THE PUNKS ARE not answering my
calls. At night, I look for them. I have been told they used to haunt the
Tsunami Museum grounds, or across the road in the Aceh Thanks the World Park, a
tsunami memorial. But no-one is there. Instead, I seek out a man named Reza
Idria, a progressive Islamic academic who reminds me of Fathun Karib in
Jakarta. Like Fathun, Reza spent time as a punk in his early youth. We meet at
Solong Kopi (est 1974), the most popular coffee house in all of Aceh. On a previous
visit I met prominent local journalist Nurdin Hassan, who told me businessmen
meet here before and after work, to plan the day and to debrief afterwards,
talking in low voices over cups of dark, rich local coffee. Solong unfolds
unexpectedly, a small courtyard giving way out back to a huge open-air space.
Everyone is smiles and handshakes. Legions of waiters ferry strong small cups
of Acehnese coffee and glutinous cue rice cakes to waiting customers.
For a lecturer at Banda Aceh’s
Islamic university, Reza Idria is not what I expect. In his early thirties,
Reza has an open face given gravity by rectangular glasses, with tattered jeans
and a sharp haircut. But he has the teacher’s power of self-starting. One
question leads to a five-minute digression. With him is Azhari, a renowned
local writer with an air of impending gloom. He lights a slim cigarette and
twirls it absently through thumb and forefinger without looking. His face is
shaped for brooding contemplation: swarthy eyebrows knitting in the middle, a
thick silver earring, a scowl.
‘So tell me,’ says Reza heartily,
‘were you worried about coming here?’ I nod, a little shamefaced. He laughs.
‘But everything is normal!’ Azhari quirks an eyebrow. ‘On the surface,’ he
mutters, and returns to his cigarette. Reza tells me there are now at least ten
punk micro-communities in Banda Aceh, with an average of twenty punks in each
group. There are more outside the provincial capital. Some have gained support
at a village level, living DIY like Marjinal in Jakarta. Punks have been
present here since the 1980s. Their numbers have been building since the
disruption of the tsunami and the end of the war. But for years, it was a
hidden subculture. It was only in 2009 that Aceh’s punks first emerged from
their subterranean world of gigs and hand-to-mouth DIY. With growth came the
splitting, a small scale-version of Jakarta’s scene wars. Anarchopunks, pop
punks and posers all formed groupings. With the fading spirit of aid-driven
cosmopolitanism still in the air, the rival groups of punks began openly
advertising their gigs and activities.
‘Banda Aceh was known as a
metropolitan city again,’ says Reza. He’s talking about Aceh’s traditional role
– a port city, open to traders coming across the Indian Ocean. But that lasted
only two years. In early 2011, the city’s government launched an ad campaign targeting
tourists in the Middle East. The punks were on the streets by day; they were no
longer scared to be seen. And that made them embarrassingly visible, in a city
that prides itself on its elegant roads bracketed by towering trees, and its
Islam-approved cleanliness. And as the NGOs and international aid agencies left
for newer disasters –earthquakes in Haiti and Pakistan – a more rigid form of
sharia began creeping back in. The scene was set.
Reza Idria and Azhari are two of
the founders of cultural umbrella organisation Tikar Pandan. Their home base,
on the outskirts of the city, is now home to several of the punks who escaped the
police camp. Tikar Pandan is a rarity – an outspoken voice against the
religious turn in their society. Most members spoke against the city
government’s treatment of the punks. ‘We got a lot of criticism from the
government after that,’ says Reza. ‘They said we were Westernising, trying to
convert people from Islam.’ He laughs. It is not that simple. One of Tikar
Pandan’s most fervent critics studies under Reza at the university. He’s involved
in the Islamic ulama association.
‘He always came to me previously
to learn how to write. Now he thinks we will bring bad things to the Acehnese
youth.’ That’s difficult, I say. Reza shrugs. ‘We expect this. Each semester,
of my twenty students, only five will have the same ideas. Some of them will
become our enemies.’
Azhari butts out his cigarette.
‘You know, sharia law here is only for the grassroots. It never works on those
higher up,’ he says, a sardonic gleam in his eye. It’s cynical, but true.
