Testimonio and Telling: Women's Narratives of Genocide, Torture and Political Imprisonment in Post-Suharto Indonesia (Pohlman, 2008)

=== [PDF page 1] === Life Writing ISSN: 1448-4528 (Print) 1751-2964 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rlwr20 Testimonio and Telling Women's Narratives of Genocide, Torture and Political Imprisonment in Post-Suharto Indonesia Annie Pohlman To cite this article: Annie Pohlman (2008) Testimonio and Telling Women's Narratives of Genocide, Torture and Political Imprisonment in Post-Suharto Indonesia, Life Writing, 5:1, 47-60, DOI: 10.1080/14484520801902332 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14484520801902332 Published online: 06 Jun 2008. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 471 View related articles Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rlwr20 === [PDF page 2] === Life Writing VOLUME 5 NUMBER 1 (APRIL 2008) Testimonio and Telling Women’s Narratives of Genocide, Torture and Political Imprisonment in Post-Suharto Indonesia Annie Pohlman To date, there has been no official investigation into or redress of the Indonesian killings of 1965/66 and the mass political detention of citizens under General Suharto’s New Order (1966/98). I argue that non-legal arenas must be explored for the documentation and circulation of testimonies by those who survived these events. As part of a larger project which aims to document, analyse and present the experiences of women during the killings and subsequent political detention, I outline two aspects of this documentation process. First, I adopt testimonio as both a political and analytical framework to argue that certain aspects of testimonio are essential to the continuing negotiations over who can speak, about what, and with what result in post-Suharto Indonesia. Second, I analyse a number of discursive strategies found within the narratives to highlight some of the issues which permit or proscribe the articulation of certain stories. Keywords testimonio; gender; violence; Indonesian history Then, in 1965, then the troubles and upheaval came, the political strife came. And I was washed away by it, destroyed by it. (Ibu Eny)1 In the aftermath of a military coup in Jakarta on the night of 30 September 1965, an estimated half a million people were murdered and a further one and a half million imprisoned for their alleged involvement.2 The regime which seized power in the months following the coup and which perpetrated the massacres, General Suharto’s New Order, remained in power until 1998. In the years since the fall of the regime, efforts have been made to initiate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Indonesia which would investigate human rights abuses perpetrated under the New Order, including the massacre and mass political detention ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/08/010047-14 # 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14484520801902332 === [PDF page 3] === 48 POHLMAN of ‘coup sympathisers’. To date, however, any official investigation into human rights abuses under the New Order has failed to take place. In the absence of official processes, the non-legal arenas in which survivors’ stories are told and the political and cultural landscapes of post-Suharto Indonesia which allow or prohibit their telling are vitally important. The narratives of women survivors in particular have been occluded and silenced, and the work of collecting, documenting and analysing their stories is now urgent. Testimonio is the political and analytical framework I will draw upon here. Those aspects of testimonio which demand a response from the reader, underline the inescapable presence of multiple voices within the narratives, and draw attention to the situation of urgency and trauma from which these testimonies arise are essential in the continuing negotiations over who can speak, about what, and with what result in post-Suharto Indonesia. Specific discursive strategies found within the narratives highlight some of the issues which permit or proscribe the articulation of certain stories. Most particularly, the context of narration when relating experiences of sexual violence perpetrated against women during the killings and political detention reveals certain strategies of how women discursively negotiate describing, or not describing, these assaults. Histories of 1965 During its long-lasting authoritarian, militarist reign, the New Order created, adapted and policed its narrative of the 1965 coup and the events which followed to shape its official version of history. According to this narrative, the Indonesian Communist Party had orchestrated the failed coup d’état. The Indonesian military, led by General Suharto, responded to the threat posed by Communism and, in defence of the nation, eradicated those responsible for the coup in order to save Indonesia. Under the New Order, those murdered or detained were branded ruthless ‘betrayers’ of the nation. The propaganda campaign following the coup effectively discredited