Sonia Fatmarani

How do you tell about a place whose fate is determined by some plants?

Centuries ago, wrote Fatris, Banda was an obsession. The greatest kingdoms in Europe sent their best fleets to search and fight for this territory. At that time, nutmeg and cloves were commodities with exorbitant prices. The demand is high, the suppliers are limited, and the producers are few: Banda is one of them.

The author admits that he spent a lot of time during his visit there. He shared his experiences teaching, attending weddings, swimming, gossiping, and having long conversations with residents about "unimportant things". About hope that never ends, trauma, bloody conflict, fire disaster, to the price of instant noodles. But in many of his paragraphs and sentences, he also fills our heads with various knowledge, history, and past stories about this 172-square-kilometer group of islands.

Fatris had quoted Giles Milton's writings about Banda, that "The aroma of the island will be smelled before we see the land,". The aroma in question certainly refers to the distinctive smell of cloves and nutmeg. However, when Fatris was about to land at Banda port that morning, he admitted that he "could only smell the smell from the stuffy decks mixed with the brackish and salty smell of the ocean". This is the first description in The Banda Journal of how much the Banda Islands have changed from their heyday.

He then wrote about how hundreds of years ago, the British Government was willing to exchange Manhattan for a small island called Rhun in Banda for the success of the monopoly on the nutmeg trade. But in 2016, Fatris had to ride a small motorboat and pass through the sharp rocks that surround Rhun Island when he visited it. Ferries and planes cannot land there. During the hurricane season, which often lasts for months, Rhun is completely isolated. The citizens are trapped. Completely different from Manhattan which is now one of the most modern cities in the world, easily accessible, and has a dynamic city life. Its shape isn’t like an island that is equivalent in value to Manhattan, wrote Fatris.

The two stories above describe precisely how Banda has been transformed, from being one of the most important areas in world trade activities to be one of the underdeveloped areas in Indonesia. I think this is what Fatris wants to convey. The expansion of the nutmeg franchise system and the Industrial Revolution did play a role in Banda's downfall. Even in the nutmeg business today, Banda is no longer known as the largest or main producer.

But the hardest thing that hit Banda was probably its failure to read the shift in market demand. Banda realized too late that the world's technology had gone further than ever. Competitors come from all over the place. While other nutmeg-producing regions have processed their derivative products and turned them into jams and sweets, Banda still relies on trading in raw form. Here, Fatris also presents criticism for the government's failure to develop the nutmeg industry in Banda after Indonesia's independence. Instead of being properly managed, several government programs there have become corrupt projects that have been left abandoned.

The duo Fatris and Fadli were able to present a slick combo of narration and photos in telling Banda. Reading this made me wonder about how it felt to be Hatta and Sjahrir, who were rumored to feel very comfortable during their exile there. And how it feels to be a resident of Banda today, whose grandfather told stories about how their land was once glorious before then fell to become one of the outermost and underdeveloped areas in Indonesia.