Burning Tires January 15 | Biography Journalism

BURNING TIRES JANUARY 15

i walk to school. wearing long

pants that flare at the bottom. first

day of high school, on budi utomo.

but today jakarta’s wearing clothes of

fire. black smoke billows upward.

flames like clumps of red cloud falling

to the street. cars are burning. proyek

senen shopping center, the first high-rise

building in jakarta to swallow hundreds of stores,

is becoming flame. the city as if

showing another side of itself, odd and crazed.

drivers of private vehicles tremble,

panic, leave their cars behind. more and

more cars are set on fire. windshield glass

shatters, roofs smashed in, stomped on. the heart

is paralyzed by blasts of flame and smoke. my head

like a burning car tire.

after the heart, the kidney, the bile, the fire revolts,

the city is like a pair of burst lungs filled

with the smoke of social inequity. i walk through

the high school gates for the first time,

into a colonial building with sturdy walls

and giant trees still left standing in

the yard. the classrooms are open-air. as i

try to sit in class, my eyes can still

look around outside: basketball court, nusa

indah blossoms, gutters, and a flag pole.

the fire blazes still. outside, people are burnt by

by wild suspicions. welcome to the first day of school,

january 15 1974, 12 noon. i

hear the university students’ demonstration.

i don’t understand, what sort of creature is a university student?

the malari incident burnt down all the japanese-

made vehicles. japanese prime minister tanaka

paid a visit to jakarta. and the university students

welcomed him by burning down japanese-made

vehicles, rejecting the threat of foreign

capital. burn and loot. i

hear hariman siregar, head of universitas

indonesia’s student council, holding a mass

meeting at ui’s salemba campus.

i walk over to the campus. i want to hear

the city’s heart. for the very first time i become a part of

the masses. studying politics from burning car tires.

the masses and i are in the same place,

in the same burst of flame. i am the masses

alone. a yellow coat and hariman’s roar,

they call him the “campus tiger,” as he

declaims. he asks us to gather all the burned-out

husks of cars, to exchange them for our friends

who have been arrested. the military

roars too—the night market at prinsen park on

mangga besar.

i go home. people are still gathering to watch

proyek senen full of smoke. fire eats into

its floors. eats into the hundreds of stores inside.

mother says proyek senen wasn’t just

set on fire, everything was looted. gold, shoes,

clothes, wristwatches, tv’s, looted. the city suddenly

as if overturned before your eyes. i could no

longer hear the city’s heart, this city getting

uneasy and reproachful. this city growing

with a lit fuse inside. this city

growing by tearing its old body to shreds

into an alien new form.

the revolt created new names in the ranks

of the student movement and the military, general

sumitro and ali murtopo among them. scorpion

generals eager to take a bite of power.

created a new stage for domestic politics.

politics with a lit fuse ignorant to the origins

of its fire, but always aware of precisely which wick would

be easy to burn: race, religion, and social

inequality. history of words militarized in the name

of anything at all. there’s a coup d’état motif in there, they

say. maybe a foreign capital allocation motif

too,they say.

night, a hard rain falls. our home,

invaded by water, floods. rainwater

doesn’t just drip from the leaky kitchen ceiling,

but seeps up from the ground too. i hear someone

knocking, hard, on the door, the sound of shoes

i don’t recognize coming in, splashing in

the water that flows over the floor. they

shine a flashlight into my eyes. they’re

soldiers, searching for the looters. their flashlight

shines into my eyes, feels like it’s never

gone away, even now, along with the fire.

along with the tires burning in my head.

datsun’s become an american citizen. making

a new nation everywhere. my first day of

school, i studied politics from burning tires.

BIOGRAPHY JOURNALISM

jackfruit leaves fall, wind, drift, jack-

fruit leaves stick to the walls of the house.

yards surrounded by yards. a javanese house, walls

of wood and termites. a low doorframe, head bows

to get through the door. a communion of voices:

bird, frog, and insect. boom. a ripe

jackfruit falls. the earth shudders. the dogs

howl hearing it fall a squirrel’s burrow

and butterflies. the cracked jackfruit on the ground

generates bugs. the smell of rotting

jackfruit seeps into remembrance. a jackfruit orchard

surrounded by jackfruit. an armed man

steals picasso’s portrait, “tete de femme,” from

a gallery in london.

whenever a strong wind blows, the ladder holds

the jackfruit tree close: my love, you must

not collapse. the house will be ruined if you

collapse. nitiprayan, village between yogya and

bantul, between rice fields and the clop of ugo

untoro’s horse’s hooves. a bicycle drifts through humid

air, before more cement and concrete and

loudspeakers come. a jackfruit climbs

up the ladder, looking for the site where

it once grew. the dogs howl. before the earthquake

and the roof tiles scattered in a piano recital. the 800-year-old

lalibela cross is reported missing in ethiopia.

the earth turns red when carpeted with fallen

mimosa blossoms. thousands of caterpillars

go guerrilla from its limbs. the birds

rejoice in feasting on them. ants and snakes

migrate before the rain comes down. shoichi yokoi,

japanese world war two soldier who didn’t

know the war had ended, passes away after 28

years hiding in an underground cave in guam.

and rain comes down just like it did thousands of years ago.

the mimosa tree, its boughs big as dragons. i hold

the rain in my arms: my love, you must

not collapse. the house will be ruined if you

collapse. in paris, russian president boris yeltsin

meets with the 16 heads of nato.

the ladder wanders the jackfruit orchard.

planes cross overhead. dusk will deliver

the horizon, the ripest red of

all primary colors, to night. insect sounds begin building a wall

from their massive, seamless song. … mother teresa

passes away, heart failure, in calcutta. what is

time? what is remembrance? what is memory?

a hibiscus leaf, its insect-bit body

full of holes, falls with its browning

yellow. amos tutuola,

nigerian folk writer, passes away.

names and events start arriving in droves.

a reunion with my own self. please, come in:

guests, dear friends, lovers, family.

the wind dies down. jackfruit leaves stick to

the air. a fire tears through the top three floors

of the bank indonesia building in jakarta. the sky like a gathering

of archives. please, come in, please. all the boredom,

all the loneliness, all the pain and little

laughs that grow into guffaws, are gathering

here. mike tyson’s boxing license is revoked, after

biting holyfield’s ear.

my body does its best to hold off a fall that

will fall. begins crawling into old age.

sends small talk to the heart and

kidneys. hugs and kisses. there’s something

hard to stand with, below the rays of

the morning sun. july 21, 1997, muhammad mahdi al-

jawahiri, the great arabic poet from iraq, passes away

in syria.

the guests, exhausted by the repeating

chronicles, have fallen asleep. cycles. the entire

house is full of their sleeping

bodies. cycles. i sleep out front with

my dogs, waiting for someone “who-has-never-

been,” who has yet to arrive.

cycles

please, come in.

seek our shared origins in a story that falls,

and rises again, and falls again—comes in, goes out—

“Ban Bakar 15 Januari”and “Jurnalisme Biografi” are from Prometheus Pinball. Richmond, Victoria: Reading Sideways Press, 2020.

Image by TK.