Airmail, page 6
Would you be surprised to know that your daughter, Charlotte, is now ninety years old? About five years ago she discovered the internet and got into genealogy. On visits home to Sydney, I nodded politely when Aunty Charlotte showed me faint photocopies of documents connecting obscure twigs of the family tree. Records of births, deaths and marriages in the Parish of Partick, down in the working-class end of Glasgow, by the docks along the River Clyde, where your father and your brothers laboured building ships for war and passenger liners in times of peace.
Charlotte’s family research was all academic to me, Alice. It wasn’t as if you and I were connected by blood. You adopted my dad not long after he was born in 1934. Charlotte was already eleven when he came home with you and your husband George from Newcastle Hospital to Yeoval, in the central-west of New South Wales. The sign on the road leading into it calls it the ‘Greatest Little Town in the West’, but the only thing Yeoval has going for it is that same Great Western Highway leading you straight out the other side.
Did you ever imagine that one day you would board one of those ships your father built, and never return?
Alice May Morrison Taylor Lloyd, I am writing to apologise that it was only through Charlotte’s research that I learnt what a musical young woman you really were. That you were a late bloomer, starting piano and voice lessons at fifteen. That you passed all of your exams for the piano and for singing with almost perfect scores. That you came home with silver medals from the Scottish National Song Society’s competitions, year after year. That you sang Leonora from Beethoven’s opera Fidelio in concerts around Glasgow, and Handel’s Messiah and Theodora, and that your public appearances were well reviewed. You were even the choir mistress of the Gardner Street Church, the musical heart of your parish!
Yet you ended up in a dustbowl of a farm in the middle of nowhere, inside a mudbrick house that baked like bread in summer, stripping wheat and skinning rabbits. How did it feel to sing to a few dozen people inside a weatherboard church, when you had performed for hundreds every week for years? Was it enjoyable to teach piano to the offspring of members of your new congregation? To join the Country Women’s Association? At times it must have felt like you were living someone else’s life. I can’t imagine this was what you would have chosen for yourself. Were you happy in Yeoval with George, or did you just put on a happy face for your second husband?
Aunty Charlotte showed me the certificate of your first marriage. Did your parents object to the hasty wedding? You hardly knew Henry John Edwards when you agreed to become his wife. But he was a sailor and soon heading back to the Great War in the North Sea. How did Henry persuade you? Did he say the war would not wait for love? I suspect that all those years leading church praise did not prepare you for Henry’s words made flesh.
When he sailed away, you must have spent sleepless nights worrying about your new husband’s safety. Whether Henry would come home injured, or damaged, or at all. I wonder what names you gave to the children you and Henry planned to have. And then you visited the War Pensions Office to collect your benefit as the spouse of a serving officer.
The letter from your father’s lawyer says, ‘There’s nothing for it but to have this scoundrel prosecuted for bigamy.’
I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to return to leading the Gardner Street Church choir, to sing in public in front of all those knowing eyes. To return to your single bed in your parents’ council flat on Dumbarton Road. But you did just that for two long years, before you decided you could do it no longer.
Was 25 August 1921 a warm day in London? Did the salty wind whip about you as you boarded the SS Berrima, clutching your third-class ticket? I wonder whether you felt relieved, terrified, excited or liberated. Maybe a bit of everything. After all, your route to Sydney was via the Cape of Good Hope.
You were no longer married, and at twenty-six no longer considered a young woman. You knew you’d have to find a husband eventually, but you weren’t in any hurry. You had your sister and her family to stay with in Newcastle while you found a job. But a few weeks into the voyage, there was that man who’d smiled at you in the chapel after you sang, introducing himself on deck. George Lloyd was a farmer, shy, and ten years older. Did he seem like a safe bet? With the war over, George had taken the opportunity to visit his family in Wales. He was returning to Yeoval, where he’d worked on other people’s farms, to find some land of his own. George had missed out on active combat due to his poor eyesight. But, Alice, you could see things very clearly now, couldn’t you? He proposed after he bought a farm, and brought you to Yeoval in a horse and cart. With the dust and the flies and the screeching galahs in the dry eucalyptus trees, it literally was as far away from Glasgow as it was possible for you to be.
When baby James arrived a few years after Charlotte you tried to get him to sit up properly, to hold up his own head. But a mother knows when something’s wrong with her child, and James lived for only eighteen months. Did you blame yourself, Alice? Did you blame George? Or maybe you blamed Henry John Edwards.
Dear Alice, I think of you on that farm in the middle of nowhere and wonder how you kept from going mad. How adopting my father as a baby, two years after you lost James, must have been an exquisite burden, a fresh joy wrapped tight in painful memories.
I wish I had not been so frightened of you when I was a little girl. I wish you had lived longer so I could have at least tried to know you better, and you could have seen me flourish in piano competitions. I wish I could have talked to you about your musicianship – where it came from, where it went – and about what it meant to give up performing. Dear Alice, most of all, I wish I could have heard you sing.
