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There was once a little girl who saluted monuments from the back seat of her parents’ car. Nobody asked her to. Whenever she spotted one through the window, she would straighten her spine and raise her hand to her temple with complete seriousness, as though whoever the monument belonged to might somehow notice if she did not.
She loved Indonesia shamelessly, before she knew there was anything to be ashamed of.
Every August, she waited for the Independence Day ceremony on television, though most of the screen barely mattered to her. She watched for the Paskibraka, and especially for the girl with the baki (flag-tray bearer). The immaculate white uniform. The Garuda pin on her peci. Sang Saka Merah Putih resting before her.
On quieter afternoons, her father would pick up his guitar. She already knew what came next. Ibu Pertiwi. Tanah Airku. Ismail Marzuki, Ibu Sud, old keroncong songs. His fingers moved across the strings and she sang without lowering her voice, without checking whether anybody thought she sounded ridiculous.
That little girl … was me.
For this year’s Independence Day, for the first time in a long time, I wanted to watch the flag-raising ceremony again.
When I was a child, the television might as well have gone dark everywhere except around the girl with the baki. I barely noticed the officials behind her. I saw the uniform, the flag, the dream. I saw a girl being entrusted with something precious.
But then as I grew older, something happened to the dream. It no longer fit into a single frame: one had to look at all the things beyond the frame in order to understand its context. And what I saw was unflattering. Corruption scandals, political absurdities, public anger and satire were rampant and understood as part of the country’s identity. The more I knew about it, the harder it became for me to look at the country with the same affection.
Indonesia became, for lack of a better word, complicated. Over the years, some of us had moved away from the tradition of saluting the flag or singing patriotic songs that matched our beating hearts; and while it bothered me at first, eventually I hopped on the bandwagon. Oddly, this gave me a kind of relief, because cynicism was easier to wear than disappointment.
After the pandemic, I moved to the United Kingdom for school. People often talk about leaving as though it begins at an airport. Mine had started years earlier. Great Britain merely gave the distance an address. There, becoming unrecognizable felt intoxicating: new friends, new hair, new tattoos, new loves, another rhythm of speech.
Nobody knew about the girl who had once worn her love of the country on her sleeve, who eventually got to join her high school’s flag-raising troop, or Paskibraka, and who once believed there could be no greater honor than carrying the flag.
I thought leaving meant deciding what survived, rather than surviving what is left. However, I had unconsciously packed the wounds and the tenderness together. Moving to a different country felt like trying on a new identity, one that had discarded everything it used to belong to.
I stopped being the person who had loved her country fiercely, unapologetically and became someone who had to first defend it and later was indifferent toward it.
If time is said to heal all wounds, mine seemed to have been left wide open for more than a decade. Upon finishing my education in the UK, my parents came for my graduation ceremony, and not long after that, my father asked me to come home. I fought against his request for quite some time, giving him a million reasons why staying in the UK was the more reasonable option for me. Mainly, though, because returning to my home country felt less like a homecoming and more like having to undo everything I could become. Also, because the dream I used to have is no longer the dream I wanted for my future.
My father was patient enough to let me finish my arguments. Then he reached for my phone, scrolled almost to the bottom of his voice memos and pressed play.
A little girl began singing Ibu Pertiwi.
I recognized the song immediately. What took longer to recognize was the girl’s voice.
In the recording, my father’s younger voice sat beneath hers while the man beside me went for my guitar and started playing the same chords. The child who knew every word and the young woman who struggled to rediscover her love for her own country were suddenly in the same room. Then, without deciding to, I sang with her.
Eventually, I agreed to come home.
Friends and acquaintances have since asked why I decided to return when I had built a good life elsewhere. The answer is never simple. But if I could offer an attempt, the closest thing I have to an answer lies in the song Tanah Airku (My Homeland).
As a child, I thought the most important words in the song were pergi jauh, or going far away; but now, the ones that stay with me are tidak kulupakan (I won’t forget my homeland). I once considered these words as a promise, an undying pledge to a selfhood that has pledged an eternal love to a nation. Nowadays, these words sound more like an admission of effort: I am trying. Perhaps, we all are.
