Avarice in Wonderland: Dialogism, tourism and Bali

Kuta! Here, on your beach, my love flickers brightly along with the algae
and the fireflies. Here, at the restaurant table and hotel, my love is like a
bright candle which is suddenly blown out by the sea breeze, then
rekindled again with all the fervour of my love. But do you know that this
world is no longer the loving world of the villagers where the beloved
goes down to the water spout and bathes naked, and afterwards goes
home to the village carrying water for her lover. This world has become
so large and the lover is like the modern dog’s flees which can jump from
continent to continent, for instance from New York to Bali, and then hops
on again to Paris.

Kuta! Your beach has provided a new challenge for my zeal, for my
love… my love comes, my love goes, ah, she goes too far for me to reach
her. Yes, love has become like the modern dog’s flees that jumped from
one city to another city far away. 1

. Diana Brydon, in summarising the concerns of Tzvetan Todorov in The

Conquest of America, asks:
How can we achieve the ideal of `heterology’ which makes understood the
difference of voices - what Wilson Harris terms the `harlequin cosmos at
the heart of existence’ - while avoiding the twin perils of insipidity and
self-parody? What is the discourse appropriate to this heterological
mentality? (30).

A number of approaches to the -- dialogic – Bakhtin In his earliest travel book, Mobile,
the French writer Michel Butor explored the cultural complexities of a six month journey
he made through the United States. The text weaves together ‘normally’ unrelated
historical and cultural fabrics, lists of information, experiences, and facts about the
United States into “an assemblage of fragments without a narrator to impose coherence”2.
Stacey Burton suggests that Butor’s juxtaposition of unlikely (or, at least,
uncharacteristic) categories had a polyphonic effect which liberated the text from
authorial control. She explains “By pointed juxtaposition and sheer abundance, the text
of Mobile works dialogically to subvert discourses that claim to be authoritative”3
releasing the other from the panoptic of the traveller, “the domination of reality by
vision”.4 Her claims concerning polyphony and cultural dialogism are questionable,
however, when she describes the types of juxtapositions used by Butor:

Jefferson’s assertion that all men are self-evidently created equal comes up against
the realities of twentieth-century American racism (segregation, lynching, racist
commonplaces) - and against Jefferson’s own comments on African moral and
intellectual inferiority in Notes on the State of Virginia. The “American
European” myths embodied in “the sacred city of Washington, where the principle
 temples and the essential government organizations” … are interrogated by
various texts about the abuse of Native Americans. . .”. 5

In Burton’s description we see that the author, in fact, continues to “impose coherence”
and maintain authority over the subject, by replacing dominant American narrative with
the preferred political associations of the outsider.
Tzvetan Todorov provides a more productive conversation between
cultural alterities in Conquest of America, an examination of the European subjugation of
Central American civilisations in the 16th century. He achieves the textual impression of
historical dialogue by quoting extensively from the Aztec chronicles and juxtaposing
their accounts of events alongside the ‘authoritative’ Spanish histories. Todorov explains
his purpose as not seeking “a terrain of compromise but the path of dialogue, I question, I
transpose, I interpret these texts: but also I let them speak (whence so many quotations)
and defend themselves“(emphasis added 250).
The resulting dialogic between cultural discourses unlocks a new
textual perspective for the reader. Seen through the eyes of the other (previously
silenced) participants in the historical experience of invasion, descriptions of events are
re-opened for new insights and fresh interpretations. Todorov’s own examination of this
juxtaposition of worldviews leads him to suggest that the Spanish conquest was primarily
a consequence of differing epistemologies and discourses. It was the scientific quality of
European epistemology with its reliance on observation and knowledge (as crucial
components of the successful exercise of power over nature) that gave the Spaniards the
crucial advantage. While the Aztecs attempted to predict the behaviour of the foreign
invaders and determine their own strategic responses “in the context of a communication
with the world, not that with men” (i.e. the consulting of oracles and the interpretation of
dreams), Cortes focused his attention on gathering information about the behavious and
beliefs of the human other because he knew that such knowledge represented power.
This capacity to dominate otherness through the aggregation of knowledge would
eventually result in the conquest of a vastly superior military force.

