Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive by Laurie Sears (review)

Trauma, melancholia, enchantment, and dread are only the most salient among the numerous effects, aftereffects, and affective dispositions that Laurie Sears pursues in her sensitive reading of Dutch, Dutch Indies, and Indonesian novels and novellas that are the focus of her provocative and timely book. As Situated Testimonies, these fictional works bear witness and bring us close to the habits and assumptions—indeed, obsessions—of everyday life on the eve of empire, to nationalist romance and internal strife in empire’s wake during Indonesia’s revolutionary years, and to current efforts to grapple with the legacy of Suharto’s brutal regime, especially the erasure and trauma associated with the horrors and mass killings of 1965–66. The book proceeds from the assumption that the conventional distinction between historical and fictional narratives is misguided. While history and fictional accounts of memory and trauma equally assume the presence of listeners for whom stories are told—as does trauma itself—the literary works that Sears singles out for attention coalesce around places where secrets hide and fester, memory falters, and where gaps are “left within us by the secrets of others,” making for a very particular temporality.¹ Central across chapters focused on different colonial and postcolonial writings is the interiority of family life and domestic interiors as key sites where “intrusive intimacies” unfold in scenes of colonial decadence and nostalgia, in the neurotic family romances at the heart of Indonesia’s national revolution or with respect to the sheer inaccessibility of memory that serves as a gnawing reminder of the New Order’s excesses and atrocities.²

Recalling Ranajit Guha’s provocation as to whether “we [can] afford to leave anxiety out of the story of empire,”³ Sears explores what the story of empire might look like once it is inflected by an attunement to anxiety and, crucially, too, by the recognition that anxiety never simply disappears, but, disavowed, persists through time. Key in this respect is “afterwardness,” a translation of Freud’s nachträglichkeit by the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jean Laplanche as a concept of nonlinear duration that is both retrogressive and progressive. ⁴ Afterwardness underwrites Sears’s own notion of “situated testimonies,” or literary works that enable access to archival constructions, and where, specifically, questions of memory and trauma and emotional traces are brought into view. If, following Sears, “incremental truth-telling”—akin, not coincidentally, to the work of psychoanalysis—may help to loosen the power and hold that phantasms wield over persons and collectivities, then this process takes time.⁵ When things do not come to the surface they reoccur and haunt.

Seen in this light, it should not surprise that the colonial and postcolonial works comprising the book’s situated testimonies echo each other and reiterate particular obsessions, phantasms, and fetishisms across time as they also disclose time’s troubling disjunctures. Transgenerational haunting, another concept borrowed from Abraham and Torok, helps to further draw this literary archive together as does the recurrent engagement on the part of Indies and Indonesian authors with psychoanalytic discourses, themes, and techniques. These include Louis Couperus’s French-inspired take on melancholia and dread in his late imperial Haagsche romans (Den Hague novels), his Indies contemporary and model for Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Minke in the Buru Quartet, the journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo’s appropriation of discourses on neurosis and trauma (53),⁶ the allusion to the “unspoken secret” of slave torture that surfaces at a colonial dinner party in Maria Dermout’s Yesterday, and the Indonesian feminist Ayu Utami’s introduction of Freudian terminology into her exploration of mourning and traumatic memories along with her attempts to integrate Indonesia’s many phantoms into its national histories after Suharto.⁷

Generally speaking, colonial experience can be described as traumatic, but the desires for, myriad encounters with, and ambiguities with respect to imperial and colonial modernity occasioned both enchantment and dread. “A world of circulating knowledges and commodities” (67) is...