FREEDOM IN ENTANGLED WORLDS

West Papua and the Architecture of Global PowerBy Eben Kirksey

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Eben Kirksey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5122-1

Contents

Preface: Flying Fish, Flying Tourists, September 1994……………………..ixList of Key Characters…………………………………………………xvIntroduction………………………………………………………….1Interlude: The King Has Left the Palace: Java, May 1998……………………231. The Messianic Multiple, July 1998…………………………………….292. From the Rhizome to the Banyan, 1998-2000……………………………..55Interlude: Freeport Sweet Potato Distribution Inc…………………………833. Entangled Worlds at War, 2000-2001……………………………………904. Don’t Use Your Data as a Pillow, June 13, 2001…………………………1255. Innocents Murdered, Innocent Murderers, August 31, 2002…………………138Interlude: Bald Grandfather Willy……………………………………….1756. First Voice Honey Center, 2002-2008…………………………………..182Epilogue: The Tube, 2006-2028…………………………………………..210Acknowledgments……………………………………………………….221Notes………………………………………………………………..225Bibliography………………………………………………………….283Index………………………………………………………………..301

Chapter One

The Messianic Multiple

July 1998

Collecting nectar from the flowers at the top of coconut trees was one of the Itchy Old Man’s favorite pastimes. This old timer, who had flaky skin and oozing sores all over his body, liked to make the nectar into palm wine. Shunned by villagers, he lived poor and alone in a shack on the edge of an isolated beach. The Itchy Old Man is the unlikely messiah of parables from Biak, the island off of West Papua’s north coast where I met indigenous tricksters in an airport transit lounge when I was a high school exchange student. Under the repulsive skin of this mythical hero are secrets of wealth and power, according to Danilyn Rutherford, who has described how this strange figure was trapped in a cycle of excessive scratching, an unbearable conjoining of pleasure and pain. Rutherford’s book, Raiding the Land of the Foreigners, chronicles how the Itchy Old Man miraculously shed his skin and embarked on an epic journey around the world. On this mythical journey he brought material wealth and a new world religion to the faithful. Drawing on Rutherford’s work, and my own sources of inspiration, I offer an account of his story to illuminate a messianic logic that produced revolutionary possibilities in West Papua.

One morning the Itchy Old Man found that his palm wine containers had been drained by a thief: the bamboo tubes that he placed in a tall palm tree each night to catch flower nectar were empty. Determined to catch the thief, he spent the next night perched in the treetop. Just before dawn, The Itchy Old Man caught the Morning Star in the act of stealing wine. Struggling in the Itchy Old Man’s grasp, the star bargained for freedom. “The sun is rising, look. You have to release me so that I can go home. Come on, what do you want? Wealth?” asked the Morning Star. “Wealth? I already have it all,” replied the Old Man. “Come on, let me go. I’ve got to get back. What are you asking for? Brains and beauty?” “Brains and beauty?” he cried, sounding offended. “I already have all of that.” In rejecting these offers, the old codger indicated that something might be hiding underneath his crusty skin. The increasingly desperate Morning Star was eventually able to give the Itchy Old Man something that he desired: a woman. Offering up a magic piece of fruit, the star passed along instructions about how to use it to impregnate the lady of his choice. The Itchy Old Man waited until Princess Insoraki, a gorgeous maiden who was the daughter of an important chief, was bathing in the sea. He threw the small magical fruit toward the princess. The fruit floated up and hit her right breast. “Yesus!” she cried. (“Yesus,” in the Biak language, means “my breast!”) At this moment, as she clutched her bosom, Princess Insoraki miraculously conceived. After Princess Insoraki returned home, her nipples turned black and began to itch. In the coming weeks, a rash spread all over her body. Her belly began to swell. After a full term of pregnancy, the princess gave birth. Everyone—especially the princess herself—was puzzled about the identity of the infant’s father. The baby boy proved to have uncanny abilities; it could walk and talk just days after birth. So the family of the princess hoped that this miraculous boy would be able to identify his father. They invited all the men on the island to a huge dancing feast. The young dandies first danced in front of the boy, but they failed to attract his attention. Middle- aged dancers were also met with indifference. Finally the elderly men hobbled out into the arena. Shuffling behind all the other men, whirling his bony limbs about in an ungainly jig, was the Itchy Old Man. When the baby boy called out and identified the Itchy Old Man as his father, the party broke into chaos. In utter disgust, everyone deserted this island, bringing all the goods they could carry and destroying the rest. The Itchy Old Man, Princess Insoraki, and their son were left behind. This unfamiliar story about an Immaculate Conception set the stage for the emergence of the Messiah himself. Once the commotion had died down, the baby boy grew hungry. He asked Princess Insoraki for food, but she told him to go to his father. The Itchy Old Man flaked off a piece of his scaly skin and offered it up for his son to eat. It tasted like the most delicious food imaginable. As his son ate, the Itchy Old Man heaped ironwood logs into a huge pile. After setting the pile alight, the elderly man leapt into the raging blaze. Antique porcelain, shell armlets, food, beads, and other valuables fell out of the fire as his crusty skin burned away. When the flames died down, a handsome youth with shining brown skin emerged from the remnants of the bonfire. The Itchy Old Man had become the Lord Himself—”Manseren Mangundi.” Revealing more of his powers, Lord Manseren drew a picture of a ship on the beach. When he stamped his feet, an actual ship—a small steamboat—materialized on the water. Lord Manseren began a trip that would change the course of world history, offering a new life of material plenty and salvation for true believers. In a word, he offered merdeka to people who gave him a proper reception. First Lord Manseren visited the dispersed relatives of Princess Insoraki who had fled after the dance party. Transforming his body back into the guise of the Itchy Old Man, he tested the sincerity and faith of her kin. Promising eternal life and material wealth, he asked his mother- in- law to lay her body down on the beach to serve as a slide for his boat. The request was rejected as outlandish; Insoraki’s mother knew that her body would be broken by the weight of the heavy vessel. Other Biak notables spat on the Itchy Old Man when he tried to come ashore. Disgusted, the hero traveled west along with Princess Insoraki and their son. Lord Manseren left West Papua and began an epic voyage. His son, who had been named at the miraculous moment of conception (“Jesus! My breast!”), disembarked from the steamship in Palestine and began sowing the seeds of a new world religion. When Lord Manseren arrived in Europe, he catalyzed the Industrial Revolution. In a small Dutch village, he found people living just like West Papuans—they were fishing, hunting, and growing sweet potatoes. Receiving a warm welcome, the traveler from a far- off land bestowed factory- made shirts and trousers on the Dutch villagers. Lord Manseren also divulged the secret knowledge necessary to reproduce the material wealth of industrialization.