The other crucial contributing factor, according to Todorov, is the application and
exploitation of knowledge that is achieved through language. Cortes keeps his eye on
this alterity that he has encountered and by this means begins to understand the the
cosmic and animistic nature of their locus of control. Henceforward he is always alert to
any opportunity to manipulate their dependence on the other-worldly in order to weaken
their resistance and give their defeat a quality of symbolic inevitability. As Todorov
explains: “Speech is more a means of manipulating the other ideas, than it is a faithful
reflection of the world.” (118)

The deciding factors which served the Spanish desire for dominance over the
other and which disempowered the Aztecs, and finally deprived them of control over their
land and culture, were contained within the differing paradigms and valorisations of
knowledge and language.
 It is also a linguistic manifestation of Levinas’s philosophy of the same, the
semiotic face of ideological dominance.

and enabled the Spaniards to overcome an overwhelmingly superior military

force.

The deciding factors which served the Spanish desire for dominance over the other and
which disempowered the Aztecs, and finally deprived them of control over their land and
culture, were contained within the differing paradigms and valorisations of knowledge
and language.1 Todorov elaborates this point when he writes that the extraordinary
success of the West in its project of conquest was:
chiefly due to one specific feature of Western civilisation which for a long
time was regarded as a feature of man himself, its development and
prosperity among Europeans thereby becoming proof of their natural
superiority: it is, paradoxically, Europeans’ capacity to understand the
other. (248)

In Levinas’s terms, the European stress on gathering information about human

otherness represented an expression of the Western sense of needing to enclose otherness
within a thematisation or conceptualisation. This requirement of the Western psyche
was expressed through the strategy of defusing and domesticating alterity and achieving a
semiotic or discursive predominance which, in turn, provided freedom from the threat of
alternative cultural practice and belief. Edward Said, in Orientalism suggests that
Western academia managed the threat of alterity by encapsulating it within the
boundaries of Western thought, by defining and delimiting it through language, so that:

…anyone employing orientalism…will designate, name, point to, fix what

he is talking about with a word or a phrase, which then is considered to
have acquired, or more simply to be, reality. (72)

Such a designation of alterity implies its prior investigation, an exploration

(however superficial or mistaken) which enables the centre to speak with sufficient
authority (from its own perspective) to appear to understand and speak on behalf of
otherness.

1 Todorov elaborates this point when he writes that the extraordinary success of the West in its project of
conquest was:chiefly due to one specific feature of Western civilisation which for a long time was regarded
as a feature of man himself, its development and prosperity among Europeans thereby becoming proof of
their natural superiority: it is, paradoxically, Europeans’ capacity to understand the other. (248)
 Todorov asserts that the typical European approach to alterity has been to define
and reduce it to either accord with, or be seen as subservient to Western standards and
values. The other is treated either as “equal”, and therefore able to be assimilated into the
“universal” Western culture, or as different, and therefore (necessarily) “inferior” (42).
He describes these alternatives as “assimilationist” and “hierarchical” and explains how
each, while taking divergent paths, is derived from the same sense of cultural superiority.
In terms of Levinas’s argument these strategies reflect the Western need to reduce
otherness to sameness.

The Western dismissal, or assimilation, of otherness has enabled it to remain

relatively constant and unchanged by its encounter with alterity. Thus the West has been
able to maintain a greater degree of cultural / national autonomy in the global context
than the non-West. 2

According to Todorov, this is done in order to provide “multiple determinations which

condemn any attempt to systematize history to failure” (252). By giving equivalent space
to the Aztec account of events Todorov provides an approximation of dialogue3 not as a
prologue to the definitive response of the Spanish histories but rather as texts which rest
on an equal footing with the European accounts.

Using a similar apposition of differing cultural viewpoints, this paper will

explore the culturally-fraught issue of tourism in Bali through the juxtaposition of
Australian and Indonesian literary texts. while not explicitly exploring internal
contradictions in the manner of Mobile, nevertheless represents a potential interruption of
self-evident truth, of monologic certainties by the exposure of singularity to the
relativising effects of heteroglossia. The proximity of alterity to familiarity in the cross-

2 It must be remembered that the experience of dialogic uncertainty and contested cultural
value is a reflection of the history of the margin, the alienation and enforced adaptation already endured by
the other under the domination of the colonial logos. The colonial experience was an hierarchic exchange
productive of manifestly unequal cultural influences and transformations. The Englishman of the colonial
period was to some degree transformed by the India which he had colonised, either through the experience
of occupation, or the narration of that occupation through the prose, poetry, and travel literature of the
period. The Indian, on the other hand, was invaded and changed from within; his territory was forever
marked by the English presence; his language marginalised; his political practice overwhelmed. While
interaction and cultural cross-pollination occurred throughout the colonial period, the most authoritative,
intrusive and influential voice was European.