Virginia Lloyd
I wish for a better world for my grandmother and mother.
I wish I had known my grandmother when she was sixteen years old, the age when most women had already been married in the colonial period of Indonesia. Sometimes twice married. My grandmother was a simple girl, born in Bogor, West Java, in the early years of the 1900s. There was no birth certificate, proof or documentation of any kind that allowed her to know her own birthday. The date of birth was usually marked by a strike of lightning on a tree, a flood, a local riot, a change of leadership or a fruit season. She came from a family of Muslim background, like most of her fellow villagers, a Sundanese ethnic group of West Java, and she was brought up in an environment where women had to obey their parents blindly. She received no education, hardly read a book and seldom hung out with friends. If I had met her then, I would have taken her out to stroll in the botanical garden, watch women’s theatre performances in Jakarta, participate in art festivals, and bought her many books about the plants she loved. I would have taken millions of pictures her (which unfortunately we might have forgotten to preserve today).
In the years from 1910 to 1940, Indonesia was on the verge of revolution, when the nationalist groups strived for Indonesia’s independence after hundreds of years of Dutch occupation. The condition of women, according to the first Women’s Congress, in 1928, was atrocious. Women were impoverished, illiteracy was high, sexual violence occurred in conflict situations, and polygamy had caused difficulties in women’s lives, not to mention the limited access to a healthcare system. In her family, my grandmother was familiar with death, such as maternity death, infant death and the death of women due to malnutrition in their pregnancy period. The people in the village accepted death as a part of everyday life; as they said, ‘Kalau mati ya mati saja’ (if they have to die, then they die). This goes for women as well.
I wish during that period I had been an activist so that I could have joined the first ever Women’s Congress in Indonesia. I wish I had joined a movement and created a situation where my grandmother could go to school, even though it would have been a Dutch school. At least she would have been able to read some of the literary works from the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe. She would have read Kartini’s letters as well, which might later have inspired her to write her own letters. I myself had my first letter correspondence with a guy living in Surabaya, East Java, whom I had never met in all my life, when I was twelve years old. Today, I write emails to my friends all over the world.
A few years before the country’s independence in the 1940s, my grandmother was married to my grandfather, a half-Indonesian, half-Spanish man, who worked for KNIL (Koninklijke Nederlandsch Indische Leger, or the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army) and was stationed in the Sukabumi tea plantation, near my grandmother’s house. My grandfather, of course, was not Muslim, not local, and for her a marriage with a Dutch man was considered close to the enemy (in this case the Dutch colonial government). His first wife fled to Holland and abandoned him with his children. Then, he met my grandmother in a plantation party held by the KNIL network. She was first asked to babysit the children and become a nyai (originally this meant a grown-up woman or a wife in the Javanese language, but it was later misinterpreted as an unofficial wife or mistress of a Dutch officer in Java). As a nyai, she had to care for her stepchildren as well as her own children.
I wish I could have been there in her difficult time, when she finally chose to marry my grandfather despite her family’s disapproval at the idea of marrying someone from a different religious background. In Indonesia, a woman was advised to find a husband with a similar background, whether in terms religion or ethnicity. My grandmother was exiled from her family due to her choice. After her marriage she started to question her spirituality, and she finally converted to Catholicism. Although she felt rather lonely in Jakarta, she managed to spend her time in church and social work. I remember the days when she took me to several hospitals, retirement houses and a friend’s house where she cared for many elderly women. We used to just sit and talk to them for hours.
I wish she had worked with organisations such as Yayasan Pulih (a crisis centre for survivors of violence against women in Jakarta). She might have been happy, and she would have cherished her time talking and talking with women survivors. She might have enjoyed the company of remarkable women activists, as I have been lucky to be endorsed, supported and loved by many of my feminist mentors.
Later, in her final years, I wish I had given her more time and comfort, creating a better world for her. She stayed with our family for a few years. She was keen on gardening and sitting for hours close to her garden. I wish I could have been there with her more to accompany her through the lonely times she spent on her own. So today, I build my own garden with words and books.
Today, I also wish for a better house for my mother, who is still living in my father’s house, the last house in which my grandmother lived. She has been married to my father for forty-three years, and they still live in the same house. The house is small and not really appropriate, I must say. It’s in central Jakarta, close to the hustle-bustle of the city. Some say the price of the location has increased ten times from what it was. Despite the need for renovation, it still fits for my father, mother and my youngest brother, as well as my sister and her two daughters. In the past few years, we have been hearing rumours that it would be demolished, due to the green-belt area program of the government of Jakarta. And if she does lose her home, where will she go?