Standing dominant history on its head and revoicing biblical scripture, this fable combines cosmological ideas from West Papuan worlds and global culture. 5 The promises of the Itchy Old Man, about eternal life and material wealth, are like the promises wrapped up in the magic of modernity—about economic development and health. This parable illustrates how the faithful obtained merdeka. This tale “does not simply figure the fictive origin of social differences,” writes Rutherford, “but also promises transformations” that are still to come. Rutherford’s work about the long- standing engagements of the Biak people with the outside world uses the Itchy Old Man myth to explore the limits of the nation on this seemingly remote Indonesian island, looking inward and backward in time. Departing from the course Rutherford has already charted in Raiding the Land of the Foreigners (2003), I use this same story to frame the historical trajectory of the West Papuan nationalist movement over a decade, looking outward and forward.

The Itchy Old Man embodies a revolutionary form of consciousness, a sense of expectation that keeps the identity of the Messiah up for grabs. Those who follow the logic of this allegory are cautiously searching for a savior who might suddenly appear at any moment in an unexpected guise. While waiting for an appearance of Manseren Mangundi, the Lord Himself, no one knows exactly what to expect. Another old man with scabies? A visiting foreign dignitary? Perhaps a phantom steamship on the horizon? If the ancestors of the Biak people lost the chance to learn the secrets of merdeka when they rejected the Itchy Old Man, perhaps there is a way to give this figure a proper welcome in contemporary times.

The Itchy Old Man does not live “in a fictive site beyond the horizon,” writes Rutherford, but instead animates an “in- between” space where imagination bridges the gap between old and new worlds. This shape-shifting figure inhabits an elusive place where expansive fantasies touch the field of historical possibility. If Derrida calls on us to wait for mysterious possibilities that are utterly unfigurable, that are beyond our imaginative horizons, the revolutionary logic of the Itchy Old Man offers a model for prefiguring coming changes while maintaining a radical openness to refiguring hopes when a desired object fails to materialize.

This tale informs my idea of the messianic multiple—a sense of expectation that is oriented to future horizons populated by many different saviors and imagined events. Rather than fixing on the arrival of any single messiah, this logic is like liquid mercury: it dances about, moving in different directions, coalescing around multiple figures of hope. Operating in the imagination of a single person, the messianic multiple animates a cautious form of hope, flitting from object to object, probing the field of historical possibility. When it catches hold of a crowd, a multitude of creative agents, the impossible comes within reach. Anything can happen at any time when this sort of collective imagination meets up with collaborative action.

The spirit of the messianic multiple was on the loose in 1998. After one particular prefigured event in Indonesia, the resignation of Suharto, dreams were refigured around multiple objects emerging on imagined horizons. Stumbling onto the scene amid powerful countervailing forces, I found that West Papuan activists were bringing a seemingly impossible collective dream, plans for establishing an independent nation, into contact with the field of historical possibility. In startling encounters with indigenous activists, I learned about improbable conspiracies among world leaders. Wrangling with intractable bureaucracies and meeting people who refracted global history through a strange lens, I found that messianic dreams were capturing my imagination.

