Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Page 15

  Both of the above sentences mean: “Are you going to eat rice and cassava now?” Notice that the only word identical in both sentences is the one for cassava (kaspé). Everything else is so different that they could almost be considered separate languages. Imagine if you had to speak English to your social inferiors (say, children and maybe lawyers) and French to your superiors (such as your boss). That’s something like the linguistic situation on Java. Now imagine if you had to speak English to children, French to your boss, Spanish to your friends at work, Italian to your neighbours, and Portuguese to strangers. That describes the social and linguistic situation on Bali.

  So saying that the Balinese have umpteen dozen words for rice really misses the point. It’s not the rice they’re naming. They’re indicating the relationships between themselves. They’re identifying one another.

  One hot tropical evening, with the thin slice of a crescent moon hanging inexplicably upside down in the sky, I travelled to the outskirts of town to see the famous legong dance. In Bali, dance is an incredibly sacred affair. A combination of movement and storytelling, it’s an infinitely subtle and refined orchestra of gestures seen nowhere else on the planet.

  The central dancers in legong are two girls, usually no more than eight years old. The girls start training for the dance as soon as their feet touch the ground, literally, and the stretched fingers and darting eyes, the strange cock of the head, and delicate side steps are a choreography handed down through the centuries. Even at eight years of age, these girls are masters and a joy to watch.

  The story of the dance derives from a Javanese tale dating to the twelfth century. On a journey a king finds a maiden lost in the forest. He takes her and locks her into a prison. When the maiden’s brother, a prince in his own right, learns of this, he threatens war. The king is warned by a bird — a black raven — that this fight will end in his death. Foolishly, he pursues the war and is indeed killed. The maiden, in her captivity, holds two fans, and it’s these fans, come to life, that are the legong. Magically, the young girls appear and dance, dressed in gold brocade to symbolize the fans. Without question they’re the stars of the show.

  Underscoring the intricate dance is the gamelan orchestra, which uses a series of instruments that look like upturned metal pots. The instruments are struck with tiny mallets so that gamelan music plinks and plonks quite delicately, reminding one of the sounds of a child’s toy piano. However, the plunking is steady and hypnotic and becomes almost trance-like. Four or five men sit on one side, with the omnipresent checkered cloths about their midsections, playing wooden flutes, while a single drummer stands behind them. On the other side of the stage are the gamelan players proper, seven or eight men with an assortment of different-sized pots clustered about, all within reach of their tiny dulcimer hammers.

  Spellbound, I listened and watched. This was no Kodak moment, carefully crafted for the entertainment of tourists. The story really did unfold like a fan and was sheer magic.

  The next day the sun dangled directly overhead so that there were no shadows anywhere. It sat on my head and shoulders, heavily, tangibly, like the meaty hand of a belligerent god. On a fence in front of me was a poster. CREMATION TODAY, it read. TOURISTS WELCOME.

  It seemed strange that someone would put up posters to announce such an event, expressly inviting tourists, and for a moment I suspected a catch, a scam, one more way of separating the naive traveller from his sweaty dollars. But then I didn’t know Bali.

  I really did want to see what happened at a cremation, though, so I went to the designated meeting place where they squeezed eight or nine of us into a minivan. I had no idea where we were going, and after an hour or so of driving, we were delivered to a village lane and the bus sped off. This was to be the first of many confused moments. Carefully crafted confusion, I might add.

  We knew we were in the right place because lying in the dust was one of the large papier mâché statues used to transport bodies to the cremation site. It formed a pretty good semblance of a lion, and I found out later that this was the animal representing the caste of the deceased.

  To get out of the sun we walked up the street to a pavilion that had been set up. In the pavilion were more gamelan players. The musical pots and pans were attached to large wooden frames so the musicians could carry everything and play as they marched. Soon we were all marching. As the procession started, we galloped ahead to snap photos. In front of the procession trundled a truck with a large water tank. A man stood in the rear of the truck with a high-pressure hose and swept it back and forth over the dusty road. Sometimes he aimed it up to shower water over the mourners. Far from being insulted, they good-naturedly smiled and laughed at the shower.

  The native marchers couldn’t really be called mourners. The entire village seemed to have come out — several hundred people, most of them dressed in black, and they weren’t acting that mournful. In fact, they giggled openly, sang, and even danced. This was a scene of real celebration distinctly in opposition to our sombre Western funerals.

  In fairness to Westerners and to human empathy in general, the bodies to be cremated in this ceremony aren’t recently deceased. It’s the custom in Bali to bury corpses immediately following death so that the earth will clean the bones, which means only the bones are actually cremated. There’s also a practical aspect to the ritual, since the passage of time after burial allows the family of the deceased to save up for the cremation ceremony. The entire village is invited to these extravaganzas so that they cost a pretty penny to put together. For that reason, too, several people are often cremated at once in a sort of funeral by bulk. A prestigious day is divined and only then do the old bones rise from the earth. They’re wrapped in white shrouds, gingerly, and placed on a bier usually shaped into the animal that represents their caste.

