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[Women's Worlds]
Buried Youth
Author: Ade Tanesia
Photographs by
 
 

That afternoon, the hot sun beating down on the arid landscape made Wonosari seem more barren than ever. After a three-hour journey from Jogjakarta, Central Java, eighteen-year-old Yuli finally arrived in Alang-Alang Sari, the village where she was born. She was there to try to convince her fifteen-year-old sister Nining to come to Jogja where she could find work as a house servant. Their father, a bakpao seller, had told Yuli that Nining was now ready to start work.

Nining had completed primary school almost a year ago, and since then she had stayed at home helping her mother with the cooking, babysitting her younger brothers and sisters and working in the fields. She didn't really feel ready to go to work as a servant like her sister, who had left the village in search of a better life. Although her father urged her to go, she was reluctant to leave the warmth and familiarity of her home. But she kept remembering her sister's words: "Ning, you have to get away from home. If you don't, they'll force you to get married soon."

When Nining saw one of her school friends preparing to get married, she finally agreed to go off to Jogja to work. Nining's friend Nur had actually wanted to get a job but had been forbidden by her parents. Fifteen years old, Nur had a boyfriend and she agreed to marry him. Her parents intended for Nur to look after her younger brother while her mother went to working selling produce. Nur's husband would live in her parents' home, and before she had her own children Nur would be able to look after both her little brother and her husband. Nining did not want to suffer the same fate as Nur, especially since she had no experience of men. As far as Nining was concerned, men were strange and unfamiliar beasts.

Finally the day came when Yuli arrived for her. With a heavy heart, Nining packed her bag with only two changes of clothes. "I don't need to take a lot of stuff with me since I might not want to stay very long," she thought to herself. As she left the village, all the neighbours came out on their front porches and called out, "Nining, are you going off to work? Make sure you work hard, Ning!" Everyone in the small village knew that Nining didn't really want to go off to work, but they let her go-they even handed out advice for her new life in the city.

The village of Alang-Alang Sari is a dry and barren place, and its inhabitants are caught in a constant cycle of poverty and hardship. Being able to complete a high school education is a rare luxury. Girls are considered lucky if they get to finish primary school or junior high school, and because of their low education levels the only jobs open to them are as household servants in the city. Their choices are extremely limited: leave the village in search of low-paying employment or stay in the village where it is virtually certain they will end up married young.

The villagers of Alang-Alang Sari don't consider teenage marriage unusual. Nining's Aunt Rumi married when she was fifteen. "My husband and I didn't have a courtship," she remembers. "I knew him before we married because his family's house is next to ours. When his parents came to ask for my hand, my parents asked me if I consented to the marriage. I just agreed straight away." Rumi wasn't forced into marriage, she just did what all the other girls in her village did. She had no ambitions to go on to further education or get a job in the city. Now her time is taken up caring for her two children, while her husband lives in Jogja selling snacks at a market to support them.

Suparmi, from the neighbouring village of Sumber, tells much the same story. She married when she was fifteen, just as she was completing her final exams at junior high school. Encouraged by her schoolteacher, she had the confidence to at least finish junior high. She went straight from one of her exams to her wedding, and her teacher and fellow students came to the ceremony after school.

"In our culture, it's considered rude to refuse marriage," says Nining's mother. She says she doesn't mind the thought of a man wanting to marry her teenage daughter. "I got married when I was fifteen. My husband and I didn't date. His parents came along and asked if I would marry his son and I agreed to it, just like that. Getting married to him was my fate."

Yuli, however, is different. People tried to match her with a husband, but she chose to look for work in the city instead. "I'm really scared to stay in the village," she says. "My mother might even put a magical spell on me to make me want to get married. Lots of parents do that to their children so that they get married sooner than they want." Luckily for Yuli, her father didn't agree with the idea that she marry young. He was afraid life might be hard for her. "It's my mother who wants me to get married soon. Sometimes I ask her if I'm a lot of trouble to her. Is that why she wants me to get married soon? But my mother says I'm no trouble at all," says Yuli, though she sounds a bit doubtful.

According to the Indonesian government's 1974 marriage law, the minimum marriage age for men is nineteen and for women sixteen. However, many have complained that this is too young, and there are currently efforts being made to raise the minimum age for women to twenty-one. Critics of teenage marriage argue that teenagers' reproductive systems are susceptible to a variety of illnesses and that there is a much higher incidence of infant and maternal mortality with teenage pregnancies. "Because the reproductive system of a teenage girl is not yet fully developed, there are many possible health problems during pregnancy and delivery. Usually these women will suffer infections in the future, and the worst case scenario is that they will get uterine cancer," says Nari, a counsellor for teenagers at the Indonesian Family Planning Unit.

