Smell
Ayu Utami
In the year 2000, ethnic tension in Borneo reached its peak when the native Dayak people slaughtered Madurese outsiders. It is said that during this hunt, the natives regained their ancestral supernatural power, used only at wartime, which enabled them to sniff out the enemy. In this manner, they were able to distinguish the rival tribe from other outsider tribes. Father Janoko, who was assigned by the Church to examine the case, returned home with accounts of Dayak warriors raiding villages or stopping passing trucks full of people. The warriors then ordered all the inhabitants or passengers to gather around, and with their sense of smell, they accurately separated those with Madurese blood and those without. They had a scent for blood. These were the most frightening stories to come out of the ethnic hostilities.
For two centuries, Catholic missionaries had entered the highlands of Borneo. Many of the Dayak sniffing out their enemy had been baptised.
*
Father Janoko was drafting a harrowing report of his journey to the massacre area when a church member knocked at his door, imploring him to bless his poultry that were affected by disease. Three thousand of his seven thousand chickens had died within a day. The poultry owner, who was a Catholic, knew that if he did not take any emergency action, the entire coop would be dead within three days, and nothing would redeem them. He was a third generation Catholic, and beginning with his parents, the family had ceased to believe in shamans. He believed in the priest. Or, to be precise, he held hope in the priest.
Amidst his anguish, Father Janoko realized that he was a shepherd and the poor visitor was his lamb. But on this dense, agrarian island there was very little space for herding, and more people kept fowl instead of stock. Then Father Janoko realized that he was a poultry farmer and that the visitor was his sick chicken. In this way, he genuinely shared the man’s grief.
Father Janoko left his report and went to the poultry farm. He sprinkled holy water to the chicken coop corners and prayed—or maybe hoped—that God still had time to save the fowl.
As he returned home, he pondered for a moment before he went back to his tormented report. Throughout the history of the Church, it seemed that no miracle had ever been performed to chickens. But if God commanded a miracle to save the chickens today, how unjust it would seem. For God did not save the Madurese.
*
Seven days after he gave his blessing to the infected poultry, Father Janoko succumbed to a high fever. Two thirds of the chickens whose health he had prayed for had died. So God had not favoured the poultry over the butchered Madurese, the subject of his report. Despite his heavy fever, he kept on writing. He wrote like a man who feared death would take him before finishing his masterpiece. Before doctors would find a strange inflammation in his brain, he had completed the account. Later, people would link that curious illness with an avian virus that was spreading in Asia. This had perhaps infected him while he was blessing the poultry. His supervisors could not understand his report. It was considered incongruous and incoherent.
*
Father Janoko read the report to his supervisors, if it could be considered a report at all:
Honorable Assembly, my dear brothers,
Rather than giving you numbers of the slaughtered or those slaughtering, I would rather put forward my own propositions. It’s not that I don’t know how to draw up an objective report, but statistics, namely the objective claim itself, always slips into reducing human beings into mere graphical representations accompanied by a notice called a margin of error.
(Notice: margin of error! That’s my big problem. It is written the smallest, and put in the most unseen corner of a statistical presentation, but is actually the essence of any statistic. That margin of error. I have my doubts about it. Because errors don’t have margins. Believe me!)
Having visited the area of conflict, I would like to put forth my deductions in the form of rhetorical questions (I’m fond of the Greek philosophers, who loved questions and answers. Isn’t it also the way our Lord spoke? Raising questions is a pretext for giving answers.)
Isn’t it true that our problem these days is the loss of faith in names? Names make a human an individual rather than a mere element. However, these days, people prefer to become, and to turn others into, Dayak or Madurese, Moslems or Christians, Eastern or Western, rather than being Fachmi, Wahyu, Andres or Andan. Man would rather be mass than be himself.
This preference to be part of a mass rather than to be an individual is the human ERROR, if you understand what I mean. ERROR is an acronym introduced by the New Order government to refer to Ethnicism, Racism, ReligiOnism and inter-gRoupism. ERROR is a latent, irrational tendency in humankind, according to the New Order authority. We may not like the New Order, but it had its logic, if you understand what I mean.
The New Order launched a crusade against any forms of ERROR, ERRORISTS and ERRORISM. For years, The New Order detained people, tortured people, day and night, imprisoned them without any documentation, without any clear charge other than the secret charge of committing ERROR, being an ERRORIST and practising ERRORISM.
However, after years of such security, can we count on the result?
Certainly not. Because ERRORISM is not external from human phenomena. Racism, ethnicity, sectarianism, or whatever kind of ERRORISM that manifests, is not a matter of ideology. It is a matter of biology. It is not about faith but — believe it or not — it’s about smell. Yes, honourable assembly, smell!
During my journey in the area of conflict, I witnessed, with my own eyes and ears, testimonies from both sides, victims and assailants confirming that in their hunt, the Dayak could recognize the smell of the Madurese from the smell of other tribes. Yes, sirs, the smell!
