Jakarta, part I: Journalism, Writing, and Jakarta

Everyone who has been to Jakarta knows this feeling; that heavy, hot, humid air that hits you as soon as you step out of the airplane. Then, as soon as you step out of the airport, a taxi awaits to pummel your bodily breathing apparatuses with extra-cold air conditioner.

A contrast of the senses that was preparing me for this sprawling city of contrast and contradictions.

Writing about Jakarta: interpreting chaos

Hundreds of motorcycles moving deftly between slow-moving cars in the heavy traffic, in the middle of high-rises, construction sites, and black and odious, black, smelly rivers; they all reminded me of my writings and news reports of Jakarta: cleanly edited paragraphs, controlled audio levels recorded in a clean, shiny studios.

Far from this reality of Jakarta I was witnessing.

But how could you translate all these into writing?

Jay Rosen, journalism professor at NYU, said recently that journalism is a way for us to be informed of our society beyond our immediate surroundings.

A society can be self-informing. Town criers, puppeteers, travelling minstrels, all fulfill this informing function for a small society.

They break down and simplify the complexity of everyday events into convenient narrative frames, so new and old stories are told and retold efficiently. Obviously, these narrative frames and storytelling strategies change to adapt to better reflect the society it caters for.

But in a place like Jakarta, where everything clash and mix all the time, ‘traditional’ storytellers face a huge problem. They take time to master narrative frames and think, as well as reflect, on how to fit everyday stories into those frames.

In a place like Jakarta, the time it takes to reflect is the time it takes for the stories to have changed. Many of these traditional narrative frames, known in this part of the world as lakon (lit. ‘roles’), depend on a world where, to put it rather tautologically, the constants are predictable.

But in metropolitan cities like Jakarta, the only constant is unpredictability.

A case in point: as I walked into the conference room where the Indonesian blogging festival was being held in Jakarta, where over 1,500 bloggers turned up from all across Indonesia (some rode their motorbikes for 12 hours to get there), I saw a stormtrooper shaking hands with Tifatul Sembiring, the newly-appointed Minister for Information. Outside the room, a busker wearing a gorilla mask is posing next to Barack Obama’s cardboard figure.

And it’s not all the United States of America. A sprinkle of Japanese Manga here, Indian-influenced music there, and the ubiquitous Chinese/Malay/Indian food everywhere.

It seems like all these cultural elements come to prove themselves of the adage ‘if you can survive Jakarta, you can survive anywhere’.

After surviving Death Star and Jakarta, this guy can survive anywhere. Picture from Brian Giesen on Flickr.

Journalism

So, as Jay Rosen said, enter journalism. When a society has lost its capability to inform itself because it has grown too big, too fast, and too complicated, the army of editors and writers (and yes, marketers and public relation officers) build the ranks of journalism to create a storytelling army which can handle the demand of that fast-moving world.

But as we get deeper and deeper into this role of being the fourth estate, watchdog of the government, etc. etc., we are probably forgetting that journalism is a storytelling form, and an art.

All these thoughts might be influenced by a tinge of romanticism as I travelled in Jakarta; a place I know so well yet it and I are always strangers to each other, as my first day back has proven.

But as Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist, said, ‘the purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.’ And to acquire and keep, if not serenity, but a state of wonder about their own society, is something that many storytellers try to achieve.

A remnant of a marionette -does anyone aside from me get why I think this picture is an apt illustration for this post? Picture from Rob McKaughan on Flickr

And all these contradictions and contrasts I was seeing in Jakarta convinced me more that journalism is an art of storytelling; a look from both deep within a society as well as a distanced perspective from it in order to put things into neat narrative frames (or, in the world of newspaper, which page the stories belong to -or what kind of ‘beat journalism’ you are doing).

Yet, even though we insist on using the term ‘story’, we often avoid the term storytelling. And it is often the adrenalin that many of us journalists seek. The ‘gotcha’ moments, the tense exchanges, the deadline-rush. Or, for those who are brave and lucky enough, the hallowed genre of war journalism.

Meanwhile, as I typed my report to send to work, following the old traditional form of the inverted pyramid, the Minister of Information went back to his meeting, while Mr. Stormtrooper went on to check out the Windows 7 systems on display. (Where a passerby made a sniggering remark: ‘The second Death Star was probably built on Windows Vista. Huge, never finished, and has lots of holes in it.’)

And as I started to feel the heat in the conference room, I remember thinking that they should turn the air conditioner up.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 11:45 pm and is filed under People, Things, onemilestories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.