“Be careful,” warned my PIC. I shifted the stick to #2. This dumb ass car, on this dumb ass road. Finally, we moved forward — slowly. “Kalimantan road,” he chuckled. Not even a Sumatra-trained driver can take this. What he means: the inequality is so awful; potholes are the norm. And we’re always one inch closer to jump off the hill. I vomited with 1.3 L car, so I have been treated like a princess, or the real deal – Pepe won’t get on unless it’s 1.5 L car; or at least give them the 4wd car, the kind of cars you see used by assholes driving around in Jakarta, with arguably better roads and asphalt. The kind of cars driven by daddy’s boys looking for some attentions from sluts and whores, then back to their private Christian/Islamic/Catholic schools. I am no daddy’s boy, possibly only an asshole, so I took my chance with this Toyota Fortuner. Crisis averted.
Months later, my rent bike went through Brugge city limit. Proper bike lanes with ducks by the canals, I’m trying to enjoy that kind of life. But then I remembered, probably hell does look like Brugge. I spell the city that way cause I’m loyal to my colonizer. I wish I could bike to Leiden, and met Nik with a better mood than just unloaded postcolonial hangover. Eventually, we talked about it. Why are we guilty with this slow morning? I prepared camembert and runny omelet for my breakfast; Nik with their coffee and yoghurt. I whispered, “I actually hated Indonesia’s heavy breakfast.” Another guilt. We walked slow to the Leiden Centraal, I almost cried leaving them before the checkpoint. I wish I could stay longer, and told them “This sucks.”
What I was trying to say to them is, how long should I do this? Endless months of trying to understand the evil of the state. My iBook library is filled with books about fascism, because I don’t have a better word to illustrate the deeds in palm oil business. The one that does not beg for deliberate satanic acts; but rather layers of tomfooleries and purebred stupidity. But unlike the fascism in the 1930s, there is only (faux?) nationalism, never the working-class rights. Long justifications of plantation office staff not sanctioning palm oil companies. “We need them after all.” Do we? Who is this we?
My bus entered Dusseldorf, my first time in Germany. Naturally, I texted Nik about Heidegger: his fascist-adjacent theory of care may explain what drives women to become the handmaiden of patriarchy and right-wing rise. I hate myself. I should have just stopped thinking and just enjoyed this even asphalt. I can’t. I need to think. I need to understand. Understanding is what keeps my psychosis away, even it brings my head 200 miles/hour. Yet at one point, understanding makes me numb. Three million hectares of illegal palm oil will be legitimized – promised another strongman. The outcries. The naivete. Meanwhile, I read the news with such a strange, enraged feeling. My face was just flat as ever. I looked up to the Eiger mountain top. So what that if that follows our omnibus law. So what that the state doesn’t care about us anymore? Have they ever? So what – just so what with these reactions? Something bigger, yet shallow, is lurking and all that we talk about is how state is evil/how state is doing its thing.
What a bunch of boring noises.
“What makes you love Han Kang?” asked Nik. They read Greek Lessons and they felt nothing. I told them I like my feelings cold and deadpan. What I am trying to say is: I’m so slow with my feelings. Not even this brain can catch up with the bodily sensation of my own feelings. I like when feelings are just descriptions of horrible and magnificent things I should understand. Han Kang and Fernanda Melchor have those skills: to write as feelings are just there. The poetics of those inexplicable feelings, however, remains strong – like the cold wind that slapped my face by the Aare River before another tear fell upon my face. Feelings will wait for me to understand. I’m very slow. I’m so sorry. It took me years to know that I despise a person. It also took me a whole ass year to know I catch a feeling. Seven years of dwelling in plantations, only now the ghost of that slaughtered cobra snake can finally catch me up.
I wish I could tell someone that maybe we could be happy together wherever we go. That it should not have had taken this long to know what I need: a gentle caress, possibly a kiss on my back. To make sense these thousands of pages on land dispossession and foreign loans. To help me understand that this sucks: the way they burn forests to the ground, kill elephants and orangutans, build my wooden barracks, so I could go miles: taking CTA comfortably, biking by the Amsterdam canal, enjoying the sun in the Lake Bachalpsee, returning home after emotionally taxing ethnography in palm oil plantations. Not giving a shit.
“I too wanna go to Germany,” a palm oil worker in the union told me, with a smirk to my chagrin. I too want to take him to any Western European country, along with his family too. But I’m disgusted by the fact that different passports are the key to different lives. I’m afraid I will hear another, “If only we could build our country the way they do…” I can’t take another jab to my fellow countrymen no matter how much I despise them and my own country. I’m sick of “omg, how clean it is here, unlike in Indonesia” – knowing that it’s true albeit the jury is still out. I too want them to be happy, and see the eternal snow in Alps. And my inang in North Sumatra can harvest whatever the fuckthey want and not being dragged down by cops.
I want to tell you: we can bike together across Western Europe. Taking back what I and maybe also you deserve. This skin color on me. That shape of your history. We can OV-Chipkaart it. We can U-Bahn this shit. The trams, the buses, the metros, the NS, they can, and must, all take us somewhere where burning 10.000 acres of bodies and plants is not necessary for a life. This time it’d be different: we’re gonna exchange glance in RATP, possible lives flashing before our eyes. Jakarta’s Commuter Line should be able to bring us closer to our little Eden – with wonderful vegetables, benzoin rainforests still intact, the latest and fastest trains and buses. No vibranium, no kawaii shit. We just lay down on the prairie. Your hands on my back, my fingers on your face. Clean air instead of coal polluting our lungs. Sounds of wind fluting instead of cars in i95. Nice pavements and ramps for our disabled cool kids instead of highways. We can only dream, love – since we have to anyway.
Pravda Palma 
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