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Chapter 8: The Alley and the Street
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156 Surabaya, 1945–2010 156 8 The Alley and the Street The ninja hysteria threw suspicion upon the newcomer. Newcomers were inherent to Surabaya, epitomised by the founding fathers of kampungs who came and settled the city (Chapter 2). Their graves remain the centrepiece of kampung graveyards, representing the final stage in a young Javanese man’s rite of passage, from wandering in search of spiritual enlightenment and work to finding a place in the world, settling down, building a home and a family and, finally, being laid to rest (Anderson, 1972a; Vickers, 2006). A man’s grave marks that place in the world and is usually accompanied by a sacred tree (pohon punden), most often the fragrant frangipani tree, planted upon the founding father’s death to symbolise the rooting of community and its perpetual growth from one seed. An old caretaker at the Dinoyo graveyard depicted the growth of the punden tree as representing the growth of the kampung, stating, “The seed and the roots that sprout from it and hold the tree in place represent the tree’s foundation, the founding father, while the stem, branches, leaves and flowers represent the kampung community , growing and renewing from that foundation.” This metaphor of the city’s seeding and sprouting also occurs in Rendra’s poem ‘Fallen’ (1974), which envisages the post-colonial Indonesian city in its state of becoming during the Battle of Independence, when the father, dying from his battle wounds, looks on to the city and states, “We will seed it and it will sprout.” Like the punden tree writ large, the post-independence city was seeded by newcomers who flooded in on buses, trucks, trains and foot to settle it, transform its land use and give rise to a sprawling metropolis that continues to grow like the branches of the punden tree. The Alley and the Street 157 The New Order government set out to stem uncontrolled settlement by containing it within the kampungs. Still using botanical metaphors, the graveyard caretaker more evocatively explained the New Order’s urban management strategy as the “uprooting of some kampungs and the trimming of others into thick clumps”. In demographic terms, this took the form of the densification of population within Surabaya’s remaining kampungs and the containment of its growth beyond them. What the government failed to control, however , were the social relationships and community that formed within the kampungs. Death and the Government of Life Throughout the New Order, estimates of the unrecorded population amounted to around a quarter of Surabaya’s official population, with the majority living in inner-urban areas such as Tegalsari, where economic activity was more concentrated and work opportunities were greater than in other sub-districts (Silas, 1982a: 21; 1996: 554). Those who squatted along the banks of the Kali Mas or lived without formal permission in the kampungs were not accounted for in these statistics, making for a much higher actual population density. Extended family networks also exacerbated kampung densities. The 1994 National Social and Economic Survey (Survey Sosial Ekonomi Nasional, Susenas) showed that 15 per cent of household members in Surabaya came from beyond the nuclear family of a husband, wife and their children (SSO, 1995: 17). Households in Dinoyo typically contained at least one or two others — such as an old grandparent, in-law, cousin or friend — and they often held residency permit cards recording other kampungs or towns as their place of residence. Financial constraints during the economic crisis forced the kelurahan offices in Surabaya to issue an instruction to kampung ward representatives (rukun warga, RW) ordering them to distinguish kampung citizens (warga kampung) from newcomers (pendatang). A meeting in June 1998 of the neighbourhood representatives (rukun tetangga, RT) of each of the eight neighbourhoods in Dinoyo’s Ward Five was devoted to handing down this instruction. The ward representative instructed the eight reluctant neighbourhood representatives to differentiate between kampung citizens and newcomers when releasing money for funerals, to which only the kampung citizens were entitled. Unlike in the warga kampung, newcomers were not [18.209.69.180] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:04 GMT) 158 Surabaya, 1945–2010 registered as living in Dinoyo, their identity cards stating other places of residence. Warning that during the economic crisis the kampung administration had to be more careful not to spend funeral monies on those who were not entitled, the ward representative explained: Many people who die within the kampung, although old and having...