Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive

Chapter 6. Masculinist Trauma and Feminist Melancholia

CHAPTEr 6 Masculinist Trauma and Feminist Melancholia To see the myth in the natural and the real in the magic, to demythologize history and to reenchant its reified representation; that is a first step. To reproduce the natural and the real without this recognition may be to fasten ever more firmly the hold of the mythic. (Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man) Then it was 1966 and just remembering the date makes people here shudder, even little things about any neighbor who was killed when the troops of the angel of death incarnated on earth as humans, but we never knew who they were. We only knew when they were already herding us toward the gaping hole, their faces dark and eyes missing. We couldn’t trust anybody, not our lovers, not even our own selves. Because at that time only by pointing to someone else could we save ourselves, moving the death over our heads over the head of another. (Utami, Larung) Ayu Utami is one of the most impressive of the post–New Order generation of novelists writing in Indonesia today. Combining her skills in research journalism with a poetic feel for language and a fresh approach to human subjectivity and sexuality, Ayu’s novels have become popular in Indonesia and beyond.1 Ayu’s novel Saman and its sequel Larung investigate how trauma shapes and haunts Indonesian archives. Because history writing during the New Order period (March 1966 to May 1998) was supposed to follow New Order master narratives, and foreign researchers MasculinistTrauma and Feminist Melancholia 177 could be banned from Indonesia for stirring up controversial memories, the body of information about the psychological aftereffects of the violence of the New Order government has been growing slowly as Indonesian and non-Indonesian scholars document the recent past.2 Since the late 1990s critical work by Indonesian scholars taking an analytical approach to the violence of the 1960s and the later New Order period has appeared, and it may take a generation to rethink the historiography of the late twentieth century.3 It is in novels like Ayu’s that oppositional interpretations of the New Order survive. Ten years after Pramoedya’s novel about haunting, hallucinations, and the construction and deconstruction of Indonesian archives, the novels of Ayu Utami bring new perspectives and new politics of location to these issues. Figure 9 Ayu utami, ca. 2000. Courtesy of Lontar Foundation, Jakarta. 178 Chapter 6 Saman and Larung and indonesian Histories Like Pramoedya’s House of Glass, Ayu Utami’s first two novels, Saman and Larung, also present doubled heroes: the activists Saman, a former priest, and the mysterious and psychotic Larung. Pramoedya’s twinned heroes show the dark and the light side of the nationalist ideal. Ayu’s twinned heroes are both activists for the cause of the nation, but one is sane and one is not. In novels that reveal the brutality and sensuality of life in late New Order Indonesia, Ayu Utami depicts ghosts and haunted characters. In her work, Ayu portrays events and characters that suggest that postreformasi Indonesia still suffers from the traumas of the New Order period and that melancholia or depression may be the affect haunting contemporary Indonesia. In her novel Bilangan Fu (The Fu Numeral) of 2008, discussed below, Ayu offers an alternative to critical melancholia, what she calls critical spiritualism (I spiritualisme kritis), as a different hope for Indonesia’s future.4 Ayu’s novels offer glimpses into the traumatic conditions just before and after the fall of the New Order in 1998 as well as the earlier violence of the mid-1960s in Indonesia. Reading them closely does not imply a search for truth, but rather a path for insight into habitual and emotional life in the New Order period and an exploration of practices of mourning, melancholia , and survival. Ayu’s novels are treated here as part of an archive of testimonies that bear witness to the excesses and atrocities of Indonesia’s New Order government. In 1965–1966 and after, those responsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands of supposed communists in Java, Bali, and elsewhere in Indonesia were treated as heroes, and what they did was argued to have saved the nation from the evils of communism. This message was constantly reiterated during the thirty-two years of the New Order through yearly commemorations, films, books, and government programs and proclamations. Those...