Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Approaches to Post-1965 Indonesian Archives (Lasmana, PhD diss., USC, 2018)

=== [PDF page 1] === SHADOW IMAGINATIONS: TRANSPACIFIC APPROACHES TO POST-1965 INDONESIAN ARCHIVES Viola Lasmana A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) DECEMBER 2018 === [PDF page 2] === There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. --Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms” === [PDF page 3] === iii For my brother, Chicco Satya Lasmana (1976-2006). “Love you more than you can imagine,” you once wrote. === [PDF page 4] === Acknowledgments O my friends, there are indeed friends, and without whom this journey would not only be incomplete, but utterly insane. At the University of Southern California, I am fortunate to have had consistent support from the Department of English. I am deeply grateful to Flora Ruiz, who has helped me in countless ways; most of all, her kindness and listening ear have gotten me through difficult times. I also want to thank Nellie Ayala-Reyes, Laura Hough, and Tim Gotimer for all that they do. The many, many conversations I had with the English department staff always made my days in the graduate program that much brighter. I cannot thank my dissertation committee enough: Viet Thanh Nguyen, my committee chair, has given me immense support, as well as critical feedback on my work; John Carlos Rowe has been a mentor since I started the PhD program, and I am indebted to him for his continued and unwavering guidance; Virginia Kuhn has gone above and beyond in being an advisor, and I know that this will not be the end of our work together; Brian Bernards has always given me detailed feedback, and I admire his care and dedication; Fatimah Tobing Rony has shared wonderful resources on various media that have moved my work in new ways. Beyond the dissertation committee, other faculty members at USC have been an instrumental part of my journey: Akira Mizuta Lippit will always be a foundational presence; Alice Gambrell has given me her unconditional support since the day I started the doctoral program and steered me in ways that benefited my scholarship; working with Vicki Callahan on the women and transmedia project has provided a rich learning experience that opened up new doors for me; and, I have gained valuable insights about the transpacific through my conversations with Janet Hoskins. === [PDF page 5] === As an interdisciplinary scholar, I have found multiple second homes in various departments and research groups at USC. I extend my gratitude to MA+P (Media Arts + Practice, formerly IML, Institute of Multimedia Literacies), where I am proud to be the first cohort to receive their Digital Media and Culture certificate; ASE (American Studies and Ethnicity); my amazing QTRC (Queer Transpacific Research Cluster) colleagues; EALC (East Asian Languages and Cultures); Center for Transpacific Studies; and, Critical Code Studies and the Electronic Literature Reading Group. To the Visions and Voices team (Daria Yudacufski, Tara McPherson, Mary Megowan, and Marie-Reine Velez): I am lucky to have worked with such a brilliant group of women. Last but not least, the Ph.D. fellowship I received from the Digital Humanities Program helped me complete the dissertation in a timely manner, and allowed me to do my research productively. The vibrant community of Indonesian scholars and media makers around the world working in various intersecting disciplines (film studies, Southeast Asian Studies, literature, gender and sexuality studies, and media studies) has been a source of inspiration: Melani Budianta, Manneke Budiman, Richard Oh, Intan Paramaditha, Veronika Kusumaryati, Stea Lim, Laura Coppens, Eric Sasono, Ekky Imanjaya, Lala Palupi, Novi Kurnia, Tito Imanda, Ben Murtagh—I am grateful to learn so much from you. I look forward to being in the same spaces again at international conferences or in Indonesia sharing work, experiences, and food. The digital humanities community has sustained me for many years: thank you to the amazing Fembot Collective, especially Carol Stabile, Radhika Gajjala, and Bryce Peake; the fearless #transformDH—Anne Cong-Huyen, Amanda Phillips, Alexis Lothian, Fiona Barnett, and many others; HASTAC, with Cathy Davidson, and HASTAC Scholars led by Fiona Barnett, whom we once called “the most amazing nerd-herder”; and, the inspiring work of Global DH === [PDF page 6] === scholars. These networks affirm our shared belief in social justice and ethics when it comes to studying digital media; most of all, the friendships made are what matters. I also want to especially thank Adeline Koh, Mark Marino, Jentery Sayers, Matthew Kirschenbaum, David Silver, Alan Liu, Alex Gil, David Malinowski, and Ray Siemens, who supported me and my work from day one. To my cohort: Nathan Pogar, Cecilia Caballero, Megan Herrold, and Gray Fisher—we are a special group and will always have our memories together to keep (Karen Tongson is responsible for making this magical cohort happen). Emily Raymundo and Sophia Azeb: three’s company, and we are the best there is. Betsy Sullivan: my counterpart in so, so many ways. Melissa Chan: you are wise beyond your years, and you are always there for me. Rio Katayama: our shared travels and conversations have been so significant. Kathy Wong, Jinhee Park, Phyllis Chen, Rio, and Melissa: the laughter, camaraderie, and food we share are truly nourishing and of a different dimension. Ali Pearl: only you can amuse and calm me all at the same time. Alex Agloro: my collaborator in work and in taste. Erin Mizrahi: for sharing your sojourns with me. Jolie Chea: thank you for reading my work with a keen eye. Audrey Lesmana, Emi Atmadiredja, Naomi Nugraweni, Evon Shih, Joey Tan, Vinny Susilo, and Frederyk Ngantung: your friendships and love have kept me going. All of these friendships, inside and outside academia— and in between—will always have a permanent place in my heart. This journey began long before USC, and I would be remiss not to thank my MA mentors, Geoffrey Green and Larry Hanley—whose enormous support I will never forget—and my colleagues at San Francisco State University: Ali Sperling, Al Harahap, Rozan Soleimani, Carolina Patino, and Ned Buskirk. I have recognized for a long time that my journey towards the doctorate began at the moment I arrived in the United States. Scott Lankford made pursuing an === [PDF page 7] === vii English major a possibility and reality when I was an international student at Foothill College adjusting to culture shock and did not know how to navigate a literature course in an American college. Alan Heineman was the first person who recognized my love for the literary and the nuances of language, and he remains a friend and mentor long after I had graduated from the University of San Francisco. Throughout my graduate career, Alan Ip stood by me, and I will always be thankful for his constant support and love. My family is at the heart of all of this. I thank my parents, Lena Makmur and Hendrawan Lasmana, for their trust and love, for letting me pursue my dream thousands of miles away from home, and for believing in me in this long journey—I can only imagine the level of worry that they have to go through with one of their children living so far away. To my sister, Glory Lasmana: words cannot begin to convey how much you are a part of me, and how much I admire your strength and courage. To my niece, Jessica Putri, whom I feel such a deep and inexplicable bond with: keep writing. To my brother, DJ Chicco: I think often about how much you were moved by music, and how deep your passion for creating music was. Wish you were here. === [PDF page 8] === viii Table of Contents 0. Introduction 1 0.1 Shadow Imaginations 1 0.2 Chapters 1-4 10 0.3 Amateurism as Praxis 13 0.4 Archive+ 15 0.5 Contrapuntal Re-Visions 18 1. Stories from the Margins: Pramoedya’s Imagined Community in Exile 20 and the Female Revolutionary 1.1 Stories Arisen from Arrest 20 1.2 Roles and Representations of the Nyai 25 1.3 Nyai Ontosoroh’s Radical Pedagogy and Wild Knowledge 31 1.4 Contemporary Re-Visions of the Nyai Narrative 35 1.5 Imagined Community in Exile: 38 Counterpoetics of Buru Island Creations 2. “Abyss and Shuttle”: Li-Young Lee’s Poetic Consciousness 48 as Ethical Consciousness 2.1 At the Limit of Writing, a Brimming 48 2.2 Histories: Anti-Chinese Violence in 1950s Indonesia 51 2.3 Imagining the World: Stories That Sustain 57 2.4 “The Word dreams, and worlds appear” 65 2.5 Elsewhere 68 === [PDF page 9] === 3. Archives in Motion: Digital Cultural Productions 71 in Post-1965 Indonesia 3.1 Media Politics in Indonesia 71 3.2 The Politics of Visualization 74 3.3 Comparative DH and Pedagogies 81 3.4 Poetics of Remix 86 3.5 A Diligent Humanities 95 4. A Polyvocal Archive: Women and Collaborative Ethics 99 in Post-1965 Indonesia 4.1 The Spectre of Gerwani, the Indonesian Women’s Movement 100 4.2 Censorship and Women’s Stories 103 4.3. Children of Srikandi (Anak-Anak Srikandi, 2012) 106 4.4 Collaborative Praxis as Feminist Pedagogical Practice 116 4.5 The Amateur and the Willful Feminist Archive 123 5. Coda 127 Appendix: “Everywhere Is Home to the Rain”: A Conversation with Li-Young Lee 131 Notes 148 Bibliography 161 === [PDF page 10] === List of Figures Figure 1 1975 manuscript of Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind 40 (title page) Figure 2 1975 manuscript of Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind 41 (dedication page) Figure 3 Mapping Memory Landscapes data visualization project 76 Figure 4 Mapping Memory Landscapes data model 78 Figure 5 Indonesian Institute of Social History’s Oral History Project 83 Figure 6 Indonesian Institute of Social History’s interactive timeline 84 project, “Through the Lens” Figure 7 Video Slam Project 87 Figure 8 “Don’t Be Afraid to Dance” by Azizah Hanum 91 Figure 9 Opening scene of Children of Srikandi 107 Figure 10 Cover of Api Kartini periodical 109 Figure 11 Soleh and Anik, shadow puppeteer and singer 111 Figure 12 Eggie Dian of The Children of Srikandi Collective 115 Figure 13 Children of Srikandi poster 118 Figures 14 & 15 Children of Srikandi production and workshop stills 119 === [PDF page 11] === Abstract Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Approaches to Post-1965 Indonesian Archives analyzes cultural productions that would have been considered impossible narratives within the hegemonic atmosphere of repression in the New Order era after the 1965-66 anti-communist purge in Indonesia, but that were made possible through subversive means of creation, becoming what Laurie Sears calls “situated testimonies,” offering “a method of reading the traces that elude archival constructions.”1 Using a transpacific lens, this project explores the relationship between the archive and historical trauma, and how various Indonesian and Indonesian- American literary and media productions function as alternative articulations beyond the confines of the archive and as spaces of resistance. The first chapter focuses on novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s writings, which originated as oral stories and fragments during his exiled imprisonment in Buru Island. The second chapter examines Indonesian-born, Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee’s works on his childhood in Indonesia, where his father was imprisoned during a period of anti-Chinese violence, before his family fled to the United States. The third chapter focuses on narratives about marginalized women and queer communities via the transnational omnibus films, Children of Srikandi (2012). Finally, the fourth chapter delineates the ways in which digital media productions have emerged as sites of resistance and transformation. All of these cultural productions mobilize a form of poetic resistance, or what Yunte Huang calls a “counterpoetics,” forms of writing that “alter memory and invoke minority survival in the deadly space between competing national, imperial interests and between === [PDF page 12] === xii authoritative regimes of epistemology serving those interests.”2 In bringing together contrapuntal perspectives and complicating master archives, these works activate what I call the shadow imagination (from the Indonesian word bayangan, which means both shadow and imagination), and make possible new realities and mediascapes in a networked, globalized world. These literary, visual, and digital texts not only document and preserve, but they also gesture towards a future that holds within it expansive possibilities for transformation, social recovery, and community collaborations, as well as vigorous local and global dialogue. In this way, the stories and projects also serve a pedagogical function. If writing against historical traumas and narrative gaps are integral to transpacific imaginations (and re-imaginations), how do these works contribute to an emergent public sphere? My project is itself part of an emerging, alternative archive in the aftermath of the 1965- 66 killings; this is a project that puts the past, present, and future into a continuum. The possibility of creating other futures, mobilized by the political and creative ability to imagine otherwise, always comes with an ethical responsibility. It is towards this possibility that this project seeks to bring together history, humanities, and the possibilities of digital research. === [PDF page 13] === Introduction My favorite window looks onto two oceans: one a house in various stages of ruin and beginning, and one a book, whose every word is outcome, whose every page is lifelong sentence. --Li-Young Lee, “My Favorite Kingdom” What would happen to me if my voice, my sole means of communication, were to be taken from me? Is it possible to take from a man his right to speak to himself? --Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy 0.1 | Shadow Imaginations When I told my Chinese-Indonesian parents that I was going to write a dissertation about works that talk back to the events of 1965 in Indonesia, the first thing that they