communist ideology and cultivated the association of communism with perversion, immorality and betrayal.3 Throughout the New Order, the regime continually evoked the spectre of ‘latent communism’ to justify and maintain its authoritarian rule. Essentially, because the regime claimed that it had ‘saved’ the nation from the communist aborted coup (and because they were ever vigilant of such a threat arising again), this warranted its long-lasting authoritarian rule. As Ariel Heryanto explains, this ‘master narrative secured the regime’s legitimacy, and served an indispensable function in the protracted political ‘‘stability and order’’’ of the New Order (153). Other histories of 1965 and the New Order’s legacy emerge covertly: Near my old house there was a betel palm tree, and they’d slaughter [people] there near the mountain top. They’d be pulled along by their feet, at the mountain near my old home, suspended by their feet, by their hands. This happened when I was already in prison, but my daughter told me about it. They’d === [PDF page 4] === TESTIMONIO 49 put the wooden stick in here (she mimes a long stick being placed between her legs and hands), like they were carrying a pig. After they cut [the victim’s throat], blood would spill out everywhere. They’d all come down together, [calling], ‘We’ve got one! We’ve got a pig!’ (Ibu Eny) Ibu Eny currently lives on the outskirts of a small village in Sumatra. As with many who were members of organisations associated with the Indonesian Communist Party, when the coup occurred in Jakarta in October 1965, once the military’s propaganda spread blaming the coup on the Communists, she followed her organisation’s orders to flee the cities. She, her husband and a number of others who were also organisation members, attempted to hide in the villages and forests in West Sumatra. They were apprehended by the mob; her husband and the others were killed and she was left alive and taken for questioning. Although she survived the killings, Ibu Eny became one of the estimated oneand-a-half million political prisoners or tapols (an abbreviation of tahanan politik) detained on a blanket charge of ‘direct or indirect involvement in the 30 September Coup’ (Tapol 1). Those imprisoned were most often subjected to interrogation, torture, starvation and forced labour in overcrowded and substandard prisons and detention centres (Flanagan and Southwood 3). The length of time individual tapols spent in prison varied; some were released after a few months while other, more ‘serious Communists’ were detained for more than ten years. One of the women who took part in this project, Ibu Lia, spent twenty-two years in prison. Ibu Eny was released after thirteen years in detention, never once having seen the inside of a courtroom. Many of those who gave their testimonies as part my project expressed anger and bitterness at the lack of any legal processing during their detention; the vast majority of tapols were never charged or put on trial for the crimes for which they were held and for which many of their friends, family members or associates were murdered. This resentment for having been so arbitrarily detained was expressed by many former political prisoners during interviews. One man who had been imprisoned in one of the notoriously harsh prison camps on Buru Island echoed these responses: ‘[We] did nothing! [...] If we had been guilty, fine then, I would have been prepared to accept it. Take us to court, in front of the court, try [us]. But there was nothing! No [evidence] at all!’4 Forty years on, the lack of any official investigation and redress of the crimes committed against them, such as would be carried out by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, angers many. In 2005, twelve former political prisoners launched a class action suing former Presidents Suharto, Yusuf Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri as well as current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for failing to restore their civil rights and the rights of millions of others accused of being communists (Kearney 21). When I raised this case during some interviews, although most believed that the attempt would fail, it was seen as a chance for survivors to testify about their experiences.5 As one woman asserted, ‘I never once saw the inside of a courtroom even though I was in prison for many years [...] I want my chance to stand before a court and say what happened’.6 === [PDF page 5] === 50 POHLMAN Outside political and legal circles, however, alternative narratives to the New Order’s version of history circulate. As Ann Laura Stoler noted in relation to the early years after the fall of Suharto, with the end of the New Order came an unprecedented ‘explosion of interest’ in discussing the Indonesian past and, in particular, the events following the 1965 coup (642). Prior to 1998, publications relating to 1965 which portrayed events differently from the regime were banned (Zurbuchen 571). Since 1998, numerous memoirs, collections of memoirs and