Gods,” where “everyone is an artist” and where humanity lives in an unspoiled state of bliss.
It’s been a lingering idea, this dream; most visitors to Bali (myself on my first trip included) still
endorse it. “I was furious at God that I was not born Balinese,” said the German photographer
George Krauser after visiting Bali in the 1930s. Lured by reports of otherworldly beauty and
serenity, some really A-list tourists started visiting the island—artists like Walter Spies, writers
like Noël Coward, dancers like Claire Holt, actors like Charlie Chaplin, scholars like Margaret
Mead (who, despite all the naked breasts, wisely called Balinese civilization on what it truly
was, a society as prim as Victorian England: “Not an ounce of free libido in the whole cul-
ture.”)
The party ended in the 1940s when the world went to war. The Japanese invaded Indone-
sia, and the blissful expatriates in their Balinese gardens with their pretty houseboys were
forced to flee. In the struggle for Indonesian independence which followed the war, Bali be-
came just as divided and violent as the rest of the archipelago, and by the 1950s (reports a
study called Bali: Paradise Invented) if a Westerner dared visit Bali at all, he might have been
wise to sleep with a gun under his pillow. In the 1960s, the struggle for power turned all of In-
donesia into a battlefield between Nationalists and Communists. After a coup attempt in
Jakarta in 1965, Nationalist soldiers were sent to Bali with the names of every suspected
Communist on the island. Over the course of about a week, aided by the local police and vil-
lage authorities at every step, the Nationalist forces steadily murdered their way through
every township. Something like 100,000 corpses choked the beautiful rivers of Bali when the
killing spree was over.
The revival of the dream of a fabled Eden came in the late 1960s, when the Indonesian
government decided to reinvent Bali for the international tourist market as “The Island of the
Gods,” launching a massively successful marketing campaign. The tourists who were lured
back to Bali were a fairly high-minded crowd (this was not Fort Lauderdale, after all), and their
attention was guided toward the artistic and religious beauty inherent in the Balinese culture.
Darker elements of history were overlooked. And have remained overlooked since.
Reading about all this during my afternoons in the local library leaves me somewhat con-
fused. Wait—why did I come to Bali again? To search for the balance between worldly pleas-
ure and spiritual devotion, right? Is this, indeed, the right setting for such a search? Do the
Balinese truly inhabit that peaceful balance, more than anyone else in the world? I mean, they
look balanced, what with all the dancing and praying and feasting and beauty and smiling, but
I don’t know what’s actually going on under there. The policemen really do wear flowers
tucked behind their ears, but there’s corruption all over the place in Bali, just like in the rest of
Indonesia (as I found out firsthand the other day when I passed a uniformed man a few hun-
dred bucks of under-the-table cash to illegally extend my visa so I could stay in Bali for four
nora
(Nora)
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