said to me was, “Don’t be too political. Don’t get yourself into trouble.” Having lived through the years before and after the 1965 tragedy, my parents know what the stakes are for people who speak out against oppressive state structures and policies. Having experienced waves of anti-Chineseness during both the Sukarno and Suharto presidencies, and understanding the levels of suppression and silencing for not just the ethnic Chinese but also for human rights activists and leftist scholars, my parents’ caution, as I have come to understand over the years, is not to be taken lightly. Despite these apprehensions, I remain compelled by the necessity to undertake a project bringing together the archipelago’s multiple and diverse perspectives, whose stories serve as === [PDF page 14] === counterpoint to state-sanctioned narratives that have been established for many decades, particularly by Suharto’s New Order government (1966-1998) after the 1965 anti-communist purge. In 2015, an International People’s Tribunal held in The Hague to address the 1965 killings determined that the Indonesian government, with support from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, was responsible for crimes against humanity. In analyzing how contemporary literature and media create new meanings and alternative visions for the future by resisting the remnants of the repressive New Order state, Shadow Imaginations aims at uncovering some of the lingering silences in the nation’s archive after the 1965 killings by the Indonesian military, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated number of one million suspected communists and communist sympathizers. Beyond the scholarly and academic pursuits, this project is also deeply personal: my brother’s murder in 2006, which to this day remains unsolved, is a tragic consequence of the corrupt New Order regime and its blithe disregard for fundamental human rights and social justice. This project analyzes cultural works—specifically literary texts, film, digital media and archives—that continue to grapple with the post-1965, post-genocide contexts in Indonesia, but that are also, in making sense of questions of identity and knowledge production, works directed to the future. As Rachmi Diyah Larasati states, cultural and artistic practices have been made “ideologically inseparable from national history and the politics of memory.”1 Shadow Imaginations, then, focuses on how literary texts, films, and digital media are mobilized and reappropriated by writers, artists, and activists as sites of resistance. Rather than simply focusing on works from the post-1998, post-Suharto “Reformation” era, my emphasis lies more on how works from the various decades after 1965 are able to speak back to the legacies and lingering === [PDF page 15] === consequences of the 1965 genocide, as well as gesture towards a beyond that activates the works as a response, a promise, and a responsibility for the as yet unnamed and unseen future of democracy that is still in a process of becoming. The works analyzed in this project, therefore, span about fifty years, and include both works that were produced during the New Order era as well as after. If, as Yunte Huang writes, "writing against colonial violence, historical traumas, and narrative closures"2 are integral to transpacific imaginations (and re-imaginations), how do these works, in a global context, contribute to an emergent public sphere and mobilize transformative and subversive spaces that can confront a past that has been shrouded in lies and half-truths, and also allow the present to have openings into a future of greater freedom and democracy? Part of the work that this project takes on, therefore, is to excavate buried histories and forgotten complicities. The United States saw Indonesia as “a gleam of light in Asia” after the 1965 genocide (as journalist James Reston wrote in a 1966 New York Times article), and considered the military coup in Indonesia a success, as it disrupted the communist domino threat in Southeast Asia that the US wanted to contain.3 The relationship between US imperialism and the Indonesian postcolonial state becomes especially fraught considering the fact that in 1955, a decolonial strategy was proposed at the Asia Africa conference in Bandung, Indonesia (organized by thenpresident Sukarno), when Western colonial power was challenged. Two years after the conference, Sukarno’s non-Western, more localized democracy was set in place from 1957 until the 1965 military coup that was carried out with immense support from the US, resulting in the killings and imprisonment of suspected communists, communist sympathizers, activists, ethnic Chinese, left-wing groups, and women’s organizations. The processes of decolonization and === [PDF page 16] === deimperialization were, therefore, left incomplete and put to a halt, and Sukarno’s anti-colonial and anti-imperialist principles were obliterated, replaced by what would become the thirty-year regime of Suharto’s repressive New Order government. If such state-orchestrated and US-backed genocide was a source of beaming victory, this project wants to shift the light from that shining façade to the darkness beneath, to make the ghosts—the bayangan, an Indonesian word that describes, at once, both the shadow and the imagination—alive again. Analyzing these works, then, is a way of understanding how the construction of Indonesian public cultural memory, as it relates to the post-1965 events, is bound not only within the borders of Indonesia, but also deeply wound up with US history of imperialism across the Pacific. Thus, shadow imaginations would allow for a re-articulation of how these histories are critically intertwined, as well as reorient both how Indonesia sees itself and how it has been (often problematically) represented across media. The motif of light and dark has occupied a central and fascinating in Indonesia’s history, and has always been bound up with colonial, imperial, and state powers. Under colonial authority, the relationship between darkness and light in the Dutch East Indies often signified, as Benedict Anderson asserts, “the passage from tradition to modernity, as though they ‘who walked in darkness [had] seen a great light.”4 Eric Tagliacozzo reminds us that lighthouses functioned as optical tools of state surveillance, enabling the Dutch authorities to monitor the activities of those who passed through the waterways in the vast archipelago: it was a way of transforming the “darkened maze of islands… into a lit archipelago capable of being watched and policed in the burgeoning twentieth century.”5 The hypervisibility of those under surveillance and control, therefore, stands in stark contrast to the bright lighthouses controlled by the colonial authorities; those who watched ensured themselves protection from being seen, === [PDF page 17] === while denying the laborers and merchants “the right to look,” to use Nicholas Mirzoeff’s expression.6 Shadow imaginations, therefore, allows us to see how resistance happens in the shadows, and provides a framework to not only uncover archival silences, but also imagine new possibilities emerging from those whose voices have been kept in the dark. The cultural works that are analyzed in this project are imagined, written, and created in the form that Huang calls “counterpoetics” (a concept that I consider as a version of Mirzoeff’s “countervisuality”): “a host of marginalized poetic/historiographical practices: antiquarianism, collection, local history, anecdotes, family genealogy, travel writing, graffiti, correspondence, fantasies.”7 As “a counterpoint to imperial visions,” these are works that mobilize a poetic consciousness vital to my project: And in contrast to the master narratives, these works of counterpoetics turn away from any meta-discourse on the transpacific; they move instead towards the enactment of poetic imagination as a means to alter memory and invoke minority survival in the deadly space between competing national, imperial interests and between authoritative regimes of epistemology serving those interests.8 Indeed, these cultural productions bring together oppositional, contrapuntal perspectives and complicate master archives and narratives, as well as make possible new realities and mediascapes in a networked, globalized world. These texts document and preserve, but they also gesture towards a future that holds within it expansive possibilities for transformation, social recovery, community collaborations, as well as local and global dialogues. The anonymous Indonesian co-director of The Act of Killing states in the film’s press notes, “This is the true legacy of the [Suharto era] dictatorship: the erasure of our ability to imagine anything other.”9 To imagine, after all, also has to do with ways of seeing and === [PDF page 18] === visualizing: the word itself comes from the Latin imago and imaginare, to form an image or picture of. To make something be seen and visible, therefore, can be subversive acts of the imagination. In her book about the relationship between performance and the Indonesian state since 1965, Rachmi Diyah Larasati points out that “Suharto’s worst crime is to have made Indonesians afraid to think and express themselves.”10 This sentiment is one still shared today, and that reflects the consequences of the atmosphere of fear and intimidation produced by the state in the New Order era. Thus, the ability to imagine something other—to see and know beyond what is permitted—holds no small consequence for the future of freedom and democracy in Indonesia. This ability to imagine an alternative, a beyond, speaks to the heart of this project, and I argue that a revolutionary form of imagination—a shadow imagination—has immense weight and emancipatory potential, especially as “the conditions of possibility for Indonesia’s national culture after 1965” are based precisely on the impossibility of non-state sanctioned narratives.11 The conditions of possibility not only meant that cultural practices and productions were claimed and appropriated by the state, but they also provided the necessary façade for the state to hide behind in order to carry out its repressive, racialized, and gendered violence in the decades that followed. Intan Paramaditha articulates that “the New Order regime was built on spectacular violence that existed simultaneously with its invisible double, spectral violence.”12 The gap between the controlled spectacle of what the Indonesian public was permitted to see following the 1965-66 anti-communist killings and the different “truths” that were suppressed by the state remains a terrain to be grappled with now as much as fifty years ago, and demands further attention to the ways that these histories, silences, and gaps still haunt the present, particularly because it is only in the last couple of decades or so that various Indonesian publics and === [PDF page 19] === individuals, including scholars and activists, are beginning to be able to publicly confront these dark spots in history. Talking about the past, especially as it relates to the effects of Suharto’s reign and the New Order regime’s murderous history, remains a dangerous terrain, evident in the necessity of the anonymity and invisibility of the Indonesian co-director and crew of The Act of Killing. Imagination, as it is utilized it in this project, is partly indebted to Arjun Appadurai’s articulation of the term: “the imagination, especially when collective, can become the fuel for action. It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighborhood and nationhood.”13 The collective sense of imagination is as much about the “neighborhood” as it is about “nationhood,” and opens up possibilities for not just making connections on the local level, but also across the transpacific. I am thus interested in exploring the role of the imagination in mobilizing spaces for democratic politics in the midst of globalization. Such revolutionized imagining is also closely tied to Mirzoeff’s notion of “the right to look,” which involves what Mirzoeff calls a “countervisuality” capable of “depict[ing] existing realities and counter[ing] them with a different realism.”14 The “right to look,” and the right to the language of representation, as Mirzoeff says, is a right to existence. Indeed, the texts and media at the margins that are analyzed in this project express hope for a better and different future, as well as imagine ways of producing knowledge and seeing the world with a different kind of power that, perhaps, can come from below in order to erupt and disrupt the structures of power above. In a 2007 article on archives, trauma, and Indonesian literary works, Laurie J. Sears writes, Because history-writing during the New Order period (March 1966 to May 1998) was supposed to follow government master narratives, and foreign researchers === [PDF page 20] === could be banned from Indonesia for stirring up controversial memories, there is not yet a substantial body of information about the aftereffects of the violence of the New Order government in studies by both Indonesian and non-Indonesian scholars.15 The future of Indonesia remains as yet to be determined, with the meaning of freedom resting in between past oppressions and other kinds of futures, both individual and collective, local and global. My project, then, is itself an emerging narrative in an ongoing, alternative archive about the aftermath of the violence of the New Order era; this is a project that is not just about the past, but also, as Jacques Derrida puts it in Archive Fever, about “a question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of the responsibility for tomorrow.”16 Indeed, the possibility of creating other futures and narratives, mobilized by the political and creative ability to imagine something other, is always “to-come.”17 As both a literary and media scholar, my work traverses the fields of literary and media studies, as well as the digital humanities. Dedicated to understanding the multivalent