The Grammar of Time Travel

This is Dialek :: Dialect, a column by Khairani Barokka on language, culture, and power.

There is the time that we use to determine the order of our days and nights—twenty-four-hour days, three-hundred-sixty-five-day years, sixty-second minutes, sixty-minute hours. Weekends and weekdays. Names for each day of the week, and the division of time for labor and time for rest. The presentation of time is cultural, also; I once met a PhD student, in Germany, studying the creation of the weekend as a construct. The existence of universalizing, psychological notions of time-space are so ubiquitous as to go so often unremarked upon.

In my home language, Indonesian, lies what I find to be a fundamental loophole in these systems—consisting, if you will, of time portals; galactic alternatives to what we know of time, baked into the grammar of our language. That is, Indonesian, or Bahasa Indonesia (literally, “Indonesian language”) lacks time-based tenses for verbs—there is no “present,” “past,” or “future” tense; instead, everything is happening at a time that other words may make apparent, may contextualize. For instance, “Saya makan” could mean “I ate,” “I eat,” or “I will eat.” “Saya makan kemarin” means “I ate yesterday”; “Saya sedang makan” means “I’m eating”; “Saya akan makan” means “I will eat.” It’s just one of the features of considerable linguistic beauty that I think we as Indonesians should appreciate more. This lack of temporal tenses has shaped my mindset as I write, layering richness onto the contexts in which I perceive language, shaping my creative work, shaping how I write and feel with regard to the supposedly departed.

The absence of time tenses presents profound presences. It makes me feel comforted when I write, for instance, “Keluarga saya di sini” (“My family is/was/will be here”), because there is not only the possibility of the meaning “My family was here” or “My family will be here”—both important in maintaining that tie between eras and familial connection—but also the possibility of the presence in the now of both past and present; the presence of the past in the now and future; the presence of futurity in what is past and what is now. This means that people and other spirits in the past and future potentially exist in the now. And that we who are in the now are part of a river, a thread, a flow of time that defies easy distinctions; a gorgeous plurality of contexts.

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There is, of course, a peace in this understanding of time: Those we love who have gone onto another plane of existence are always potentially here, with us, and will continue to be in the world. Our existence is tied to the expanse of pasts, is a part of many possible futures.

Here in Jakarta for the holidays, I write these words in a bedroom that is the resting place of parts of inheritance from my grandmother, who died in 2012. Wooden furniture that used to be in her house: a simple chair, low to the ground; a matching mirror attached to four drawers; a writing desk with more drawers, which used to house her things and now house ours. The remaining part of my inheritance, not here, is my apportioned share of her kebayas (each girl grandchild getting a few)—the traditional cloth tops she wore above sarongs, tops I keep in London and wear outside when I’m fairly sure they’ll be protected from the elements. Which is to say, of course, rarely. When I say, “These were my grandmother’s things” in Indonesian, “Ini barang-barang Yangti saya,” I am also saying “These are my grandmother’s things.”

She wrote so much at that desk; letters and housekeeping. I remember her showing us a handwritten list of everyone’s birthdays, all her children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren. It mattered that she wrote them down on paper with ink, that her hand touched the dates.

When I was about nine, my grandmother wrote me, in her curlicued, wizard-like penmanship, a long, caring missive I never replied to. It was one of those delays that felt worse the longer it stretched out. I felt guilty whenever I saw her, that I hadn’t yet replied—I was afraid of disappointing her, someone who saw and believed in my love of words. That guilt has never fully left.

And yet, since I inherited the seat where she’d likely written that long letter, everything I write under the watchful eye of the writing desk—essays, poems, books, journals—feels like a long-overdue answer to her. This desk gives off a protective effect from a hemisphere away, felt even in London, and when I say “meja tulisnya menjagaku,” I am saying “the desk protected me” and also “the desk protects me.” The verbs expand beyond linear notions of time and space. It took about twenty-five years for me to let go of the guilt of not responding to one letter; it took writing for years with the desk both hers and mine, my family’s, past, present, and future.

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The fact that I often write about trauma, others’ and my own, means that whether or not I write in English, I experience the words subconsciously as closer to Indonesian in the sense of time expanding. Trauma is remembered non-linearly, straddles time constraints, operates on an underworld agenda in which all clocks working with oppressive linearity go awry. To protect us, to get us to trust our innate, often denigrated as “nonsensical,” understanding of time first.

And this is just the case with Indonesian, my country’s lingua franca, not to mention the conventions of time in hundreds of other languages found in Indonesia. These differing time tenses, or lack thereof, correspond to hundreds of Indonesian spiritualities, and I personally only understand what I know and live—an Islam understood with a bit of Kejawen (a Javanese manifestation of Islam, syncretic with so-called animism and other spiritual elements), Minangkabau spiritualities, and the occasional foray into other spiritual worldviews that I find resonance in, that don’t necessarily contradict my interpretation of Islam. Having loved ones of other religions than my own has only strengthened the need to understand all of our energies as not disparate, however you choose to understand that.

