The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia

Introduction: Dancing on the Mass Grave

xiii Many women gather in the yard in front of my house each evening while children play and practice certain dance.1 Every day they inhabit a kind of “no man’s land.” Except there is a man who hides his gun in his bedroom, who comes and goes to the Air Force base surrounded by sugar cane, in East Java. His body has the wounds of war, seven in total. Holes and strange marks cover his skin. His name is Mr. Soek. Those holes are deep, cutting his flesh and marking his skin weirdly because of their itchiness. My finger often wants to caress those holes, and I once was able to enter one of them to touch the scarred tissue that had replaced the skin at the bullet’s entry point. I often ask him about the cause of those injuries. He forbids me to keep looking at the scars, and furthermore to keep asking him what was the cause of those injuries. Many people told me that he is sakti, possessing divine power, because he is still alive although many bullets entered him. For me he was sakti also, not because of his wounded body, but because of his signature on a piece of paper, which enabled me to be admitted to a school. Because of Mr. Soek, I could go to school, although I had to leave my childhood friends behind. They did not get the signature because many of their parents were missing and they failed to submit proper letters from the government about their “clean identity.”2 Mr. Soek was like a magician. When I needed a new school, his name suddenly became the name of my father, and he came to school wearing his Air Force introduction Dancing on the Mass Grave xiv Introduction uniform and introduced himself as my parent. He was the only man in the house where I stayed.3 One day he told me that his first and second wounds were from the fight for independence; the rest were from the civil war in Madiun. He explained that he was not sure who shot him. In one of his missions he was facing many women in Javanese sarongs, running around. It was confusing for him. He didn’t know if they were a rebel group or just innocent civilians. He made the decision not to shoot them, but suddenly from behind there was gunfire and many bullets flew at him. He did not have a chance to see where those bullets came from. He was very young and in the middle of a teak forest in Madiun, East Java, in 1948. I was never able to retrieve his memory and his unspoken witness in detail, including whether he killed the people who resided in the teak forest, who, to my knowledge, were mostly farmers. Perhaps before I was old enough to be trusted with such information, a loaded truck of Army men came to the neighborhood and found me on the street playing with neighbors, singing and dancing in a circle, pretending to be a dance teacher. The leader of the Army asked if we, the children who were playing on the street, knew where Mr. Soek’s house was. All the children were pointing at me. I walked slowly in front of them, bringing the soldiers to my home. Mr. Soek was in the corner of the house, standing up straight like in the photographs of Air Force training that I often saw in magazines, yet his body was shaking. A month after that, I realized Mr. Soek did not wear his uniform anymore; he had been forced to resign his position because the office discovered his connection to the family of the dancer in our house, and that was forbidden. He was married (illegally) to a female dancer, who was accused of being a former Gerwani member. Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia) was a women’s movement during the time of Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia. Although the group was legal under Sukarno, later, during the rule of Suharto (the second president), it was blamed for allegedly sympathizing with the communists and was banned and persecuted. During and after the time when Suharto came to power, many members of Gerwani simply disappeared.4 Membership in Gerwani became a monster of motherhood in my house. For me, “Gerwani women” were my aunties, dance teachers, Introduction xv...