workings of identity, culture, and politics, the nature of this project is contrapuntal, and perhaps cacophonous, but necessarily so. In its examination of Indonesian and Indonesian-American texts, this project is cross-disciplinary, existing in the intersections of transpacific studies, literary studies, Southeast Asian studies, Southeast Asian American studies, and digital humanities. In analyzing the ways in which the legacies of the anti-communist genocide have led to the profound repression of human rights in Indonesia, and whose consequences are just now in the nascent stages of being grappled with, my hope is for this project to contribute productively to these various disciplines by destabilizing conventional understandings and boundaries of the === [PDF page 21] === disciplines. The multidisciplinary nature of this project calls attention to the new ways of seeing, hearing, and knowing we can gain from crossing barriers of scholarly fields and productions. The theoretical underpinnings of this project are also informed by postcolonial critiques and theories of the archive. In particular, Ann Stoler’s work on archival productions and “archiving-as-process” guides this project in productive ways, and her analyses of “the principles and practices of governance lodged in particular archival forms” critically inform my articulations of how the cultural texts examined in this project form an alternative archive beyond what has been established in the colonial and postcolonial eras in Indonesia.18 My focus on the imagination within a networked, globalized sphere considers the influence of different media practices on culture, politics, and representation; these are practices that demonstrate a different kind of power and capability, and display their own sets of articulation of power as well as their responses to it. My contention is that we must take into account the ways in which technologies impact the flows of culture and politics in transpacific communities, at the same time that this transpacific project also disrupts and destabilizes laudatory narratives of technological progress and globalization. Furthermore, the dramatic changes in media available for global representation in the post-1965 era also emphasize the significance of the use of various technologies, especially as much of the audio-visual content under the New Order regime was used to maintain its hegemony and state power, even as these technologies, paradoxically, also made possible more emancipatory, transformative, and antiauthoritarian uses. === [PDF page 22] === 10 0.2 | Chapters 1-4 The first chapter, “Stories from the Margins: Pramoedya’s Imagined Community in Exile and the Female Revolutionary,” takes as its focus novelist and activist Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s works that originated in the Buru island prison colony where he was exiled between 1969-1979. It was during the years that Pramoedya spent in the Buru island prison colony that fragments of what would become his most famous works were created: the Buru Quartet series and his memoir, The Mute’s Soliloquy, as well as other novels, originated first as oral stories and scribblings. These stories were a mode of survival, helping Pramoedya and his fellow prisoners to imagine a world beyond the treacherous one they were in. Because the incomplete decolonization process put a halt to Indonesia’s national revolution, this chapter pays particular emphasis on This Earth of Mankind (Bumi Manusia), the first installment in the Buru Quartet tetralogy set in the Dutch East Indies, for its depiction of what a model of revolution might resemble: here, it takes the form of Nyai Ontosoroh, a native Indonesian concubine to a Dutch businessman; her progressive, anti-colonial stance is what eventually inspires the Javanese protagonist, Minke, to tap into a mode of resistance that sustains the spirit of the novel. The Nyai is a particularly important figure to pay attention to, as Suharto’s New Order regime recreates an image of the woman as a meek, docile subject. She is someone whose progressive anticolonial spirit and activism becomes the novel’s diegetic and extradiegetic voice, and who embodies Édouard Glissant’s notion of “relational poetics.” It is not insignificant that Pramoedya chooses the figure of the Nyai as a model of courage and resistance against colonialism, and if the Buru Quartet was intended to serve as a rewriting of Indonesian nationalism and anti-colonialism, then it is one that locates postcolonial feminist ideology as central to its rewriting process. Such a focus on the representation of women and postcolonial === [PDF page 23] === 11 feminism connects this chapter with Chapter Four, which examines marginalized women’s work in film and their collaborative efforts in using the medium as a space of resistance to the rigid structures of gender and sexuality left behind by the legacy of colonialism and the New Order era. In Chapter Two, “‘Abyss and Shuttle’: Li-Young Lee’s Poetic Consciousness as Ethical Consciousness,” I trace the historical trauma, displacement, and violence that the Indonesianborn, Chinese American poet Lee and his family experienced in their journeys through the transpacific. This chapter focuses on Lee’s memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, as well as “Changing Places in the Fire,” a poem from his most recently published book of poetry. Here, I analyze the sustaining power of stories and myths that enable Lee to activate the poetic consciousness as ethical consciousness—it is a movement from the word to the world, an encounter with the Other and embodied others. Such a consciousness is one that is sustained by poetic imagination and literary creation, and that makes possible a way of being in the world that moves beyond defensiveness and grievance, but goes towards reconciling the consequences of historical trauma. An appendix containing an interview I conducted with Lee is also provided as a supplement to the key ideas that this chapter discusses. The third chapter, “Archives in Motion: Digital Cultural Productions in Post-1965 Indonesia,” addresses the politics of visualization in Indonesia and focuses on three digital media productions: a data visualization and mapping project, a digital archive, and video remix. By analyzing these digital projects, I attempt to articulate an alternative approach to digital humanities, and offer an articulation that focuses on comparative digital humanities and pedagogies, arriving at what I provisionally call diligent humanities. This chapter also emphasizes how digital media is intimately tied to the ethical, and how it can be mobilized as === [PDF page 24] === 12 tactical media and a political tool that enables the makers to present a different perception and experience of history; and in doing so, these works bring both local and global dialogue into play. If “freedom is not the lack of relation but the very possibility of relation,” these digital media productions not only manage the ties that bind and produce the individuals and their lives, but they also function to loosen those binding ties and transform them into something that has the potential to bring a community together, in the name of collectivity.19 The final chapter, “A Polyvocal Archive: Women and Collaborative Ethics in Post-1965 Indonesia,” focuses on The Children of Srikandi Collective’s Children of Srikandi (Anak-Anak Srikandi, 2012), the “first film from queer women about queer women in Indonesia,”20 as a manifestation of what Sara Ahmed calls “the willful archive.” 21 Like Srikandi, the warrior in wayang kulit (shadow puppet performances) who is neither man nor woman, this omnibus film defies categorization: it crosses the boundaries of modernity and tradition, and breaks away from limitations of gender, sexuality, and forms of representation, merging narrative, performance, documentary, and fiction into short, intricate, interwoven films. Children of Srikandi also serves as an important cultural and political work, especially considering the repressive structures of gender and sexuality set in place by the New Order regime, as well as the increasingly conservative turn that Indonesia has taken in the contemporary moment. The film is a body of work that utilizes alternative modes of creative practices and perform a counterpoetics, allowing both the filmmakers and audience to explore shadow imaginations that resist the absolute and the repressive. In the sections that follow, I trace the meanings of and provide contextualizations for a few key terms that ground this project, and that appear and are used throughout the chapters in different ways: the amateur, archives, and the contrapuntal. === [PDF page 25] === 13 0.3 | Amateurism as Praxis The notion of the amateur, or amateurism, can be seen to be at work throughout all of the chapters. My articulation of amateurism has been largely influenced by Edward Said’s work, in particular his essay “Professionals and Amateurs,” in which he poses critiques of the growing pressures of professionalism in the 20th century—critiques that still remain relevant today. Specialization, writes Said, “kills your sense of excitement and discovery, both of which are irreducibly present in the intellectual’s makeup.”22 Said proposes, instead, an intellectual spirit of amateurism: Despite their pervasiveness, each of [the pressures of professionalism] can be countered by what I shall call amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession.23 Said’s call for a spirit of amateurism is of particular relevance to this project for a number of reasons, which I shall identify here. First, Said warns against the dangers of conforming to and blindly following the acceptable mainstream consensus by providing the example of the Red Scare: … you were required to accept unquestioningly the premises of the Cold War, the total evil of the Soviet Union, and so on and so forth. For an even longer period of time, roughly from the mid-1940s until the mid-1970s, the official American idea held that freedom in the Third World meant simply freedom from communism: it reigned virtually unchallenged.24 === [PDF page 26] === 14 Said continues to say that these anxieties about national defense and security in the United States enabled “immense disasters in the form of costly wars and invasion (like Vietnam), [and] indirect support for invasions and massacres (like those undertaken by allies of the West such as Indonesia, El Salvador, and Israel).”25 Said’s notion of amateurism as a way to counter naïve and destructive nationalism, therefore, is directly related to the events of 1965-66 in Indonesia, when the U.S.-backed anti-communist genocide led to the killings of an estimated one million people, as a way for the U.S. to contain the communist threat that was seen to be spreading throughout Southeast Asia. Second, as “an activity that is fueled by care and affection,”26 amateurism is a spirit and praxis that runs throughout the whole project. Pramoedya’s perseverance—in the face of exile, forced labor, and physical torture—pushed him to continue to tell stories, even when they had to be orally circulated when he was prohibited from writing for many years. With its emphasis on care, amateurism is motivated by the origins of the word itself: amateur comes from the Latin amare, to love, and as Roland Barthes writes in a vignette, “The Amateur renews his pleasure (amator: one who loves and loves again).”27 Even with the military and government continually burning his manuscripts and books, as well as banning his published books up until 1999, Pramoedya never stopped believing in the importance of narrative as testimony, witness, and as counterpoint to state-sanctioned versions of history. Li-Young Lee has said, “I am an amateur poet”: “I love poetry, and I read it all day and think about it… But I realize I do it as an amateur.”28 I see lines of connection here with Pramoedya’s continued commitment to writing: both Pramoedya and Lee address the historical traumas and political violence that they had experienced, and both have struggled with the limits of what language can do, and what the role of the writer should be in a world fractured by === [PDF page 27] === 15 instability, violence, human rights violations, and loss. As Lee says after he had tried to quit writing poetry once, “I came to the conclusion that aesthetic awareness—or aesthetic consciousness or aesthetic presence—is the only possible ethical presence we have.”29 In the end, both Pramoedya and Lee have persisted in continuing to mobilize the poetic imagination and literary creation, in spite of—or perhaps because of—disastrous circumstances. In the last two chapters of this project, I identify the spirit of amateurism in a set of media practices that emerge from the works of first-time filmmakers and videomakers. Their amateurism, however, is not one that can be reductively characterized as unskilled or incompetent, as the conventional definition of the word amateur might imply. I argue in both of these chapters that the video remixers participating in the Video Slam Project and the Children of Srikandi Collective filmmakers enact a different and particular form of amateurism that emerge out of a need to respond to the stifling and repressive political and cultural climate as a result of the New Order regime: it is an amateur praxis and ethics that involve collaboration, a deep commitment to social justice and human rights, and the creation of affective bonds and friendships. These media makers, therefore, mobilize an amateur media practice in radical, subversive ways—a practice that becomes a pedagogy in itself. The notion of the archive is significant for the underpinnings of this project: the archive in the physical sense, the archive as metaphor, as well as the archive in the digital space. How do the literary texts and media productions examined here talk back to the archive of the nation and subvert some of the state’s repressive ideologies, as well as uncover the silences