It was a film studies assignment in high school that estranged me from a normative understanding of cleanliness. While completing a textual analysis on French director Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), a satirical work that critiques the capitalist modernization of Paris post-WWII, I came across a paper that interpreted the film’s architecture to represent the enforced sanitation of modernism: the transformation of sensually—unpleasantly—explosive old Paris to Tativille, where glass walls are spotless, all brass handles shiny and untouched, and not one stairstep showing signs of wear by leather soles. For the first time, I saw the phenomenon of urban hygiene beyond its status as an advantage of modern life, instead as control over chaos, wilderness, nature itself, creating a perfectly, intentionally sterile physical and mental environment. Having lived only in cities my whole life, however, my realizations were confined to theory and my impending assignment.
Now, having spent nearly a month travelling and living life in Indonesia, the familiar discourse regarding a sanitized modernity leapt out of academia and into my personal experience. In Indonesia, I observed firsthand an environment stereotyped as non-Western, non-modern, and, from the perspective of the modern West, unclean. It is difficult not to observe, I think, as the exhaust fumes coming out of the motorbikes permeate the air as they rampage the roads we tried to cross; as the narrow strip of bare dirt and sand extends alongside the road as a default sidewalk; as mosquitoes hover around the prasmanan dishes set out on the table; as the dark and burning frying oil sizzles behind the gimol stand; as colorful plastic bags are strewn across lawns and alleyways; as I clumsily maneuver the water ladle together with my left hand to clean my backside; as ants and spiders scuttle lightly onto my arms and legs in the jungles of Simolap and in my Jogja home, and I try my best to repress my fight-or-flight response, shaking off the aliens and forcing myself to reconcentrate.
I would be lying if I said I’m adapting perfectly well, that I don’t miss the luxury of a hot shower, that I enjoy worrying about potential diarrhea when drinking es jeruk from the street. To this day, I am to this day confused about when ants began randomly crawling out of my laptop. Yet, amidst these observations, I noticed the fundamental irrationality of most of my fears. The creatures and physical sensations, interactions that provoke in me reactions of disgust, anxiety, fear—they post far less harm to me in reality than in my imagination. A daddy longleg on my shoulder threatens my life in no significant way; my reaction to discovering it on myself poses far more influence on its lifespan than mine. I have no logical reason to shirk away from the feeling of dirt on my feet and stones between my toes. No health complications will occur if I accidentally swallow a fly, and science already proves that water is far more effective at cleaning than toilet paper. But this knowledge does little to quell my surging panic when, during a midnight bucket shower, I squint to see an army of black ants crawl across the shower walls that surround me, roaming along the paint cracks, heading towards the door. I wonder what it is that made me so afraid of creatures that mean no harm to me. I wonder when I began to perceive sand and dust and specks of sand as irritating nuisances, instead of elements that will out-exist me till the day I myself become dust. I wonder when I came to recognize the marks of nature on my body as blemishes that need to be scrubbed off, removed, cleaned immediately. What is it that has made me so afraid of being dirty?
Imagination has never appeared out of thin air. In Indonesia and many places around the world, hygiene—the specific standards set for it as imagined by colonial powers—has long been recognized and analyzed as a colonial concept. In historian Rudolf Mrázek’s Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony, hygiene in relation to public infrastructure reflects the Dutch’s inferior view of the “native” Javanese: in discussions of “road hygiene”, Dutch settlers often complained how the dust blown around by rampaging “grobak carts, buses and trucks” infects people with “plague, cholera, typhus” and other diseases (Mrázek 24), and demands that roads become paved with gravel and asphalt to prioritize automobiles, mostly purchased by settlers. These assumptions are more than scientific inaccuracies: when the Dutch “believed in progress as cleanness”, they inevitably saw “natives” as dirty, uncivilized, lesser; to them, non-Europeans were “speaking and writing flesh and blood, or simply mud.” (Mrázek 27) This characterization of colonized populations by colonial powers is not unique to the Dutch Indies: Palestinian-American political scientist Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism demonstrates how, evidenced by historical Western attitudes toward Arabs, colonial entities reaffirm the superiority of their own identities through characterizing the “other” as everything that they themselves are not, thus justifying imperialism as the exercise of the “stronger” culture’s right to dominate a “weaker” one: if Europe—by extension, America—is civilized, developed, modern, and pure, then one must believe the oriental and their societal conditions to be barbaric, undeveloped, backwards, impure, and thus dirty. The colonial cultural myth reinvents itself and persists across time and space, and the closer one finds oneself with what is generally recognized as the West, the more ingrained these orientalist beliefs are in one’s understanding of the world, both around and far away from them. I grew up in a metropolitan area of China with expansive access to Western media and culture. I was familiar with squat toilets, but it wasn’t until I had lived in Indonesia that I became conscious of how, in my subconscious, I had marked them as by nature unclean and associated their existence with underdevelopment. On reflection, I find it terrifying that I am guilty of these assumptions, even though I came from the culture that these assumptions are made towards. No one, not even the most well-meaning individual, can fully exonerate themselves from colonial assumptions in a post-colonial world. The past is never fully past.
So where do we go from here?
It is Saturday night, and I’m following my homestay siblings—Litha, Nana, Adzra—through the southern alun-alun night market, where bustling street food stalls with frizzling oils and neon lights complement the pair of ancient banyan trees, its overbearing figure making the branches bend in all directions outwards, the leaves rustling lightly in the warm, humid summer air. Litha takes us to get cups of instant coffee with floating ice shards, and I stand to the side as Nana fills up two paper bowls with steaming hot bakso, watching as the owner swats flies away from the metal pot. I find that I do not mind. We leave the circle of stalls with plastic boxes of cheese-smothered dimsum and Adzra’s nameless bag of fried rice balls, squeezing past the stream of market-goers and the rows of motorbikes parked on the roadside towards the lawn. Litha rented a straw mat for ten thousand rupiah, and we soon found an empty spot near the banyan tree, next to all the young and old couples huddled on their mats. As I lower myself onto the mat, I notice straw wrappers strewn around the lawn and ants as large as my pinky nail scuttling on the mat, their outlines made visible by the moonlight, and I press down a wave of apprehension as I dig around for a skewer. Soon I had forgotten all worries: the taste of sembal burns in my throat, and I hear my siblings’ hearty laughter as I frantically ask for water in a raspy voice. There we sat for hours, criss-crossed on the paper-thin mat, talking and laughing under the night that fell on our shoulders like a weighted blanket, its edges mulled by the sweet wine of youthfulness and young love. Suddenly I feel it all: the scent of the smoke coming from a nearby bapak puffing a cigarette, the roar of the motorbike’s engine as it dashes ahead on the road, the crackle of the oil frying wontons as I wait in line, the wrinkled feel of money squeezed in my hand as my body is pressed against others on the crowded sidewalk, wave after wave, beads of sweat fermenting near my temples and rolling slowly down my cheek, I swelter in this humid, dusty, uncomfortable heat—and I can no longer sense the fear. Only gladness remains: what a privilege it is to be here, to live amongst people and insects and real life, muddy dusty real life.
There is no textbook answer on how to rid ourselves of history. But here I am, with my family of strangers in a foreign land full of memory and wounded pride and indignation and grief, and I find myself content. This, however flawed it may be, is my answer, for the time being. I wonder what yours is.