Ghost Stories

Returning to my life in Indonesia has been like walking on hot coals and sinking into a warm bath wrapped into one. Either way you look at it, I’m hot and sweating. I’ve been in my new community for almost seven weeks now, and I can’t believe how much I had forgotten about this crazy Java life while I was away. I forgot how much I loathe dangdut music (a strange and unrhythmic combination of Bollywood and House music) but love the low budget, creepy music videos the genre puts out. I forgot that to call another person an animal name is deeply offensive, and therefore insulted many a teacher at school my first week back when I taught them the phrase “see you later, alligator.” I also didn’t remember the ghosts, and it appears those Javanese spirits are on a mission to make sure I never forget about them again.

In writing this post I took the opportunity to talk to my fellow teachers and neighbors about the ghost stories that permeate everyday life here. From what I can gather, the religion of Islam that arrived around the 16th century was simply combined with already existing Javanese practices. Rather than eradicating those local customs altogether, as one teacher explained it “all beliefs are same belief now.” So while my friends, neighbors and fellow teachers are all practicing Muslims, they still adhere to the Javanese customs and beliefs of long ago. It’s a strange and lovely mishmash I’m still navigating.

According to traditional Javanese lore, the human soul (semangat or spiritual essence) is roughly the size of a thumb and appears as a miniature form of the body in which it resides. Because the soul can “fly” it is often compared to and addressed as if it were a bird. It temporarily leaves a person’s body during sleep, trance and sickness, before departing permanently at death. When the soul leaves the body it assumes the form of a sort of homunculus, and thus can feed on the souls of others. So to use Harry Potter jargon, there is a tiny Dementor inside all of us. At death, the soul usually passes into another person, animal or plant. The spirit (called the anitu) continues to linger and may be harmful to its survivors, depending on the manner of it’s death.

On a hot and hazy Monday morning, it was like any other weekly flag ceremony. All the teachers lined up in their beige civil servant uniforms and the children assembled into their class formations wearing blue checkered scout vests (Indonesia loves it’s coordinated clothing). I’ll come out and say that I am not the biggest fan of flag ceremonies. We stand for a very long time while the Vice Principle says a few short prayers, gives a long speech on studying hard and motions the student body to sing the national anthem with a bored flick of the wrist. A standard ceremony lasts between forty-five minutes to an hour. It’s a hefty dose of pomp and circumstance that keeps the students out of the classroom and standing in the glare of unforgiving tropical sunshine. I do enjoy high-fiving my kids as they trek back inside when it’s all over. It’s a hurdle both teachers and students alike have to get through; and the ceremony brings us closer together in it’s mutually felt misery.

Expecting the same that Monday, I resigned myself to an hour of zoning out when halfway through the first prayer there was a scream. A girl standing in the middle of her group had crumpled to the ground, taking down one or two other kids with her flailing limbs. She began writhing on the ground as if her brain had been removed and her skull had been stuffed with something like microwaved aluminum foil, dinted, charred and shorting with sparks. For a moment, everybody stood stunned and staring. As her screaming grew more pitched a few teachers rushed forward. No sooner had they lifted her up, another young boy on the opposite end of the field collapsed in the same way. Pandemonium ensued. I wouldn’t have known what to do, but in the midst of this madness, I heard my Vice Principle cry into the microphone “women and students get back to their classrooms immediately!” I’m well versed in the film “Titanic” and so understood that phrase to mean our school was goin’ down.

It was clear that our school situation was in dire straights. Within an hour, seventeen students had been taken down by an evil spirit and possessed by it. Screams and cries echoed throughout the classrooms. We were all sent home. The next morning was the same, students kept collapsing in class and led (if they could stand) or carried to the nurses office. I did my best to teach over the wailing around us. Our local shaman (your everyday exorcist) was called in but his purification ceremony did little to hold back whatever had grabbed ahold of the student body.

In high school I was part of the choir program, and every so often a chorus member would faint under the hot stage lights during a performance. Once one singer sank down, it was always more likely that a few more people would sit down, lightheaded as well. It’s thought that if one person becomes ill, others around him/her will begin to feel sick as well. I don’t particularly believe in ghosts or evil spirits. I do believe in the psychosomatic herd-mentality of feeling ill. None of my students or fellow teachers carry bottles of water with them. Many of my students wake up for 4:30am prayer and do not drink or eat anything until the 10:15am break at school. This would make me feel weak and sick too.

