Category: Indonesia

Yesterday, in “We Are…KPK!” I wrote about the current KPK crisis. Today, a reflection on why I translated KPK Adalah Kita as “KPK Is Us” rather than “We Are KPK,” as in the title of that post.

The problem starts with the word adalah. It means “is/am/are,” in the context of (PRO)NOUN+TO BE+(PRO)NOUN, but as every beginning student of Indonesian will tell you, that’s not exactly right, because Indonesian does not have a verb “to be.” Yet this word adalah creeps into spoken and written Indonesian quite a bit. Compare Google hits for saya guru di [= I am a teacher in…] versus saya adalah guru di [= I am a teacher in…].

My Indonesian teachers tell me that adalah is commonly overused by English speakers who are uncomfortable with “to be,” and that it’s also become more common in standard Indonesian in recent years. But it’s not new. When I was poking around for older uses of adalah, for example, I found this speech by Sukarno from August 1965:

That’s Sukarno quoting Alexander Blok’s “Those Born in the Years of Stagnation.” (Now that is globalization.) He quotes Blok directly with Kita putera2 tahun keberanian [= We are the children of the years of bravery], and then immediately follows this up with Ya, kita adalah putera2 tahun keberanian [= Yes, we are the children of the years of bravery]. This shows one use of adalah, to emphasize “is” in “X is Y.”

But I don’t think that emphasis is what’s going on here. Perhaps someone who speaks Indonesian better than I do will disagree with me, but KPK Kita and Kita KPK are both grammatically correct, yet neither sounds right. Is this an instance of language change in real time, the continuing evolution of Indonesian away from its origins as a simplified trade language?

The other challenge in translating KPK Adalah Kita is knowing if the word order is deliberate or incidental. My guess is that it deliberate, and that “We are KPK” is less accurate then “KPK is us.” Why? Well, we can look for uses of the phrase Kita adalah KPK, and here is what we find:

1. … sementara satu-satunya yang menjadi harapan kita adalah KPK (source)
2. … benteng terakir kita adalah KPK (source)
3. Hanya saja pesan kita adalah KPK fair dan adil. (source)

In all of these, kita is modifying something else, and the translation is always “our X is that KPK …”. In fact, here is the only exception that I can see based on my very cursory overview of the first page of the g-hits:

1. Katakan pada semua anggota KPK. “kita adalah KPK, ikon anti korupsi Indonesia.” (source)

In that instance, the writer is channeling members of KPK themselves who are saying “We are KPK, the icon of anti-corruption in Indonesia.”

Now does this matter? I think it does, and I think that it’s the same difference between having written Je suis Charlie versus Charlie est moi. In the former, you are showing that you stand by Charlie Hebdo; in the latter, you claiming more directly that Charlie Hebdo could have been you. I don’t think it’s an accident that few people chose to say Charlie est moi. I think it is absolutely deliberate that in this latest KPK scandal, for the majority of Indonesians, KPK is us.

Jokowi’s young presidency is in the midst of a serious political crisis. Here is Andreas Harsono from Human Rights Watch.

On Friday, members of Indonesia’s National Police – widely considered one of the country’s most corrupt government institutions – arrested Bambang Widjojanto, deputy chairman of the official Corruption Eradication Commission, or KPK. (For the record, Widjojanto was an intern with Human Rights Watch in the 1980s.)

That arrest was remarkable not just because the National Police have been a long-time target of the KPK’s anti-corruption efforts. The timing also smacked of political revenge, as the arrest occurred just nine days after the KPK declared Commissionaire Gen. Budi Gunawan — President Joko Widodo’s sole candidate for National Police chief – to be a graft suspect.

In a country rife with official corruption, KPK is one of the very few political institutions that has garnered the public’s trust. That fact has made it a target, as Indonesia’s most powerful people seek to weaken or destroy the institution (on the previous KPK scandal of 2009, see Ehito Kimura, Christian von Luebke, and Simon Butt).

This post, though, isn’t about this latest KPK crisis. It’s about the headline on the cover of Indonesia’s weekly magazine Tempo: KPK Adalah Kita.

KPK Adalah Kita literally means “KPK Is Us.” At first glance, this looks like a simple appropriation of Je suis Charlie, another fun little instance of today’s globalized media landscape. But that’s not the right interpretation. KPK Adalah Kita actually harkens back to Indonesia’s presidential campaign in summer 2014. Specifically, to this:

Jokowi adalah kita [= Jokowi is us] reflected the notion that Jokowi represented regular Indonesians, not the elite political classes. Perhaps a more accurate translation would be “Jokowi is one of us.” And the image of the gecko confronting the crocodile, scorpion, snake, and other creepy crawlies on the Tempo cover is harkens back to the last KPK scandal, during which the following image circulated widely.

The gecko (cicak) here is next to the crocodile (buaya), and this reads “I am the gecko who bravely battles the crocodile.” A more evocative translation that resonates with English speakers might be “I’m the little guy who bravely fights against the machine.” It’s bad news for Jokowi’s presidency if he is now viewed as part of the machine.

This is Part 1 of two posts. Tomorrow, in Part 2, I will get into the weeds about translating KPK Adalah Kita as “We are KPK” versus “KPK is us.” Stay tuned…