accounts, and scholarly works about and by former political prisoners have been published and are widely available in Indonesia.7 Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s work on the relationship between human rights’ movements and life narratives is useful to consider this ‘explosion of interest’ in the events of 1965 in Indonesia. They draw attention to ‘the importance of storytelling in bringing the specificities of local conditions of abuse... to the attention of a global community’ (20). One way that these narratives do so is by attaining what Gillian Whitlock refers to as a ‘discursive threshold’ (144). By examining emergent life narratives by black women in South Africa and Australia, Whitlock shows that it is not only necessary to analyse the narratives themselves but also essential to interrogate ‘[w]hat conditions created the enunciative space that these [testimonies] occupy’ (144). Within post-Suharto Indonesia, where memoirs and accounts of 1965 are gaining increasing political and cultural distribution but where official processes have yet to begin, the collection and circulation of narratives may serve another function. As Schaffer and Smith have found, these women’s narratives may help to ‘generate climates that enable the reception and recognition of new stories’ (4). In other words, when stories about events in the Indonesian past are published and circulated, this may, in turn, encourage others who survived these events (and other human rights abuses perpetrated by the New Order) to speak also. Specific characteristics of testimonio offer a way for the narratives of women survivors of the 1965/66 killings and political imprisonment to achieve greater circulation both in and outside Indonesia. Yvonne Unnold asserts that there are three characteristics of testimonios; first, they emerge ‘in a sociopolitical situation of urgency’; second, they ‘are driven by the commitment to bear witness’; and lastly, they ‘seek to transform a sociopolitical consciousness’ (13). In response to more than forty years of political, social and economic repression, the survivors whose stories are emerging spoke their truths about their pasts in order to refute New Order discourses of history. In essence, the very existence of these testimonies, their raison d’être, originates from and constitutes a challenge to an opposing, official history. Testimonio and Political Purpose [After my husband and the others were killed] then they took me to the police station. At the station I was ‘processed’ every day, every morning. In the mornings, the police would call us all for our [roll call], so I’d come out. I’d be === [PDF page 6] === TESTIMONIO 51 processed again, I didn’t want to answer their questions, so they’d hit me, beat me here, beat me here, hit me until my head swelled up... Everyone was beaten! [...] Women, men, girls, all of us, people would be able to recognise us before we went in to be interrogated, but they wouldn’t afterwards. There would be screams and crying from the beatings [...] We were tortured in many different ways. We were women, but they still beat us. They would beat us with long rubber rods, yelling, ‘Confess!’ If you didn’t confess, you were beaten, but noone confessed. But because we were hurt so badly, in the end, well, well, it was just... it happened. (Ibu Eny) One of the most important and distinctive features of testimonio is that the narratives are told in order to elicit a response in the reader/listener. As John Beverley’s definition suggests, ‘The situation of narration in testimonio [involves] an urgency to communicate’ (‘The Margin’ 12/13). In the case of the testimonies by the survivors of 1965, the goal is to inform people about and involve them in the struggle by survivors in Indonesia to have the human rights’ abuses perpetrated by the New Order regime acknowledged and redressed. In order for these processes to take place, however, testimonio’s goals of informing readers about situations of urgency and involving them in these struggles must be achieved. The famous testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchu*/An Indian Woman in Guatemala, illustrates the potential power of the genre. Prior to the publication of Menchu’s account in 1983, the massacres of Mayan people during the Guatemalan army’s ‘scorched earth’ campaign in the early 1980s had gone largely unnoticed internationally. Despite the controversies which surround Menchu, particularly after the publication of David Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, her book is important for the discussion of the political aims of testimonio as, more than any other, it brought international attention and condemnation of the treatment of the Maya in Menchu’s account suggests how testimonio aims to inform and involve the reader. It does so partly because, during the recording of the testimonio, the narrator is addressing the interlocutor who, as was the case during my own interviews with women survivors, will listen, ask questions and occasionally redirect