3 Neither the Spanish nor the Aztec histories were written for cross-cultural audiences. Similarly
the Australian and Indonesian texts under consideration in this thesis do not address themselves to
audiences outside their own cultures. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical assertions concerning the fundamental
role of the addressee in the construction of the utterance and the value of exteriority (or outsideness) in the
development of a dialogic suggest the artificial nature of dialogue as proposed by Todorov in Conquest of
America (and by myself in this paper).
cultural encounter provides an exteriority, a fresh eye in the reading of cultural truths by
allowing a conversation between uncommon interlocutors who speak from very different
positions. The introduction of Indonesian fictional texts in this chapter (as well as
chapters 6 and 7) is intended to provide space for an Indonesian response to the
Australian fictional construction of its identity. The theoretical purpose in this will be,
using Todorov’s approach, to add alternatives to the single text, to multiply the
possibilities (whether they be acceptable or not), and to attempt to provide sufficient
material to break up the totality. Seeking out the voice of otherness is an attempt to
overcome monoglossia4 by providing space for (permitting the voice of) the heteroglossic
to be heard and thereby to generate a dialogue (albeit a somewhat artificial one) between
Australian and Indonesian literary texts.

In the first part of the Australian novel The Edge of Bali, Inez Baranay explores
the Kuta tourist culture through the persona of Nelson, a young Australian girl returning
to Bali to rejoin her Balinese lover who has promised to await her return. Nelson is
unashamedly a tourist. She has no knowledge of, or interest in, Balinese culture. The
first time that Nelson visits Bali with a friend, she is looking for a good time and meets
Miki, a Balinese bar worker, with whom she develops a romantic relationship. She
leaves Bali promising him she will come back as soon as she can get enough money.
When she returns to Bali she takes it for granted that Miki has been waiting for her and
that they will simply continue the relationship that was postponed by distance.

For Nelson the relationship with Miki is not in any way compromised by the
propensity, and necessity, of young Balinese men to use their contacts with tourist girls as
a means of gaining income. When she returns to Bali and arrives at the Bungar Club,
where he works, he is with another white girl and he fails to recognise her when she
greets him. Made aware of her mistake, she rushes out of the club: “Miki called after her.
Not her name. “You! Girl! Chick!” Finally, “Nelson!”, but she had gone” (15).

Later, hanging out with Australian friends, Nelson is told by a Balinese boy,
Agung, that he is looking for a tourist girl only staying in Bali for another week so he can
fill in time until his Dutch girlfriend returns to Bali in ten days. “’Yeah, don’t waste ten
days just waiting.’”(21), Nelson says, highlighting her sense of betrayal and bitterness
toward the Balinese young men who appear to her to be exploiters of the feelings and
material wealth of Western girls.

In this first section of the book, titled “Nelson”, the conception of the Balinese
young men as expedient gigolos is reinforced through an interview given by the long-
term manager of a Kuta club to Marla (who is the central character in the second section
of the novel):

4 Monoglossia represents the socio-political and linguistic opposite of Bakhtin’s theory of

heteroglossia (which I defined and described in chapter 1). It is the outcome of cultural and political
pressure brought to bear on the naturally multivocal universe with the purpose of gaining and maintaining
control over it.
 “Most of the girls, Australian girls, haven’t got a clue. There was an
Australian girl waiting for a barman here, she had bought him a
motorbike, she wants to buy land with him, she goes to all the clubs with
him. She’s being used, sucked in. . . Ninety per cent of the girls with
Balinese boyfriends don’t know.” (37)

This part of the narrative constructs the Balinese exploitation of Australian female
tourists, as a kind of a colonial reversal. Marla, who is sensitised to Balinese culture (by
her reading) and determined not to be seen as a tourist, manages to resist the too easy
relationship with the Balinese boys, and the stereotypical Balinese romance. However,
towards the end of her stay in Bali, she becomes involved with a court dancer in a remote
palace community. His ‘authenticity’ provides a certain sense of distance from the
normal tourist behaviour that she despises but in the end she too is unsettled by the
dancer’s talk of his financial dreams:

He would like to have a business with tourists. His family own some land
near the sea. There they could build a place to stay. If they had more
money. Don’t let me think of it, she thinks, don’t let me even think of it, I
know he wants nothing from me, he has told me so and it is true. (204)

Once more the pejorative construction of the Balinese male as predator and
exploiter and the traveler/tourist as victim, is reinforced.

