A Strange Visit

Some questions are left to mortally and immaterially wound you. No one knows this better than Joni , a maintenance worker at one of palm oil plantations that I visited. “Is it true that if I got the hazmat suite, my job would be better?” An eerily similar question happened four years ago, “But you can help us, right?” Both ask for reassurance that, as I learned the hard way, I can never give to anybody. I smirked at the distance, and I told Joni, “Probably, but it’s indeed a good start.” Joni smiled, carried his 16-ltr fertilizer gallon. Joni sprays and spreads fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to palm oil trees in this company’s estate. He was supposed to have a hazmat suite because the chemicals are so toxic, it will affect his health both in a short and long run. But he doesn’t have any; yet, even he had one, the temperature is always too hot in the plantation. Either you die of cancer or heat shock. Option is a luxury in plantation lives.

That night after meeting Joni, I went back to smoking a pack a day again for few months, and I only stopped when my acid reflux wounded my thorax and larynx, and when my best friend for 12 years scolded me. Her voice and love for me are the only thing that makes sense in this world. Feelings don’t make sense to me, so I opted out crying a year ago and switched to smoking. I forgot how I felt about Joni until I read Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus. A professor at Hebrew University writes to Ruben Blum, the protagonist, against the hiring of Ben-Zion Netanyahu. The professor writes:

“If you would like a man to obtain a job in a distant land, would you praise him beyond what he deserves and lose your honor? Or would you say nothing and retain your honor?… But these are rabbinic questions, and I am no rabbi . . . I am merely a lecturer, who to remain truthful in my work must remain truthful in every situation, regardless of the consequences.”

How does one remain truthful in adversity? Especially when the truth may ruin the optimism and our becoming dreamers of tomorrow? How does one organize pessimism when bitter truth is the only thing that liberates? Did I just lie to Joni about the hazmat suite? Because truthfully: I don’t think it’s gonna be better with the hazmat suite. His life is not a game theory for me. Plantation lives are never a theoretical playground nor political projection to me. They are neither my wounded nor object attachment. I am tethered to palm oil plantations, I have become one of palm roots sticking out of ramps, desperately looking for an exit and to satisfy my insatiable need for water.

I’m not a scholar activist. I never aspire to be one. I’m a scholar. I thrive for truth; because justice lays in truth, and to seek justice is to commit to intellectual rigor. To what extent I should stay silent with this vulgar pain worshipping? How much intellectual honesty that one can receive? How much thinking is too much? Much as I believe in just transition and professionally work towards it, without the truth, it will be nothing more than another capitalist uneven geography project at best, and another diversity essay for your grant submission at worst. We can’t get closer to love with that, we can’t make lemonade all our sadness that way.

Discussions about painful lives in plantations also annoy me these days. It is weird, and often alienating, to understand that some people need to familiarize themselves with atrocities that already felt like a fever dream now to you. They were not back then. I guess I never realized that plantation lives may finally mean something to people the minute they involve applications to graduate schools, career ladders, and some scholarly agrarian patrons. Car-window sociologists, Du Bois may add. Dreams may fall apart tomorrow, but I will still be bound by the poisoned river dividing our plantation. It’s also weird: my ethnography works to estrange the familiar, while many do the opposite. Another testament of what kind of black box plantations are even to the most educated and well-informed scholars out there — myself included.

I met Joni again before I went back to America. He accidentally stepped on palm thorns. They are dangerous and can be fatal (can cause blind if they fall into your eyes, a frequent case in palm oil plantations). The thorns are so delicate and subtle, it can take years for infection to heal; sometimes the flesh gets rotten. Joni got it slightly better cause he managed to clean his feet up before the thorns got deeper. His flesh, however, still decayed and dried out; I gave him my bio-oil cause it does help minimize the scar. He wasn’t sure if he could work for the next few days with rubber boots and everything — or a hazmat suite if any. Another pay cut from the company.

No amount of painful stories, pity party, and/or misguided passion will make me feel a thing. One gunned-down farmer is too much and a beheaded elephant scarred you for life already. Neither the hole in her head and the missing ivory’s trunks are ever enough. Some lives are too sanctified to be thrown back to their faces.