the conversation. As Doris Sommer shows, however, this speaking with another person shifts, ‘by extension, [to] each reader [who] is addressed by the narrator’s immediate appeal to ‘‘you’’... When the narrator talks about herself to you, she implies both the existing relationship to other representative selves in the community and potential relationship that extend her community through the text’ (118). While this is by no means a straightforward process, testimonio demands that the reader move from the subject positions of voyeur or tourist, to a position whereby s/he is required to do something. As Beverley explains: ‘we are placed under an obligation to respond; we may act or not on that obligation, we may resent or welcome it, but we cannot ignore it’ (Testimonio 1). === [PDF page 7] === 52 POHLMAN Multiple Subjects, Multiple Subjectivities Georg Yudice’s definition of testimonio highlights the narrator as ‘an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity’ (17). This is another defining and controversial characteristic of testimonio as it complicates the issues of voice, subjectivity and representation, yet it is also an inexorable characteristic of the narratives of women survivors during the course of this project. The multiple subjects/subjectivities present within the testimonies also problematise other fundamental issues of testimonio, such as truth, history and authority. This was highlighted when Stoll’s book challenged the veracity of Menchu’s testimonio, claiming that it could not ‘be the eyewitness account it purports to be’ because some of the events she described were ‘experiences she never had herself’ (xii). As Leigh Gilmore explains: [W]hen the issue is narrowed to the legalistic question, ‘Did she lie?,’ almost none of the complexity of representing the self in the context of representing trauma can be retained... her testimony tests a crucial limit... and not just the one understood as the boundary between truth and lies, but, rather, the limit of representativeness, with its compulsory inflation of the self to stand for others, the particular way it operates both to expand and to constrict testimonial speech, and the way it makes it hard to clarify without falsifying what is strictly and unambiguously ‘my’ experience when ‘our’ experience is also at stake. (Limits 5) Beverley explains that testimonio is less concerned with the life of the protagonist/narrator than ‘with the problematic collective social situation that the narrator lives with or alongside others’ (‘The Margin’ 15). The ‘I’ stands for many, not as a singular story but as the story of many in a situation of urgency. As L. P. Rice-Sayre writes in relation to Menchu’s testimonio, ‘It is not Menchu’s uniqueness that makes her life story worth telling; rather, her life story is important because it repeats the experience of so many others’ (52). In particular, for the purposes of this project, I investigate ‘multiple testimonios’, or, as Beverley describes them, ‘polyphonic’ testimonios, a ‘formal variation on the classic... singular testimonio... made up of accounts by different participants in the same event’ (‘The Margin’ 16). This type of testimonial writing is much closer to my attempt to present and analyse women survivors’ testimonies of their experiences under the New Order in Indonesia. While straying far from a more ‘prototypical’8 model of testimonio, such as I, Rigoberta Menchu, by presenting the testimonies of a larger number of women who experienced similar events under the New Order, I understand each individual to be a spokesperson of a larger population of survivors of the mass killings and political imprisonment. === [PDF page 8] === TESTIMONIO 53 Trauma and Multiple Subjects Those of us with husbands who didn’t come back meant that they were murdered, that’s for certain. If they didn’t come back, it meant that they couldn’t come back. When we were released from jail, when we got home, if someone wasn’t there, be it your child, your husband, your wife, your family, it meant that they were dead, that was it. (Ibu Eny) When those who were imprisoned, such as Ibu Eny who spent thirteen years in jail, were finally released, they often returned home to find members of their families missing or frightened to be associated with them due to the stigma of political imprisonment. The former prisoners also returned home to face restrictions on freedoms of movement, speech, political participation and other rights. These restrictions were further expanded during the 1980s with the enforcement of such policies as the ‘Clean Self, Clean Environment’ policy which curtailed not only the rights of former political prisoners, but also those of their families. In essence, the Institute for National Defence recommended that Indonesian citizens be ‘clean’ and ‘clean in their surroundings’, the latter a reference to a person’s relationships with former political prisoners. As a result of the government’s stance on this issue, ‘certificates of non-involvement in the 30 September