And yet for all that science and psychology can say about this phenomenon, the Javanese believe in something beyond what my Western perspective can explain. It is a culture that believes in the mystery that shape-shifts at the edge of the senses. When a person is stressed, scared or sick, their souls are at risk of becoming possessed by bad energy, or angry anitu.

We have a lot of bad energy at my school as September progresses. In total, forty students have been possessed this month. Each time it happens, all classes are disrupted as everyone charges outside like kamikazes with poor navigation. My American upbringing has little patience for such behavior, and I have continued to hold my classes and come to school. I go to class even after a few male teachers tell me they would understand if “as a woman, you preferred to stay safely at home.” My feminist bravery was slightly undermined later that day when a female teacher literally fled the school after a possession happened in the classroom next to hers. She has a new baby at home and “couldn’t risk anything bad happening.”

While it used to be titillating to me, I am now annoyed when teachers come into my class supporting upright a wobbly, blank-staring student who delivers a prophesy in tongues to a solemn classroom. I’m short with the kids who have been possessed too. I tell them tersely to drink water and eat breakfast, convinced hydration solves everything. It has also crossed my mind that these sweet kids have taken a turn for the sneaky, putting on an act to get out of lessons. I look at my students one afternoon though, after a particularly scream-filled episode and they do not look like they are faking. They look scared.

Halfway through this past month, after another frustrating day of canceled classes, it dawned on me that even though the events at school were completely unreal to me, everyone around me believed in it (a simple but staggering light-bulb moment). Didn’t that alone on some level make it true?

When somebody tells us something that would be disturbing or inconvenient for us to believe, we reflexively scrutinize that person for some excuse to discredit him/her. We do it all the time with politics, with religion, and with that friend who reads Tarot cards and carries crystals in her pocket. It is what I had been doing with my counterpart when he explained to me what was happening with the spirits. I needed a different approach. I started listening to what the teachers and students were telling me and did my best to accept it as the truth. Living on Java is often like living in an alternate universe, where it is acceptable to blare dangdut music at all hours of the day to soothe the flighty nerves of chickens, where white rice is a filling meal and ghosts exist. Just because those things are not true for other parts of the world does not make it less so on this island.

Now that I’ve grown accustomed to my little corner of the twilight zone, I almost think it’s a nice gesture if, after one student falls pray to an evil spirit, a few others follow suit. It means no one has to go through that undoubtedly freaky experience alone. My students have a lot going on in their lives, beyond the two hours I get with them every week. There are Islamic holidays and Javanese celebrations to participate in. There are responsibilities in the home and in the community to uphold. The school curriculum has changed. Again. They are growing up at a unique time in Indonesia, a country that has modernized quickly in the sixty years it has been a democracy. The Indonesia of their parents’ generation is not the country they will come of age in, but nobody knows what that Indonesia will look like yet, or how to get there. All of this would make me stressed and more likely to be possessed with negative energy too. In a culture that is built squarely on the notion of “saving face” I wonder if my students’ possessions are a silent acknowledgement of the difficulties that can’t be talked about openly; a haunting call and response that communicates the common problems they are all grappling with but cannot talk about.

We still have students “taken” every few weeks, although things are improving. Instead of sitting bitterly in the corner chugging from my Nalgene, I’m working on accepting the spiritual activity for what it reveals about the people I live and work with. What the Javanese spirits reveal is that we don’t have to go through difficult things without the support (or possession) of others. I understand now that mass possessions are, in a way, the sum of everything I love about this communal culture. Nobody has to go it alone. When I had the flu a few weeks ago, neighbors and teachers came to sit with me so I wouldn’t be by myself. Your sickness is my sickness. My stress is your stress. Or in the words of recent alt-pop sensation Vance Joy, “this mess was yours/now this mess is mine.” Perhaps he was singing about Indonesia.

After a rough few months on my end recovering from a bike accident, and fighting for my reinstatement to Peace Corps (an experience I felt very isolated in), the haunting of my school has been an eery reminder of the obvious: we all want to believe our pain is singular–that no one else has felt this way–but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we’re not unique. It means we’re not alone. Maybe this is what the Javanese spirits are trying to tell us; that inexplicable sorrows and frustrations and difficult moments await all of us, and while I can’t feel your pain, I feel mine, and through it I understand yours all the better.

This Month In Photos!

Standard Supper

Afternoon Homework Help

Birthday Baking

My Backyard

PC Hike

Dos Amigas/Dua Teman

Cultural Exchange