Discourse on Hate

hate /het/verb, noun
verb (not used in the progressive tenses)
1 to dislike sth very much: [vn] I hate spinach. I hate Monday mornings. I hate it when people cry. He hated it in France (did not like the life there). I hate the way she always criticizes me. [v -ing] She hates making mistakes. I hate coming home late. [v to inf] He hated to be away from his family. She's a person who hates to make mistakes. I hate to think what would have happened if you hadn't been there. [vn -ing] He hates anyone parking in his space. [vn to inf] She would have hated him to see how her hands shook. I'd hate anything to happen to him. 2 [vn] ~ sb (for sth) to dislike sb very much: The two boys hated each other. I hated myself for feeling jealous. He was her most hated enemy. Sometimes I really hate him. 3 [no passive] [v to inf] used when saying sth that you would prefer not to have to say, or when politely asking to do sth: I hate to say it, but I don't think their marriage will last. I hate to trouble you, but could I use your phone? (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

So much have been written about its cousin - especially in some parts of the globe showered in the (comercially) pinked campaign every second month of the year (boring, boring). But what about its opposite feeling?

It's not that I'm as noble as Dalai Lama or Mahatma or other saintly people if I stay away from hating (people). Or at least, try to. As for my case, it is simply due to my banal fear of adding unnessary wrinkle lines before its time that hating, I believe, could cause. I don't think I ever have an object for this strong word as a noun (hatred). And as a verb, my use of it is not really particular. Time and again, I'd say, 'I hate traffic jam or I hate some crooked politician with funny moustache', but can't really think of a familiar face I ever target the feeling to.

It's most possibly cos my life has been generally 'safe' from state/big man-inflicted tragedy, keeping me reasonless from possesing this strong feeling. All those pains and sadness and other ordeal in life inflicted by other human beings, as far as mine, comes in meager size. There is no holocaust in my life, nor Cultural Revolution, nor 1965 massacre in Indonesia, nor excruciating pain/suffering/humiliation inflicted on those women raped during the Japan occupation or Indonesia's 1998 riots, nor those people caught in the middle of ethnic conflict in Rwanda or the religious one in Moluccas Island or what the world still have to add the long list of human misery until this very second. I just happen to be the lucky ones.

Such acts, as most of us know, can be generated by many reasons. But, when it comes to personal level, can it be also something genetic? If a girl's moderate temper (like mine? ugh) is not really prone into a such, long-term anger which easily morphes into hate - could it be due to her father gene - known to his closest as someone with such a big heart? One's temperament - is that in one's DNA?

If not blood-related, can it be cultural? A certain culture is based on revenge, so I was once told, inherited from some Viking tribe whose customes rooted in mockery and fists and betrayal. So. Does my grandmother's surrounding culture - a serene, 'alus' (refined), dismissive Javanese its female trained throughout her life contributes to my personal trait? (Mind you, not the contradictory, two-faced traits its male-culture possesed by the Central Javanese). Is there really such thing? How valid this analysis? Switch the news channel, and the proof (that human beings can be a profound hater) is aplenty (of men not learning from human kind history,thus failed to stop the vicious cycle of hatred). But why does it sound so simplistic?

If one managed to save his/her soul from being engulfed or empowered by hatred, how strange it could be to be an object of some kind. Arch your eyebrows, but this thing is as old as other worldly sins. You can be hated because the colour of your skin. But when someone you know (even more if once so dearly) lavishes his/her extreme dislike (or anger) on you, hissing the harshest words (from the same lips which once were so able to utter such highly imaginative tender ones), how would you react? After the shock, it might leave you shiver, cold, frozen in sadness, then tremble-shatter, but how it shakes the inner- as much as the outer you? Debris of absurdity scattered, as one may look in dismay at his/her own failure to fathom the moment (when he/she is hated). In the blurred blue print of a soul, what is actually the trigger, and how it actually triggers? I mean, where? Is it in the mind, in the heart, in between? Is it in the course of times, in certain space, in a peculiar apace?

But hate or hatred does not always mean a bad thing. "I hate injustice" so uttered this grand dame of activist I interviewed recently. Decades of violence and injustice has led her lead an extremely rich life, full of good deeds and small miracles woven into her daily life. She entered the list of 1000 women campaigned by a women organisation in Genf to win the Noble Prize this year.

