Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive

Chapter 5. Trauma and Its Doubles in Postcolonial Masculinity

CHAPTEr 5 Trauma and Its Doubles in Postcolonial Masculinity For we, even as audience, do not yet feel free from the savage events before and after 1 October 1965. For we are not visitors [to Indonesia]. We are not foreigners. We bear this burden of history—a burden that others do not have; the burden not only of trauma, but also of hope. (Goenawan Mohamad, “The Violent”) What are the threads that are unwoven which this work of “untying” bears upon? Freud spoke of “memories” and “expectations” attaching us to the other. What he doesn’t take account of, but which is rarely absent—precisely in the fabric, the context of those memories and expectations—is the place for the message of the other. For the person in mourning, that message has never been adequately understood , never listened to enough. Mourning is hardly ever without the question: what would he be saying now? What would he have said? Hardly ever without regret or remorse for not having been able to speak with the other enough, for not having heard what he had to say. (Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness) In 1963 H. B. Jassin, Goenawan Mohamad, Arief Budiman, and other artists and writers signed the “Cultural Manifesto” (I Manifes Kebudajaan, Manikebu), proclaiming their right to artistic freedom. At the time the politics of LEKRA, the left-leaning arts organization supported by President Soekarno and Pramoedya Ananta Toer, were at their most strident , calling for artists and writers to adhere to the aesthetics and priorities 160 Chapter 5 of socialist realism.1 The ideas that Soewarsih Djojopoespito and Armijn Pané advocated in their essays of the late 1930s and early 1940s on universal humanism, individualism, and the rakyat, or people, were at the heart of these heated debates over artistic and intellectual freedom in the postcolonial state of Indonesia. Poet, activist, and journalist Goenawan Mohamad, supporter of the “Cultural Manifesto,” remembers that he became something of an outcast during those years, and he eventually left the country to study in Belgium. It was while Goenawan was in Belgium that the Soekarno government fell and the killings began. Silence surrounded the killings of 1965–1966, which took the lives of over a half a million people, most of whom died in Java and Bali.2 Because of the brutality of Indonesia’s New Order regime, its censorship practices, and the whitewashing of its complicity in the deaths of up to a million of its people over its thirty-two years of rule, most stories and memories of the 1965–1966 violence were repressed until the fall of the New Order in May of 1998. The New Order government of Major General and then President Suharto, who forced Soekarno to surrender all power to him in March of 1966, silenced all stories of the killings except its own. New stories of the 1965–1966 violence began to appear in Indonesia after the relaxing of press censorship that began at the end of the New Order, and that moment of openness was one of the benefits of the brief post–New Order Reformasi (Reform) period.3 Robert Cribb has described how the killings of 1965–1966 took place in small groups so that a person would only have had knowledge of a small number of deaths: “The nature of the killing in 1965–66—commonly dispersed , nocturnal and by small groups—was such that no one could possibly have had first or even second hand involvement in more than a small portion of the total number of deaths.”4 Each person who took part in the killings would have known his fellow killers and their victims—often very well—but would not have known how many others knew of their killings or how many others took part in other killings. This is reminiscent of Couperus’ novel Old People and Things That Pass Them By, discussed in Chapter 2, in which the old people were waiting to die and to take their memories of violence with them. In waiting for the “Thing,” the evil, to pass, the three perpetrators of the crime would be dead, but only after sixty long years. And, before they died, they continued to believe they had succeeded in hiding their crimes of passion and murder from their families and society. They did not know that the child Harold had witnessed the Trauma and Its Doubles in Postcolonial Masculinity...