Der Schein trügt (in English)

Snapshot: It’s not difficult, being happy in places like these. Smiling people, beautiful scenery just around the corner and cheap living wherever you go. But the pretence betrays itself. Der Schein trügt. I live in a space that is riddled with tension and subverting it by pointing to “happiness” not only fails to do justice, it fails to comprehend, replacing understanding with appearance or representation. It fails to scratch the surface, fails to see beyond that representation, beyond what is displayed on the outside.

Story: Recently I attended an event at the end of which the organizer self-promoted, explaining some of the other projects he is involved with. Now, this organization does great work: they draw attention to various social and environmental issues that are not normally on the agenda, such as plastic waste and recycling; they organize garbage collections, awareness-raising workshops, movie screening and many many more things. But after a slightly elongated elaboration on trips for “visitors” (read: white tourists) to a rural village in East Java, the organizer concluded with “these people will not understand you when you speak English, or even Indonesian – they only know Javanese – but they can still share their life with you, because they have smiles to share”.

Now, I know this man did not intend to be politically incorrect, or insult anyone’s integrity. But it does strike odd that whenever people mention Indonesia, or South East Asia more generally, the first mention is how people always seem to smile. “People are so friendly there – smiley faces all around!”. These phrases, and many others like them, betray the orientalist overtones that seem to structure much of the discourse on intercultural communication. Excluding those you go to visit from participation in the dialogue of cultural exchange, by definition excludes them from this very exchange – remaking it into a one-way alley towards (cultural) appropriation and disenfranchisement. Reminiscent of the metaphorical negro entertainer in the US American sixties whose job is to “just smile it”, the smile as the medium of communication just doesn’t live up. The problem is not that smiles can’t communicate anything, but that its perfectly acceptable to share a smile in the absence of language, but unimaginable to share signs of sadness, illness or loss. Imagine going on a tour to the rural village and seeing people crying!

This is why the smile as a medium of communication betrays the falsity of its own claim. It assumes an equality in communication and compassion that is not only nonexistent, but is impossible to create without a shared parole. How are people supposed to “share their lives” with anyone, if there is but one communication medium available? Compassion, commiseration, empathy – truly comprehending and sharing someone else’s life - all grow from sharing  the lived experiences of that person, whether directly or relayed through linguistic media. Sharing smiles in lieu, curtails these experiences and their inherent struggles. Worse still, it negates the existence of any negativity. Wiping struggle, sadness and all things unpleasant from the picture and replacing them with the ostensibly all-inclusive smile, assumes that by hiding them, they will simply cease to exist. 

In a country ridden with various and multiple tensions – between muslims and other denominations, between the Javanese majority and the politically under- or not represented Balinese, Sumanese, …, between women with hjiabs and those without, between LGBQ and a repressive government, to name but a few – the arrogance of assuming that “a smile says it all” is, and can only be, a colonialist and orientialist dream. Reducing locals, or rural villagers to their happy smiles, reduces them to the display of what visitors expect and want to see; the snapshot of an imaginary place that has no reflection in reality. This, in turn, veils a lived and experienced reality that, if shared and communicated as such, would ensure no western tourist ever returning to the villages.

Stories of colonialism and neo-colonialism, of extortion, expropriation and betrayal. The reality of plantation systems cash-cropping cocoa and coffee for European markets and extinguishing biodiversity, of political, social and religious repression, of militarization by a Western model, of tourism and its destruction of the few pristine places left on Java and the subsequent fight for and frequent success of making a decent living regardless - those are the stories that structure the lived experiences of most rural communities on Java. These are also the stories no smile can ever communicate. How convenient then, that these are also the stories no visitors wants to hear. As if the only reason rural communities existed was to display to tourism that which they expect to see: villagers smiling at the simplicity of their lives. Whether or not they are actually happy with them is entirely irrelevant, because if they aren’t – who is going to find out?

It's been said before: The colonial gaze sees what it expects to encounter, with the interpretory framework of any action or encounter defined prior to that experience taking place. That this precludes the possibility of those gazed-at ever to “be” in the full ontological sense, precisely because it constitutes the relation of difference by which the ontology of the always-already European subject is established, is probably unknown to most tourists who go to rural Java. And if they knew even the term ontology, I wonder if they’d care.

The point being that the realisation of this relation of difference and inherent denial of ontology begs the question for alternatives. Echoing Spivak; of course the subaltern speaks, and speaks back. But if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound? (It’s a trick question really, because of course there is always something there to hear it…).

In my few brief weeks here, I encountered a truly surprising number of decent, hardworking people trying to make a living off tourism without doing damage to their communities, or the space they inhabit. Equally, there is literal bunches of people who don’t care, and just want to make a quick buck. But there is an awareness – there are tourist “attractions” controlled and administered by local communities, there are awareness workshops, guidebooks on etiquette and dresscode, ecological hotels and homestays – the lot. But if after five reminders (two polite, one irritable, two downright rude) the lady in front of me still insists she needs to wear a bikini in the bus, or take pictures of every “cute, brown skinned baby” she sees; well, at some point I despair. And so, I’m sure, do some locals. And so we smile. Forcefully at times, genuinely at others. I can’t say I blame anyone for smiling at times like these – but I do blame who takes every smile for face value, who constructs upon a smile the theory of a subcontinent full of happy people without worries – lolling about on their rice fields, grinning at the simplicity of it all.