It's said (by some rock star I suppose :-) it takes a man to love a woman to hate her. Nice contradiction - flattering yet illusory. But to contrast the act of hating with the act of loving between the two sexes at a personal level, well, probably Roland Barthes' notions can enlighten. He concluded, the language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak, for it is addressed to ourselves and to our imaginary beloved. It's for that very reason, a lover's discourse is a language of solitude.

(Barthes) Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which "I desire you", and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); careess, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. (To speak amourously is to expend without an end in sight, without crisis; it is to practice a relation without orgasm. There may exist a literary form of this coitus reservatus: what we call Marivaudage).

Then. What it really takes from one to extremely move from the deed of love to the expression of hate? Or, is the difference between the two is as thin as silk thread? Or can one extreme feeling, for once, wraps around the other inside, like a closed mask? (love inside/as hate or vice versa). Similar to Zhang Xianliang's protagonist in Half Man is a Woman, "I love you that's why I can't stay on with you. I have to hurt you, hurt you so much, so you put me out of your mind." Only, he delivers this paradox as a silent monologue - so loud, yet unsaid. He made her believe that he hates her.

But even if hate is some kind of a lover's discourse, and that might be highly flattering for the object, yet it remains illusory. Eventually, it unfailingly hurts. Probably forever.

Chinatowns Part Two: Scorched Out for Love, remix #1

Traffic miracles do happen in Jl. Hayam Wuruk, Kota/Glodok, Jakarta's Chinatown. I was marching along the sacred avenue, heading to some portion of the yummy dimsum (albeit limited selection) at the end of the journey, amazed that the street - used to be choke-a-bloc with cars on business hours and beyond, pollutions and what have you - was total clear. Only happens in Sincia, so the local, indonesianized dialect (Hakka? Hokian?) for Mandarin 'Xin Nian'. This 'heaven' also is only possible since 1999, as Gus Dur (then the President) re-acknowledged the rights of the Chinese-Indonesians to express their cultural identity that had been discrimanated throughout Suharto's tenure. Two-day holiday in a row, a very long weekend indeed, and it turns this City to an amiable one-fourth-ghost town. Just like Beijing, at the same time of the year. Yet so pleasant (cos the shops remain open). It's just like Iedul Fitri - empty. All the holidaymakers seem to have flown off to Bali, Singapore or joined the traffic jam heading to the closest sea sides.

Kaliber (short version for Jl. Kali Besar Barat), is two streets separated by the black-watered, canal-like gutter in the middle. I wish I could possess one of the shop-houses - or offices - lining up in these streets, some are so dilapidated. In June 2003, some artists did an exhibition in the roof-less ruins, and I'd go, 'shit', if only... Imagine to have a contemporary dance centre there - with a programe so eclectic like The Place in London. I know that some young architects have been trying to generate fundings to save these once beautiful quarters, still, to no avail.

Yesterday, in the daylight, I failed to re-locate the first Kota club I visited back in 1999. I didn't even know the name. We - a bunch of people from different nationalities - got stranded to that place, first mistaking it for a dangdut disco. If you don't know what dangdut music is - well, it's your problem. Find out. I remember clearly that the lobby had a strange ambience. Kind of heavy decoration (some green velvet as the floor? ouch!) with nasty-looking bouncers looking at us as if we were some extraterrestials got lost on earth. The sounds thudding from inside floated some mysterious air, and the shock (mine!) came as soon as I entered the space.

What a music! High pitched, high bpm tacky house, banging so loud, almost bleeding my ears. The big hall - I could not see the borders - was almost pitch dark, only occasionally lighted by the laser lighting splashing from some points. It was packed with those nocturnals whose eyes were closed, and head shaking to right and left. Chinese descendants - yound and middle age. I just met insanity en face. As Sheryl Garratt says in her book, Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture, "this wasn't clubbing as a pastime, it was clubbing as a religion, a release, a way of life." But she here referred another intake of clubbing, the one in New York, early 1970s that is, and it's just so funny to compare both, which I will do soon in one of these days.