in the archive? How do digital technologies impact notions of the archive and the Indonesian communities’ === [PDF page 28] === 16 relationship to historical traumas, as well as mobilized alternative forms of archivization defines by collective forms for authorship? In this project, Ann Stoler’s notion of “archiving-as-process” and how “contrapuntal intrusions emanated from outside the corridors of governance [and] erupted… within that sequestered space” (my emphasis)30 of the archive provide a foundation for my formulations on how these texts generate transformative emergent archives beyond what the state established in post-1965, post-genocide Indonesia—these are projects that make impossible stories possible. Not all archives exist to ensure preservation and “universal access to all knowledge” (the Internet Archive’s mission). In the case of colonial archives, for instance, as Stoler points out in her work on the archival techniques and productions in the Dutch East Indies, the archive becomes a technology through which colonial fantasies unfold. During the decolonization period, documentations are often destroyed in order to eradicate all traces of crime and violence. Under the Suharto dictatorship, only the state-sanctioned version of history was allowed, produced, and disseminated, while narratives outside of what the New Order government approved were not only excluded, but suppressed and destroyed. After the fallout of Suharto’s regime in 1998, the archive of the nation, in the case of Indonesia, is still in the process of rediscovering, uncovering, and reconstituting. “But where does the outside commence?” writes Derrida, “this question is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others.”31 Where the outside begins is a question that must persist and continue to be asked again and again, particularly whenever one thinks about, accesses, and uses an archive. In more practical terms, what is at stake is the issue of agency: what is the archive for, who does it empower, and who gets left out? When we think of physical archives, we think of confinement, of places enclosed by walls and security ensuring that only === [PDF page 29] === 17 those with permission and authority can access archival materials (Derrida describes the archive as “house arrest”)—such institutional barriers often get in the way of private and public partnership, so that what gets archived runs in opposition to community knowledge. Despite this initial impression of the archive as a finite, closed system, however, the archive has always had, lodged within its economy, a sense of the untamed. What we think of as closed off domiciles, or “house arrest,” have already had an excess spilling over it (an “eruption,” as Stoler writes)—the archive is always a negotiation of the vexed and complex relationship between inside and outside. For Foucault, the archive “reveals a rule of practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.”32 Instabilities and transformations, therefore, are conditions of the archive, making possible disruptions to the archive’s seemingly well-kept boundaries. If the archive signifies the law of things that can be said, Diana Taylor’s notion of the “archive and the repertoire” works to bridge this divide between enunciability and silence by thinking about how the repertoire, which she describes as the performative and the expressive, is “a process, a praxis, an episteme, a mode of transmission” that serves as a means of intervening in the world, and allows us to expand how we understand knowledge, as well as where the limits of the archive lie.33 A thinking beyond the archive, therefore, necessitates understanding the archive as a concept that has built within it the element of anticipation, a sense that it is more than a repository, but also a shared space that can support collaboration among users and the transformation of ideas. The Indonesian Institute of Social History digital archive, for instance, aims to bridge the gap with the broader public community by using visual and interactive media === [PDF page 30] === 18 as a way to ease the community’s access into learning about the suppressed history of the anticommunist genocide.34 The question of making the nation’s history (that has thus far been shrouded in secrecy and silence) relevant to the larger community is one of negotiating how materials in the archive function in the broader social world. Indeed, it becomes a question of ethics. We must, as Derrida suggests, move beyond “an archivable concept of the archive,” for the archive is not only about the past, but also “a question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of the responsibility for tomorrow.”35 The archive must exist in an economy of circulation, modification, and change—a kind of logic that has, perhaps, always been present in the concept of the archive as Stoler’s description of the messy colonial archives reveal. 0.5 | Contrapuntal Re-Visions The contrapuntal, as articulated by Edward Said, is derived from the musical term counterpoint or contrapuntal, where two or more distinct melodies form a polyphony. It is with such polyvocality that the projects I discuss in this chapter form a resistance to state narratives in Indonesia after the 1965 anti-communist killings. Said’s contrapuntal perspective is one that allows us to see interconnected, though at times seemingly disparate, histories, and stories together, in order to get a fuller picture, and so as to avoid, as Said warns us, “the defensive little patch offered by one’s own culture, literature, and history.”36 A contrapuntal or comparative approach, therefore, allows us “to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant.”37 Li-Young Lee says, “If the world is fractured, the work of poetry is to marry everything, to integrate everything.”38 Lee’s poetic consciousness, also emerging as ethical === [PDF page 31] === 19 consciousness, is what enables him to make the passage from inside to outside, to allow the encounter between us and the world, and between us and the embodied Other. The contrapuntal, or counterpoint, also refers to the backstitch in sewing techniques, where stitches overlap and are sewn in a back and forth sequence. The contrapuntal, in bringing together oppositional perspectives and thinking through disparate experiences, is as much a knitting together as it is a tearing apart. As a term, the contrapuntal’s roots in cultural, social activities like knitting and music, which highlight the haptic, the affective, and care, make possible an expansive, ethical practice sustained by a contrapuntal vision. To think, feel, make, and live in generative ways with a firm grasp of the resources at hand, in order to knit together, as well as tear apart when we need to, is the work of archival emanations and contrapuntal transformations: it is a work of the shadow imagination, replete with revolutionized imaginings. === [PDF page 32] === 20 Stories from the Margins: Pramoedya’s Imagined Community in Exile and the Female Revolutionary Do not be surprised, therefore, that when I look back at the past I see the Indonesian revolution embodied in the form of a woman—my mother, Pradnya Paramita, Hindu Goddess of the Most High Wisdom. --Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy (1999) 1.1 | Stories Arisen from Arrest On October 13, 1965, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was removed from his home, detained, and sent to multiple prisons in the Jakarta region in Indonesia over the span of four years, before being exiled for ten years (1969-1979) in a prison colony in Buru Island, about 1400 miles away from Jakarta. Recalling the night of his arrest, Pramoedya describes the violence with which the soldiers carried out their arrest: I was arrested and everything that I possessed was confiscated… Even my house was confiscated and never returned. I was taken away by truck and hit several times with a gun until I almost lost consciousness. […] At that time, my wife was giving birth somewhere else. A neighbor told her what was happening to me. She rushed home but was unable to enter. She witnessed the burning of my eight manuscripts and all my documents. My entire library went up in flames, too. Burning manuscripts is something that can never be forgiven! Burning books can only be described as evil. The soldiers’ act was proof of the degradation of their culture, of their vandalism: the antithesis of the creative process of writing, one of the main symbols of culture.1 === [PDF page 33] === 21 This harrowing episode included beatings that left him partially deaf for the rest of his life. It is also one of near-total devastation of Pramoedya’s archive, in the multiple senses of the word archive: the burning of his writings and books, and also the building itself (from the Greek arkheion), the home that he and his wife have built a life in. The unimaginable ruin is allencompassing: the violence that Pramoedya experienced damaged him physically, tore his house apart, and destroyed the efforts that he had put into his life’s work. Here, in an impassioned recounting of events during the volatile political climate in 1965, Pramoedya declares that creativity and culture are also part of this destruction, gesturing at the vital necessity of the creative acts of writing, of telling stories, and of the imagination. The communist threat that the United States tried to contain in Southeast Asia led to a U.S.-backed military coup in Indonesia in 1965, resulting in the overthrow of Sukarno’s Old Order by then-general Suharto, and leading to the rise of the repressive New Order regime that depended on military power, male-dominated rule, discriminatory policies against the Chinese, and the subordination of women. The arrests, kidnappings, and murders of close to an estimated one million people included suspected communists, communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese, scholars, activists, the Indonesian Women’s Movement, and left-wing cultural organizations that Pramoedya was affiliated with. Joesoef Isak, Pramoedya’s editor, publisher, and ally, wrote, “It is not easy for Pramoedya to be a writer in his own country. For that reason the Latin phrase, ‘Verba amini proferre et vitam imedere vero…’ might be applied to him: ‘He who expresses himself freely risks his soul for truth.’”2 Pramoedya was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize and awarded multiple awards, including the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award in 1988. His commitment to language, justice, expression, and revolution—indeed, a commitment === [PDF page 34] === 22 to the freedom to write—came at no small expense. Pramoedya was imprisoned at all stages of his life: in 1947, he was imprisoned in Bukit Duri, Jakarta, by the Dutch for his role in the Indonesian revolution, until the Dutch officially recognized Indonesia’s independence in 1949; in 1960, Pramoedya was imprisoned for a year, without trial, under the Sukarno presidency for his defense of the Chinese and critiques of social issues in the publication of The Chinese in Indonesia; under Suharto’s New Order regime, Pramoedya was sent to multiple prisons in Jakarta between 1965-1969, and then to the Buru island prison colony from 1969-1979, for his affiliation with leftist cultural organizations that were suspected to have communist ties. Upon release, Pramoedya was still subject to house arrest and surveillance, as well as the continued banning of his works, a ban not revoked until much later in 1999. Much of Pramoedya’s manuscripts had, throughout his life, been destroyed. The violence of burning manuscripts and books strikes an even more poignant note when one thinks of a habit that Pramoedya developed after his release from the Buru prison colony: having been conditioned to burning rubbish and wood as part of the forced, mandated labor on the island, Pramoedya continued burning rubbish at home with his own hands for the rest of his life.3 While in Buru island, Pramoedya was prohibited from writing for eight years; it was not until 1973 that Pramoedya was allowed to write. During this time, Pramoedya started reciting stories to his fellow prisoners—stories that became some of his most famous works, including the Buru Quartet series (the tetralogy that earned Pramoedya international recognition), and The Mute’s Soliloquy (Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu),4 a collection of his prison notes and letters. This Earth of Mankind, the first novel of the Buru Quartet, is a story of resistance—it is about the struggle for independence, and about the impending national revolution that will eventually lead to the establishment of Indonesia as a country. The story begins in the Dutch East Indies in the === [PDF page 35] === 23 late 19th century, a time when the robust industry of trading and moving products such as spices, coffee, machines, and other supplies circulated between the East Indies and Europe, while also bringing in merchants from all over Asia—This Earth of Mankind reflects this ethnic diversity, including people from various Indonesian ethnic groups, and Dutch, Arab, Chinese, Japanese, and French characters as part of the landscape in Java. This Earth of Mankind centers on the story of Minke, the protagonist and descendant of Javanese aristocracy, who falls in love with Annelies, the mixed-race (“Indo,” meaning someone who is of Indonesian and Dutch descent) daughter of Nyai Ontosoroh, a native Indonesian concubine of a Dutch businessman (nyai means concubine). Having been educated at an elite Dutch school, Minke’s worldview shifts when he becomes the unofficial student of Nyai Ontosoroh, who believes in the emancipatory aspects of language and education. The story reaches a climax when Nyai Ontosoroh and Minke face the Dutch court in an effort to prevent Annelies from being shipped off to the Netherlands because Minke and Annelie’s marriage is not officially recognized under Dutch laws, and as Nyai Ontosoroh has no legal rights over her own daughter. This