“Bomb”
An indeterminate amount of time passes as we cut to Ibu Ratna sitting on a couch in a quiet room. Golden light is coming through the window at an angle, implying that it is near sunset in Jakarta.
Ratna is visibly shaken and General Hidayat kindly brings her a cup of tea, both as a cultural nicety as well as to calm her nerves. Hidayat takes a seat to get down to business, to consult his Doctor for a diagnosis and a prescription.
The diagnosis is grim. As they discuss the source of the infection, its rapid onset, and its violent spread, the camera zooms ever closer to Ratna. As Ratna realizes the scope of the problem, the camera movement itself symbolizes the encroaching panic and the mounting danger. Every moment the camera draws closer, Ratna’s confidence is wavering. Yet, it is not just Ratna’s confidence that is flagging, it is the very confidence of Modernity that is likewise failing.
In many ways, Ibu Ratna is not only a symbol of the Medical profession and its clinical Gaze, but she is likewise a symbol of Modernity itself. She is representative of a highly educated indigenous middle class that took upon the trappings of the Nation-State at the time of independence.[1] Many anti-colonial nationalists, while opposing their colonial masters, nevertheless did so in such a way that reinforced many of the core tenets of the enlightenment ideology that inspired colonialism in the first place. In particular, for many post-Colonial societies, their new States simply replicated the Colonial administration that had oppressed them, but put indigenous elites in charge instead of the Europeans.[2] In such cases, the new governments often became akin to administrative technocracies wherein the highly educated middle and upper classes made decisions for the rest of the population and in their name, for their own good. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first leader of Independent India, once wrote: “In the constructive schemes that we may make, we have to pay attention to the human material we have to deal with, to the background of its thought and urges, and to the environment in which we have to function.”[3] Such an attitude of condescending administration fits well with the authoritarianism of the Polizeistaat.
Yet, such a mirroring in the post-Colonial societies was not merely an accident. Many anti-Colonial nationalists actively sought such a mirroring as an end goal. Sutan Sjahrir was a key leader of early Indonesian nationalism, in his book Out of Exile, Sjahrir exemplifies this desire to emulate the West as a method of competing with the West. Sjahrir writes:
For me, the West signifies a forceful, dynamic, and active life. It is a sort of Faust that I admire, and I am convinced that only by a utilization of this dynamism of the West can the East be released from its slavery and subjugation. The West is now teaching the East to regard life as a struggle and a striving, as an active movement to which the concept of tranquility must be subordinated…Struggle and striving signify a struggle against nature, and that is the essence of the struggle: man’s attempt to subdue nature and to rule it by his will.[4]
Not only is Sjahrir saying directly that the only path toward liberation lies in the successful emulation of the Modernist West but likewise a key aspect of that emulation is the subjugation of nature to the will of man. Such a subjugation can only occur within the context of scientific knowledge production, by viewing nature through a utilitarian Gaze.
Ibu Ratna not only represents that class of highly educated indigenous managers of post-Colonial States, but likewise the tensions of Modernity itself. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. With 205,000,000 Muslims, 88% of the population follows Islam and 13% of all the world’s Muslims live in Indonesia.[5] While the State (particularly the military) is itself secular, a good proportion of the nation is religiously conservative. This can be seen throughout this opening sequence as many women wear veils and other head coverings. Ibu Ratna, Professor of Mycology, significantly, wears no such modest covering. While we cannot say from the textual evidence that Ratna is an atheist, what can be said is that she is a part of the secular modernist world. A world that eschews the superstitions of the past, a world that has become “disenchanted” as Charles Taylor puts it eloquently; a world that can be quantified, observed, and known. In being known, the world is likewise controlled. All through the scientific Gaze of the medical doctor, the academic professional.
When it is revealed that 14 other workers are missing from the grain mill where the infection began; that likely their hijacked bodies are running rampant outside the safe walls of the hospital. When it is revealed that any hope for containment has been lost, Ibu Ratna’s hands tremble, the teacup clattering noisily against her saucer. She has lost control, in the same way the Polizeistaat has lost control.
“We brought you here to help us keep this from spreading.” General Hiyadat says calmly. “We need a vaccine or a medicine.”
There is a long pause as Ratna looks Hiyadat in the face.
“I have spent my life studying these things. So please listen carefully.” Ratna’s technocratic condescension is tinged with panic, “There is no medicine. There is no vaccine.”
Hiyadat appears flummoxed, he had done what he was supposed to as an agent of the secular administrative State: he sought the opinion of the expert. He knows she is the expert because the State has deemed her as such. “So what do we do?”
After another long pause, as the music swells, Ibu Ratna, the professor of mycology, the medical doctor and rational agent of secular modernity says simply: “Bomb.”
[1] Jurgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Trans. Shelley L. Frisch, (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2010), p. 100; See also Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
[2] See Frantz Fanon, “Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in Wretched of the Earth, 1961.
[3] Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, (Princeton &
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 8, Emphasis added.
[4] Westad, p. 77.
[5] “Muslim Population of Indonesia.”
