There are things that die slow in this world, and if you’ve
lived long enough—really lived, not just existed like some folks do, shuffling
through their days like zombies in a Romero flick—you’ll know that the slowest deaths
are often the most terrible. Not the quick, merciful kind that comes with a
heart attack or a car wreck on Route 9, but the kind that eats you from the
inside out, one piece at a time, until there’s nothing left but the memory of
what used to be.
That’s what happened to Manglé.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? That’s what my
editor always tells me—“Rye, you sonofabitch, start at the beginning.” So let
me tell you about a boarding house on a street that used to be called Kebon
Kembang but isn’t anymore, because nothing stays the same forever, does it? Not
streets, not people, and sure as hell not magazines.
The Birth of Something Beautiful
Picture this: It’s the 1950s, and the world still smells
like hope and cigarettes. In a boarding house in Bogor—that’s in Indonesia, for
those of you who skipped geography class to smoke behind the gym—a group of men
are arguing about what to call their baby. Their magazine baby, that is.
Wahyu Wibisana, a name that rolls off the tongue like honey
mixed with broken glass, suggested “Manglé.” In Sundanese—and here’s where it
gets interesting, folks—Manglé means “flower garland,” specifically jasmine.
The kind Sundanese brides wear in their hair, white as wedding promises and
twice as fragile.
But here’s the thing about jasmine: it’s beautiful, sure,
but it dies fast. Real fast. And maybe, just maybe, that should have been their
first warning.
Rochana Sudarmika, the boarding house owner with the kind of
practical mind that sees dollar signs where others see dreams, loved the name.
Her husband, Oeton Moechtar, was the kind of man who put his money where his
mouth was—ten thousand rupiahs and five typewriters, which in 1957 might as
well have been Fort Knox and a printing press.
When they offered Moechtar the editor’s chair, he did what
smart men do when they sense trouble coming: he passed the buck to his wife and
ran. Not literally, you understand. He had important forestry business to
attend to. Trees don’t cut themselves down, after all.
The Golden Years (Before the Rot Set In)
November 21, 1957. Mark that date, because it’s important.
That’s when Manglé crawled out into the world, squalling and pink and full of
potential. Five hundred copies of something called Sekar Manglé, with a
cover featuring Ika Rostika, a traditional singer who probably never imagined
her face would become the birth announcement of a cultural institution.
Twenty pages. Black and white. Blurry as a drunk man’s
vision and twice as uncertain. But it was theirs, and that meant
something in a world where most things belonged to somebody else.
The magazine grew, as healthy things do. By the time it
moved to Bandung in 1962—and there’s something about that move that feels like
crossing a threshold, doesn’t it?—circulation had swelled to nearly 100,000
copies. For a regional-language magazine, that was like hitting the lottery and
getting struck by lightning on the same day.
Mh. Rustandi Kartakusumah took over when Wibisana fled to
Bandung like a man running from something he couldn’t name. Kartakusumah was
different—a writer who’d rubbed shoulders with the big boys, taught at Yale and
Harvard, brought a whiff of the wider world to their little Sundanese garden.
Under his watch, Manglé transformed from a simple
entertainment rag into something more. Something that mattered. It carried
fairy tales and short stories, sure, but also politics and culture and all the
messy, beautiful complications of human existence.
The Slow Slide into Darkness
But here’s the thing about golden ages—they end. They always
end. Usually with a whimper, not a bang, though sometimes you don’t notice the
sound until it’s too late.
The first crack in the foundation came in the late 1990s,
when Indonesia’s economy went to hell in a handbasket. Circulation dropped from
100,000 to 50,000, then to a pathetic 4,000 copies. Imagine that—going from a
minor celebrity to a street corner nobody in the span of a few years.
The Sundanese were forgetting their own language, you see.
Kids found it easier to learn English than the tongue their grandmothers had
sung them to sleep with. Schools stopped subscribing. Government agencies cut
their orders. The very people Manglé was supposed to serve were walking away,
one by one, like guests leaving a party that had gone on too long.
The Living Dead
By the 2000s, Manglé had become something between a zombie
and a ghost—not quite dead, but not really alive either. Circulation stabilized
somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 copies, which sounds better than it is when
you remember what they used to be.
The magazine kept publishing, kept trying to matter, kept
featuring Sundanese women on its covers like some kind of cultural CPR. But you
can’t breathe life into something that’s already drowning, can you?
Other magazines tried to compete—Kujang, Sunda
Midang, names that probably mean something beautiful in Sundanese but sound
like whispers in a graveyard to the rest of us. But Manglé outlasted them all,
not because it was stronger, but because it was too stubborn to die.
The Rescue (Or Is It?)
Recently—and this is where the story gets interesting
again—Universitas Padjadjaran stepped in like some kind of academic knight in
shining armor. They took over Manglé through their Sundanese Cultural Center,
promising to digitize it, preserve it, make it relevant again.
But here’s what they don’t tell you in the press releases:
you can’t resurrect something that died of natural causes. Oh, you can prop up
the corpse, put some digital makeup on it, maybe even make it dance a little.
But it’s still dead underneath.
What Dies and What Lives On
So what does this all mean, this slow-motion tragedy of a
magazine that outlived its welcome? Maybe it means that some things are
supposed to die. Maybe it means that holding onto the past too tightly is just
another way of refusing to live in the present.
Or maybe—and this is the thought that keeps me up at night,
the one that scratches at the inside of my skull like fingernails on a coffin
lid—maybe it means that we’re all just magazines, aren’t we? All just
collections of stories and memories and fading photographs, slowly losing
circulation until there’s nobody left to read us.
Manglé isn’t really about a magazine, you see. It never was.
It’s about the things we love and the way they die despite our best efforts to
keep them alive. It’s about languages that become whispers, cultures that
become museum pieces, and the terrible, inevitable entropy that eats everything
in the end.
But maybe—just maybe—that’s not the end of the story. Maybe
somewhere in Bandung, in a digitized archive that smells like server farms
instead of printing ink, Manglé is still alive. Still telling its stories.
Still wearing jasmine in its hair.
After all, the best ghost stories aren’t about the dead.
They’re about what refuses to stay buried.
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