Gerson Poyk’s short story “Kuta, di Sini Cintaku Kerlip Kemerlap” (“Kuta, Here
My Love Flickers Brightly”)6 generates an interesting counterpoint of this tourist
perception of Balinese culture and a literary insight into the struggles that confront the
Balinese as they face the onslaught of a rapacious modernity. Poyk’s story also suggests
a useful counterpoint to the typical Australian literary construction of the relationship
between Australian female tourist and the rather infamous “Kuta Cowboys”.

The young (unnamed) Balinese man, who narrates Poyk’s story, opens the
narrative with his description of the plight of Balinese youth in the modern world, the
world of tourist Bali, a description that emerges out of his relationship with an Australian
tourist, Regina. The description (translated as an introduction to this article) evokes the
narrator’s growing sense of imprisonment in a pre-determined space of poverty and
immobility, a primitive enclosure which has become virtually inescapable for the
Balinese inhabitants, but readily accessible to the jet-setting tourist. The images that this
sense of betrayal generates bears some comparisons with Aldous Huxley’s “Savage
Reservation” in Brave New World.7

In Huxley’s novel, set in a genetically fashioned future, a primitive tribe is

‘preserved’ in its ‘authentic’ state in an area of rainforest cordoned off from the rest of the
global population. The purpose of maintaining the tribes belatedness is to provide the
tourists of high-tech modernity with a museum of their own distant past. The Warden of
the Reservation informs the characters, Bernard and Lenina, (who have jetted in from
‘civilisation’ for a dose of primitivism) that, “There is no escape from a Savage
Reservation…Those who are born in the Reservation are destined to die there” (84).
 While the tourists experience the typical responses of revulsion and fascination at
the behaviour of this primitive humanity, we are told that the natives in the “Savage
Reservation” have learned to fulfil their role in relation to the appearance of visitors from
the outside: “[R]emember” the [helicopter pilot] added reassuringly to Lenina. “they’re
perfectly tame; savages won’t do you any harm. They’ve got enough experience of gas
bombs to know that they mustn’t play any tricks” (86). The “Savage Reservation” exists
and is maintained in its ‘authentic’ state for the pleasure, the horror and the titillation of
the tourist. Enclosed by its electrified fence it is preserved as a quaintly and shockingly
primitive state.

The narrator of “Kuta, di Sini Cintaku Kerlip Kemerlap” describes the tourist enclave at
Kuta Beach in a similar fashion. He sees himself as being enclose by a kind of cultural
and geographic stasis for the pleasure, and at the mercy, of the wealthy and mobile
foreigner. Yapady Wolf, in an article titled “The World of the Kuta Cowboy”,
interrogates the motivations of first world tourists in Bali. She suggests that for those
westerners who consider themselves travellers, travel represents a voyage of discovery:
It then starts to figure that many tourists use the word ‘discovery’ in the
same sense that their ancestors in the colonial era did when they set off to
‘discover’ and plunder ‘new worlds’. Just like their ancestors, most first
world tourists tend to take home with them copious amounts of ‘booty’
from their forays into the third world. Meanwhile, stuck in their base of
economic inferiority, the locals have little hope of conducting reciprocal
tours of discovery in the tourists’ backyards. The relationship seems
hardly equal. (13)
In comparison with this if you asked a local what tourism represents to them “[t]hey
may well tell you that it’s about selling; selling their environment, their culture and their
services to the guests.” (13)

Poyk’s narrator is a guide who seeks out tourists to transport around the island on
his motorbike, for a suitable fee. As a guide who has to be away from his wife and
children for days or weeks at a time, he is given great freedom by his wife in order to
support the family. This freedom, born of necessity, leads him into a range of situations
which challenge traditional Balinese values and family loyalty. He is, for example,
drawn into what he describes as “dunia malam” (the dark or night world), mixing with
the female prostitutes and their pimps who flourish because of the “tuntunan turisme”
(tourist demand). In the midst of enormous competition for the tourist dollar he feels
compelled to use a method that he describes as “bermodalkan handuk” (modeling a
towel) to win his female customers. This involves traveling to Kuta beach and following
the tourist behaviour of sunbathing naked, in order to strike up a conversation with the
tourist girls. When he tries this with Regina, an Australian tourist, she suspects him of
being with the police but he informs her of his real profession (as a guide) and convinces
her to use his services.

