Javanese

Sheila grew up in Blitar, East Java, where she spoke Javanese at home and Bahasa Indonesia at school.

She arrived in Memphis as a kid, navigated an American childhood without a

roadmap.

Not because she forgot them, because it felt safer not to.

This is From Where to Here, the podcast about language, culture, and the journeys that reshape who we are.

Sheila grew up in Blitar, East Java, where she spoke Javanese at home and Bahasa Indonesia at school.

She arrived in Memphis as a kid, navigated an American childhood without a roadmap, picked up English, French, and a bit of Japanese, and taught herself Korean through K-pop and sheer curiosity.

She thought she might become a linguist.

Mass hysteria took hold, and panicked villagers reported seeing ninjas everywhere.

In the minds of many Javanese, the ninjas had actually adopted the powers of the sorcerers they initially sought to hunt.

For instance, there's documented eyewitness accounts of black-clad figures leaping over rooftops, transforming into cats or other animals, and turning invisible.

The terror was palpable and often irrational.

Every person out wandering at night immediately became the target of suspicion.

And by suspicion, I mean that anyone caught out after dark took the very serious risk of being beaten to death by angry mobs.

The Javanese authorities detained hundreds of mentally ill people for their own safety, fearing they would be mistaken for ninjas by paranoid crowds.

By October and November, reports of gruesome vigilante executions flooded in.

Right.

Some of, you know, all of which sound very interesting, some of which are clearly more political than others, and not incoincidentally, those are the ones that are written in Javanese.

And

they're the ones that Dry Stubble doesn't like also.

They speak, uh, Sranan Tongo or Sranan Togo, which is the Creole lingua franca, and then they have their indigenous language.

So the Indians speak Hindustani, the people who came from Indonesia speak Javanese, um, indigenous people speak their indigenous tongues.

And so the average person there is trilingual because the Dutch were very accepting of a multilingual society, and they were not as strict about conversion and cultural assimilation as the British were.

So when you have this sort of forced monolingual society, which is what was happening in Trinidad, where English had to be the medium of government because government was based on the British system, English had to be the medium of education because the education was based in the British system as well, you had this kind of Creole that was created that incorporated not just Hindustani words, but French words, Spanish words, Arabic, words from the Chinese community.