SPECTRAL ECOLOGIES
MULTISPECIES HAUNTINGS AND THE AFTERLIVES OF ABANDONMENT
From the project “BlueUrban –Global Trajectories and Specultative Futures in Sea-level Change Adaptation in Southeast Asia”, funded by the German Science Foundation ́s SPP 1889 Regional Sealevel Change and Society.
Text written by Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa (in collaboration with Mohamaed Soufi Gemilang)
While infrastructural cartographies illustrate stories of urban coastal worlds of the overbuilt, un/remade, and the speculative, our gaze on Pekalongan, western Java, foregrounds transoceanic reverberation as distinct forms of haunting – through memories of multiple loss, their ecological echoes, and of shadowy arrivals and disappearances. Watery submergence does its silent work, while serving as an allegorical and methodological lens with which to trace intertidal multispecies narratives related to changes in land use, livelihoods, alternations in spiritlore; and for some, the subsequent abandonment of homesteads and ancestral grave sites.
As bodies and as finite selves that have sojourned these perpetual sites of submergence, we ourselves tread carefully and reverently through their storied landscapes and visual material, all of which patchwork diverse visions of vanishing ecologies. Yet neither do we privilege the singular story of lost futurities, that are made to sit antithetically against the more infrastructurally aspirational and spectacular urbanscapes of Jakarta, Metro Manila or Singapore. Instead, these reverberative contemplations point to watery hauntologies implicating farmed jasmine, fish ponds, abandoned abodes, and ancestral graves which co-produce emergent ecologies, inviting more generative understandings around submergence across Java´s amphibious littoral, vernacularly referred to as tanah air (land-water).
Arguably then, how much, if at all remains truly abandoned?
What did the tides bring?
The historic multiethnic colonial Javanese port town of Pekalogan is a space that has long been politicised for its tidal incursions and alarming rates of land subsidence, as much as 4-11cm per year. Today, while vast swathes of land remain fully or partially submerged, residents of Pekalongan live their daily lives according to tidal calendars, for as in the case of Semarang, certain hours of the day turn its urban fabric into a veritable waterworld. Competing languages and discourses of abandonment, imply not merely acts of departure but implicate active, lively practices of socio-material and symbolic haunting. Tides co-create as much as erase. Well-rehearsed critiques of capitalism, state infrastructural decay and overbuilding is but one narrative on climate justice (and retribution). As some may argue, a significant number of urban centres on the northern coastlines of Java are sinking, while socioeconomic debates are singularly framed around discourses on loss and damage, and the paradoxes of central government and municipal failure.
Unwriting Tidal Incursions
Among these spaces lie Simonet, a hamlet built on a sandspit in the postwar years following Japanese occupation and the Indonesian War of Independence. Documentary journalists and other local and international media entities that frequently visit often simplistically frame Simonet as a material symbol for ´climate displacement,´ some alluding to its spectral presence as pulau hantuor a ghost island. Yet, it is a ghostliness that prevails by virtue of the missing and the abandoned, what once was, like the Wonokerto Fish Auction that was gradually disassembled. Former residents of Simonet contend that coastal abrasion may have begun when they themselves collectively felt the movement of disappearing sediments in 2006. Its 300 inhabitants were reduced to a strip of 12 hectares. Farmed jasmine (Melanti gambir), fish and shrimp ponds were primary sources of livelihood and folk would posit being ´farmers´ rather than seafarers and fishers despite dwelling on the coastal edge. A mix of compelled and voluntary relocation (as a part of a state-led ´managed retreat´ policy) began in 2019, when villagers were moved to neighbouring Semut and other hinterland sites. During the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, coastal abrasion had worsened and much of the cultivated land and aquaculture ponds were lost. Yet a few, like Pak Ono, continue to revisit the few jasmine gardens and milkfish ponds they have.
Pekalongan´s sedimented histories
As a colonial trading port during, its name derived from a Dutch East Indies Government Decree (Gouvernements Besluit) No. 40 of 1931, is the earliest document in which the name Pekalongan is known to been mentioned. The name Pekalongan is derived from the term 'Halong' (many). The city´s coat of arms bears a fish symbolizing the harbour, a batik canting implement, and a while jasmine. Ethno-religiously polyglot and hybrid, the city is home to Javanese, Tionghoa, and Arab communities, with a competing form of Islamic religiosity while boasting historically sacred sites and artefacts such as the Jami Aulia Mosque and the Sapuro Kebulen doctrines. It remains one of the rare places in Indonesia with its “Chinatown” given the influence of precolonial and colonial mainland Chinese trading networks. Practices such as the syawalanand sedekah bumi (earth alms) co-exist uncomfortably with reformist Islamic thinking, while displaying faint traces of syncretism. Syawalan for example, is performed seven days after Eid al-Fitr, marked by cutting enormouslopisgiven to visitors. Sedekah bumi, or Legonan, is an earth alms custom hyper-locally practiced once a year, during the month of Legeno, often implicated in the legend of the Queen of the North Sea – Dewi Langar. Slaughtered buffalo parts along with other food, sometimes a boat and a hoe are ´offered´ to the tides for calmer waters and plentiful fish during the festival of Nyadran. In one rendition of the folktale, Dewi Lanjar (also Dewi Rara Kunging) is storied as an ordinary woman, patiently awaiting the anticipated return of the seafarer she loves, on a lonely pier. He never arrives, and she, in her quiet benevolence, vanishes one day. Some claim she may have been taken away, to become a retainer of the far more powerful and feared Nyi Roro Kidul, the Queen of the South Seas, while Dewi Lanjar herself continues maintaining her revered position as a guardian spirit of the northern waters.