Movement/Indonesian Communist Party’ were required of any person seeking employment in government services, the military and some businesses, as well as for admission to school or university, or of anyone wishing to move to a new district (van der Kroef 643). Thus, the individual women who gave their testimonies as part of this project often emphasised the everexpanding sphere of influence of this collective trauma; a trauma which they experienced as individuals, as inmates within prison camps which held hundreds if not thousands, and as members within families who, by association, also suffered the Suharto government’s vigilant repression of ‘latent communism’. The individual’s ability to represent the trauma experienced by many has also been dealt with by a number of Holocaust survivors and scholars. Discussing the concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Europe, Terrence Des Pres draws attention to the conditions of these camps where the identities of individuals were erased, where ‘men and women were reduced to a single human mass’ (37). When the survivors of the camps began to speak about their experiences, they would often speak using the first person plural; ‘Almost all survivors say ‘‘we’’ rather than ‘‘I’’ when describing their camp experiences’ (Des Pres 29). Kathryn Robson also examines Holocaust survivors’ attempts to represent trauma and draws our attention to Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy, Auschwitz et Après, in which she bears witness not only to her own experiences but also to those of her fellow inmates in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück as well as to the survivors’ lives after returning to France (157). The third part of the trilogy, Mesure de Nos Jours, appears to be a collection of narratives by different people who had been in the camps*/both those who survived as well as those who did not. Each of the narratives, all written by Delbo, ‘brings with it a testimonial obligation: to bear === [PDF page 9] === 54 POHLMAN witness to the trauma suffered by a silenced collective, to speak for those who cannot’ (Robson 158). Des Pres and Delbo both illustrate how ‘[c]ollective trauma appears to render individual testimony problematic, as the individual’s experience of mass trauma is tightly interwoven with that of the collective’ (Robson 158). For Des Pres, ‘Survival is a collective act, and so is bearing witness’ (38). As can be seen in Delbo’s trilogy, whether or not the act is achieved, an individual survivor, having experienced mass trauma, may strive to inhabit a ‘collective subject position’, and thus bear witness not only for herself, but for those who cannot. When conducting interviews with women former political prisoners in Indonesia in 2002 and 2005, it was not always clear to whom a particular woman was referring. For example, during a particular interview, a woman might begin by telling her own story of being arrested following the 1965 coup, then give details of another woman’s arrest, revert back to speaking about her own experiences, and continue to intermesh the stories of other women she had known at the time with her own story. It is important to specify here that this intermeshing of experiences is by no means unproblematic. Discursive Strategies: Contexts and Secrets The settings for speaking are vitally important to the telling of women’s narratives of genocide, torture and political imprisonment under the New Order. ‘Settings’ are not only the larger, sociopolitical landscape in which the women give their testimonies, but also the mise en scène, or sites of telling, which are ‘both occasional, that is, specific to an occasion, and locational, that is, emergent in a specific... context of narration’ (Smith and Watson 56). The how, when, where and who of these narratives are as much a part of the testimonies as the words spoken (and not spoken). As Robson has argued: ‘The possibilities and limitations of language and of narrative in the face of trauma also depend on the forum in which trauma is recounted’ (13). This is because the stories told belong to the time and place in which they were told. Thus, the narrative texts presented and analysed in this project are necessarily different from those stories. The women (and men) interviewed during the course of my fieldwork in Indonesia gave testimonies as part of an interview process. By removing these oral testimonies from the interview settings in which they were told, I am aware that I often must, for the sake of the analysis, also remove the ‘questions, comments, silences and exclamations that interfere, influence and help shape the testimony in its interview setting’ (Unnold 117). In particular, vital aspects of the testimonies given were the silences within those narratives and the secrets shared and not shared. As Della Pollock has argued, secrets hold the ‘precarious possibility of telling. Whispered, half-told, announced, secrets unfold as both risk and power: as the risk of embarrassment, shame, helplessness, betrayal and