penultimate scene is key in highlighting Nyai Ontosoroh’s rhetoric in fighting the judges, demonstrating her ability in undermining colonial subjugation and maneuvering multiple psychical, linguistic, and intellectual spaces within her limited role in society. In this chapter, I focus on This Earth of Mankind precisely because of the centrality of the Nyai Ontosoroh figure in this first installation of the tetralogy. Centering on Nyai Ontosoroh’s strong, willful, and radical character holds significant political weight: Pramoedya depends on her in order to chart an alternative history to the Indonesian revolution, one that is based on a model of what I consider is a precedent for postcolonial feminism as portrayed by Nyai Ontosoroh’s role, an “unofficial teacher”5 who understands that resistance to oppression and === [PDF page 36] === 24 colonial power necessitates the transformative use of the power of language and of a differential consciousness capable of thinking through multiple planes of awareness. How would Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet tetralogy have intervened in national politics and race, gender, and intercultural relations in Indonesia had it not been banned from circulation in 1979 after his release from prison? Even though Pramoedya tried to re-write the Nyai narrative into popular consciousness by positioning her as the foundation of the Buru Quartet and by revising the representation of the Nyai figure, the ban on his works was not lifted until 1999. What effects Pramoedya’s works might have had at the time of publication, therefore, had to be deferred until twenty years after (though, to be sure, the ban did have an effect on the public, as activists and scholars fought to have the ban revoked, and as Pramoedya’s works were still managed to be surreptitiously circulated among students and activists). Nyai is a Javanese word that, in its original form, is a respectful form of address for women, but that later denotes a woman with low morals in its iteration in the colonial era: a Nyai is a concubine, mistress, and housekeeper. The Nyai, therefore, is an essential figure for understanding the gendered and racialized power relations in the Dutch East Indies, as well as for considering how the disappearance of the Nyai narrative has led to an Indonesian postcolonial state fraught with silences, erasures, and violations. The focus on the Nyai in This Earth of Mankind is, therefore, a radical act of writing, especially when women considered too transgressive, political, or radical were vilified during the time the novel was written.6 Pramoedya’s defiance is not only in the mere writing of the Nyai Ontosoroh character, but also in his depiction of her as a central figure, as someone who I consider a progenitor of postcolonial feminism. === [PDF page 37] === 25 In an interview on her 2007 play, They Call Me Nyai Ontosoroh, an adaptation of This Earth of Mankind, the playwright Faiza Mardzoeki remarks that “the spirit of the story belongs to Nyai Ontosoroh… Minke is a narrator that tells the life stories and experiences of Nyai.”7 With Nyai Ontosoroh as Minke’s object of narration in This Earth of Mankind, Pramoedya presents an alternative history to Indonesian nationalism through the voice of a woman who is living on the margins of society, but who is also able to “hack” and reappropriate the tools of colonial authority and power—including language, trade, culture, and education—that she has been thrown into. Such a strategy reveals the pivotal role that the Nyai played during and after the colonial period, influencing both the Dutch and Javanese societies which she is a part of and apart from. 1.2 | Roles and Representations of the Nyai Colonial power, as embodied in the European men, depended greatly on the Nyai, particularly because “[concubinage] permitted permanent settlement and rapid growth by a cheaper means than the importation of European women.”8 After the abolition of slavery in 1860, concubines provided not just sexual services, but also convenient and cheap labor. As a result, “by the nineteenth century concubinage was the most prevalent living arrangement for European men… It was only in the early twentieth century that concubinage was more actively condemned.”9 It is important to note how much the concubines in servitude were needed by the European men: both as self-affirmation and through which power gets legitimated, but also because concubines were able to navigate multiple roles as housekeeper, caretaker, business liaison, mistress, and mother. As Nyai Ontosoroh tells her daughter Annelies, “so it was that I began to understand that in reality I was not at all dependent on Mr. Mellema. On the contrary, === [PDF page 38] === 26 he was dependent on me.”10 The Nyai’s position, therefore, is complicated by the agency that she has in the household (Nyai Ontosoroh gains control of the business, and is taught the European bourgeois ways of learning), when, in fact, she does not have any legal rights at all. Indeed, the domestic space for a concubine is a complex one: in this space of the home, race, gender, and sexual relations make colonial power work effectively in insidious ways. Ann Stoler writes, “sexual control was both an instrumental image for the body politic—a salient part standing for the whole—and itself fundamental to how racial policies were secured and how colonial projects were carried out.”11 The domestic sphere under colonialism is not simply a personal space; it is where colonial power gets mapped onto the female body, and where subordinating the concubines in such privates space allowed the European men to further their colonial agendas. In an article tracing the different versions of the Nyai Dasima story, the most popular Nyai story to have persisted since the early twentieth century, Jean Gelman Taylor states, Dutch male and female authors in the period 1870 to 1920 saw the colonial condition in essentially the same way: the nyai and the white man, and the problems for European society as to what social position should justly be accorded the nyai and her children… the novelists were describing colonial reality when they chose as their subject the relationship between brown and white and focused on the nyai and her European employer.12 Indeed, the concubine-master relationship was a “colonial reality”: Nyais were instruments of labor and objects of servitude through which the men were able to expand their territorial reaches via business endeavors on Native land, as well as through their progeny—both products of European colonial power, but for which the European men can easily relinquish responsibility. In === [PDF page 39] === 27 This Earth of Mankind, Nyai Ontosoroh carries out the business affairs and labor required to maintain Boerderij Buitenzorg (the Buitenzorg estate), a name symbolic of Dutch colonialism— Buitenzorg is the Dutch name for what is now the city of Jakarta, and “Ontosoroh” is the Javanese for Buitenzorg). As colonial reality reveals, however, the Nyai’s disenfranchisement is disguised by this seeming possession of power over household and business matters. In a moving scene where Annelies listens to her mother’s retelling of the past, Nyai Ontosoroh divulges, A nyai is just a bought slave… she has to be ready at any moment for the possibility that her master, her tuan, will become bored with her. And she may be kicked out with all her children, her own children, unrecognized by Native society because they were born outside wedlock.”13 At the same time that the Javanese community will not recognize Nyai Ontosoroh’s maternal rights, the Dutch law in place also “would not acknowledge [Nyai Ontosoroh’s] motherhood, just because [she is] a Native and was not legally married.”14 This was intrinsically part of colonial reality: “The Indies Civil Code of 1848 made their position poignantly clear: native women ‘had no rights over children recognized by a white man’”15—a reality that is painfully depicted in This Earth of Mankind when Annelies has to be shipped back to Europe, as the institutionalized colonial law cannot recognize Nyai as her legal parent. Here, it is important to trace the history of the Nyai figure—both as part of colonial reality and history, and as part of the various ways that the Nyai has been represented in literature and in performances. As Taylor delineates in her essay on Nyai Dasima, the story itself has a long history. It has been told and retold in Java for two hundred and fifty years… in its passage from folklore to popular play, from book === [PDF page 40] === 28 to movie, the Nyai Dasima story allows us to consider how the passage of time itself alters interpretations of the story and the uses to which it is put.16 Taylor makes a critical point about the representation of Nyai Dasima: adaptations and revisions of how the story gets told, as well whose purposes the different retellings serve, are in no way neutral and devoid of cultural and political implications. Retellings are not just stories; they reflect a colonial reality of use and abuse, as well as power and disempowerment. The story of Nyai Dasima is pertinent for our discussions at hand; not only is it the most popular of the Nyai stories, but it is also “clearly an important text for Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet.”17 Annelies recalls a moment when she caught Nyai Ontosoroh reading: “[Mama] was sitting at her table, reading. She looked at me, closed the book, and I caught a glimpse of the title, Nyai Dasima.”18 Upon seeing Annelies, the Nyai promptly puts the book back into the cabinet. In another instance, Nyai Ontosoroh recommends the book to Minke: “Francis wrote Nyai Dasima, a truly European-style novel. But in Malay. I’ve got the book. Perhaps you’d like to study it.”19 The intertextuality in This Earth of Mankind makes Nyai Ontosoroh a multi-layered historical figure; she is a textual embodiment of the Nyai Dasima’s story, but revises the Dasima story as her narrative progresses. Pramoedya’s deliberate use of G. Francis’ Nyai Dasima as a foundational text and precursor to Nyai Ontosoroh serves a threefold purpose: on the one hand, Pramoedya gestures towards the long and significant history of the Nyai figure; on the other hand, he suggests that in his adaptation of Nyai Dasima, he is repurposing and reconfiguring her into something different from what has come before; finally, highlighting a European-style Malay literary work hints at an openness for cultural and linguistic hybridity that, before Pramoedya, has not entered the conversation in postcolonial Indonesia. === [PDF page 41] === 29 The Nyai narrative, therefore, occupies a pivotal aspect of colonialism; Pramoedya’s Nyai Ontosoroh, in particular, functions in both local and global ways as part of the colonial transactions of power. Furthermore, including the Nyai figure in intellectual, political, and cultural discourse is significant precisely because of the erasure of its narrative starting from the early twentieth century onwards—for the very particular reasons of obfuscating the nation’s colonial history. Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntal analysis is useful for our consideration of such erasures: In practical terms, ‘contrapuntal reading’ as I have called it means reading a text with an understanding that what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England… the point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded.20 Contrapuntal reading has to do with looking through intertwined perspectives, as well as being able to consider not just how power works, but also how struggles against dominance happen. Through such contrapuntal reading, we can recover what has been expunged: in the case of the Dutch East Indies, the Nyai who represents the colonial reality of the relationship between European and native—colonizer and colonized—is, as Taylor points out, “reflective of a brief historical period.”21 The disappearing genre of the Nyai narrative, however, was not merely accidental; it was orchestrated by a government that exercised extreme caution in terms of what gets circulated in the public, in order to present a sanitized version of colonial history and reality. Balai Pustaka, the colonial government-controlled publishing company started in 1908, had the === [PDF page 42] === 30 “explicit goal of [ensuring] ‘that the educated indigenous people have decent reading materials’”—the Nyai story, apparently, was considered too shameful of a figure to include in popular literature, and was not deemed “decent” and moral enough for the enlightened Natives.22 The Nyai’s erasure from literature in the later colonial period and throughout the modern period, therefore, reflects a disavowal of the gendered foundations of colonial domination; the expungement is indicative of the ways in which the use and abuse of women in colonial Indonesia becomes a silenced and obscure part of its history, and that is later echoed in the ways in which women became vilified in the 1965-66 anti-communist purge. As Laurie Sears notes, “In Indonesia, the governments that have replaced the Dutch colonial regime have merely recirculated domination to varying degrees by exchanging local oppressors for foreign ones.”23 It was not until Pramoedya’s novel was published in 1979 that the Nyai narrative reappeared in popular literature. Pramoedya’s representation of Nyai Ontosoroh serves multiple purposes: it acts as intervention to existing Nyai narratives that typically present the Nyai as a “good and patient victim” or as “someone who ‘gets lies, deceit, cruel treatment, robbery, and finally death.’”24 In all the versions of Nyai Dasima that Taylor examines, the portrayals are uniform: the Nyai is presented as an ever-suffering victim whose only escape is in death. Pramoedya’s Ontosoroh, however, seeks neither escape nor a return to her previous life. Instead, I argue that Nyai Ontosoroh embodies a form of proto-postcolonial feminism, as the "exploration of and at the intersections of colonialism and neocolonialism with gender, nation, class, race, and sexualities in the different contexts of women’s lives, the subjectivities, work, sexuality, and rights.”25 This definition is especially salient considering the ways in which Nyai Ontosoroh exists in precarious spaces of in-betweenness: === [PDF page 43] === 31 Her insistence thereafter on the title nyai accentuates the contradictory position she occupies under colonial modernity as the housekeeper and mother of a modern bourgeois family who has herself rejected her Javanese past while still, in the eyes of the law, the kept Native slave of a colonial tuan.26 The collision of disparate personal and public spaces, as well as the intersections of colonial power with gender, class, race, and sexuality, all work to present a complex picture of Nyai Ontosoroh whose personal life is always implicated in the political realm of colonialism; for her, the blurring of the personal and political puts her in a precarious space. 