In the face of these government regulations, parents often resort to tricks or outright lies to arrange the marriage of their children. For instance, they might claim that their child is twenty rather than only fifteen. In poor regions like Gunung Kidul, few children have official birth certificates, and even if they do, it's usually easy to find a sympathetic-or corrupt-official. In Sukapura, West Java there was a case of parents wishing to marry off their daughter who at the time was only in the fourth grade of primary school. When they appeared at the marriage registrar's office, they substituted an older girl in order to disguise their daughter's true age.

The challenges of teen marriage are dramatic enough that they have even been made into a highly popular new soap opera, Pernikahan Dini or "Early Marriage," about a married teenage couple. Although for young city girls this show might be fascinating fiction, for many other young Indonesian women it's an everyday reality. Research conducted in 1998 found that 42% of Indonesian teenagers are married, with 75% of them married at age 17 or younger. Teen marriage happens in isolated places like West Irian, but also in villages only a short drive from major cities like Jogjakarta. In regions like Gunung Kidul where poverty is endemic, early marriage is often welcomed by parents, who then have one less mouth to feed.

But teenage marriage is not just a matter of economics. The area of Boyolali is located on the slopes of Mount Merapi, about two hours' drive from Jogjakarta. Most of its inhabitants are tobacco farmers, and a few grow vegetables to sell in the city. Their living conditions are much better than those of the people of Gunung Kidul. If they continue to marry off their daughters at a young age, it's not because they can't afford to support them. Some of these families can even afford a good education for their daughters. But a combination of parental and peer pressures often forces young women into marriage.

Miyah lives in Genting village in the Boyolali area. Her parents forced her to get married a year ago at the age of fifteen. Miyah says she didn't even like the man she was forced to marry, although she tried to get to like him. Not even the entertaining shadow puppet play performed at her wedding reception could stop her constant weeping. Sitting on the bridal dais, her cheeks were damp with tears for the entire evening. It wasn't that she didn't want to get married-she just didn't like the man she was marrying. But while Miyah was powerless to stop the marriage, she could still resist becoming a willing bride. After the wedding, Miyah refused to move to her husband's home. She remained with her own family and the newlyweds never ended up sharing a home together. Although they did not get divorced, their marriage was considered by the community to be a total failure. People in the village said that both of them were still virgins.

Few people in these villages think in terms of a woman's choice or long-term goals. Such notions have little place in a homogenous society where virtually everyone is a farmer. Mas Suroso, a village man, explains, "Girls usually get married here when they're teenagers. We work as farmers, so we don't need a lot of school education. Two of the villagers here got university educations and they ended up coming back to grow tobacco. So what's the point of having a college education? Things are different here in the village. City people think long and hard about who they will marry, but we just get married. We don't have to think a lot about the future. Whatever is meant to be will happen."

Gese, who lives in Kajor village on the slopes of Mount Merapi, was also forced into marriage at the age of fifteen. Her education ended when she completed primary school, and she has never travelled outside her village. "I never had a boyfriend, I just got married when my parents told me," she says. Gese was terrified of refusing her parents. "If we don't do what our parents want, we could get kicked out of our family or have to leave the village. And then where would we go?" she asks.

When asked if it was difficult to spend her wedding night with a man she didn't even know, Gese answered simply, "As a woman, I have to obey my husband." Soon after her marriage, Gese became pregnant, but her baby died when it was one month old. Her second baby was stillborn when she was nine months pregnant. "I was so sad," she says softly. When she asked the advice of a traditional healer, he told her that the death of her two babies was the will of God and that she just had to accept her fate.

For Gese, getting married at fifteen was nothing extraordinary. "All the girls here get married young," she says. "At twenty you're too old for marriage. You end up being called a perawan tua (an 'old virgin')." Being called an "old virgin" is a serious embarrassment for a girl and her family because it implies that she didn't "sell" and that no man wishes to marry her. Rather than suffer this stigma, many girls choose to marry young.

Yuli, and now Nining, will soon become "old virgins." But in Jogja they will also get a chance to see other ways of life. They will know that women can still marry at the age of thirty or later, and that marriage can be a kind of partnership between two friends. What they do with this knowledge-and what influence they might have on the other young women of their village-remains to be seen.

Ade Tanesia is Associate Editor of Latitudes Magazine.