The sexual relationship that develops between the narrator and Regina is used by
Poyk to illustrate the complexity and ambivalence that the tourist issue raises for the
native Balinese, and acts as a metaphor of a broader sense of exploitation and
disempowerment in Bali. While traveling around the island they talk about their differing
cultural perspectives. He tells Regina that he lives the life of a guide because the
alternative would be to return to the rice field as a farmer which he claims is the most
despised vocation in Bali, outside of prostitution. Ironically and tragically, as the
narrative progresses he is forced to consider the possibility that in his eagerness to avoid
farming he has become the thing he despises most: a prostitute. It is a further irony that
the despised role of the rice farmer is precisely the idealised “authentic” role that tourists
seek for, and celebrate in, their photograph albums and store of memories of that “real”
Bali.

Initially the narrator sees himself as a willing sexual partner but as the journey
progresses he begins to contemplate the power differential in their relationship and the
fact that Regina is in reality his employer. One night Regina wakes him from an
exhausted sleep so that he will listen to and translate her poetry into Indonesian.
Afterwards when they “bercinta” (make love) he begins to feel resentful of her demands.
The fact that he drives the motor bike all day and has a different sleep pattern means that
he is often exhausted by the evening and ready to sleep early. But, on Regina’s payroll as
a guide, it seems he must also be at her sexual beck and call. Despite his attraction to her
he feels increasingly torn about the role he is apparently expected to play. He writes: “In
the end I felt that I was a milking cow” (36).8

It is prostitution, in the narrative, that comes to represent the complexly

ambivalent relationship of the Balinese to the tourist West, the difficult mixture of desire
and revulsion, gain and loss. A great deal is made of the fact that so many Indonesians,
especially the Javanese migrants, are forced to commodify their sexuality (menjadi
komoditi seks (21)) in order to survive in tourist Bali. As the narrator considers the
difficult nature of his relationship with Regina he remembers the way that the Governor
of the province had tried to get rid of prostitution in Bali by sending the Javanese
prostitutes back to Java and how, because of the tourist demand, they soon returned. He
has even heard stories of Balinese young men being used by the Western tourists and
begins to wonder about his own role as a guide to the tourists:

For a long time, I have not heard, that there are women who search for
male prostitutes, so that I had almost came to disbelieve it, and soon I
came to disbelieve it completely, until my travels with Regina. But I am
not a prostitute. I am an unofficial guide, an unregistered guide who rents
his motor bike, who by chance meets beautiful women. But she is an
educated woman, a university graduate, and over and above everything a
poet. Thus, although I am extremely tired, and feel as though I am a
milking cow, and all at once I am thinking about male prostitution as has
happened with friends who are unofficial guides, nevertheless I am
sufficiently relieved, because I have not fallen too far into the tourist
garbage heap. (38) 9

When he considers the possibility that she may be using him as a prostitute he
consoles himself with the stories he has heard of Indonesian boys receiving huge sums of
money from female tourists who have become infatuated with them. Thus his experience
with Regina takes him to the place where he has become, both a horrified victim of
tuntunan turisme and a hopeful participant. His role, in all its contradictoriness and
complexity, is a metaphor for Bali itself in relation to Australia and, more generally, to
contemporary Western cultural and economic structures.

Llike many of the other Balinese (and Javanese) men and women caught up in the
tourist industry, he inhabits a world with its own rules, a world with a special and
separate morality, in which certain cultural values and practices have been suspended.
The way in which traditional values are put on hold when the interruption of tourist
demands and desires requires it, is clearly enunciated by the narrator when he says to
Regina:

You are truly a modern person. Different than Indonesian women.

