“It is as though the gods that made the continents had a great deal of material left over and cast it helter-skelter into equatorial waters.” [1] So write Louis Fischer in 1959, about the 7,900 islands than compose Indonesia. The gods might have thought things out better as to how they distributed their worshipers.
It is a feature of the righteousness of religions that they always pose themselves against external scourges, whether secular in the form of plagues and famines, or religious in terms of the powers of evil that they concoct for their own purposes. They never regard themselves as a scourge, as a virulent and evil pestilence that is, almost always, more disruptive deadly and deadly than any invasion of locusts, rats, or flood or famine, or human “sinfulness.” I do.
One doesn’t need to read The Spice Garden to arrive at such a conclusion; just pick up a newspaper and read the lines or between them for the underlying or overt cause of many of the world’s wars and other miseries. Religious dogmatic differences, one of the most stupid human creations for their own self-delusion and self-destruction, will be found lurking behind most every pogrom, massacre, system of torture and other inhumanity. Religion is the spice that flavors so much of human behavior that, despite its lethality, it is hard to imagine history as being very interesting were it removed from the human equation.
Noli, the island of Michael Vatikiotis’s novel will remind most readers of nearby Timor and its tribulations. There apparently is no actual Noli, but it is easy to imagine there might be since the author sets his story on one of the islands among the 1208 islands found in the eastern province of Indonesia. This is the Maluku (also Molucca) archipelago that is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean to the north; the province of North Sulawesi on the west; the province of East Timor on the south/southwest; and the province of Irian Jaya on the east. They are the fabled spice islands, islands where the cloves, mace, peppers, nutmegs and other exotic flavor enhancers and putrefaction perfumes that were worth more than gold in their time were fought over by the Portuguese and Dutch.
Noli is also the name of a spice that was once the prime element of the island’s economy but, like the rest of the spice islands, no longer plays a significant economic role after the discovery of alternate sources of spices in Africa and India. So Vatikiotis’s Noli supports itself with a local fishery and an indolent lifestyle, leaving plenty of time for intrigues, suspicions, and plots.
Indonesia, of which these islands are a part, is the world’s largest Muslim nation. They are the majority in the Maluku islands, flowed by Christians (predominantly Protestant) and small fractions of Buddhist, Hindu and local animist beliefs. Like a “garden,” the other term in the metaphoric title, the island is a microcosm where different metaphysical “species” play out their delicate social balance through invasion and supercession.
Vatikiotis gives this relationship a particularity in the relationship between Ghani, a Muslim fisherman who also owns the local hotel-café, and Fr. Xavier, a Jesuit. At another level is a young couple who want to marry, but are from the respective faiths. Ghani and the priest are friends, who joust amicably over their different faiths, and are about the only characters drawn in much relief. Both of them are not pure examples of their religions; Ghani is a womanizer, and Xavier has his internal struggle with his vow of celibacy. But both would be content to see their days lived out with cool drinks on the veranda and the simple circadian rhythms of the insular life. So the reader almost anticipates how these relationships will play out in what is also an expected upset in the status quo.
Almost anything can act as the detonator for social breakdown of that equilibrium, a word, a look, or, in this case, a rape. What follows in The Spice Garden is what we have seen in the news in Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, India, and in countless wars, revolts, insurrections and “ethnic cleansings” — neighbors, fellow citizens, friends, and co-workers going at each other with a ferocity and hatred so virulent and murderous that one wonders how it could have been held in abeyance at all. The perpetrators are mostly roving gangs of youth, fired with some purpose in their otherwise dull or hopeless lives by religious leaders and zealots, and manipulated by political leaders who understand that their power relies heavily on ethnic and religious tensions. Anything, from past slights, to presumed insults fuel the beheadings, mutilations, pillage, and of course, rape. This is what happens on Noli, where the respective gangs rush about trying to obliterate the innocent and unprotected of their respective “infidel” communities.
It is also what happened in the Moluccas between 1999 and 2002, a period in which this writer “watched” these atrocities played out from the closer vantage of Hong Kong. Vatikiotis, who is a journalist specializing in this region has been even closer, so close that one wonders whether he might have debated treating this subject in a non-fiction book. Which is the weakness of this novel. The reality on which it is based is covered with only the thinnest veneer of artifice; Noli could easily be the island of Banda Neira, [2] and its spice “noli” a reference to nutmeg, which at one time made Dutch traders extremely rich. While the characters of Ghani and Fr. Xavier are given some biography and emotional depth the rest of the “cast” are pretty much caricature. This is not all the author’s fault; the reality of the subject he as chosen is often beyond our imaginations, and we have now, too often, on our television news seen the carnage, the bloodthirsty zealots and their pliant minions, and the archetypical strutting military-political leader in mirrored aviator sunglasses.
At the end the people of Noli do their best to return to some degree of uneasy equilibrium, but things are not as they used to be. They never are, and they never were.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.8.2005)
[1] The Story of Indonesia, 1959, P. 3
[2] See, for example, chapter two of Thurston Clarke, Searching for Crusoe; A Journey Among the Last Real Islands , 2001.