  On the day we went, the villagers sang and chanted, with three papier mâché towers, like parade floats, tottering above them, shouldered into the air by dozens of men. Every few metres the villagers would stop and turn the giant statues, spinning them awkwardly three times before continuing the procession.

  As I mentioned earlier, the ritual is all about confusion. The Balinese Hindu belief is that a spirit separated from its body by death will be confused and will desperately try to cling to what it’s known for a lifetime. It will try to return to its body so it can stay in the village, which means it has to be coaxed away, fooled a little bit. The loud noise, the jingling and clanking, the singing and dancing, are all done to confuse the lonely spirit.

  The spirit is literally spun around, mixing it up further so that it can’t find its way back. Lastly, the mourners dress in black so the spirit can’t see them. The idea is that it won’t recognize anyone and will be forced to conclude that it must go elsewhere. The day I attended the ritual the locals, of course, were dressed in black. We tourists, I later found out, were invited on purpose. Like all good tourists everywhere, we wore an assortment of badly fitting colourful hats and an unflattering rainbow of shorts. What we didn’t wear was black, especially in the tropical heat. So the first people the spirits saw were us. No doubt that scared them immensely.

  The cremation ceremony is quite brilliant. Bali is a place that has soaked in the sauces of many different cultures. From each it’s taken a little something. At a performance of another sacred dance I watched a scene unfold in which the god Rama was surrounded by hideous demons. They bubbled around him and spoke in distinct English. That was a poke at us — a highly traditional dance with white-faced demons from the wicked West.

  From birth to death and everything in between the Balinese have an approach to life that’s radically different from that in the West. The culture is rich and the language is almost insurmountably difficult. It has an internal sense, though, largely based on the old Hindu caste system.

  The indigenous language of Bali, as a whole, is called Bahasa Bali. As I said, it marks social structure exactly, so much so that, depending on who’s talking (and who is being
talked to), any one of five completely different forms might be employed. Each has its own vocabulary, and to some degree its own grammar. According to the particular caste of the speaker and specific caste of the individual being spoken to, up to five completely different sentences might be uttered — all meaning the same thing.

  This is linguistic pragmatics gone ballistic. Initially, two Balinese strangers, not knowing the other’s caste, start a conversation in what’s called Basa Alus, the high language. Basa Alus came directly from the Hindu-Javanese court languages of the tenth century. It was the language of the original Majappahit Kingdom, the tongue of the scholars and artists who arrived on Bali with the exiled royal court of Java.

  At some point in our hypothetical conversation the caste level of one speaker would be asked (or surmised) and the levels would be adjusted accordingly. The Balinese language uses very few greetings or politeness markers otherwise. There are no equivalents for please or thank you, for example, nor is there anything that translates into “good morning” or “good evening.” All these things are marked in the form that’s used.

  A second form is called Basa Lumrah and is applied when talking to people of the same caste, and between family and friends. A third is called Basa Sor and is employed when speaking to people of a lower caste or to people who are non-caste. Basa Madia is a fourth form and is a polite language utilized for conversing with strangers or with people to whom one wishes to show respect.

  Basa Singgih, the fifth form, is the most distinct of all. Its grammar and vocabulary are completely unlike the others. t’s used to address persons of high caste, usually in formal and religious contexts. Even the Balinese aren’t always fluent in this language. Written Basa Singgih, oddly enough, is the language seen on the signs of welcome and farewell found in most Balinese villages.

  Between the five forms there are separate vocabularies that encompass about a thousand basic words. Most of these relate to descriptions of people and their actions. More recently, the five forms have become blended and simplified so that it’s now common to speak of three forms: a low or informal Balinese (essentially Basa Lumrah), a polite Balinese (mostly Basa Madia), and a high Balinese (a mixture of Basa Alus and Basa Singgih).

  For example, nggih or sometimes saja. In polite Balinese yes would be inggih or patut, and in high Balinese yes could only be patut. On the other hand, the word for no in low Balinese is sing or tuara, while in polite Balinese it’s tan and in high Balinese it’s nenten or tan wenten. Bewildering, isn’t it?

  Languages are relative things. They describe a particular manner of existence in the world, a way of being that’s somehow different from that of the speaker of a different language. The Balinese languages are a good example of that. It’s almost impossible for us to untangle the complexities involved in their social stratification. It’s enough perhaps to understand how very different the whole system is from English. But, and here’s the crux of the matter, the truth is that it’s merely a different set of rules, a different game, for getting at much the same things done with English.

  Actually, English takes as many different forms as Balinese does. There is, for starters, no single language that can unequivocally be called Standard English. We speak in a variety of ways, and like the Balinese, what we say is largely a product of the social situations we find ourselves in.

  There are, of course, many different accents and grammars in English, each quite accurately marking our social and geographical status. For instance, there’s the Cockney English of a character like Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (here, even the name is telling) who speaks like this: “I ain’t done nothing wrong. I’m a good girl, I am, and I won’t pick up no free and easy ways.” Such speech is replete with double negatives, archaic contractions, and slang that locates her specifically to the poorest neighbourhoods of London at the end of the nineteenth century. Contrast that with the proper Oxford English of Professor Henry Higgins or, for that matter, the queen of England. And yes, all these accents and dialects are most certainly English.

