Long-time expatriate Jeremy Allan has managed to pull off what many a bule with literary pretensions has only dreamed of doing: write a book about his experience in Indonesia and see it through to publication. Unfortunately for all of us would-be authors, Mr. Allan has set the bar fairly high with his recently-released Jakarta Jive. Marketed as a chronicle of the political upheaval that followed the fall of president Soeharto in May 1998, Jakarta Jive is essentially a book about ordinary Indonesians and their personal struggles with the chaos that threatens to engulf them.
He follows the lives of three Jakartans as they go about their daily business as in a world turned upside down. There is Monica, a young student of Chinese decent who shakes off her political apathy to become an important figure in the student protest movement, using her camera to chronicle a city spinning out of control; Pak Trisno, a worldly-wise furniture seller who feeds Allan with a ready supply of curiously Javanese wisdom and endless cups of coffee; and Heri, a one-time banker now reduced to running a sidewalk restaurant after the collapse of the country’s financial system. While these three fascinating characters are the book’s foundation, Mr. Allan also gives us a glimpse into his own life, particularly his domestic adventures in the ‘Kemang Palace’, the home he occupies that soon becomes a battleground for his rather obnoxious housemate, Adam, and Siti, Allan’s girlfriend.
The writer does an excellent job of describing the key events surrounding Soeharto’s downfall. For those of us living in Jakarta at the time, Allan’s account will, no doubt, act as a sobering reminder of an awful period in Indonesia’s recent history. Others unfamiliar with the events of 1998 may well be shocked by the extent of the violence and bloodshed. The four students shot dead by soldiers at Trisakti University and the fourteen protesters who suffered the same fate soon after in Semanggi were only the most visible casualties of the violence.
Allan also devotes a lot of time to the hidden victims of May 1998, the Chinese Indonesians who suffered cruelly at the hands of the rampaging mobs of looters, particularly in the Glodok area of north Jakarta. Desperate to get to the bottom of what actually happened in Chinatown, the now-passionately involved Monica searches for victims of the widely reported rapes that were one of the most abhorrent legacies of the city’s descent into anarchy.
Battling the understandable reluctance of most of the victims to discuss their horrific experience, Monica does eventually manage to meet some of the traumatized women, one of whom goes so far as to strip naked to reveal the extent of her injures and remove any doubt about the depth of her suffering.
Mr. Allan has a easy way with words, something that makes Jakarta Jive an enjoyable read, at least in terms of literary style if not content.
It’s a constant source of bemusement to me that there aren’t more books written about Indonesia, given the fascinating contradictions of the country and the relatively large expatriate population living here. Jakarta Jive demonstrates that there is a rich vein of material waiting to be tapped by writers with an appreciation for the complexities of this often bewildering place.
—Tim Paterson Jakarta Kini February 2002