That distinct tenses hold no tensile strength in Indonesian, so to speak—or, one could say, that the possibility of all forms of time are contained within every Indonesian verb—is powerful. it is both a rejection and an expansion of time. What is expansive is the possibility in a single word of far more worldviews than the Western-imposed, masculinist, positivist thinking handed down from European Enlightenment about what is “rational”; an understanding of rationality still used to tamp down indigenous cultures, to justify violence and theft. Words like “supernatural,” “fantasy,” “science fiction,” “witchcraft,” and “the occult” have often been used to describe things that are generally thought of to be fictional, nonexistent—including concepts of transcending space and time, and spiritual presences that defy time distinctions. “Magical realism” is used to describe some fiction, as though these “magical realist” events are not very real for people with certain understandings of the world. This goes along with the denigration of many forms of spirituality, that persist despite genocidal attempts. As Lou Cornum wrote in a piece in The New Inquiry entitled “White Magic,” witchcraft is a concept that settler colonialism has used to subjugate and decimate Indigenous bodies in the Americas.

That distinct tenses hold no tensile strength in Indonesian, so to speak—or, one could say, that the possibility of all forms of time are contained within every Indonesian verb—is powerful.

Yet Western European-influenced science is now exploring and confirming what Indigenous communities around the world have known for hundreds of years: that plants have sentience, for example, or that climate change could well revive long-dormant viruses. That intergenerational trauma can be passed down from body to body. However, there are those of us who eschew the need for Western science to prove something true and deeply significant to our communities—Indigenous, Black, brown, and Asian knowledges that have resisted decimation. Here there is an important distinction between the proliferation of fake news that is anti-science, which is a very real issue (to support, for instance, climate change deniers), and the instant denigration of Indigenous, Black, brown, and Asian beliefs and worldviews about the natural world as fanciful, “of the past,” rather than timeless concepts of fundamental communal importance that have survived the continuing marks of genocide and colonialism. That have allowed us to survive, that are the keys to our continued survival.

Science has always been political. What counts as “the truth” always is. So what the many planes that verbs without temporal tenses means to me is an acknowledgment of a plurality of truths, of ways to feel at home in the world. Of ways in which our relationships to plants, animals, and each other exist not only in the here and now; and that people before us and after us knew, will know, of these relationships. There is a comfort in believing that all our ancestors’ understandings of time and space, however met with destruction, live on in our soulbodies somehow—just as our flight or fight reactions today come from the ancient need for survival, chemical reactions as present now as they were when we first discovered how to make fire.

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The late performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz is one of my favorite theorists; in Cruising Utopia, he writes about “queering” time, envisioning queer futurities and notions of time beyond the usual strictures. I’d like to think he would love the Indonesian language’s understanding of time as expansive and filled, potentially, with possibilities for different understandings of it, understandings beyond capitalist ones: non-linear notions of time.

In a performance installation I did at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, entitled Annah: Nomenclature, I speak to various potential Annahs—the Annah supposedly portrayed in Gauguin’s 1890s painting Annah la Javanaise [Annah the Javanese]—as various possible spirits who existed and persist. It felt real to me; it was real. Throughout the eight years that I’ve been creating arts projects and a book-in-progress about them, these possible Annahs have felt very present, some of them even guiding me. When an audience member told me afterwards that they, too, had felt Annah’s presence in the room, it was all I could ask for.

So when we say that those who are departed are still with us, that we can feel them, this is a truth also found in and reinforced by our language. All the energy our ancestors created on this plane of existence lives on in how they changed us, in more publicly palpable material things they created or altered, but also according to understandings from myriad spiritualities and languages. Reclaiming this embodied knowledge may be as simple as understanding that our language—in my case, Indonesian—does not automatically or easily translate into the supposedly distinct notions of “past,” “present,” and “future” in English. That it contains larger truths: the speculative, the spiritual, the sacred, the bodily acknowledged. That it holds what is plainly felt and simultaneously hidden from a world that so often seeks to co-opt, to explain with harmful forms of rationality.

What is being acknowledged here is simultaneously subtle and ubiquitous, all-encompassing—a glowing, untranslatable patina of possibility. In language, and in the emotion it evokes, it is possible to be grounded in a comforting understanding of existence beyond oppressive notions of time and space. Here we know the peace and the comfort of justification for the spirits so many of us feel among, and for how we feel about existing as spirits in others’ futures, in others’ pasts. What frequently gets lost in English translation regarding the understanding of time can instead be saved, clung to, and understood as a gift—albeit one so vast as to be, fittingly, uncapturable. In this we can find a reminder of ancestral strength, as well as a warning: not to bend others’ timelines and universes to fit the shape of our own.

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