1.3 | Nyai Ontosoroh’s Radical Pedagogy and Wild Knowledge As the primary figure, instrument, and object of colonialism, the Nyai “becomes an international coinage—an effect of what Bakhtin calls ‘heteroglossia’—caught… between the world of native Javanese family values and the multiracial, international economy of colonial domestic affairs.”27 In This Earth of Mankind, it is exactly this capacity of working in different registers that allows Nyai Ontosoroh to utilize her marginality to intervene in and between both worlds: the character who most embodies the voice of the Other—that most central of Bakhtin’s conditions for social and political challenge to the voice of authority— is Nyai Ontosoroh… her fiery independence and her success as a businesswoman constitute a challenge to orthodox Javanese views on women, especially concubines, and she is by far the most important influence on Minke.28 The emphasis on Nyai Ontosoroh’s influence on Minke is an important one, particularly because of Minke’s centrality as the narrator of Pramoedya’s novel, thereby placing him as one of the === [PDF page 44] === 32 novel’s main characters, possibly symbolizing the next generation of individuals who will forge the path towards a new form of nationalism in postcolonial Indonesia. As Faiza Mardzoeki reminds us, however, it is Nyai Ontosoroh that haunts the novel: she is both the diegetic and extradiegetic voice in Minke’s story, providing both the foundation of the story as well as the anti-colonial, resisting force (“fight” is one of the most used words in the novel) from the beginning to the very end. Even when she is not directly involved in a scene, Nyai Ontosoroh provides the motivations for Minke’s actions through her unconventional, emancipatory pedagogy. From the very beginning, Minke is astonished by the poise and knowledge that Nyai Ontosoroh possesses: “She was amazing, this nyai… From what school had she graduated that she appeared so educated, intelligent? … And if she did graduate from school, how was she able to accept her situation as a nyai? I couldn’t understand any of this.”29 Minke’s speculations about Nyai Ontosoroh’s educational background prompts him to refer to her as a “teacher” in several instances: “she was really an unofficial teacher whose lessons were delivered officially enough.” (my emphasis)30 Sold into concubinage by her parents, Nyai Ontosoroh reinvents her status by reconfiguring what it means to be a Nyai. Instead of subscribing to and following in the footsteps of her predecessor, Nyai Dasima, whose text provides the historical basis for understanding her own character, Nyai Ontosoroh taps into a form of untamed, wild knowledge which, as we see towards the end of This Earth of Mankind, proves more valuable than the teacher Magda Peters’ institutionalized knowledge. Prodding Minke to take a stand against the authorities, Nyai Ontosoroh asserts, This fight is more important than school. At school they will gang up on you and will hurt both your body and your feelings. By facing this situation now you will === [PDF page 45] === 33 learn to defend yourself and to go on the attack in public, before all races. You will graduate with the diploma named fame.31 Nyai Ontosoroh’s progressive, anti-colonial stance inspires Minke to tap into a mode of resistance that eventually sustains the spirit of the Buru Quartet. It is through Nyai Ontosoroh’s anti-colonialism that we begin to see the possibility of an activism to counter the colonial forces at work in the novel. Stating that “this fight is more important than school,” Nyai Ontosoroh understands the urgency of this turning point in their lives. Her activist knowledge, although “unofficial” and outside of institutionalized learning, is what is needed to fight the colonial institution. With Minke as “the receptacle into which [these ideals] overflowed,” the novel offers the possibility of an anti-colonial agenda that is based on a hybrid form of meaning-making, bridging both the Nyai’s “unofficial” (though learned) knowledge with the more traditional forms of knowledge that Minke has garnered from his elite Dutch education. Nyai’s educational path is an unconventional one: taught to read Dutch and handle business affairs by Tuan Mellema, she continues learning and reading on her own. Despite not having gone to school, Nyai Ontosoroh is able to speak Dutch fluently, read Flemish texts, and engage in intellectual dialogue with Magda Peters, Minke’s schoolteacher, on critical theories. In the climactic courtroom scene, Nyai Ontosoroh displays the extent to which she is able to wield resistance by using the conqueror’s tongue: With a clear voice and in flawless Dutch—defying the judicial order that she use Javanese, and ignoring the pounding of the gavel—like the flood waters released from the grip of a hurricane, she began… […] her tongue did not stop letting fly words, bullets of revenge.32 === [PDF page 46] === 34 Aware of the subversive power of using the Dutch language in order to fight against colonial authorities, Nyai Ontosoroh is also cognizant of the importance of one’s own tongue in order to mobilize anti-colonialist efforts—she exhorts Minke to write in Malay, as it is a language that will reach a wider audience: “now you must write in Malay, child. The Malay papers are read by many more people.”33 Thus, Nyai Ontosoroh is someone who understands that “relation… is spoken multilingually. Going beyond the impositions of economic forces and cultural pressures, Relation rightfully opposes the totalitarianism of any monolingual intent.”34 Through Nyai Ontosoroh’s ability to traverse multiple linguistic and sociocultural spaces, This Earth of Mankind puts postcolonial issues of language—and language use—at the forefront of the novel, and it is not insignificant that Pramoedya has chosen a woman to fight against Dutch colonialism and provide “a model of resistance and courage.” If the Buru Quartet was intended to serve as a rewriting of Indonesian nationalism and anti-colonialism, then it is a story that not only locates a kind of postcolonial feminist ideology as central to its rewriting process, but also one that makes use of the notion of hybridity in order to undermine pre-existing power arrangements embedded in colonial structures, whether it be through language, race, gender, or sexuality. Nyai Ontosoroh is the embodiment of the kind of “wild” knowledge production that Farid and Razif describes in their essay on “the radical literature produced by the nationalist movement of the early twentieth century which was disparagingly dubbed by the colonial state as batjaan liar (wild publications).”35 In this “subaltern literature,” The women figures portrayed in batjaan liar were generally different from the images drawn by the colonial rulers… Batjaan liar usually described a woman activist with a strong character, broad knowledge, able to pass judgment and sometimes conduct debates with me. One will not find such characters in Balai === [PDF page 47] === 35 Pustaka novels. The position of the nyai (mistress) in the batjaan liar was also described differently compared with the other literary works of the era. The nyai was portrayed as a woman with strong character and willpower even though her fate was very much in the hands of the plantation owners.36 By repurposing the Nyai figure as someone who transgresses from what the colonial and Javanese societies expects of a nyai, Pramoedya is arguably writing back to the era of the “wild” writers of the early twentieth century, and putting himself in alliance with them. The similarities between this description of the representation of the Nyai in batjaan liar with Nyai Ontosoroh are uncanny. It is unsurprising that, like the radical nationalist activists and writers, Pramoedya’s works were also banned and systematically removed (in Pramoedya’s case, confiscated and burned) from the public consciousness. A notable parallel to the “wild” writers is the way in which their texts were written: batjaan liar used colloquial Low Malay in order to differentiate itself from “the colonial administration codified High Malay,” while Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet came out of a similarly “low” place: the prison.37 1.4 | Contemporary Re-Visions of the Nyai Narrative Today, the Nyai narrative is far from being completely eradicated from popular consciousness. Instead, it has found its place in popular media such as television comedy shows and plays. While many of the recyclings of the Nyai Dasima present her as a damsel in distress, Nyai Ontosoroh has been taken up by activists and feminists in performances that highlight the ways in which she defies gender norms, colonial power, and the servitude that she has been sold into. Feminist playwright Faiza Mardzoeki’s adaptation of This Earth of Mankind is an international play produced in cities across Indonesia, as well as internationally in the === [PDF page 48] === 36 Netherlands, Amsterdam, and Belgium. With less than twenty years since Pramoedya’s books started to recirculate, the adaptations and revisions of the Nyai Ontosoroh story are still in their nascent stages of circulating in the national, international popular consciousness. What is remarkable, however, is the way in which Nyai Ontosoroh’s hybrid knowledge that crosses the boundaries of Dutch-Native and institutionalized-unofficial forms are enacted in 21st century productions and adaptations of her story: these are plays, performances, and dialogues that happen inside and outside university settings, and that are accessible to both the academic community as well as the larger public. As Nyai Ontosoroh advises Minke, writing in Malay will “be read by more people.”38 Similarly, these performances reach a bigger audience than just those within academic institutions. It seems appropriate that these performative retellings of Nyai Ontosoroh are outside of academic discourse, and are instead performed in theatres and other public spaces; these adaptations, therefore, could be aligned with what I have described as Nyai Ontosoroh’s “wild” knowledge. These performances, too, serve the uncanny role of returning Pramoedya’s text closer to the one from which it came: oral stories told in the Buru island prison colony. Thus, these remakes “renew the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovate and interrupt the performance of the present. ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.”39 Just as Pramoedya looks back to Indonesia’s colonial history and rewrites nationalism through the figure of Nyai Ontosoroh, his works now exist in a local and global flow and exchange of creative ideas that takes the nyai narrative seriously as a lens through which we can rethink postcoloniality in the 21st century. Making the present a “necessity” takes on an urgent tone—it is an act that takes into account how deeply the past informs the present (and vice versa) in a continuous, back-and-forth flow of negotiations and renegotiations. === [PDF page 49] === 37 As Homi Bhabha writes, reconfiguring the past as something that “interrupts” the present cannot be regarded simply as a nostalgic practice, but instead an active one where the current moment becomes an ongoing process of making sense, of revising as we need to.40 These contemporary retellings and adaptations of Pramoedya’s Nyai Ontosoroh story, therefore, are significant cultural and political works that help us make sense of the contemporary postcolonial state. As Jean Taylor states, … the unvarying image held up by European and Indonesian, male and female artists alike, in written and visual media is of the woman as center of calm, exemplar of submission and refined behavior – the model, in short, promoted by President Suharto’s Family Welfare Guidance. But, by shifting our emphasis from the depiction of woman as victim to the depiction of woman in relation to components of her society, we can provide materials for the ongoing project of writing an autonomous history of Indonesia and understand the agenda of today’s Jakarta-based elite.41 Popular during the colonial period, and then abruptly expunged from the early twentieth century literary productions, the Nyai narrative is, as of yet, an important area of cultural study still in its nascent stages of being articulated as central to not just Indonesian studies, but postcolonial studies in general, as well as to the transnational and transpacific exchanges of knowledge. The Nyai is also particularly important to Indonesia as President Suharto’s New Order regime recreated an image of the woman as a meek, docile subject. As a figure who we might consider a predecessor to postcolonial feminism, Nyai Ontosoroh represents the “insistence on understanding colonialism (and its legacy) and neocolonialism as one of the most important obstacles for the attainment of the more egalitarian and just world, and in its emphasis on women === [PDF page 50] === 38 as the group who will not only benefit most from the changed world but also lead this particular historical transformation of humanity