judgement, and as the power of knowledge === [PDF page 10] === TESTIMONIO 55 and (cabbalistic) authority’ (193). During many of the interviews, for example, in often whispered conversations, narratives were told which carried with them certain risks. These risks were due to any number of complex considerations, such as feelings of shame because a certain taboo had entered into the narrative. Sometimes the secrets shared would be those of the past. For example, one of my main contacts, Ibu Lia, who spent more than twenty years in prison, most of them in isolation, recounted a number of stories about how she and the other political prisoners in her cell block had passed hidden messages to each other. In tiny scrawl, written using hidden pencils on small, stolen pieces of paper, she and the others in the cell block would push the small messages into holes in the walls of the toilet area to communicate with one another. On the other hand, secrets were also not shared. During any particular interview, my aim was not only to hear the narrative of a particular woman’s experiences but also to explore the ways in which she told that narrative. If someone steered the conversation away from a certain topic (for whatever reason), I would not draw the conversation back to that topic. As Pollock has also argued, ‘Secrecy constructs the borders it guards’, thus, secrets are ‘only disclosed within a circle of declared membership or as a means of drawing in the outsider, producing memberships’ (186; 193). Sometimes I was drawn in to a certain extent, at other times I was most definitely left outside. As an outsider, who, on most occasions, a particular woman met only once, these negotiations of allowing me to be included or excluded in certain narratives marked different borders at different times of trust and understanding. Particularly when the topic of sexual violence emerged, taboos were often encountered, sometimes resulting in various avoidance strategies for discussing experiences of rape and sexual assault. Here ‘taboo’ means ‘subjects that are culturally marked as linguistically prohibitive topics of discourse’ (Trinch 599). Again, in each situation, the context of narration was key. While I am not proposing that the discussion of sexual violence is marked (linguistically or otherwise) as a taboo in all parts of Indonesia or that even the ways in which it is marked are the same across the great number of ethnic and other groups there, I do want to draw attention to a few examples of occasions on which certain narrative strategies emerged when the topic of sexual violence arose. One way a number of women negotiated these taboos discursively was by telling their own story as that of another. This narrative strategy has been studied by a number of other researchers including, for example, Vesna Nikolic- Ristanovic, whose work has examined gendered violence against women during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo in the 1990s. As in the Nikolic- Ristanovic study, I found that third person narratives would emerge, telling the story of what happened to a ‘friend’ or to another woman/women in the same cell or the same camp (207). It was also not uncommon for a woman to talk about ‘all the women’, referring to either ‘everyone in the cell with me’, ‘all the women in the same camp/prison’ or ‘all the women in this region’. As Nikolic- Ristanovic found, one reason for employing these discursive strategies may have been to avoid the stigmatisation that is often associated with victims of sexual === [PDF page 11] === 56 POHLMAN assault (24). Another reason may have been that the experiences recounted were traumatic and difficult to narrate. One example of this was during an interview with three women (Ibu Sri, Ibu Lani and Ibu Nana) who were all from the same region in Sumatra. We had been discussing what had happened during the killings and mass arrests in that area when Ibu Nana and Ibu Lani, together, told this story: Ibu Lani: There were many women who were taken as wives because their husbands had been taken, so the wives would be taken. Then they’d be gang raped, one after another. There was lots of that! In [this region] there were only three of us. Three of us who weren’t... Ibu Nana: Who weren’t raped. Ibu Lani: This woman [she is referring to herself] and one other. Ibu Nana: She was old, even the older women were raped. Ibu Lani: Raped! The only reason I wasn’t raped was because I had only recently given birth. [I had been] pregnant. So wherever I was interrogated, I held my baby to me. I held on, so they wouldn’t take the baby from me. But if I hadn’t had my baby with me, I would have been... (pauses) sexually assaulted... we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t fight back. Annie: If someone fought back...? Ibu Lani: They’d be shot... We’d be brought [for interrogation], but the weapon that I had was the little baby that I had. That was the only thing I had. [...] Really, there were only three in [this region]. For the whole of [this region], only