It is true that there had been a long history of injustice. The natives mentioned that they had been treated with treachery for years. But it is not the injustice that is amazing. It is this sense of smell that is amazing! Smell, honourable assembly, is a matter which we aren’t conscious of but which determines our behaviour. I don’t mean to join the racist bandwagon, but ... we all smell differently from one another, don’t we, as one race must also smell differently from another? This may sound politically incorrect. But, if we want to be honest ... hmm, don’t you think the Arabs smell different from us? They eat goat, a lot of goat, and drink goat’s milk with dates and honey. Their sweat reeks of goat and is as glutinous as glucose. Don’t you think that Chinese sweat has the sharp scent of garlic and the damp stench of pork? Don’t Caucasian people smell of acrid, rotting cheese? Javanese stink more than Sundanese because Sundanese eat fresh vegetables and steamed foods while Javanese overcook their meal and use too much coconut milk. The Sundanese who eat goldfish smell differently to the ones who never eat goldfish because the fish eat human excrement. And Indians! Their sweat is as thick as their curry, their writing as heavy as their food.
I am speaking honestly, expressing what is on my mind.
(At that time, Father Janoko’s mind was being invaded by an inflammation.)
We are what we eat. When God said, as it is written in the Bible: ‘Not that which goes into the mouth defileth man, for whatsoever enters the mouth goes into the belly, and is cast out into the draft,’ he was actually commanding us not to be racist. However, God also said: ‘That which comes out of the mouth, this can defileth man.’ Remember - God is not known to be explicit. Yeah - but what comes out of the mouth are not only dirty words, but also dirty breath. Bad breath! And he meant smell, in general.
I witnessed with my own eyes how the Dayak were able to distinguish the smell of the Madurese from the smell of other ethnic groups. We modern people call this power supernatural. But in fact it was actually a natural power. Smell is the most ancient layer from which we base our racism and sectarianism. This experience has led me to understand an experiment performed upon a certain kind of mice: they identify their group and outsiders based on smell.
Question: when did this primitiveness reappear in humans?
Let me answer, for a question is a pretext for an answer.
The answer is: when names lost their addresses. Yes, when names became homeless, language became a curious vagabond. Oh, names like ‘God’, ‘angel’, ‘heaven’ are divine names. They are not of this earth - as our Lord said: ‘My Kingdom is not from here’ – so they need not have an address on this earth. Sceptics have problems with them but true believers never question their address. However, names like ‘rationality’, ‘humanity’, ‘socialism’, ‘humanism’, ‘emancipation’, ‘equality’, ‘human rights’, ‘transmigration’, ‘unity’ are mundane names that are of this earth. Each of them is required to have an address or a telephone number, the minimum data required by a courier service to deliver your package.
Unfortunately, they have lost their addresses. They have left their houses like the prodigal son but they cannot re-enter their houses because the people are not forgiving like Our Father. Journeys have changed them and they have become unrecognisable. They don’t have any residences anymore.
Language represents a nation, the saying goes. Nay, I say. Language overcomes the smells. When language no longer prevails over the smells, then the smells shall overcome the language. There will be no tie. You will be recognized by your words or by your breath’s odour. If your words cannot be trusted, it’s the odour of your breath that will be relied upon. If your deed cannot be trusted, it’s your body odour that will be counted upon.
Rationality is represented by eyes. But instincts are represented by the nose. Unfortunately, I have to be honest, God doesn’t talk about this most important human sense: this smell. The Holy Book talks about people who are blind or hearts that are deaf, or tongues that are mute, but the Book doesn’t have anything to say about people who don’t smell. There has never been a miracle to recover a numb nose. The Bible doesn’t have any description about smell. Whereas in fact, my dear Theophiles, smell is the source of hatred against the other. Smell is the foundation of human ERROR. ERRORISM. Ethnicism, Racism, ReligiOnism, intergRoup-ism. But we and our religions don’t want to admit it. Our religions, the monotheisms of Abraham, do not want to acknowledge instincts. That is why our holy books do not talk about smell.
And that is the very reason why our religions are powerless when it comes to a primitive war, when people revive their olfactory powers. Our One and Almighty God becomes impotent when people return to their instinct of smell.
My journey to the conflict area has led me to draw two conclusions. First, I have to be honest that our religion does not acknowledge smells, and that this fact creates problems when we come across ERRORISM. Second, the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, where God substituted the boy with a goat, and the metaphor of Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, show that Christianity reveres stock with four feet, but disregards fowl. It looks up to the goat, but it looks down upon the chicken … chicken …*
On the word chicken, Father Janoko turned quiet. All of a sudden, he realised that he didn’t understand what he had written. He felt that he had just awoken from a dream of unique, streaming thoughts only to find that the thoughts were indeed so unique that he could not understand them at all – a strange deviation during which what was previously conceivable had now become ridiculous. There were flashing images. And traces of smells: the products of slaughter. Sick chickens. Before him he saw the audience – they were quiet. They had been looking at him uncertainly for some time already.
After the incident, Father Janoko was given sabbatical leave. His students speculated that he had an error on his brain. Nobody knew whether Father Janoko got a brain inflammation after he saw the massacres in which the victims were recognised by their smell, or from an avian virus infection when he was sanctifying poultry. But his brothers and the laymen of his church accepted that he had developed a kind of brain illness when he was on his vocational duty. Sad, but these things do happen sometimes.
Translated by Kadek Krishna Adidharma