in the future.”42 As Nyai Ontosoroh urges, “we must fight back, we must resist.”43 1.5 | Imagined Community in Exile: Counterpoetics of Buru Island Creations Buru Island Prison Camp. Spoken, 1973; Written, 1975. Each of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novels in the Buru Quartet series carries these details, reminding us of the specific political and social circumstances from which the texts originated. When the Quartet was first published, the book covers were inscribed, in large font, with the words “Buru Island Creation” (“Karya Pulau Buru”)—this was a doubly bold move by the publisher (Hasta Mitra), as it was a risk to publish the works, and explicitly stating its Buru origins made the defiance even more glaring. In addition to the Buru Quartet, Pramoedya wrote four other works while in Buru, including three historical novels, A Changing Tide (Arus Balik), Arok and Dedes (Arok and Dedes), Whirlpool (Mata Pusaran), and a historical drama, Mangir. He had a manuscript for an encyclopedia about the Dutch East Indies that he wanted to publish, but this, along with his many other manuscripts, was confiscated and destroyed. Henk Meier, a Dutch translator of Pramoedya’s work, notes that much of Pramoedya’s writings “might all be characterized as, formally, nothing but notes (catatan catatan).”44 When he was finally given permission to write in 1973, it was only with the help of others from the outside that batches of his notes and writings were smuggled out. By the time of his release, his remaining notes and papers in Buru were destroyed. It behooves us to note that the destruction of Pramoedya’s archive, therefore, happened both before and after his arrests—the violence he endured on physical, mental, === [PDF page 51] === 39 intellectual, and spiritual levels was consistently materialized throughout his life by the Indonesian military and militarized government. Scribbled on the 1975 typed manuscript of This Earth of Mankind are Pramoedya’s notes, including one that says, “not to be revealed to anyone” (tidak untuk diketahui orang, my translation). On this manuscript, we also discover that Pramoedya dedicated the novel to G. J. Resink, a professor and friend of Pramoedya’s who has been credited as someone who helped save Pramoedya’s early works from complete obliteration. === [PDF page 52] === 40 Figure 1: 1975 manuscript of This Earth of Mankind (Photo by Viola Lasmana, taken at the H. B. Jassin Literary Documentation Center, Jakarta, Indonesia) === [PDF page 53] === 41 Figure 2: Dedication page of the 1975 manuscript of This Earth of Mankind: “As a tribute to a friend: G. J. Resink” (Photo by Viola Lasmana, taken at the H. B. Jassin Literary Documentation Center, Jakarta, Indonesia) === [PDF page 54] === 42 In his acknowledgment of G. J. Resink’s “rescue work,” Pramoedya also invokes the connection between the creative act of writing and the inextricability of justice with culture, much like what Pramoedya has said about the atrocity of burning manuscripts and books as evil and as degradation of culture: … a creation can easily be ruined or destroyed, quite deliberately, simply because men have insufficient respect and attachment to fundamental human rights. This in turn simply reflects the still-low level of civilization and culture of those who attempt its destruction, indeed of the whole system of values of society concerned. In this connection let me express my respect and untold thanks to Prof. Mr. G. J. Resink, who in 1948-49 saved my manuscripts… But for him, all these works would certainly have been destroyed, as happened to a number of my manuscripts from before 1947 and after 1965. His rescue of these texts in itself represents part of what I mean by social support. Of course my thanks are also due to H. B. Jassin, who immediately brought out a large proportion of my shorter writings of 1948-49, while I was still in prison. What he did consolidated Resink’s rescue work.45 By recognizing Resink’s instrumental role in saving Pramoedya’s early manuscripts from the Bukit Duri prison when the Dutch imprisoned him, Pramoedya also calls attention to the connection between social justice and freedom of expression—the ability to imagine, create, and write has to do with basic human rights. The stories from Buru became a mode of survival, helping Pramoedya and his fellow prisoners—many of those also activists and cultural figures like Pramoedya—to imagine a world beyond the treacherous one they were in. === [PDF page 55] === 43 The significance of these stories working as a sustaining device, when the prisoners could expect death at any moment (either by execution, malnutrition, or disease), reveals the imperative and affirmative role of the imagination and of storytelling. These narratives, therefore, function as what Yunte Huang calls “counterpoetics,” a range of “marginalized poetic/historiographical practices” including “anecdotes… correspondence, fantasies,” among other marginalized writing practices. Huang writes, [counterpoetics] move instead toward the enactment of poetic imagination as a means to alter memory and invoke minority survival in the deadly space between competing national, imperial interests and between authoritative regimes of epistemology serving those interests.46 As a counterpoint to life in exile under military watch and to the ever-present threat of death, these stories activate the poetic consciousness in the most adverse of conditions, providing a source of strength and resistance, passed from Pramoedya to one group of prisoners and the next. Pramoedya explains, As a woman who stood up alone, to the injustices of Dutch colonialism, [Nyai Ontosoroh] was a character who provided a model of resistance and courage for my fellow prisoners to look up to, so that their spirit would not be demoralized by the killings and the cruelties witnessed in the camps.47 These historical stories of revolution and the struggle for independence, therefore, also make possible a different articulation and imagination of belonging for political prisoners in exile, and activate an elsewhere that enables an alternative understanding of temporal and psychical consciousness. === [PDF page 56] === 44 If, as Benedict Anderson says, print capitalism, with its ability to disseminate ideas and writings—the “mechanically-reproduced print-languages capable of dissemination through the market”48—to the masses beyond one’s regional space is key in making possible a national consciousness, what happens when one is cut off from these technologies of print-languages? Pramoedya writes, imprisonment is a terrible thing for it means the severance of communication with the outside world. We prisoners were unable to convey our feelings and opinions about the treatment meted out to us. It goes without saying that the trauma of the mass killings that took place in 1965 and the years following effectively silenced the voices of many who might have otherwise protested. And in this regard, I am probably an exception, one among the very few prisoners who was not about to give up the right to air his view to whomever, whenever, or wherever.49 This distinction between inside and outside is crucial when we talk about the freedom of expression and the ability to disseminate ideas and thoughts, especially as it pertains to a sense of belonging to the nation, and what it means to be able to imagine, as Anderson says, one’s self as part of a larger community. For Pramoedya and his fellow prisoners in exile, who were on the margins of the formation of a “nationally imagined community” (in contrast to those who could be part of a communicative loop via print and paper), they were outside of the “languages-ofpower” that print capitalism made possible.50 Yet, simultaneously, what remains remarkable about Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet is the conviction that the Malay language was a critical aspect of and the print-language needed for the emergent national imagination and imagined community in the Dutch East Indies, which later became Indonesia. === [PDF page 57] === 45 Pramoedya was aware of such inextricability of power to print capitalism—this became one of the reasons that he refused to stop writing, and why he resisted from destroying his own writing when all hope seemed lost, and when writing seemed incommensurate to the tortures and suffering happening around him: What would be the meaning of anything I had to write when compared to [that man’s arrest?] Even though my writing tablet was more than half full of notes, I wanted to destroy it. It was meaningless, nothing but a prophylactic for personal anxiety. Yet each time my hand moved to burn it, my conscience told me to stop. “These notes, regardless of their worth, are a part of me,” I told myself. And so, even though I felt what I had written to be unsatisfactory, I still couldn’t destroy Pramoedya’s understanding of the vital necessity to record and witness his experiences are consistent with his assertions about the “creative process of writing, one of the main symbols of culture” that the soldiers violated when they burned down his library. The notes that make up Pramoedya’s memoir… are especially valuable because they record the personal, literary, and historical coordinates of what was lost in the most traumatic moment of contemporary Indonesian history. Both for an Indonesian and a non-Indonesian reader, they provide a compelling point of reference for “the events of 1965” (peristiwa 1965). In political terms, they compel attention to the unresolved national and international issues surrounding the crimes of the New Order regime, and the support given that regime by liberal democracies such as the United States. In literary terms, they call attention to the === [PDF page 58] === 46 significance of Pramoedya’s work as a whole as it was shaped up to, and as it was shattered following 1965.51 As Pramoedya writes in his prison notes, “Following the events of 1965, I lost everything… What would happen to me if my voice, my sole means of communication, were to be take from me? Is it possible to take from a man his right to speak to himself?”52 This identification of the importance of voice, and of expression, is crucial here because the silencing of Pramoedya’s voice as a writer after his arrest in 1965 was almost total (and, in fact, not the first time it was silenced – his 1960 publication of The Chinese in Indonesia was banned right after it was published). When Pramoedya was given permission to write in 1973, his fellow prisoners not only built a room for him so that he could have a private space to write, but they also covered some of the physical labor that Pramoedya was tasked. Pramoedya writes in his memoir, “the time I found for writing was a gift from my fellow prisoners who took over my fieldwork for me.”53 The oral stories that circulated in Buru, therefore, enabled a collective to emerge—in the space of the island prison colony, Pramoedya and his fellow prisoners were connected not just by their imprisonment, exile, forced physical labor, and fieldwork, but also by the creative ability to imagine, as well as the shared effort it took for all of them to create the space needed for the creative act of writing and imagining. This collective was crucial to Pramoedya’s ability to write in Buru, which would not have been possible without the help of his fellow prisoners. The Buru island group of prisoners was not an imagined community in the Andersonian sense of the term, but a community propelled by a collective, shadow imagination. In the enclosed area of Buru, the island became an imaginarium for a collective of those who labored: labor, from the Latin and French labor, meaning hardship, toil, and suffering, is transformed into === [PDF page 59] === 47 a labor of the imagination, collectively experienced through the shared stories that were initially composed without pen and paper, but with Pramoedya reciting the stories to his fellow prisoners: both an experience in a capsule in time, but that also transcended the spatial and temporal limits of the prison colony. Such a conception of an imagined community in exile, separated from the print-languages required for a national imagined community to emerge, becomes even more poignant when we take note of the protagonist Minke’s thoughts in the first few pages of This Earth of Mankind: “One of the products of science at which I never stopped marveling was printing […] It was as if the world no longer knew distance—it too had been abolished by the telegraph.”54 Marveling at the technological developments of the 19th century—including printing, photography, trains—Minke, the protagonist, becomes a receptacle for the imagined community in exile; with the absence of access to pen and paper, the oral transmission of these stories open up the possibility of a larger world of connections, activated by the imagination. The imagined community in exile, then, becomes a community that imagines—an imagining community. === [PDF page 60] === 48 “Abyss and Shuttle”: Li-Young Lee’s Poetic Consciousness as Ethical Consciousness For me, the only possible ethical consciousness available to humankind is poetic consciousness, because poetic consciousness accounts for the most of who we are. --Li-Young Lee, “The Subject Is Silence” (2012) It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence. --Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1986) 2.1 | At the Limit of Writing, a Brimming Li-Young Lee’s memoir begins with a “desire to speak with the dead.”1 The opening pages of The Winged Seed: A Remembrance recount a lurid dream in which his father returns from the dead, “carrying a jar of blood in one hand, his suit pockets lined with black seeds.”2 These seeds, as Lee’s father tells him, are his way of holding on to memories; they are remembrances. Lee’s prose and poetry are, too, articulations of remembrances, of the mix of “memory and forgetting”3—they are like what Lee describes as an “apocalypse, uncovering.”4 The often two-fold, opposing