three weren’t raped. (Pauses) The others, well... Another discursive strategy which appeared was the use of euphemisms and ambiguous or vague terms to refer to different actions or events during sexual assaults. In her analysis of lexical variants used by Latina women to describe sexual violence, Shonna L. Trinch found that ‘the use of terminology that palliates indecency and indelicacy in order to uphold decorum plays a key role in the construction of sexual assault narratives’ (572). Euphemisms are therefore employed and, as Charles Kany found, are ‘the means by which a disagreeable, offensive, or fear-instilling matter is designated with an indirect or softer term. Euphemisms satisfy a linguistic need. For his own sake as well as that of his listeners, a speaker constantly resorts to euphemism in order to disguise an unpleasant truth, veil an offence, or palliate indecency’ (v). Trinch argues that these strategies are ‘manipulated by speakers to avoid loss of face or to offer to their interlocutors, as well as to guard for themselves, a way out of a potentially offensive interpretation of an utterance’ (571). The following example is taken from an interview with Ibu Eny who was relating incidents of sexual assault during the killings and interrogations. My contact in that area, Narny Yenny, had previously interviewed Ibu Eny on a === [PDF page 12] === TESTIMONIO 57 number of occasions as part of her own research and, as is clear in the text, begins by prompting her to tell a particular story. In this example, I want to draw attention to the omission of verb subjects (perpetrators in particular), and the use of more ambiguous verbs in place of verbs which describe specific actions. Examples in the following text of these ambiguous verbs are ‘di(be)ginikan’ and ‘digitukan’ which follow the passive construction ‘di*/base verb*/kan’; ‘gini’ and ‘gitu’, in this case, roughly meaning ‘like this’ or ‘like that’, creating passive verbs meaning something approximating ‘an action that was done by someone/ something else to someone/something’. Gestures and bodily actions were used together with these verbally ambiguous descriptions to create a much more clear, embodied narrative performance. Upik: Bu, about the sexual abuse... Ibu Eny: Oh, [you mean] if there was anyone raped? Upik: Yes. Just about that, Bu. Ibu Eny: Those who were raped, they weren’t with me. I was in prison when it happened. Upik: But you had to take off your clothes...? Ibu Eny: Yes, when [we] were questioned/interrogated, [we] had to take off [our] clothes. Upik: You had your clothes removed... Ibu Eny: Everything was taken off... yes, me and the other women [with me] all had our clothes taken off, [...]. Yes, taken off, they said because they wanted to check for tattoos, if [you were in] Gerwani (one of the Indonesian Communist Party’s associated organisations), a Gerwani tattoo, if [you were in] Pemuda Rakyat (the Communist Party’s youth organisation), [then] a Pemuda Rakyat tattoo would be looked for [...] Everything was taken off. Naked. That’s what it was like for us [...] the same again at the military station and at the police station [where they] did the interrogations. [There were] three who faced us. Annie: Men? Ibu Eny: Men. At the time [when we had to] take off our clothes, [we] didn’t want to be beaten. Yes, we were ordered to stand up, all our clothes were taken down, only our underpants were left. Ha, it was like that that we were inspected. Our breasts, ni, diginikan (she clutches at her own breasts, pulling them up forcefully) to the top, they said there was a tattoo there. Ha, there’s a tattoo here (she lifts her sarong with one hand, the other grabs the front of her underpants), they said there’s a tattoo here. In reality, I think, it wasn’t a tattoo but our privates that [they] were looking at, like that. One person would have been checked and of course there wouldn’t be any [tattoos]. There weren’t any, but we were all digitukan [treated in this manner]. === [PDF page 13] === 58 POHLMAN Testimonio, Post-Suharto Indonesia and Talking about 1965 Beverley, in addressing the problematic relationship between testimonio and truth, draws our attention to the original Spanish*/dar testimonio or ‘to give testimony’, which, as he says, ‘carries the connotation of an act of truth telling in a religious or legal sense... [it] means to testify, to bear truthful witness’ (Testimonio 3). Yet testimonio is not, nor was it ever intended to be, legal testimony*/in the sense that it is not the testimony given by a witness in a courtroom with the evidence in that testimony governed by a particular body of rules determining its admissibility. But as testimonio is removed from the ‘category of truth produced by legal discourse’ (Gilmore, ‘Jurisdictions’ 699), the consequences of this removal must also be considered. In particular, the question is, how do these consequences affect the survivors, such as Ibu Eny, whose stories are told in post-Suharto Indonesia about the killings and mass detentions following the 1965 