ – is something I’m asked all the time, as though a stranger from a foreign land might carry some antidote. ‘So, you’ve been to a Trump rally – what’s it like?’ I have been to a couple, but attendance doesn’t grant any special insight. Just look at the wildly different results across the genre of Trump Rally Anthropology, where liberal writers get sent into deepest, darkest America to find out what the natives think. For Dave Eggers, writing in the US Guardian, Trump’s choice of Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ as a theme song reflected the mood, which was ‘so gentle, so calm and so welcoming’. Eggers even laced his article with the song’s lyrics, as though they contained some gnomic clue to what was going on. For David A. Graham in the Atlantic, such events were frighteningly hostile: ‘Just below the surface of a Trump rally runs an undercurrent of violence.’ These reports describe different people, different places. (‘You should have seen Florida,’ one reporter told me. ‘It was like a rock concert for old people.’) But that doesn’t explain the discrepancy by itself. After my first Trump event, in a studio south-west of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I left with the impression that not a single person there really knew what was going on, including Trump himself.
*
I have to admit – my first impulse on seeing Donald Trump in person was to laugh. He was walking cross-stage, past a statue of Rocky Balboa wearing a ‘TRUMP’ T-shirt, on his way to a lectern that was bracing itself for gripping. I caught the signature lemon-suck expression on his face, and lost it. I’m not alone in this reaction; other attendant reporters, and even Trump fans, respond the same way. Later, at the first presidential debate, the press-overflow room greeted his arrival with chuckles. One French journalist said, to no-one in particular, ‘Donald is an idiot – how the fuck did he get here?’ It’s like the comedy of streaking: taboo violation and an inappropriate context. How the fuck did he get here?
By itself, turning up at a Trump rally is the empirical equivalent of lifting a wetted finger into a tornado. It is too chaotic, too diffuse to understand just by being there. There is a simultaneous impulse to patronise, excuse, exonerate, mansplain, coddle and
make fun of the attendees. Here in Pennsylvania, like everywhere else, the Trumpies are pervasively Caucasian, even though the local area, Chester Township, is majority black. In fact, the huge attendance (several thousand) belies a local reality: the counties surrounding Chester Township are exactly the kind of places Trump will need to win. But he is struggling among suburban moderate Republicans, who baulk at things like Muslim internment camps.
The crowd are really from further afield, bus-ins from the surrounding region known as ‘Pennsyltucky’, a mildly pejorative nickname for the rural areas outside Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. They are people used to being addressed in a mildly pejorative tone. Trump is on a moderating pivot, and has noticeably toned down his racial rhetoric. He’s ostensibly making an appeal to African Americans, but it’s really for the benefit of those uncomfortable white moderates. ‘What do you have to lose?’ he says to people who aren’t there, repeating the phrase three times in a Marlon-Brando-Is-The-Godfather accent that doesn’t quite come across on TV. But there must be something to lose; there are cities where Trump wins 0 per cent of black voters, making him a more unpopular figure than the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. (Duke, like most of his ilk, is enthusiastic about The Donald.)
It’s Trump’s rhetoric and persona that have brought him this far, but hearing him speak is not like witnessing a demagogic doomsday device being unveiled. It’s effective, but not ominously so. There are no ums, ahs or hesitations in the whole presentation, partly because he has given it so many times, with only occasional variations and ad libs. Everyone knows this speech. It is the one about the wall, the big beautiful wall that Mexico is going to pay for. It is the one about the way America doesn’t make things anymore, about how once upon a time cars were built in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico, and now the cars are built in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint. It is a lament for a country that the crowd no longer recognises, and that no longer achieves greatness. What a relief that someone can finally say it! Trump is controlled, often funny, and extremely vulgar. Parts of the speech are for entertainment purposes only, but you leave not quite sure which parts those are. Stretches about special interests and the media sound a lot like Noam Chomsky.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 9
