Paradise Revisited

After quite some considering about what way to choose to extend my visa it all ended up being quite spontaneous anyway: Karlien (my classmate) was going to be in Bali with her parents and asked if I didn’t want to visit them. Thinking that maybe some distance and a break would be good for my fieldwork I booked a last minute ticket and so on Monday afternoon I was boarding the plane to Bali. Boarding the plane inevitably gave me a preview of how it will be to do the same in December and somehow I was very happy I was not leaving for good yet! To meet Karlien like this, on the other side of the world, had something very strange and very normal at the same time…It was really nice to be able to catch up and share experiences, worries and joys with somebody who is going through roughly the same although Singapore and Timor Leste share little more than the same side of the world I would say…I was very hospitably taken into the family and taken everywhere with them, which gave me the chance to see some things of Bali I would not have gone to on my own. The highlight was something that according to Karlien we could actually not miss as anthropologists and that was a Balinese Cockfight! (One of the most famous Anthropological texts ever written is about the Balinese Cockfight, written by Geertz) Now, as a vegetarian I found it actually a bit hard to excuse myself to go such a thing, but in the end I thought that this was a once in a life-time experience and that watching a cockfight fought between roosters that have been pampered all their lives is probably better than eating a bio-industry chicken and so I gathered enough arguments to get myself to go. Actually I surprised myself with not finding it that hard to watch at all… The scale of it (a reasonable arena), the fact that they do it every (!) day and the intensity of the betting took me by surprise! It was absolutely fascinating to watch how men, with hand movements that most of the time escaped my comprehension, agreed on sums of money and on the rooster they were betting on. After a fight, while the loosing rooster was already being prepared for dinner so to say, money would be given, passed or thrown through the arena to settle the bets… Here you see men who are offering their bet for the preferred rooster, trying to find someone who is brave enough to bet on the rooster who is thought to be the weakest

What also fascinated me was the relationship between the men and their roosters. Roosters are pampered, put in and out of the sun, fed special food, massaged and spoiled around half a year until they start their fights, but then it can be suddenly over in one fight, and if the rooster loses, the owner seems to have lost any affection for the animal, drops it to the floor and somebody else will take it to be slaughtered. Somehow I found this a cruel and fascinating loss of affection. If you look well on this picture you can see the size of the knife the roosters get tied to their paws (it is huge!) and also you can see that probably the owner is more nervous than the rooster (even though this rooster won its fight after this picture was taken)

And the rooster of the previous picture deals a fatal blow to its white opponent

And here are the two anthropologists stepping in the footsteps of Geertz who was actually directly or indirectly responsible for us being here!

After the cockfight our journey took us past endless rice fields and the green everywhere astonished me after the brown of dry-season Timor Leste

What also fascinated me about Bali was that people, everywhere, all the time, seemed to be engaged in some religious ceremony! I have never seen anything like that…It was Tuesday morning but everywhere we passed ceremonies taking place, people walking in a procession, people celebrating various marriages or people bringing little offerings in their domestic temples. That devotion towards the spirits, towards Mother Earth and all the other things I have no understanding of had something special. I was particularly amazed by the roof-architecture of the temples

And here are two boys taking a break from a ceremony to fish in the lake at 1.700 meters altitude

Bali is famous for its resemblance to paradise, at least that is what people say. And I have to say that if you chill by the swimming pool of your hotel, while the flowers drop from the trees, the sun shines in a blue sky and various Buddha’s and Shiva’s and Vishnu’s gaze serenely over you, it comes quite close

But that is not the whole story…after spending two and a half months in Timor Leste I was shocked not only by the wealth but also the opulence. I was repulsed by how fat most of the tourists were, how loud they spoke. I was scared away by the eternal smile on the faces of people offering you all the things that you can imagine to buy with money while they are rudely rejected by tourists who want to enjoy paradise…after visiting parts of Timor Leste in the back or a truck, in the middle of Timorese with guitars and laughter I felt isolated in that car, with air-conditioning, and a friendly tour guide who takes you from one rice-field-view to the other rice-field-view…I felt like I was locked up in a bubble I could not see clearly through, I was looking for the paradise everybody talks about but I couldn’t find it, it was not my paradise…and when I got ill on the last day all I wanted was to go back to my own paradise. A paradise that is not perfect, a paradise that combines beautiful views with garbage in the streets, a place that combines people’s friendliness with stories of the dark side of humanity, a place that both feels like home and like very far away from home. But at least nobody there ever promised me anymore than there really is. Nobody told me it would be paradise there, and still I found it in some places…