Security Gates

Friendly City in the perspective of Postcolonial Theory

By: M. Nawawiy Loebis

Security gates is a metaphor of insecurities applied by

authority over its citizens, security gates is also a
mechanism of control to empashized the power of
authority, place all beings under conditions of suspicious
and even suspicious to himself. Security gates are a
symbol of inequality, greed, fear and terror. Security gates
are the peaks of Paranoia and Schizophrenia.
• A friendly city is a city that gives us a sense of comfort and happiness.
• If that so, do you feel friendly if
o you surrounded by threats, being pickpocketed in public transportation,
o robbed in a quiet road in the city,
o hours of being framed in a traffic jam,
o and could not go anywhere due to of the flood in some cities,
• these are the states in almost every developing poor country that can be experienced daily in
Indonesia.
• You might consider this is a common problem that can be easily dealt
with by for example provided infrastructure,
• if so why it can not be dealt with for decades and its conditions
becoming worse.
• The answer to that is, what we see is actually only a symptom. and
symptoms can not be solved or cured if the cause has not been found
yet.
• Do you feel friendly if you are an urban immigrant working as a
garbage collector, driver, housekeeper or an office boy in a multinational
company?. While you migrates due to losing your jobs in your home
villages due to competitions with the owner of large capitals that owned
millions hectares of lands in the villages that transforms it into a
commercial farm and exarerbated by the cheap imported agricultural
commodities that continuously be implemented by your government.

• Do you feel friendly in the city if you are jobless so you have to live
below the bridge or squatter alongside the river bank or railway

• How many migrant living in the city?. The big Indonesia city nearly
empty when they return home during the muslim holiday, the high way
stuck, a lot of migrant dies due to accident, however they insist to go
back home to the only friendly place they ever found in they are
experience.
• The migrant experienced alienation In the city , they are not respected
by not calling their name but by their profession, such as night
watchman, a security guard, a maid, a garbage man, rickshaw driver,
office boy. in order to distinguish one another and they get a nameplate
on their chest so easy to be recognized, or wearing a company uniform
with logo, signifies that he is a company property.
• They are merely a profession that had no relationship with other
residents.
• On the contrary, it is a different situation in their villages of origins,
where they are called according to his affinity status in the community
who knew him well, they are called as uncles, aunts, in- laws, and
every other call conditioned by emotional relationship, no barriers, no
class and no wall, which they did not find in the city of individualistic
life. That’s is why, they have to go back home annually, to recharge
their humanity, to be a human again at least once in a year.
Do you feel friendly, when you threatened with the bomb which can kill
you any minute, we always find ourselves nervous when we use public
transport systems or in crowds, due to frequent bomb scares (Misselwitz,
Weizman and 2003: 272 ).

The feeling of suspicious or being suspected, Do you feel friendly if you

were treated as a suspected person as in George Orwell's fictional Novel
where people are suspicious of one another.

What do you feel when you go through a security gate? Actually, who is
being suspected?. Of course, you are not feel suspected because you know
you do not carry bombs but you have to go through security gate because
you are suspected by others, you feel comfortable because you do not
suspect yourself, yet you feel security gate is necessary to your security to
avoid others who you suspect might be carrying the real bombs.
The country for security reasons passed this matter into a law, which
means the country asserted that it is not safe place. You will be lock up
just for saying a word bomb in the public space. the security gate set in the
shopping center, hotels, offices area, terminals, bus stations, train stations
and etc. Why? Because the city is under suspicion and we are suspecting
each other, and it is officially recognized by authority who dictated by
super power.
The question is, can a city that has been threatened with a bomb like the
describe above being friendly?.

• Are friendly, just the completeness of the facility infrastructure in

accordance with standard physical cities in developed countries,
without considering the economic condition, sociological and
psychological? of its inhabitants.

• Are friendly cities may be built by the suspicious authority ?. Friendly

city is the possibility, struggle, war, that must be won by the removal of
oppression done by colonialism, liberalism, capitalist, communist, and
neo liberalism, neo imperialism who theoretically created the condition
above due to unequilitas and oppression which affected the whole place
especially big cities in a developing country.
The Thirld Alternative
• After the second world war,, which are capitalism and communism as
the winner have divided worlds. The world was divided into two
primary systems political, capitalism and socialism, and they are named
the First and Second world
• Some of their former colony struggle hard to gained independence
many of this newly independence countries located in the southern part
of the globe exactly Asia and Africa. So to distinguish the state of
colonial and its former colonist the former called West countries
(colonial) and the latter called Eastern Countries (colonialize) or simply
called North (colonial) and South (colonialized).
• Some independent newly independence countries joined and calling
themselves non-aligned countries which have no affiliation with the
First and the Second countries who has ruled, colonized, killing and
gutting the the natural resources of their former colonized country.
• Non-aligned non-blocks countries, holds a conference in Bandung in
1955. In many ways, the Bandung conference marks the origin of the
terminology Postcolonialism,a self-conscious political philosophy.
They saw themselves as an independent power block, of a new 'third
world' perspective on political, economic, and cultural global priorities.