In 2005, Bama Athreya, the deputy
director of the International Labor Rights Fund in Washington, spoke out about
Aceh’s prostitution rings, drug cartels and illegal logging operations run by
the Indonesian military. And now that Java’s troops have gone home? There are
new secrets. In 2010, an angry mob stormed a police station in West Aceh after
rumours spread of the existence of an illicit brothel within.
Inside the police station, they
found a naked couple and severely beat the man. The woman, a sex worker, was
repeatedly slapped. Alcohol, too, is discreetly available from top hotels. Sin
is more dangerous for the middle and lower classes.
Reza nods briskly. ‘Jakarta gave
us Islam as long as we stayed with them,’ he says, raising expressive eyebrows.
And the military were shipped back to their barracks. But then we found we
still could not go out at night because of the sharia police. The military
operation is replaced by the sharia police.
And because it is local – now we
cannot criticize it. Now, [others] think we come from an eleventh-century
place.
Azhari invites me to see their
home base. Tikar Pandan is housed in a sprawling, decrepit mansion set in a
semi-rural area with fences wrought of living trees. The building echoes.
Cigarette butts lie in forgotten ashtrays. On the garage walls are dozens of
photos, remembrances of the Aceh guerrilla war against Jakarta’s control. There
are photos of cold-eyed children in military garb – war orphans, child soldiers,
future punks. This place is an activist centre, a publishing house, a place for
prayer, a writing school and a library. It feels like a place where a new family
has been made. And that is fitting, for Azahari lost his parents to the sea in
2004. All he tells me is that it was a bad, bad time, when people lost their
family and friends. His own loss is shuttered from the world. Azhari leads me
to a table and we sit. My guide goes quiet for the space of three cigarettes.
Then he tells me something surprising. Ulama Faisal Ali, one of Aceh’s
arch-conservatives, visits this place –even though he rejects punk and several
of their other causes. ‘Our people are from very
different backgrounds,’ he says, watching my face.
He produces a small smile, and I
begin to see why Tikar Pandan might be tolerated despite its criticisms of the
powers that be. Connections matter, and Reza Idria is from a distinguished
religious family. His rebellion is permitted. Tikar Pandan began as these things
do: university, a group of friends, an intense debate over religion and
politics. And then the weaving began, says Azhari.
‘Before us, there was no
organisation in culture, activism, human rights and gender. No-one was doing
this work.’
I hear a female voice outside,
the first I’ve heard since entering the building. ‘That’s Nindy,’ says Azhari.
‘She’s kind of a punk.’
Nindy, it turns out, is not only
a protopunk, but also a feminist studying law. She spent long enough studying
in Ohio for a Midwestern accent to creep into her English. Nindy looks like a
Jakarta hipster – square glasses, fresh-faced and young, her hair dishevelled.
On a red string around her neck
hangs the Venus symbol. She clasps it in one hand, unconsciously.
‘Punk is for me a political
idea,’ she says:It’s the notion that we act against the mainstream because
there’s something wrong with it. We need to be heard as a social critique. People
here see punk as brutal acts, brutal people. It’s not that –it’s being
open-minded and critical. She pauses. ‘But we are always going to be the
minority.’ There is a certain fresh intensity to Nindy. She does not gel with
the international image of Aceh as the principal outpost of joylessness in
South-East Asia.
‘Punk is diverse, too,’ she says.
‘There are punks – the ones who came from Medan – who aim not to be sober. And
there is Aceh’s Tanggul Rebel, the Rebel’s Dam group, who have the ideology.’
As she speaks, Nindy takes the
end of a jilbab scarf and covers her hair and chin. I hadn’t noticed that her
hair was exposed until she covered it.
‘I’m going on campus,’ she says
wryly: On the street, I rebel and I wear what I want. But on campus, they are
very strict. I have to wear this. You can wear miniskirts, though – as long as
you don’t show your tits. I think girls should be free to wear whatever they
want. And with that, she’s gone, near-running out the door to make her class.
AFTERNOON IS SLIPPING into dusk.
