Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive

Chapter 3. A Neurotic Family Romance of Modernity and the National Form

CHAPTEr 3 A Neurotic Family Romance of Modernity and the National Form The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. I would personally say that for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason. (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks) While translating my work of forty years ago I often wanted to enhance or soften the thoughts and feelings that I had poured into Buiten het gareel [Free from Restraints]. But I had already promised not to change even one word in the book. Besides, does it make sense for a 63 year old grandmother to “correct” work that she wrote when she was 25 years old? I felt happier just reading and smiling at my hate, my love, my anger, and my fervor of forty years ago, and longing for those days of my youth. (Soewarsih Djojopoespito, Manusia Bebas) Soewarsih’s Djojopoespito’s Buiten het gareel (Free from Restraints) is an Indies novel written in Dutch about the romance and narrativity of revolutionary activity rather than a novel that hides phantoms from the past.1 It was published in Holland in 1940, just after the Germans invaded Holland. Soewarsih does expose family secrets in her novel, and her activist older sister Soewarni Pringgodigdo was deeply upset about the family stories that the novel tells. It is thus a neurotic family romance, or family narrative, in the sense that Soewarsih’s novel from the late 1930s portrays and then deconstructs the romantic nationalist imaginings of the time. She investigates the limits of Native Indies women’s desires and A neurotic Family romance of Modernity 89 possibilities for emancipation in the intertwined spaces of personal and political life. Freud’s notion of the “family romance” has been popularized by Lynn Hunt as an optic for looking at social histories of revolution. Hunt states: “By family romance I mean the collective, unconscious images of the familial order that underlie revolutionary politics.” In her book The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Hunt focuses on the killing of the monarch during the French Revolution, his replacement by a fraternal order, and the impact of this unique situation on the status and roles of French women.2 Freud’s notion of the family romance, or “the family narrative of neurotics,” refers to several stages in a child’s development where the child wishes to replace one or both of his or her birth parents, for a time, by parents of higher social standing.3 Familial orders are important in Ruth McVey’s 1967 study of the Taman Siswa (Garden of Pupils) school movement of the interwar years in the Dutch Indies. Soewarsih Djojopoespito’s main characters taught in these schools. McVey notes how Figure 5 Soewarsih Djojopoespito, Jogjakarta, ca. 1970. Photograph by rob nieuwenhuys. Courtesy of KITLV Archive. 90 Chapter 3 family relations, albeit very Javanese ones, structure the organization of Taman Siswa schools: “In the Taman Siswa’s official philosophy, the association was seen as a ‘spiritual family,’ of which Ki Hadjar Dewantara was the father and the system’s founding principles the mother. When in 1930 considerations of control and the implementation of the Taman Siswa’s educational principles made it necessary to give the system a regular organizational structure, every effort was made to preserve the familial concept and the idea of paternal leadership.”4 In the Indies, the paternal nature of the Dutch regime, the Indies Natives’ desires to emulate Dutch ways in the early decades of the twentieth century as Dutch language and schooling became available to the children of the elite, and the desire for European status among various Indies peoples make the “family narrative of neurotics” an apt metonymy for the colonial situation. The Indonesian Revolution has not yet been studied as a family romance, and that is not my intention here, but I see the idea of the family romance as a useful one for looking at the early Indonesian nationalist period that is portrayed in novels, letters, essays, and speeches. Hunt mentions that she does not want “to account for” the work of art or literature; instead she wants “to get at the common historical and imaginative processes that animate painting, engraving, and literature—as well as political events during the French Revolution.”5 Hunt’s focus on deconstructing rather than accounting for imaginative processes...