Sometimes the dead don’t stay buried. Not in the way that
matters.
I’ve seen it myself in the small towns across America—those
forgotten places where old men gather at diners with cracked vinyl seats and
coffee that tastes like it was brewed in 1986. But what I’m about to tell you
isn’t about Estes Park or St. Francisville. This is about something older,
something that crawls through the soil of Indonesia, where the living and dead
maintain a relationship that would make most folks in the American Frontier
cross themselves and look away.
They call it Nyekar.
(That’s “Nye-kar,” if you’re wondering how to pronounce it,
though if you say it wrong, the locals will smile politely and correct you
while their eyes tell you that you’re still an outsider, still someone who
doesn’t get it.)
The tradition is as simple as it is profound—visiting
graves, cleaning them up nice, saying prayers for the departed, and scattering
flowers across the final resting place of those who’ve gone before. Sounds
innocent enough, doesn’t it? Maybe even beautiful. But beneath that peaceful
veneer lies something ancient and powerful that reaches back through centuries,
back before Muslims brought their faith to those islands, back to a time when
gods were numerous and hungry.
I learned about it from an old man in Jakarta, his face a
roadmap of wrinkles that told stories his mouth never would. He lit a cigarette
with hands that trembled just slightly—not from age, I think, but from the
weight of remembering.
“Before Ramadan, we go,” he told me, smoke curling from his
nostrils. “After Eid prayers, we go again. Before weddings, before a son’s
circumcision.” He looked at me, making sure I understood the gravity of what he
was saying. “We never forget them. And they never forget us.”
The word itself—Nyekar—comes from the Javanese “sekar,”
meaning flower. But this isn’t some pleasant garden party. This is about
maintaining connections with those who’ve crossed over to whatever waits on the
other side.
You might be thinking this sounds like Mexico’s Day of the
Dead or similar traditions, but you’d be wrong. Dead wrong. There’s something
uniquely potent about Nyekar, something that got under my skin the first time I
witnessed it in a small cemetery outside Yogyakarta, where the air hung heavy
with the scent of jasmine, frangipani, and incense.
* * *
The Prophet Muhammad—peace be upon him, as the faithful
say—initially forbade his followers from visiting graves. That’s a fact that
seems important somehow, like the first warning in a horror movie that nobody
heeds. He was worried about his newly converted flock falling back into old
ways, into the trap of polytheism, of associating partners with Allah.
But later, as their faith grew stronger, he changed his
mind. “I used to forbid you from visiting graves,” he said, “but now visit
them.”
Why the change of heart? Because graves remind you of death.
Of your own mortality. Of the hereafter.
I’ve thought about that a lot—how something forbidden can
become permitted, even encouraged. How thin the line is between reverence and
something darker. Something hungrier.
In Java, the tradition took root and flourished under the
Wali Sanga—the nine saints who spread Islam across the island, blending it with
existing beliefs like food coloring in water until you couldn’t tell where one
ended and the other began.
The Javanese already had Sraddha—an ancient Hindu ceremony
to honor the dead. The saints didn’t stamp it out. They transformed it,
baptized it in monotheism while preserving its beating heart.
Clever.
* * *
I visited a grave site in Bekasi once—the Batok Sacred
Grave, they called it. Discovered around 1636 during the Dutch colonial period.
The locals spoke of it in hushed tones, about the power of the man buried
there—a religious figure who fought against the Dutch.
People still come seeking blessings, whispering requests to
bones that have long since turned to dust.
“Does it work?” I asked my guide, a twenty-something guy
named Arif with keen eyes and a smartphone that kept buzzing in his pocket.
He shrugged, but his eyes betrayed him. They always do.
“Sometimes,” he said finally. “When you believe enough.”
That’s the thing about belief, isn’t it? It has power. Real
power. The kind that lingers long after the believers themselves have turned to
dust and bone.
The flowers they scatter—jasmine, frangipani, roses,
ylang-ylang—they’re not just pretty decorations. They’re messengers. Offerings.
Keys to a lock most of us pretend doesn’t exist.
Some Islamic scholars point to a hadith—a saying of the
Prophet—where Muhammad planted wet palm branches on graves to ease the
punishment of the deceased. Sheikh As-Syarbini explains that these branches can
be replaced with flowers or fresh plants.
That’s the official explanation, anyway. The one that makes
everyone comfortable, that lets them sleep at night without wondering what’s
really happening when those flower petals touch the soil above a grave.
But I’ve been there at dusk when the shadows grow long and
the boundary between worlds thins like worn fabric. I’ve seen old women with
backs bent from decades of hard work place their offerings with trembling hands
and whisper words that sound more ancient than any formal prayer.
They’re not just honoring the dead.
They’re negotiating with them.
* * *
The fusion of pre-Islamic beliefs with Islamic practices has
produced something unique in Indonesia—a tradition with layers like geological
strata, each telling a different story about the people who lived and died on
those islands.
King Hayam Wuruk attended a family Nyekar ceremony in Kalayu
Village back in 1359 AD. It’s right there in the Negarakertagama, Pupuh 31:
“Kalayu is the name of a perdikan kasogatan village, the
site of the temple tomb of the king’s relatives. The Nyekar at the tomb was
performed with great respect.”
Almost seven hundred years ago. Think about that. While
Europe was still in the grips of the Black Death, Javanese royalty were already
performing these rituals, already maintaining that connection between the
worlds of the living and the dead.
Seven hundred years of flowers scattered on graves. Seven
hundred years of prayers whispered into the earth. Seven hundred years of
remembering.
That’s the kind of power that doesn’t just fade away. It
builds. It accumulates. Like radiation, like compound interest.
Like dread.
* * *
Today, Nyekar remains deeply embedded in Indonesian Muslim
society. Isfiana Oktaria Nasihatul Umami—try saying that five times fast—wrote
in some academic journal that it helps maintain social relationships,
strengthens cultural identity, and preserves ancestral heritage.
All true, I’m sure. But there’s more to it than that. There
always is.
The practice demonstrates the success of cultural
adaptation, where the core principles of Islam merge with local customs. It’s a
testament to human ingenuity, to our ability to find compromises between the
old and the new, between what we’re told to believe and what we can’t help but
feel in our bones.
But sometimes, late at night when the world grows quiet and
my thoughts turn to those flower-strewn graves half a world away, I wonder who
really adapted to whom. I wonder about those wet palm branches the Prophet
placed on graves to ease suffering, about the flowers that replaced them, about
the whispered requests and the answers that sometimes come.
I wonder what happens in the soil beneath those scattered
petals, in that liminal space where worlds touch and boundaries blur.
And I wonder if, perhaps, the dead are not simply being
remembered.
Maybe they’re being fed.
(You know what I mean, constant reader. You know exactly
what I mean.)
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