Submerged histories of/in the rawa-rawa
The materialities of submergence, of sedimented minerals on which settlements were built and trading ports were constructed as well as subsequent tidal incursions and watery inundation, foreground other metaphoric meanings of submergence in Pekalongan. These entail intertwining histories of symbolic and mnemonic submergence – the silencing of competing religiosities, haunted multi-layered memories of violence and civic conflict from days of Japanese Occupation during WWII and the Indonesian National Revolution, to state-driven anti-Communist ´cleansing´, particularly the massacres of 1965.Rawa-rawa, coastal swamplands and mangrove forests together with vast swathes of unoccupied land were invariably haunted as they sedimented their place in local history as spaces of insurgency and concealment.
The benevolence of jasmine
- Pak
Ono, Simonet (April, 2023)
Jasmine (Melati, Indonesian) was first planed on river beds and terra-aqueous areas. Farmers today concur that the shrubs were brought by and popularised by Bojong migrants moving from the south. Ono, relayed the ancestral stories he´d heard as a little boy when the first jasmine tea factories were set up by Chinese business owners in the 1920 and 1930s. Family names such as Yong Cho and Yong Wee are still pertinent today, given how Bandulan tea was made renowned. Today, many of Java´s jasmine tea factories are concentrated in Tagal and Pekalongan. Ono´s father was among the first to cultivate jasmine in Simonet, a “pioneer” (cikal bakal). He later joined up as a volunteer soldier for the Japanese during the occupation and served in Kuala Lampur. Jasmine is a truly hybrid littoral plant, drawing nourishment from both fresh groundwater and sandy coastal soils. Overtime, the salinisation of Pekalongan´s soil made it near impossible to grow healthy shrubs closer to eroding shorelines. When jasmine farming became difficult, high numbers of smallholders converted their plots to shrimp and milkfish ponds. Some continued mixed livelihoods oscillating between aquaculture and farming during the monsoonal seasons. Jasmine plucking has been a gendered occupation and significant numbers of female farm labour took up work in batik production which remains a cottage industry western Java while controlled by middlemen.
Of kangen – spectral sensusalities
The lifecycle of cultivated jasmine seems mythical as much as it is mundane. As a shrub it flowers so plentifully that it covers much of the plant, which is allowed to grow between one and four meters. Flowers are sold by the kilo, at approximately 20,000 IDR (1.8 USD) per unit. Tea factories require unopened buds for processing. Larger buds get sent to the factory and it needs to be processed before it opens, or else it gets discarded. Bloomed jasmine flowers used for weddings. Symbolically jasmine holds other meanings in Javanese lore. It is at the same time associated as a flower of death, for its overwhelming scent is taken to indicate the presence of spirits and other energies. Sites such as Simonet were once home to plentiful jasmine home-gardens, that were eternally covered in white, former residents narrated. What haunts today is the scent of disappeared jasmine – for their shrubs have become spectral themselves. Scent haunts the living and is indicative of haunting, as much as it is haunted by recent memories implicating kangen(Javanese, longing and nostalgia).
Hauntings, old and new
“Simonet has always had plenty of spirits. They are near coastal waters, maybe because it is the best place for them to reside. Along the shorelines from Wonokerto to Ulujami beach in Pemalang, you will find many ghosts. My parents used to give offerings (sesajen) containing banana combs, incense, jasmine, white rice, cold tea and coffee as a form of thanks Sedekah Bumi every Kliwon Friday. This was done to thank the ´danyang´ spirits that act as village guards. There are the dedemits, some are female known as ‘Wewe Gombel’ and usually have long breasts and are known to take away children. Changes in the landscape make it more comfortable for them to live here, with the sea washing over. Long before the tides came in, they tried to occupy this place, interfering with our lives at times. Now, due to changes in nature and the large number of houses that have been emptied out, more and more dedemit are arriving, getting comfortable, attached, and developing a sense of place here… claiming these structures as their own. A pillar that stands on its own is enough.”
Unearthly becomings
In her critique of western literary form, Elvia Wilk in her contemplative essay in her collection Death by Landscape (2022), recounts the fallacy of the protagonist-led story in which a person/collective are positioned against the inert, passive backdrop of the wor(l)d in which plants, animals and minerals are all intertwined. Yet, any built form in present-day Simonet defies such centrality, for here built form lies enmeshed in watery flows while becoming other than solid. Concrete almost becomes a substance of water as other sediments, plant matter and animal life such as algae and mollusks layer over. Simonet implies a banishing of the human world (as opposed to the more-than-human in the case of extinction), both decentering human presence while recentering the very nature-cultural residues of desertion. Submergence has as much an effect on built surfaces as it does the subterranean, as ancestral grave sites continue to be shifted or entirely abandoned. Bones and other human remains are interred elsewhere, while leaving empty edifices above the swirling tides.
Beyond ´abandonment´
Hauntologies implicating submergence – of disappearance and un/anticipated arrivals, at times displacing human-centric narratives – serve as another rendition of reverberation. Using abandoned materialities of places and spaces in Simonet, submergence serves as more than a metaphor with which to think about layered pasts, presents, and un/remade futurities. Teeming spectral subjects and their encounters while avoiding the pitfalls of romanticizing and essentializing communal belief systems and water cosmologies, foretell that there is nothing that is/will be truly abandoned.