Halin ai… Bamban Kada Babuah
On the 25th April 2024 we launched Halin ai.. Bamban Kada Babuah, a comic that explores the diverse impacts of urban flooding on communities including women, older people, people living with diffabilities, and informal workers including bin pickers and food and market vendors.
Illustrated and storyboarded by Ariel, and coloured by Zaldi, the comic brings to life lived experiences shared by people living in riverside communities in the city of Banjarmasin in a series of creative workshops led by GENERATE in 2022.
Facilitated by Ariel, these creative workshops invited participants to draw and illustrate their experiences of urban flooding, combining creative expression with discussion and critical reflections on the ways in which social, economic and environmental injustices intersect in their lives to exacerbate the impacts of flooding.
The participants represented a community integral to the social infrastructure that feeds and cleans the city, yet who are excluded from decision-making, urban planning, and disaster risk-reduction processes. They are, however, on the frontline of increasingly unpredictable weather and hazards, living at the intersections of climate, environmental, and social injustice.
These workshops, and the comic itself, explore the different ways in which people experience and navigate the everyday challenges of increasingly frequent and rising tides and floodwaters and unpredictable weather that disproportionately impacts their health, homes and livelihoods.
The comic highlights, in particular, the experiences and perspectives of people living with diffability. We adopt here the term difabel (differently-abled), which was derived by Mansour
The comic aims to foreground the diversity of individual experiences as they encounter and navigate structural inequalities and injustice, highlighting how flooding intersects with gender, age, diffability, poverty, and other structural factors. We have been using it as a tool for engaging communities and stakeholders from city government to mobilise more inclusive and transformative approaches to disaster risk reduction and climate change.
It was launched in partnership with our Kayuh Baimbai diffability-inclusive disaster preparedness toolkit on 25th April 2024.
The comic has been published in Banjar, Bahasa Indonesia, and English.
(Text shared here is borrowed from our 2023 articles: ‘Hanya ada Satu Kata: Lawan! On decolonising and building a mutual collaborative research practice on gender and climate change, Gender & Development, 31:2-3’ and ‘Halin ai: Intersectional Experiences of Disability, Climate Change, and Disasters in Indonesia, Social Inclusion, 11:4’. https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/7105.)
Madihin for Social and Climate Justice in South Kalimantan
In July 2022, Muhammad Budi Zakia Sani and Syahril, two leading Banjarese Pamadihinan, led a Madihin performance on the riverside in Banjarmasin, a city in South Kalimantan.
Madihin was recognised by UNESCO as a form of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014. It is a spontaneous musical monologue repartee in the Banjar language by one or more Pamadihinan (musicians) in traditional dress, who use a drumming instrument called a tarbang. It is witty and fast-paced as the musicians perform by responding to each other, making observations about each other and those around them. The lyrics are often sarcastic, contain social messages, and at the same time make people laugh.
Pamadihinan also use tone, pitch, and facial and bodily expressions to create humour and at the end of their performance they will often (jokingly) apologise to the audience in case their performance has offended them.
In this performance, perched on chairs on a wooden jembatan (bridge) extending over one of Banjarmasin’s fabled 1,000 rivers, the two Pamadihinan performed a Madihin they composed in response to transcripts from GENERATE’s fieldwork across the city. It spotlights the everyday experiences of riverside women who live around the Kuin Estuary.
The Madihin highlights a tapestry of local and global forces at work in the everyday lives of working-class women living on Banjarmasin’s riverside. Through humour it explores and highlights the diverse ways in which climate change in affecting different women.
Across the week before this riverside performance, Zakia Sani collaborated with GENERATE to co-lead a series of community Madihin workshops. Bringing together informal workers, women, older people and people with diffabilities, Zakia taught participants how to drum, the different Madihin rhythms, and how to create the couplets to end and begin on the same rhyming word.
Madihin, the Banjar language, and local dialect, and a popular local form of oral storytelling, was chosen in order to subvert the emphasis on ‘expert’ knowledge when discussing climate change. We instead aimed to focus on experiential and lived knowledge. This allowed our climate change discussions to open according to local vernacular and logics and offered people a tool through which they could share their stories in an entertaining way, bringing participants, researchers, and musicians together to release sadness while simultaneously laughing together.
Humour and laughter not only shaped the emerging stories but were deeply generative and embodied. Humour became (and is) a key coping mechanism and way of challenging a perceived lack of agency. Madihin, a form of oral storytelling, resists the domination of text in knowledge production about climate change. It foregrounds the local values, identities, and priorities that bring people together and shape their resilience to crisis. Our creative Madihin workshops created a safe space for making visible systemic social, climate, and broader tensions and injustices.
These Madihin videos invite us to confront contested notions of agency, power, and inclusion typically obscured in climate research, and shifts our focus from the narratives of ‘experts’ and ‘decision-makers’ to consider the (mostly devalued) everyday labour of people who must adapt and carry each other along.
(Text shared here is borrowed from our 2023 article: ‘Hanya ada Satu Kata: Lawan! On decolonising and building a mutual collaborative research practice on gender and climate change, Gender & Development, 31:2-3’.)