The Banda Islands reside in an air-sea junction that is active for nearly 10 months each year, barring October and November. During the Southeast and Northwest Monsoons, getting in and out of the Bandas can prove difficult, if not impossible; yet the spice with which Banda is synonymous—nutmeg—could never have been circulated around the globe without the collaboration of the monsoon currents.
In the thick of the Southeast monsoon, I spent 64 hours either on a plane or a boat (or waiting for a plane or a boat) travelling from London to Banda Neira. Reminded of a term I was once intimate with, jam karet (rubber time), I had to relearn the art of nongkrong—sharing the present with the bodies around me in a very elastic temporal state. When the band of time that had moved me across 8 time zones finally snapped, I stepped onto the deck of ship to see Gunung Api, the real and mythical mother of the Banda Islands.
It might be said that the Bandanese owe the blessing, or the curse, of the nutmeg to the active, volcanic ecology of Gunung Api; and their expulsion to the winds and waves that swirl around her. In Indonesia, volcanoes are much more than backdrops against which human dramas play out; they are makers of histories and tellers of stories. In 1599, on the very same day that a Dutch ship sailed into the archipelago for the first time, Gunung Api erupted after a long period of dormancy; and in the minds of some, recalled a prophecy made by a Muslim mystic that a group of white men would invade these lands one day.
To this day, those Bandanese who remain use a word for “history”, fokorndan, that comes from fokor, which means “mountain”—or rather, Gunung Api. Here, time echoes against the hillsides and waves; and is absorbed by the bodies—human and non-human—that reside in this landscape. For the Bandanese, these islands were always Land, not land—agentive and enmeshed with imaginative and material lives.
So, jam karet, indeed.
Terima kasih banyak for the nongkrong
@ikokersapati @sperfectus @mbakmegan
#indonesia #bandaislands #nutmeg #environmentalarchitecture