Reza and Azhari take me to a new coffee shop, where I will meet their nocturnal
punk-in-residence. Reza’s family wealth is evident in the car he drives – a
sleek black 4WD with aircon on overdrive. He slips a Cradle of Filth CD into
the stereo, and we glide through Banda Aceh’s streets with a backdrop of primal
metal roars and savage drums.
The coffee shop is buzzing. I
wonder how anyone sleeps in Aceh, buoyed up by endless cups of strong coffee by
day and night. Before long, a haunted-looking youth approaches us. This must be
Tikar Pandan’s in-house punk. His full name is Ramadan, but he prefers Made.
Born in Banda Aceh, Made has been a punk since 1998, part of the anarcho-punk
community Tanggul Rebel. Years of sleeping by day have thinned him, made him
almost spectral. His skinniness adds extra intensity, as if he’s struggling to
maintain his hold on the world. And there is a wide-eyed fragility to him, like
a newborn fawn. Made has rejected society, and it has rejected him in turn. He shakes
my hand and looks around hungrily. I order cue cakes and Made inhales them like
it’s his last meal on earth. A strand of hair falls across his mouth and he
clears it away fussily with a hooked little finger. I order more sweets and
they, too, disappear. It’s quite possible he’s here for the free food.
We’re joined by Akmal, Reza’s
younger brother. The two look nothing alike. Akmal is hulking, with the
shoulders of a rugby player. He wears a motorbike t-shirt and rolls slim,
elegant cigarettes. But Akmal is here because he’s organising a massive new
punk concert to tweak the nose of the authority. His thinking is that he will
be safe if he gets big Indonesian punk names such as Burgerkill or even
Superman Is Dead. The local authorities would never dare shut down such a
big-name event. It’s clever strategy, an escalation of the conflict played out
in the media, with conservative local media pitted against the liberal media of
Jakarta and the West. But Akmal is taking on an impossible challenge – solving
punk’s civil war by calling for unity amongst punks. I wish him luck, but I
know that SID will not come to support the anarchists.
I ask Made why he wanted to
become a punk, and he looks incredulous: Want? ‘Want’ is not the right word. I
have this personality and punk matched it. Punk is freedom of expression – not
being afraid to say what’s on your mind. We learn not to lie. Punk is not religion
– punk is art, punk is culture, punk is bravely exposing what is going on.
But what did you expose to make
the city government crackdown?
Made tosses his hair back. ‘We
were the enemy of the city government’s image. We never used to be.’
Akhmal looks up from his
BlackBerry. ‘Now we have a reason for the punk ideology of anti-authority. It’s
given us the reason to get bigger. And more clever, because the punks have been
re-educated.’
He breaks into a hoarse laugh. Made
should have been re-educated. He wanted to be part of the persecution. On that
December afternoon, in the Culture Park, Made was doing his last sound-check
before taking to the stage with his reggae-punk band. But then the sharia
police swarmed the event and the audience broke and ran. Most of the organizers
and band members were arrested. Not Made.
‘I asked them to arrest me,’ he
says, grinning. Why, I ask, surprised.
Made grins and makes no direct
answer. ‘The truck was already full. And I was disappointed.’ Ten days later,
Made’s friends were released. And the impact? Nothing, he says. Everything is
back to normal. ‘Except for their new hairstyles,’ he says. ‘Now they are
skinheads!’
He titters and pulls back his
hair as if he’s drawing curtains with two skeletal fingers.
Tikar Pandan’s punk begins
speaking in aphorisms, unprompted: ‘We can enjoy the taste of hungry,’ he says,
pausing for effect: As long I am not like the government who enjoy making small
people hungry. The Acehnese are punks – we are not afraid to speak the truth,
we are tough, and we are not afraid of anything.
Will he always be a punk?
‘Inshallah,’ he says, God willing, ‘I will be punk until I die.’
Doug Hendrie is an
Australian writer and author of Amalga Nations: How Globalisation is Good - a series
of unexpected – and bizarre – cultural mash-ups, from the Star Craft video game
superstars of South Korea to the Clash-loving punks of Indonesia; from gay
power in the Catholic Philippines to the street filmmakers of Ghana. This
article is an excerpt of Chapter 4 “Second Life: The Punk Flames Still Burn in
Indonesia”.