  We have Irish and Scottish and idiolects such as those found in African-American hip hop lyrics. We have the baffling jargon of legalese (its sole purpose is to baffle, one might say) and the Latin-based vocabularies of medicine and science. We have the slang of teenagers and the soliloquies of Hamlet.

  But all of the above are grandly, profoundly English.

  Even a single individual, in the course of a normal day, speaks in a number of completely different forms. Think about it. Among friends we might well swear more freely, especially over a beer or two, watching, say, a hockey game. But at work, or in a job interview, or meeting in-laws for the first time, we speak quite differently, since we’re acutely aware of the different contexts and change our language accordingly.

  All peoples, in every language, adjust their words to the social situations at hand. The Balinese system is almost absurdly overt about it, while English marks things more subtly, but everything comes down to much the same thing. We have different systems, sometimes unimaginably dissimilar, but we’re all aware of the social context and how much obsequiousness or straightforwardness is needed. That’s a fundamental component of our communication with one another, and many of our mistakes — our miscommunications — in understanding people from different language backgrounds can often be traced to a difference in how the relationship between the speakers is marked.

  Sometimes whole oceans of misunderstanding lie between people. Sometimes words do fail us. I flew home by way of Osaka, Japan. Actually, we touched down there for a couple of hours. I was continuing on, flying into the broad Pacific, but even as we were descending over the great inland sea called Seto Naikai, something about the date tweaked my memory.

  It was August 6, and it didn’t take me long to remember that this was the exact date, back in 1945, that a plane ducked out of the clouds, just as we were now doing, not too far from where we were, to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  Everyone knows the story, but few are aware of what happened in the days leading up to the bombing. It’s actually one of my favourite linguistic stories, a case study in pragmatics and an excellent example of miscommunication.

  On July 26, 1945, a final ultimatum was issued to the Japanese prime minister. It was called the Potsdam Declaration, and it came from the Chinese provisional government, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and President Harry S. Truman of the United States.

  Truman, desperate with the moral consequences of unleashing the terrible weapon now available to him, offered a last way out to the unsuspecting Japanese. I can imagine him well. He wasn’t the sort of politician we have today. Harry was a simple farmer and had worked on the railways in younger days, even sleeping in hobo camps — a true man of the people. I can picture him wracked with guilt, sitting slouched at the big desk in the Oval Office, head lowered with the crushing weight of what might soon happen.

  So, knowing what the others didn’t, he spent a little longer on the paragraphs intended for the Japanese prime minister. “The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which [was] applied to the Nazis,” he wrote. “The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, all mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and, just as inevitably, the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.”

  Of course, Truman couldn’t tell the Japanese exactly what was going to happen. The atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project were still carefully guarded secrets and would be for another ten days, but he meant precisely what he said about “utter devastation.” He wasn’t mincing words, and he fervently hoped his message would be taken to heart.

  I guess the U.S. president didn’t really expect a reply, but it’s in the reply that the story gets interesting. On Saturday, July 28, Prime Minister Suzuki agreed to hold a press conference at four o’clock at which time he would answer the Allied declaration. To the all-important expected question “Wha
t will you do?” Suzuki replied suddenly and simply, “Mokusatsu.”

  Mokusatsu is an intriguing word. Moku means “silence,” whereas the word satsu means “to kill.” The literal interpretation then is “to kill with silence.” As with many words, however, there are different shades of meaning. Mokusatsu, under some circumstances, can refer to the withholding of opinion. We can understand it in the context of the way in which politicians often respond by saying “No comment.” It’s a sort of ducking of the question, maybe leaving it for later, perhaps hoping the whole issue will go away. Or, a little more aggressively, mokusatsu can signify a conspicuous ignoring of something, as perhaps one might disregard a troublesome uncle who’s had too much to drink at a wedding. Of course, in extreme cases the word can be translated as a “fuck-you” silence.

  However, the silence of a “No comment” and the silence of a “Fuck you” are quite different, and Truman’s translators had a real job on their hands. As it turned out, the translation was as predictable as it was tragic. Truman remembered it like this: “They gave us a very snotty answer. They told me to go to hell, words to that effect.”

  Nine days later the United States obliterated Hiroshima and sixty-four thousand innocent souls. The silence kept up for another day and then Nagasaki, too, was annihilated.

  So here’s the point: what did the Japanese prime minister really mean? To the end of his life in 1948, Suzuki refused to say. Saving face is incredibly important in Japanese culture, and who’s kidding anyone — it’s important in every culture. If Suzuki had truly meant for the Americans to wait a few days, if he had meant to say he needed more time to answer the proposal fully, then apparently he hadn’t made himself clear and the bombing could be seen as the result of his ineptitude.

  On the other hand, if he had truly meant to tell the Americans to go to hell, then by doing so he brought hell itself down on two of his cities. In either case he would have lost face for his decision. So perhaps it was best to say nothing.