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FIVE Intimate Contention 1. I am struck by the recurrence of the phrase mau kemana in the West Sumatran newspapers of the 1910s and 1920s, and then in the popular novels of the 1930s and 1940s. I have done no comprehensive survey of the phenomenon; however, as a sort of pre-independence mantra mau kemana figures prominently in the writings of such divergent figures as Hamka and Tan Malaka. See Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession.” 2. “Saya korban Revolusi.” Roestam Anwar then continued, dramatically addressing the younger Minangkabau in the group, “Tapi kamu korban Pembangunan!” (But you are victims of [Soeharto’s] Development!). It was 1995 and expressing such a sentiment publicly was risky. Penumbras The revolution is the great eclipse of Indonesian history. Time is marked relative to its passing, all other moments are swallowed up in its shadow. It is awesome, beautiful, and, if stared at directly, blinding. The unexpectedness of the revolution , precipitated by the Japanese occupation, eclipsed the myriad visions of the future that had grown, clandestine and subversive, in the oppression of the Netherlands East Indies. Once the revolution had happened, the incantation mau kemana (where to go?) that had sounded throughout the popular literature of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, was answered.1 Immediately, movements were reoriented and historicized to fit with a nationalist narrative. Deeds were exaggerated; unserviceable alliances were forgotten. As one old man in Padang told me, recalling the postrevolutionary scramble for heroic recognition, “I am a victim of the Revolution.”2 The revolution was largely admirable, and the heroes mostly heroic, but much of Indonesian history has been lost in the shadow zone of this eclipse. It is worthwhile to shake off the strictures of the revolutionary narrative. There is a peculiar illumination to be found in the penumbra. Modern histories of Indonesia have tended to focus on the overtly political —those movements and people whose acts led to today’s nation-state. The understandable appeal of anti-colonial struggle has relegated apolitical organizations to footnotes and caused historians to ignore the intimate histories of family life and household relationships.3 The protagonists in most histories— even the more anthropological and sociological histories—have been the people and movements labeled “modern.” Families and households necessarily insinuate themselves into the biographies and hagiographies of national heroes, but these “modern” men and women were just too modern to be trapped in an anthropological matrix of kinship and culture for very long. In their books, family is confined to first and last chapters—birth and death. A hero’s family is visible only when the hero is helpless. But for many who struggled in the colonial period, “Indonesia” was neither the battlefield nor the prize. Those Sumatrans who saw themselves as participants in the Alam Melayu (Malay World) looked to Singapore and Malaya (and not Java) for a sense of community. Hajjis were inhabitants of the Ummat Islam and maintained ties with Mecca and Cairo. In Minangkabau, there were numerous cultural and political identities from which one could choose. The people in the rallies and on the stages, running the printing presses and huddled in back rooms—although these people addressed a world greater than that of immediate and daily life, and although they fought for vast and inchoate identities—at night still went home to eat and sleep.4 So it was in these homes that the dreams and possibilities articulated by day were tested and challenged when the sun set. The revolution reduced the rumah gadang (the Minangkabau longhouse) to a logo—the emblem on the flip side of the 100-rupiah coin or a silhouette shingle marking Padang-style restaurants. The rumah gadang is now the rumah gadang tradisional—and the flip side of another piece of Indonesian symbolic currency, moderen. It is necessary to analyze the history of the ideas of home and family because the home was not only a mirror for contemporary political thought but also an actively contested and precarious ideological space. Balatentara Nafsu—The Army of Desire Haji Abdul Karim Amrullah, called Haji Rasul, the father of Hamka and author of the Kitab Cermin Terus, formulated in the early 1930s the official Muhammadiyah reformist line on passion and lust: Intimate Contention 113 3. Tony Day has criticized the state-centric historiography of Southeast Asia. Although Day is referring to an earlier period, the influence of nationalism has put blinkers on the study of modern Southeast Asia too. See Tony Day, “Ties That...

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