coup? Given that this kind of testimony ‘does not conceive of itself as legal testimony, and thus does not constitute... legal fact’ (Weine 23), this unavoidably means that such testimony cannot be used ‘as is’ in any legal system. Nor does it fulfil the requirements of admissible evidence that would be necessary for prosecuting perpetrators of these crimes. Yet to uncover and redress the human rights’ abuses committed under the New Order regime since the fall of Suharto, non-legal avenues must be pursued. Testimonio raises issues of truth, truthtelling, multiple subjectivities and the situations of urgency and trauma from which they emerge, and yet despite these dilemmas (or, in fact, because of them), testimonio offers a political and analytical framework with which to collect, analyse and circulate survivors’ narratives. With the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Indonesia at a standstill, there is also an urgency for this process to begin*/not only because an official investigation into the killings and other human rights’ abuses is long overdue but also because the survivors of those abuses are running out of time. The youngest woman former political prisoner with whom I spoke was in her late fifties, the eldest in her mid-nineties. Given the failure of successive governments since the fall of the New Order in 1998 to carry out official investigations into the events of 1965, the testimonies of those who survived these events must find other avenues for documentation and circulation while survivors remain to testify. Notes [1] ‘Ibu Eny’ is a pseudonym for a woman I interviewed in September 2005 in Sumatra, Indonesia. ‘Ibu’ is a term of address for older, usually married, women in Indonesia. All names, places and other identifying information have been erased or obscured. [2] The precise number of people murdered and imprisoned following the 1 October 1965 alleged Communist coup is unknown. For further information about the coup, the killings of 1965/66 and mass political imprisonments, see key works by Benedict R. Anderson and Ruth T. McVey, Robert Cribb, and Justus M. van der Kroef listed in the References. === [PDF page 14] === TESTIMONIO 59 [3] See those works by Saskia Wieringa and Steven Drakeley. [4] Interview with Pak I___, Central Java, November 2005. [5] The case was rejected by the Central Jakarta District Court in September of that year. See Ima (n.p.). [6] Interview with Ibu A___, Jakarta, October 2005. [7] See, for example, those works by H. D. Haryo Sasongko and Melanie Budianta, John Roosa, Ayu Ratih and Hilmar Farid, and Asvi Warman Adam. By ‘widely available’ I mean that if one were to go into a Gramedia store (Indonesia’s largest bookstore chain), such books are available. However, comparatively, books are quite expensive for the general population despite rampant copyright infingements and mass photocopying, so by ‘widely available’ I mean ‘easily available to those with adequate funds and access, usually those in the middle class and above’. Also, it must be said that there was also a handful of works published in the last years of Suharto’s regime which contradicted the New Order government’s version of the 1965 events, such as Bayang-Bayang PKI [Shadows of the Indonesian Communist Party] by ISAI, the Institute for the Studies on Free Flow of Information, in 1995. [8] My use of the term ‘prototype’ here refers to categorisation theory, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (19/20). References A___, Ibu. Personal Interview. Oct. 2005. Adam, Asvi Warman. Soeharto: Sisi Gelap Sejarah Indonesia [Suharto: The Dark Side of Indonesian History]. Yogyakarta: Ombak, 2004. Anderson, Benedict R, and Ruth T. McVey. A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971. Beverley, John. ‘The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative).’ Modern Fiction Studies 35.1 (1989): 11/28. **/*/ /. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Cribb, Robert, ed. The Indonesian Killings of 1965/1966: Studies from Java and Bali. Clayton, VIC: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash U, 1990. Delbo, Charlotte. Mesure de Nos Jours. Paris: Minuit, 1971. Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. Drakeley, Steven. Lubang Buaya: Myth, Misogyny, and Massacre. Clayton, VIC: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 2000. Eny, Ibu. Personal Interview. Sept. 2005. Flanagan, Patrick, and Julie Southwood. Indonesia: Law, Propaganda and Terror. London: Zed Books, 1983. Gilmore, Leigh. ‘Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchu, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self- Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma.’ Signs 28.2 (2003): 695/718. **/*/ /. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Heryanto, Ariel. ‘Where Communism Never Dies: Violence, Trauma and Narration in the Last Cold War Capitalist Authoritarian State.’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.2 (1999): 147/77. 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