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

Chapter 1: To Remember Differently: Paradoxical Statehood and Preserved Value

1 Two hours ago, I performed the Javanese court dance Srimpi. Like many such dances, Srimpi places the female body at its center, attaching to it many ritualistic and often sexualized meanings. The female body as signifier has been used incessantly over the past forty years by the Indonesian government to create its own national cultural identity as a peaceful, perhaps “exotic” place steeped in the traditions of the past. But Indonesia has not always been so peaceful. I read these words in a post-performance discussion during a 2005 event at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), one part of a larger celebration of global performance, entitled “WAC [World Arts and Cultures] Is Back.” Perhaps, without obvious explanation , I was hoping to capture the urgency of the potential for different cultural narratives in this space (U.S. academia) through the presentation of my paper following the performance. Yet this performance was another example of a replica of Indonesian dance as a cultural text, one that renders a mesmerized aesthetic, one already mediated by pretext: the colonial narrative.1 Although in the context of “WAC Is Back,” the dance was practiced and performed by dancers (myself and another woman) from Indonesia—the independent state formerly colonized by the Dutch—my effort to reconfigure a colonial-era cultural policy that was embraced by the independent state (particularly during the Suharto regime) still strongly 1. to remember differently Paradoxical Statehood and Preserved Value 2 To Remember Differently functioned to (re)confirm a certain myth issuing from Dutch narratives about a “timeless,” sacred dance from Java. In this context, through my own narrative departures from canonized understandings of Indonesian arts, I hoped my representation of the form might serve to mediate outsider unfamiliarity with the specific, political religiosity of Javanese dance. The aesthetic presentation , however, remained the same. In this sense, the performance project risked the mistranslation of its cultural meaning and context. Also, although the form is located in two different lines, or loci, of cultural representation—one based on the enduring colonial interpretation of the dance and the other in the idea of the performing body as translator of historical text—the current performance space was already steeped in the sustained myth, mediated by the presence of traveling, dancing bodies, which arose as the colonial reports describing these dance genres were first distributed. In this context, both text and movement have served to establish, confirm, and negotiate desire for an imagined native cultural knowledge, particularly in the Western world.2 The longevity of the concept of the “peaceful Dutch East Indies,” now transformed as the peaceful, democratic, independent Indonesian nation-state, remains unchallenged, bolstered by the aesthetic glamorization ubiquitously present on the global stage of “world dance.” Following my performance of the canonical, elegant, royal Javanese form Srimpi, I proceeded to explain that in my famously peaceful nation, upward of one million people were killed, disappeared , imprisoned, or exiled in “response” to an odd, poorly organized political action in 1965 that was later claimed to be a failed coup d’état. The Indonesian military, under the leadership of then-general Suharto, quickly seized on the act—and the sketchy, confusing nature of the information surrounding it—changing its title from the self-proclaimed “Gerakan 30 September,” or the September 30th Movement, to “Gerakan 30 September PKI,” or the September 30th Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI). The event was thereafter officially known by the acronym G30S-PKI. The letters PKI, pushed up against those that signify the event itself (G30S), thus constituted the Suharto regime’s first production of officialized history, a strategy To Remember Differently 3 on which it was to rely heavily in order to keep itself in power for the next thirty years. Disseminated on a national scale so soon after the fact, the foundational abbreviation G30S-PKI supplanted other knowledge of the September 30th movement (including the basic detail that it actually took place on October 1), naturalizing the link between the membership of Partai Komunis Indonesia and the socalled coup and establishing their connection as a key element of the new Indonesian “collective memory.” During the event itself, six Army generals and one high-ranking officer then serving under Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, were murdered by a group of loyalists who claimed to be protecting Sukarno from an impending rightwing coup. Shortly after the event, the largely...