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I look into the windows of houses and apartments to see inside the homes of people I don’t know. Peering afar, I see collections of the same white walls dimly lit with the a soft yellow hue. I walk below these buildings to look up or simply as I pass by when coming home from work. My eyes go up to the rows and columns of square and rectangle windows. A white room with a TV is suspended in the center and picture frames of photos surround it. All the items, spaced in a grid-like manner, microsmically parallel to the constellation of windows I look at all at once. The couch stacked against the wall and from there we could guess a coffee table below it or see a shadow of a plant. These images cast a memory, a spell of the suburban city mundane that is familiar so familiar of the places I used to be around as a child. I look back to these memories often and they look back at me.
I feel like the houses we grew up in act similar to the molds of a ceramic vase. It’s how I learned to be curious about these stories which have been part of what binds our sense of self while also hide from us too. What may also fuel us, generatively or destructively.
These are photos from google maps, of a place I once called home in Toronto, Canada. It was a one-bedroom apartment where my Mom, Dad, sister and I would sleep together. Our conjoining queen-sized beds were fortified by cardboard boxes hidden by batik blankets and placed right against walls. They were like bookshelves, we used them to place our books, toys, lamps, cassette player and CDs. It was a few hundred meters from the Loblaws groccery store, adjacent to the Scotia Bank where if you turne right it opened to the rest of the busy street. There was a convenience store on that corner where we used to rent DVDs. We eventually stopped because we were always late returning them. It was the first apartment that I’d ever felt was a luxurious home. I think it was also my mom’s favourite out of all the places we lived after my dad graduated from his school in Wisconsin. We moved around for some years after that. To Chicago, to Middleton, to Richland centre. But there weren’t a lot of places my parents were happy in. Also I remember them being nervous about my Dad finding a proper job. Before that he was working as a valet attendent, transportation driver for people with disabilties and my mom was learning English at community center. I remember the last place we were at, Hamilton, a small town outside of Madison. My mom and dad were waiting at the phone waiting for a callback on of the jobs my dad had interviewed for. And they called back.
So this brand new apartment we moved into had a wash and dry machine in the kitchen, a wall that was a whole mirror, a bathtub and three doors that led out to the front yard, a parking lot and the back garden. Our neighbours were Tuba, Nancy and Bob. Nancy took a liking to me and would let me wash her car. She showed me her dead parrot that she kept wrapped up and in her freezer. Bob and his wife weren’t so fond of us though, they lived below us on the basement floor. He’d always come upstairs to complain about the noise. It was mainly because me and my sister would run around. Tuba was nice, she was a Turkish student doing her university studies in the city. My Dad, still hears from her. During this time I attended the John Wanless Elementary Public School from third to sixth grade (2003-2007) on Fairlawn Avenue.
When I hear the word “decolonize” I think about these specific moments from my childhood. I’m not really sure why. When I ask myself “What stories do I want to tell?” I remember things that my family wouldn’t remember the same as me. We grew up in a YT, rich, suburban neighbourhood where the same mould of body, sound, clothing and smell were prominent. My sister and I tried to follow that mold as kids, and I think that’s why I look back to these memories a lot. Whiteness is a trippy concept, it something that doesn’t belong to me and I don’t belong to it yet it replicated itself through our perception of the world. When we moved back to Indonesia, the first time I looked down from the airplan windows and saw for the first time, shanty towns with red and blue roofing in a grid-like concentration, I was shocked. I made a vow to go back to Cananda within the next 2 years. I was around eleven at that time. I eventually moved to Bali where I got a scholarship at an international school. Two of my dad’s friends worked there as art teachers. This wasn’t the start of a tumultuous inner dialogue but is definitely what fueled a dissonance between my American/European friends, their families and their neo-colonial expat/tourist society burrowed in Indonesia. Some kids would call me “Fake Indonesian” in school and for a long time I carried that with me.
I remember walking with two of my friends in Andong, along a small canal. These canals direct flooding or irrigate from rivers for bathing or watering fields. Two little Balinese boys were playing and bathing as we walked by. They hid at the sight of us and while laughing they ducked under the bridge. “Maybe they hid because we’re white”. My two friends looked at me and laughed “You’re not white”.
They used to call me mom a rebel. She would wear short-shorts when no other girl would and didn’t give a shit. Going through some photo albums, I see her in these peach-red shorts.
Decolonization is an important tool I use to unravel my enmeshment of realities and unpack a past and present. To bring forward what I sensed as a kid and further communicate it to my loved ones. There are parts of me, like my speech, thinking, and emotions that have been molded by a white supremacist society. Many find this point very extreme. “You can’t just throw these words around!” But from this trajectory, I can explain why there are parts of me that have been hidden. Like the way I dance, tell stories, believe, sense and connect to others. When I moved back to Indonesia as I kid, I could see what I took from my parents and much down the line where these traits came from. However, I realize that “decolonize” means something different for some like my dad, for example. Then I started thinking about my peers in the Netherlands or old friends in Indonesia and how different it may mean to them. In entry 3 “White girls call me dangerous”, I referenced a text written by Rachel Black wood titled: Transnational Circuits of Queer Knowledge. In this entry I wanted to mainly point out an example for Western frameworks are being used to construct singular global discourse around lesbian, gay, queer, trans, bi and pan identities. And so I grapple with questions suchas as how can decoloniality exist outside Western frameworks when the very way we learn it, speak about it, communicate it it and so on are predominantly in North American and West European institutions? SO... where I am I need to understand how I can ask: What does it mean to decolonize as a transmigrative/diaspora Indonesian working as an artist in the Netherlands? How can I open this up while also stimulating space for other people to also answer this question in-situ?
In refering back to Rolando Vasquez’s essay On epistemic restitution and joy, the term coloniality is not a Western concept, it is a thought created from the positionality of the Global South, coined by Anibal Quijano. Coloniality is not colonialism, it is its continuum. In this process, I am reflecting upon my education, upbringing, wishes, queerness and dreams as I also ask others similar questions. I also feel like this is work that may not be possible to do in Indonesia and so I must look onto it, speak about, around it until I can I find a way to do these activities on land. In my recent interviews, I sense there a beautiful contradiction that can help me formulate some answers through waywardness, radicality, and postcoloniality. What weaves through thes interviews is the craving for modernity and the fear of it.
In decolonial theory, epistemic restitution (in my shallow understanding) incites a return from the Earthlessness (the ways global capitalism exploits), a spiritual return, a return to a way of the senses which belong to different bodies, returning to a temporality (time which is unregulated by racist and commodity oriented structures), and linking the seen/unseen devastations of coloniality, especially happening overseas. I wonder, in these discussions, how we can begin to talk about the craving and fearing of modernity from that start with conversations in the Global South.
Image 1 - Google maps Screenshot / Scotia Bank
Image 2 - Google maps Screenshot / Old apartment
Image 3 - Google Screenshot / Ditches in Bali