• The event was enormous importance; it symbolized the common

attempt of the colonialized people to throw off the colonial white
western nations. Politically, there was to be a third way, neither that of
the capitalist nor that of the communism block.

• However, that third way was slow to be developed. The term

gradually became associated with the economic and political problems
that such countries encountered, and consequently colored with
poverty, cities problems described in the beginning of this paper,
once again fall into the hand of neo imperialis or neo colonial countries.
Cities of War
• Fortified cities, as an indication of insecurity to protect their citizens
from military force has been found alongside the history. Athena,
China great wall to keep the Mongol outside, Roman Hadrian wall in
England and Malacca fortified city.
• Acts of war and terror against cities and their inhabitants are saturating
our world. The city, with its buttressed walls, its ramparts and moats,
stood as an outstanding display of ever-threatening aggression’’
(Mumford, 1961: 44).
• The sacking and killing of fortified cities and their inhabitants was the
central event in premodern war (Weber, 1958).
• Some even argue that the imperative of ‘‘security’’ is beginning to
overwhelm the other, city aspects such as social welfare, education,
health, infrastructure development, economic regulation, and planning.
• In the modern times, fortification has changed into a security system
such as immigration act that prevent the enemy of state outside the
boundary. Once more, security gates is used to find a suspected person.
The expanding neo imperialis and metropolitan cities that lay at the
core of nation were no longer organizers their own armies and
fortification, but they maintained political power and control,
repression, and the neo colonial acquisition of territory, raw
materials, wealth, and labor power from afar (Driver and Gilbert,
2003).
• Furthermore, the distant control relay on programs imposed on many
nations such as the IMF, WTO, and World Bank, in fact such programs
have added to the sense of crisis in many cities. This is because they
have directly resulted in the erosion of social and economic security
and the further immiseration of the urban poor (Schneider and
Susser, 2003).
Cities, warfare, and organized political violence have always been
mutual constructions.
”The city, the polis, is constitutive of the
form of conflict called war“,
just as war is itself constitutive of the political form called the city’’
(Virilio, 2002: 5)
Translation dan Hybridization
in the context of
Postcolonialism
Translation
Translation is also a kind of metaphorical displacement of a text from one
language to another. Aristoteles described translation as an elaboration of
something with something else that totally have no similarities. In the
context of Postcolonialism theory, colonialism has translated an indigenous
culture into the subordinated culture of a colonial regime, or the
superimposition of the colonial apparatus into which all aspects of the
original culture have to be reconstructed. However, certain aspects of the
indigenous culture may remain untranslatable. As a practice, translation
begins as a matter of intercultural communication, which involves the
power and domination. Therefore related to political issues and its links to
current forms of power, as a consequence translation never takes place in
an entirely neutral space.
• Translation becomes part of the process of domination, of achieving
control, a violence carried out on the language, culture, and people
being translated.

• The close links between colonization and translation begin not with acts
of exchange, but of violence and appropriation, of 'deterritorialization'.
Failure of translation by either by colonial or by colonialized becomes a
force of resistance, resisting the opponent.

• Translation becomes central to the migrant's experience in the

postcolonial city, as she or he takes on the more active role of cultural
translator. Having translated themselves, migrants then encounter other
translated men, other restless marginals, and translate their experiences
to each other to form new languages of desire and affirmation.
Translation is not a neutral operation between two equal languages or
cultural sites.
In case of colonialism, translation turns into a tool for the construction
and exercise of European authority in mainly three aspects:

• First, the representation of the other as inferior;

• Second, the teaching of European languages;
• Third, the elimination of differences as a means of control.

Western education served to accomplish many goals simultaneously: to

pass on Western knowledge, to make indigenius appreciate the greatness of
western civilisation and to convert colonised subjects to Christianity.
(Bhabha 1990b: 211).
Hybridization
• The hybrid is ‘neither one nor the other’, instead, it is always in-
between, where it continually transforms itself according to the
dynamics of cultural interaction. Babha introduced the concept of ‘The
Third Space’ as a manifestation of ‘hybridity which enables other
positions to emerge’. (Bhabha 1990b: 211).
• Hybridisation, then, represents the constant, never-ending process of
cultural interaction through which cultures continue to exist in a constant
process through which cultures and cultural elements are rearticulated
and gain renewed meanings, materials, forms, construction techniques
and ornamentation.
• As a consequence, hybridity, as a cultural condition, allows minority
positions to deploy the partial culture from where they emerge and,
so, to construct their own visions of community and their own
version of historic memory, in order minority peoples contest the
hegemonic power.
Hybridization&Third Space