The United Nations, He Has Sins

Poring over regional journals, I became determined to conduct research in West Papua for my senior thesis as an undergraduate major in anthropology and biology at New College of Florida. I found an article written in 1958 by Dr. J. V. de Bruijn, reviewing the ethnographic literature and reporting that West Papua is “an earthly paradise for anthropological research” with “numerous opportunities for anthropological studies of cultures barely influenced or even untouched by Western culture.” When I read this article some forty years later, in the mid-1990s, few new studies had been conducted. Compared to Papua New Guinea—the site of classic anthropological studies like Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and Their Magic, Margaret Mead’s Growing Up in New Guinea, and a multitude of more recent works—West Papua remained terra incognita. Hoping to fill some of the gaps in the anthropological literature, I crafted grant proposals to investigate how the El Niño drought of 1997 impacted indigenous groups in West Papua’s highlands.

In early 1997, I applied to study abroad at Bird of Paradise University (Universitas Cenderawasih), the largest state institution in West Papua, through the Indonesian embassy in Washington. Months passed with no word from Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. I clung to increasingly unrealistic hopes for a visa. Having completed all my paperwork, without anything left to do, I waited for a decision from an inscrutable center of power. While I harbored improbable dreams for a personal miracle in the realms of Indonesian bureaucracy, signs of major changes in the world order captivated my imagination.

Admittedly, I was fascinated by, deeply fearful of, and inextricably implicated in, the messianic promises of the third millennium, the fabled era that began to unfold as my fieldwork was taking place. Like many people my age in the United States—members of what some commentators have dubbed the “millennial generation”—I felt a growing sense of anticipation as the Y2k approached on the horizon. I had lost faith in the predictable march of progress and the bureaucratic institutions governing the modern world. Personally I was never a believer in organized religion. Still, I found secular elements of the messianic idea beginning to move within me.

At the moment when I was about to give up hope of ever visiting West Papua, surprising developments in Jakarta were all over the news. Suharto had just resigned. Paying another visit to the Indonesian embassy, I found a consular officer who was willing to help. Perhaps inspired by the infectious spirit of the reform movement, or finding my special permission from Jakarta locked away in a dusty embassy filing cabinet, this official approved my visa on June 4, 1998, fifteen days after Suharto’s fall.

A week later I arrived in Abepura, a suburb of Jayapura, the capital city of West Papua. I rented a small room in a maze of cinderblock walls, tin roofs, and gravel alleyways. Nine West Papuan and Indonesian students became my flat mates in a ramshackle boardinghouse that had been cobbled together out of plywood and tin roofing. Our shared cooking facilities consisted of a counter, a garden hose, and a portable kerosene stove.

There was a marked lack of enthusiasm for talking about the 1997 El Niño drought. The rains had come months before. As I tried to go about a narrowly defined program of anthropological research, as I attempted to study the drought, West Papuans began to make and commemorate history in the streets. Enrolling in anthropology classes at the university, trying to steer clear of political activity, my own life quickly fell into a mundane routine. I became a regular patron at the university library, where I read through a treasure trove of theses written by West Papuan students and a haphazard collection of books in Indonesian and English.

Agus, a short, older man with a deeply creased face who wore a soul patch—a small beard on the lower lip that was once equally popular in rural parts of West Papua and metropolitan centers of style in the global North—waylaid me near the library one afternoon. He asked me to return the next day, around the same time, with a tape recorder. When I showed up, as promised, he launched into a monologue in thickly accented Logat Papua: “On this little tape I want to record a statement. If you go to the Global World Body’s place of gathering, please pass on this language,” he said. We were standing outside the library, with passersby looking at us askance. “This language is named the rough language, villager language, that I am talking. You can translate it into refined English if you want, to pass it along.”

Agus was the first of many West Papuan activists who tried to gain my ear. I was perhaps expecting to encounter a representative of an indigenous culture who would teach me about the opposite of what I already knew: telling me myths in contrast to history, revealing ideas about cyclical time instead of a linear model, describing immanent gods instead of a transcendent God. Instead of these predictable differences, I discovered startling and disquieting tales when I tried to listen carefully to indigenous voices. Seemingly familiar stories were related to me in unfamiliar ways. As Agus told me about his freedom dreams—trying to use the language of history, law, and human rights—I found myself struggling to keep up.

Agus talked about the U.S. officials who betrayed his nation, but at the time I was unable to understand. “Kennedy, and his secretaries, have sins,” Agus told me. “He already saw, but he pretended not to know. He already saw, but he plays dumb. It doesn’t matter, just kill them.” I tried hard to follow his wandering narrative, without dates, where the identities of different historical actors and institutions bled together. Agus knew that his people had been betrayed by global power brokers. But he was only able to partially translate his knowledge into a recognizable historical narrative. “My message is that the United Nations, he has sins,” Agus said. “Above the un is God, below him are governments. Is that the Global World Body? Is that the un? Does the un rule the kingdom of heaven? No, he is just a regular human.”

(Continues…)

Excerpted from FREEDOM IN ENTANGLED WORLDSby Eben Kirksey Copyright © 2012 by Eben Kirksey. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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