Different than Indonesian people. If I meet an Indonesian woman who is
not a prostitute who does not ask for payment, the Hansip [the
neighbourhood patrol] will surround the house, and the people together
with the Hansip, catching me in the act with the Indonesian woman, will
herd us to the office and we will be ordered by the Hansip to marry. But
with a white woman everything is safe. We must provide facilities for all
the tourists who come to Indonesia. They can enjoy the scenery, the
Legong dance and the Indonesian boys. (17) 10

Even his wife, who may or may not suspect his infidelity but is forced to accept
his almost continual absence, is infected with the excitement of what appears to be easy
money:

When she sees the five thousand rupiah note which is still new, she stops
me hugging her, then she dances the Janger Bali for a moment, then she
exhorts me with complete happiness, “Go, go, go again and get lots and
lots of money”. (50) 11

She does not know that her husband in his eagerness to gain sufficient money to
set up a restaurant in Bali has made plans to leave her and marry Regina so that he can
work in Australia. Although he is conscience stricken when he considers leaving his
children he consoles himself by deciding he will leave Regina in turn, once he has
sufficient funds, and return to his children in Bali. In this relationship then, he is both the
exploited and the exploiter, or at least potentially so.

At the same time that he appears to plot his road to riches, he is conscious that he
has probably fallen in love with Regina and in terms of their plans to marry he no longer
feels that he is prostituting himself to her. When Regina returns to Australia, she leaves
him some extra money and promises to send more so that he can “…jump like a modern
dog’s flee to the kangaroo continent” (53.)12 But after a year without hearing from her
he comes to realise that now she is far away, she has escaped his reach and reproach. He
knows that she will not even take the time to send him a letter of regret. Once more, he
feels that the wealth of the West has exploited his poverty by buying his company and
sexuality and then, through the mobility that he is denied, has escaped any of the social or
moral consequences:
 I took a deep breathe and I realised that man is indeed like a dog’s flee,
like a dog’s flee he easily hops from one town to another. After he has
made a distant leap, the modern man sunbathes on the beach, travels
through the scenic regions, eats at the restaurants and has sex in the hotels.
And the love that the modern man has could perhaps be called the love of
a dog’s flee. (54) 13

After denigrating the life of the farmer in Bali to Regina and desperately
attempting to avoid its claim on him, he decides it would be better, after all, to return to
the plot of land he has not yet sold. He sells his motor bike and “burns the immoral
towel” (54). 14 After this return to the traditional lifestyle he concludes with the words:
“And I am immediately cured of the wound and deception of the love of a dog’s flee”
(54).15

I have used Gerson Poyk’s narrative perspective in “Kuta, di Sini Cintaku Kerlip
Kemerlap” to provide an Indonesian perspective on tourist Bali16, a largely unheard and
uncared-about version of the tourist experience. His description of the personal
humiliation and familial stress that the Western dollar brings with it represents a critical
challenge to the stereotypical production of the Balinese playboy as scheming and
greedy, through its portrayal of a reversal of exploitational practice. Poyk’s text, and the
playboy point of view that it purports to represent, deals with only one, very limited
aspect of modern Balinese life in terms of the influence of tourism17. Nevertheless, it
represents, when placed alongside Australian novels like Inez Baranay’s Edges of Bali
and Gerard Lee’s Troppo Man, one interchange between culturally divergent texts that
suggests the fact of misunderstanding on both sides, as well as opening up the possibility
of dialogue.
1 Endnotes
Gerson Poyk. “Kuta, di Sini Cintaku Kerlip Kemerlap.” Di Bawah Matahari Bali. Jakarta: Penerbit Sinar
Harapan, 1982. 7-54.

Kuta! Di sini, di pantaimu, cintaku kerlip kemerlap bersama ganggang dan kunang-kunang. Di sini, di meja
makan restoran dan losmen, cintaku bagaikan kandil kemerlap yang tiba-tiba mati dihembus angin laut, lalu kunyalakan
lagi dengan seluruh semangat bercinta, tetapi ketahuilah bahwa dunia ini bukan lagi dunia ini bukan lagi dunia cinta
orang dusun di mana sang kekasih turun ke pancuran lalu mandi telanjang, kemudian pulang ke dusun membawa air untuk
kekasih. Dunia ini sudah menjadi begitu luas dan kekasih bagaikan kutu-kutu anjing modern yang bisa melompat-lompat
dari benua ke benua, misalnya dari New York ke Bali, kemudian melompat lagi ke Paris.