Chinatowns Part One: Scorched Out for Love

the nightclub/kitsch, greenish floor/tacky walls/long alley, smoky/up, then down into the dark, foggy/'mamas' linger around/the crest-shaped bar/their girls, waiting/preying/prowling/whilst/on the dancefloor/sea of house-brand mineral water bottles/shaken by techzak music/order of the night/from behind the deck/all nocturnals brush shoulders/mingle/stone-/zombie-like creatures/join choruses in drug-infused euphoria/

ur standing tall/on the stage/overlooking the den/below/bodies, sweating/twisting/ur smooth face/observing/in ur funky, fine shirt/me, with/subdued thoughts/we'll be just buddies/another web of platonic feelings/trying to lock ur stare/out, hands held/tread the stage down/pass the crest-shaped/out to the fake light/
a trip to the church/stadium

but/ur soft-sturdier/bigger torso/engulfs mine/gently/twist of the nite/i turn....

- sorry for my craziness, I hiss to ur chest - so natural/ as if expecting this moment
and the elevator door opens/we're instantly lovers/smitten

Shameless - this is a failed attempt or a fake imitation of Jeff Noon's Needle In The Groove (Anchor, 1999). There's no way I can copy his writing style ("Think Borges crossed with Philip Larkin on acid and you've got some idea of the power of its very English enchantment"/Arena), no matter how flirtatious I'v been with his mother tongue for years. But his story conjuring up the mystery of dance culture, allowing the complex rhythms of the music to infect his language, I agree to whoever wrote the back-cover comments, shows how Noon creates a new kind of writing, so-called 'liquid dub poetics' that just mesmerised me for days until I finished the damn book.

But my Noon's intake here is to help me enter the realm of a (particular) Chinatown I feel like describing this time - now that we are marching to the new Chinese Year, in just few days. I've been to some by now and before I knew, I started to pick up a magnifying glass whenever I visit one these days. The three in the UK (London, Manchester, Liverpool) are easy to figure out. They centre on a main street (Gerard St in London), and the small hub piling around it, a window display full of Chinese knick knacks, cliched intricacies. The whole food world - full-stacked Chinese supermarkets, restaurants (from Peking duck to dimsum), moon cake and other delicacies shops, 'take-aways' - along with shops selling DVDs, cheapest international phone cards in town, Chinese medicines and practice of Chinese doctors - you name it. This structure bears so much resemblance with the one in Melbourne (with the Museum of Chinese immigrants, and a restaurant dedicated to Mao Ze Dong in which I was once spoilt). The one in Paris is mixed with the Vietnamese noodle stalls. Whilst those 'Little China' in Southeast Asia seem to take it further. Here, the sense of localities is strong - albeit sometimes can't escape the typical 'Chinese' street contour (lineup of neons flashes, Chinese characters emblazoned in red) like the one in Bangkok. Its enchanting shophouses with its faded paints now became the arty thing. Rents rise high - so I heard.

But the one in Jakarta, the Kota/Glodok area that is, is another case. Unfailingly, I strongly think I have to start from Stadium, the 'church', the notorious club, to enter its realm of nightlife that I still haven't found in any Chinatown I have visited so far. (What about those in the US? curious).

This part One is only an overture, to a world I finally peeked into about five years ago. Kota is where this city began to pulse about four centuries ago - but its present blunt, physical presence blurs its old charms. Old, colonial buildings in the area are rotten - one by one dissapears. This part of the town is confined to be just a commercial hub where you can snatch pirated DVDs or electronic stuff with the best bargain (as long as you don't mind hassling), old Chinese temples, viharas, or the most original dimsum.

For many Jakartans, Kota nightlife represents more like a myth than a real part of the town they are a regular. Or, the closest, it's a cliched notion of outrageously high-speed bpm, incredibly tacky house music, super-bad remixes of West Life and the likes, e-madness, girls for 'ups and grabs' packed its 'one stop entertainment' temples like Stadium, ruled by the organised crime kings and lords, whose names we only dare hiss in initials. It is a decadent world - a black-red brocade, kitsch, female G-string probably wore by its young whores. The seediest gay bar is located here. A tangled, vicious circle of corrupted economy and crooked passion, just like a miniature of the state.

But a taste of Kota nightlife is a must, for those who would like to understand the world underneath, the history of Chinese immmigrant existence, the cultral shreds it is made of. To me, it takes millions rides to Jl. Hayam Wuruk, the main avenue, so many strolls to Jl Mangga Besar, and walks and nibbs in its vast arrays of Chinese foods in its maze of back alleys. Still, it's never enough. I hope to extend this discussion in my next Chapter. Just bear with me for a bit, hao ma?