Merapi Sem Fogo

The odd thing of having Mount Merapi in the distance every morning as I wake up and gaze at it through the morning mists of Yogya, is that it is often not visible at all. As the morning advances, its contours begin to appear. I have however hardly seen it uncovered by clouds in the MM Wisma where the university has put me up. Of course, as it spews a cloud of gas and smoke, it also contributes to its own haziness. It is majestic, grand and also unfathomable. I don't want to go and take a look at it. I am not curious in that way. I prefer to look at its consequences down here: the civilisations that have risen and waned in the valleys made fertile by its eruptions - and those of other volcanoes - through the centuries.

There are uncanny parallels with and links to Brasil popping up all the time. Floods have been common because it is the rainy season. The road between Solo and Malang has been hit more than once. At the same time, in Teresópolis, just on the mountains outside of Rio, a tragedy has been unfolding as the rains are virtually washing the town down the mountain slopes. Therefore, there is banjir here and banjir over there (as well as in Brisbane in Australia). Rain in Teresópolis is hardly news. What is tragic is the extent of the damage and the deaths. That is new. Strangely, there is also a royal connection here just as over there. Just as neighbouring Petrópolis, Teresópolis is linked to the royal family's supposed enchantment with the mountains outside of Rio. In fact, to this day the descendants of the old royal family still receive money from taxes collected from citizens who inhabit Petrópolis even though the family has not reigned since 1889. Petrópolis is named after Emperor Dom Pedro II (or his father, Dom Pedro I, whose plan it was to build a palace there), and Teresópolis is named after his wife, though the town itself only came up just after the empire had ended and the royal family had quietly sailed to its exile in France. There they spent the rest of their days supposedly wallowing in nostalgic luxury without ever once being allowed back. Petrópolis in fact during almost half a century would become the de facto capital of the Empire as the court moved to the mountains to escape Rio's sultry weather for several months at a time every year. Cariocas have continued this ancient royal tradition and not only wealthier citizens have second homes there as well as in other towns in the mountains, but also largish numbers of people migrate there over the weekend or the summer school vacation.

The weather is Yogya is also very similar to the weather in Rio now. The weather of alto verão or high summer. Therefore, royal connections and floods are not all that both have in common. There is also coffee, in fact, as old Rio imperial province and as well as parts of Jawa were the places where the first coffee plantations arose, more or less at the same time. My Javanese colleagues at the university smile when they see me taking my third or fourth cup of coffee for the morning. I am Brazilian and therefore a coffee addict. I like the coffee in Jawa. They don't use a percolator - coador - as we do, or a filter, and so the dregs just float until they sink and you can drink the coffee. Just as in the other former royal city, people here too are polite (more polite than over there in fact) as well as full of subterfuges. It is funny to think that this city was once under the yoke of an often scathingly direct and abrasive people such as the Dutch. The Javanese must therefore have faced a daunting civilizing mission, which they undoubtedly won. The Dutch remained in town for less than two hundred years, and even so often facing silent but fierce resistence and even open rebellion as when Prince Diponegoro - made into a national hero in the postcolonial era - rose against them (to the horror of his peers who were mostly in favour of not openly confronting the Dutch at the time). What is less than two hundred years in Jawa's history...after all, Borodubur has been standing now for well over a thousand years.

Rio didn't rebel. Only, the elites decided the royals had to go - after all, slavery, the mainstay of the empire, was no longer important, and the next monarch would be a woman, Princess Isabel, married to a French count and therefore a foreigner - and in this way one day the city awoke to the fact that it had become the capital of a republic overnight. I think one postcolonial destiny for the royal palace was turning into the city's main post office. Today it is a well-preserved but somewhat bare building from the eighteenth century where exhibits are held and where there is a café. In 1988 the country was asked to decide in a referendum whether it would become a presidential republic, one headed by a prime minister or, rhetorically, a king. The presidential republic easily won the day and the prospect of monarchy was probably buried forever. Some of the royal descendants live in Rio in relatively great comfort as famous non-entities who occasionally appear on the news in fashion shows or bickering with each other over supposedly stolen china or else reminiscing about the old days. Another old royal palace is now the governor's office and is supposedly haunted. One royal descendant declared on television that it only became haunted in republican times...

That is something else that Rio and Yogya have in common: the life of the spirits. Both cities are very interested in the various aspects and forms of the spirit world. Ilmu kebatinan, as Dewantara put it in his works, or the sciences of the inner self (batin is Arabic, in fact). There is also kejawen, which may or may not be related to ilmu kebatinan. It comes from Jawa, of course. All of it is quite mysterious to me, but not to locals. Amazingly, both cities also worship a goddess of the seas: Iemanjá in the case of Rio on New Year's Eve, when hundreds of thousands dress in white and go to the beach, wade into the water and throw flowers to the goddess, and Roro Kidul, the goddess of the south seas, in the case of Yogya. The sultan once a month goes to the coast nearby and makes a public offer to Roro Kidul. Iemanjá is in fact a Yoruba deity from what is today Nigeria and Benin. She crossed the ocean to Brasil with Africans and has since inhabited both shores receiving equal reverence on the part of her worshippers. She is also present in the Caribbean.

There are funny little signs of Brasil all over Yogya. 'Ayam goreng' is one of them: frango assado or frango frito as the case may be, namely fried or roasted chicken, a much appreciated dish in both cities. Frango assado should actually be 'ayam bakar', but there are far fewer sign boards announcing it. I ask someone and he assures me ayam goreng is more common. There is also 'ayam kampung' or 'galinha caipira', that is, chicken that was raised in freedom, and has not been fed industrialized chicken feed in chicken farms. Just as in Brasil, it is supposed to be leaner but much tastier than other chicken. It is also more expensive. In India they also have it, I am told by my Indian colleagues at the conference: it is called desi-murgha or ayam desa, namely, village chicken.

It is incredible how chicken and sea goddesses could travel so easily across the globe whereas historians usually have such a difficult time.