Jakarta is a city with over 12 million people, and more than half of the population are visitors or migrant workers from other provinces. The city has hundreds of problems and challenges: traffic, land conflicts, parking, street accidents, pollution and violence. In the past few years, there has been an increase in people’s evictions from locations claimed to be owned by the government. The dispute between government and people has created tension, violence and homelessness. A home in Jakarta is also a very expensive deal. There are no cheap houses today. There is expensive middle-upper-class real estate in suburban areas. There are also expensive apartments blooming in several areas. But there are no cheap houses provided by the government, except for rumah susun (small flats) supported by the local government of DKI Jakarta. People with money finally bought the rumah susun. Access to houses usually does not extend to the poor or people with very little income. Currently, illegal occupants build houses from cheap wood within areas considered as abandoned, such as the edges of railways, under bridges, on empty land and in abandoned buildings.
Although I wish my mother could live in a better house, I could actually see her adapting and being quite happy with her life. She has been working as a housewife, a church activist and a social activist for a long time. In her work she has helped many other women and sick people, gathered for charity, worked with elderly women and young women, and engaged in other forms of social work with eagerness. She never complains about the work, despite the fact that she has to come home every day to an inappropriate house. She still works for other people with loving and open arms. In between times, she never forgets to remind me to pray in every step of my way.
I still wish for a better home and life for her, especially in the past few years, when violence against women in public transportation has been increasing. We have read in the newspaper how women have been raped in the bus or angkot (a small bus for public transportation). We have also seen that many cases of sexual harassment happen on the commuter line or train. The lack of safety for women in public transportation has created anxiety and stress for urban women. We have to deal with it every day, while our regulations do not protect women’s lives in Jakarta.
My mother has never owned a car. She travels with public transportation almost every day, despite the threat or challenges. She never complains, but I wish that I could do something to help her. I wish I could convince the governor of Jakarta to provide safety for the citizens. It is the task of our government. The government should provide housing, mechanism to pay for cheap houses, accessible transportation, green areas and safety for women in public transportation. The overpopulation in Jakarta is also a big problem, and the numbers of visitors or people migrating here have been increasing each year. An increase of public transportation does not solve the problem, let alone the safety issue.
I wish I could buy my mother a car, but it would only add to the horrible traffic problems in Jakarta as well as pollution. I wish I could accompany her everywhere and make sure she is safe, but I honestly cannot do that. I wish also that she could live in another city, but that would be moving the whole family to a new environment with a process that might be difficult for some members of the family. So, I can only write her story, her mother’s story and her dreams. Just like I write about my grandmother and her garden.
In other cases, we see in Jakarta an increase of church eviction, due to land disputes with some fundamentalist groups who did not want Catholic or Christian churches to be built around their area. An increase of pressure against minority groups or religious minority groups has been emerging. In the case of Ahmadiyah, some of their mosques were burnt down and people were hurt in the process, including women. There were several cases of violence happening in Jakarta because of eviction. My mother has been a longtime church activist. With all the violence happening, in church or mosque attacks, I worry also for my family’s wellbeing, as a part of a minority group in Indonesia.
I know that we all live in our own world and that maybe somehow my grandmother and mother have been living in a colourless world, not a dazzling one. But I do believe they were happy with their choice and life and they tried their best to do whatever they believed in, all this time, with all its consequences.
Yet, I still wish that I could really make them proud, although I haven’t had the chance to give them a beautiful, safe, loving, pollution-free, green environment, with a policy that really protects women’s rights. All I can give is my promise to try to do my best, to nurture the ‘small garden’ that I work for now. So I will tell many stories, tell your stories (perhaps), tell our mothers’ stories, our grandmothers’, our friends’ and the women’s before us, documenting herstory, not just history, with pride and a smile. I wish I could eagerly work in the gardens of activism, literature and spirituality to continue their work. After all, a wish is just a wish. It won’t be something until we all work together to make it happen.
Dear Jürgen,
This is the first letter I have written for fifteen years. Since then, the letter as you and I know it has been forgotten, just like people have massively also crossed their private boundaries to migrate, to meet within the crowded virtual public sphere created by advanced technology never imagined by your generation.
My generation has been busy and spoilt by the so-called short, instant and rapid communication. So, why do we need to write this obsolete-form letter when everything can be expressed through electronic messages called SMS, or social media like YouTube, Facebook or Twitter?
But today I miss writing and want to write a real letter, one that can provide me more space for what I have been thinking so that I can write deeply and thoughtfully without a rush and ending up being shallow. For this, I have to get out of this boring virtual public sphere, which is becoming the one you predicted and much more.
Jürgen,
The other day someone asked me why I still wanted to write novels. Were novels still needed in this era, when people love television and the internet more than books? Will the digital generation love to read books and love novels like the previous generation did?
These questions have been deeply haunting me since. I need time to think through what kinds of answers I can give. More than that, I need an answer for myself as to why I write novels. What do I need them for?