Kuta! Pantaimu telah memberikan tantangan baru bagi semangatku, bagi cintaku. Kekasih datang, kekasih pergi, ah,
perginya tidak tanggung-tanggung jauhnya. Ya, cinta sudah menjadi kutu anjing modern yang melompat dari kota yang satu
ke kota yang lain yang jauh. (7)

2 Burton, Stacey. “Travel as Dialogic Text: Butor’s Renditiond of “America” and “Australia”.” Genre 28.1-2
(Spring 1995): 17-33.

3 Burton, 25.

4 Said, Edward, W., Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978, 240.

5 Burton, 25.

6 From his Di Bawah Matahari Bali collection of short stories.

7 Adrian Vickers explains in Bali: A Paradise Created, up until the beginning of this century, Bali was most
commonly characterised as Savage Bali. Once conquest (of the ferocious Balinese population) was no longer the central
goal of western concern Bali came to be seen first as “the museum of the ‘classical’ culture of the Indies” (80) and then,
with the emergence of a western interest in travel and tourism, an island of culture and a “disappearing paradise” (98)

8 “Akhirnya, aku merasa bahwa aku adalah sapi perahan.”

9 Sudah lama aku tidak mendengar, bahwa ada wanita yang mencari pelacur lelaki, sehingga aku hampir tak
percaya, dan kemudian aku tidak percaya sama sekali, sampai dengan perjalananku dengan Regina. Tetapi aku bukan
pelacur. Aku seorang guide liar, seorang guide tidak terdaftar yang menyewakan sepeda motor, yang kebetulan menemukan
seorang wanita cantik. Tetapi dia seorang wanita terpelajar, seorang wanita tamatan universitas, dan di atas segala-
galanya adalah seorang penyair. Dengan demikian, maka walaupun aku capek, dan merasa sebagai sapi perahan, dan
sekaligus mengingatkan aku pada pelacur lelaki seperti halnya teman-teman guide liar yang lain, namun aku masih cukup
lega, karena aku tidak terlalu jatuh menjadi sampah pariwisata. (38)

10 Kamu betul-betul orang modern. Lain dengan wanita Indonesia. Lain dengan orang-orang
Indonesia. Kalau aku bertemu dengan wanita Indonesia bukan pelacur yang tidak minta bayaran, maka
Hansip akan mengililingi rumah lalu massa bersama Hansip menangkap basah aku dan wanita Indonesia
itu lalu digiring ke kantor dan di sama di suruh kawin Hansip. Tapi dengan wanita kulit putih semuanya
aman. Kita harus memberi fasilitas kepada semua turis yang datang ke Indonesia. Mereka boleh
menikmati alam, Tarian Legong dan lelaki Indonesia. (17)

11 Ketika ia melihat uang selembar lima ribuan yang masih baru, ia menolak pelukanku, lalu
menari-nari Janger Bali sebentar, lalu mendorong aku dengan penuh kegirangan, “Pergi, pergi, pergi
lagi mencari uang banyak-banyak! (50)

12 “Melompat bagaikan kutu anjing modern ke Benua kanguru itu.”

13 Aku pun menarik napas dalam-dalam dan aku pun sadar bahwa manusia adalah benar-benar kutu anjing. Seperti
kutu anjing, ia mudah melompat dari kota yang satu ke kota yang lain. Setelah mengadakan loncatan jauh, manusia
modern berjemur di pantai, menggelinding di daerah tamasya,makan di restoran dan berkelamin di hotel-hotel. Dan cinta
yang ada pada manusia modern, barangkali bisa disebut cinta kutu anjing! (54)

14 “Membakar handuk maksiatku”

15 “Dan aku segera terobat dari luka dan tipuan cinta kutu anjing”

16 Poyk himself is not Balinese but Timorise, which generates a range of different questions concerning the voice we
are hearing.

17
 Adrian Vickers notes (if such a singularity can be said to exist) it has been and continues to be the overriding
paradigm of Western and Indonesian analysis:
For most Balinese tourism does not determine how their culture is organised on a fundamental level, but it
is the arena in which public discussion over the direction of Bali’s culture takes place. Thus important
decisions about Balinese religion and art are made either by Balinese or by authorities in Jakarta with
reference to tourism… (194)