In a Jakarta Shelter, a Choir Keeps the Names of Home

JAKARTA — On Thursday evenings, a corridor resettlement centre on the city's northern edge fills with singing, and the songs are all maps. The choir — thirty-odd voices from four drowned coastlines — sings the fishing calls, wedding tunes and street cries of places that the registered migrant count, now approaching 116 million, records only as departures. "We lost the houses. We did not lose the songs," said Ratih Kusuma, who started the group after arriving from a subsided delta town. The centre's coordinator said the choir began as a way to occupy restless evenings and became something the case files have no column for: a way of staying whole. Ethnomusicologists from Pacific Rim University have begun recording the sessions, calling the repertoire a "living atlas" of coastlines the maps are quietly redrawing. The migrants sing places they cannot return to, so that their children will know the places existed at all.