consciousness that emerges in Lee’s works pushes us to think about how forgetting is embedded in acts of remembering; how an apocalypse, in its catastrophe, is also a revelation (from the Greek apokalupsis, to uncover); how presence and enunciation come from silence; and how the movement inward into one’s deepest thoughts must also be a movement toward the outside: “us and the world.”5 Lee’s writing is a writing of the disaster. “Without language,” writes Maurice Blanchot, “nothing can be shown.”6 Disaster, Blanchot says, “is the limit of writing”; it is that which “describes” as soon as in-scription happens, but “does not mean that the disaster, as the force of === [PDF page 61] === 49 writing, is excluded from it.”7 The de-scription that happens at the moment of in-scription is when language, materialized through the poetic consciousness, allows one to make the movement outward—it is when the breach between the page and the world allows this exchange between inside and outside to happen. What is the limit of writing for Li-Young Lee? Lee has said that he “would like to be known as a poet of reconciliation, a poet who made it back from exile.”8 When the world is fractured, and when the violence of displacement has left so many punctures in one’s life, how does one write through to the very limits of language, in order to reach a point of reconciliation? Through acts of the poetic imagination and literary creation, Lee goes beyond the experiences of loss, displacement, trauma, and political violence that he and his family had experienced in the late 1950s through the early 60s. Lee’s parents were political exiles from China, and refugees who, after multiple transpacific crossings through Indonesia, Macau, Hong Kong, and Japan, settled in the United States in 1964 with the rest of the family. I argue that it is only through a writing of the disaster, a writing that “goes under” and enters the abyss, that Lee is able to break through to what Blanchot describes as a “thought of the disaster which disrupts solitude and overflows every variety of thought, as the intense, silent and disastrous affirmation of the outside.”9 A writing of the disaster involves the interaction between inside and outside, and it is with language—even, or especially, when silence is the language at work —that Lee accesses and mobilizes the poetic consciousness in order to get to a place of reconciliation, which can only happen with the breach between inside and outside. “I feel the real medium for me is silence… The real subject in poetry isn’t the voice. The real subject is silence,” says Li-Young Lee.10 The silence of one’s innermost depths functions as not just the medium, the platform for poetry as Lee describes, but also the middle: that which === [PDF page 62] === 50 hovers in the in-between space of the speakable and unspeakable, of inside and outside, of that middle ground between “us and the world.” Poetry, as the language of inward thought, voice, and identity, touches the midpoint—the medium—between inside and outside; it is a touching of silence, one that is un-covered from historical trauma, personal losses, and political injustices. As Lee says of his own writing, it is a “brimming,”11 a writing at the very limit, edge, or threshold, allowing for the passage of relation to the other: reconciliation, after all, cannot happen alone; for true reconciliation to happen, there must be a recognition of the other, an acknowledgment of the embodied other. In this passage and exchange between inside and outside, Lee activates a contrapuntal, poetic consciousness that makes possible a way of being in the world that moves beyond defensiveness and grievance, and goes towards reconciling the consequences of historical trauma; this is shown particularly by the ambivalence with which he reflects on his childhood in Indonesia in the crucial years of 1957-1959, a time of intense political upheavals and Sinophobia that resulted in the imprisonment of his father and the Lee family fleeing to several countries as refugees, but that was also a time when the world seemed full of potential, a feeling nurtured by Lee’s love for storytelling, and made possible by the stories told by those caring for Lee and his siblings. Imagination, from the Latin imaginaire (to form a mental image of), plays a vital role in making possible an alternative perspective to a world of violence. Viet Thanh Nguyen has called for the necessity of imagination beyond the nation, one that is tied to an “ethical and aesthetic move”;12 such a thinking of the interconnectedness of ethics and poetics is also echoed in Crystal Parikh's work that examines Li-Young Lee’s “ethical poetics.”13 I see both Nguyen’s and Parikh’s formulations of the possibility for a politics of the imagination beyond national borders === [PDF page 63] === 51 aligning with Yunte Huang’s notions of “transpacific imaginations” and “counterpoetics,”14 which argue for poetic resistance in the face of power and violence. This chapter, therefore, calls attention to the importance of stories, testimonies, and the literary imagination in confronting and countering a transpacific history laden with narrative closure. Lee’s work activates a counterpoetics that, as I elaborate in this chapter, presents a vexed relationship with what he calls “the Word” (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not)—a signifier that is manifold, ranging from the divine, to the beloved, to language, to life itself—while in the throes of historical trauma and continued, increasing violence in the world. In this ethical move, via the poetic consciousness, Lee activates in-between, interstitial spaces that open up the literary to the political, the inside to the outside, silence to resilience, and the Word to the embodied other—or, the Word to the world. Lee’s poetic consciousness, manifested in a writing of the disaster, is one that enables a thinking that oscillates between, to use Lee’s phrase from one of his poems, “abyss and shuttle”15—an imagining between chasm and flight, between catastrophe and deliverance. 2.2 | Histories: Anti-Chinese Violence in 1950s Indonesia Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957. Much of Lee’s reflections in his poetry and memoir are attempts at coming to terms with his family history and the violence of displacement that began with his parents’ journey from China to Indonesia. His father was arrested by the military and sent to a prison camp and former leper colony for nineteen months (1957-1959) after being accused by the Indonesian government of conspiring with the CIA to bomb Indonesia, and for spreading pro-Western ideals during a time when President Sukarno wanted to establish a socialist democracy, and when Sukarno’s authority as president was === [PDF page 64] === 52 overshadowed by the growing power of the Indonesian military. The mid-1950s was a period of increasing anti-Chinese sentiment and militarization in Indonesia that sowed the seeds for the overthrow of the Sukarno presidency by then-general Suharto, and that eventually culminated in the anti-communist genocide in 1965-66. The conditions under which Lee and his family lived during the tumultuous period in late 1950s Indonesia were enveloped not just by the trauma of displacement, exile, and of being outsiders in a new country, but they were also compounded by tremendous loss: the absence of Lee’s father during his nineteen-month imprisonment when Lee was still a toddler, as well as the loss of Lee’s siblings: “we knew there were two of us missing: a brother in China our parents hadn’t heard from in years, and a brother buried in Indonesia, neither of whom our parents talked about in front of us.”16 Lee’s older brother joined them from China many years later in the United States, and Lee eventually visited his dead brother’s grave with his sister during a pilgrimage to Indonesia, only to find that his brother’s body was buried underneath seven other dead strangers, piled on top of one another over the years. The chronology of events in the mid to late 1950s is important for understanding the political and personal stakes of the racial tension during this time in Indonesia. Here, I want to call attention to a few details that have not yet been addressed in the scholarship on Lee’s works: first, Lee was born immediately after the first outwardly racist speech against the Chinese in Indonesia happened; second, the time that Lee and his family spent in Indonesia coincided closely with the writer and dissident Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s anti-racist activism and work during those first years of Sinophobia. These intersections present a fuller picture of the political backdrop of Lee’s writings about his identity, childhood, and family history; the parallels with Pramoedya’s life and work also provide a glimpse into the suppression of any kind of public === [PDF page 65] === 53 writing defending the ethnic Chinese, as shown through Pramoedya’s The Chinese in Indonesia—published just after Lee and his family fled Indonesia—which was banned immediately after, and resulted in Pramoedya’s arrest. Chronology of events (1956 onwards) 1956 Asaat Datuk Mudo’s speech at the All Indonesia National Congress of Importers attacks the Chinese as a manipulative group that monopolizes the economy in Indonesia. Pramoedya Ananta Toer identifies this moment as the start of explicit hate-spreading against the Chinese in Indonesia—both Chinese nationals as well as the ethnic Chinese born in Indonesia. 1957 Li-Young Lee born in Jakarta. Martial law implemented in Indonesia. Lee’s father imprisoned for 19 months in a prison camp and former leper colony. 1958 Pramoedya attends the first Asia-Africa Writers Conference in Tashkent, then visits China. 1959 Lee and family flees Indonesia to Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, and finally the United States. Establishment of the Presidential Regulation 10 of 1959, prohibiting the Chinese from conducting retail business in rural areas, and the start of anti-Chinese policies. 1960 Publication of Pramoedya’s The Chinese in Indonesia. Pramoedya imprisoned for a year, without trial, for his defense of the Chinese in Indonesia; The Chinese in Indonesia subsequently banned. 1964 Lee and family arrive in Pennsylvania, U.S. 1965-66 Anti-communist killings in Indonesia; Suharto overthrows Sukarno and establishes the repressive, militarized New Order regime. === [PDF page 66] === 54 1965-1969 Pramoedya imprisoned in multiple prisons in the Jakarta region in Indonesia for his leftist work and affiliation with cultural organizations suspected to have ties with the communist party. His works are also subsequently banned. 1969-1979 Pramoedya exiled to the Buru island prison camp and former leper colony. In 1956, Assaat Datuk Mudo, a businessman, former Minister of Internal Affairs, and former Acting President of Indonesia, stated at the All Indonesia National Congress of Importers that the Chinese were monopolizing the economy and manipulating indigenous Indonesians in their business transactions. Assaat’s speech in 1956 was key in fomenting the anti-Chinese sentiment in Indonesia in the late 1950s. In fact, “within a few weeks [of Assaat’s speech,] committees in support of Assaat’s ideas were established in various parts of the country.”17 Assaat’s speech led to the growing strength of the “Assaat Movement,” which called for economic policies regulating the Chinese community’s business activities in Indonesia. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in his 1960 publication of The Chinese in Indonesia, identifies Assaat’s 1956 speech as the beginning of outward, explicit hate-spreading against Chinese foreign nationals, which consequently became an attack on all Chinese-identified individuals, including Indonesian citizens of ethnic Chinese descent.18 The Chinese in Indonesia, one of the few scholarly texts available about this subject (and Pramoedya’s lesser known texts), was based on a series of articles that Pramoedya wrote for the newspaper Bintang Timur, and published as a response to the discriminatory policies put in place in 1959, which resulted in the establishment of the Presidential Regulation 10 of 1959 (Peraturan Presiden No. 10 tahun 1959, abbreviated as PP-10/1959). PP-10/1959 was a policy issued by then Minister of Trade Rachmat Muljomiseno and signed by President Sukarno, prohibiting the Chinese from conducting retail business in rural === [PDF page 67] === 55 areas, requiring them to transfer ownership of their businesses to Indonesian citizens, and forcing them to move to urban areas by the following year—much of this was done by military force. One of Pramoedya’s primary goals in publishing The Chinese in Indonesia was to make a stand opposing PP-10/1959 and to call attention to the absurdity of the policy. He did this by historicizing Chineseness and the place of the Chinese in Indonesian society; Pramoedya made the case that for centuries, the Chinese had been contributing to the economy and helping it grow, rather than stealing from it or manipulating the Indonesians. He also wanted to dispel misconceptions and stereotypes about the Chinese by tracing the origins of anti-Chinese sentiment to the segregational policies that the Dutch colonial rule put in place long before Indonesia became an independent nation in 1945, and that before the Dutch put these policies in place, the Chinese and indigenous Indonesian populations had in fact been working alongside one another without antagonism. The Sinophobia that was brewing since the mid 1950s was exacerbated by the fact that martial law had been implemented in 1957 after a series of regional uprisings, giving the soldiers free rein to carry out their tasks in often violent ways. 1957 was also the year that Li-Young Lee was born in Indonesia—the moment that Lee came into the world, therefore, was one in which ethnic discrimination and militarization had begun to take place and manifest in all aspects of societal life. The declaration of martial law in 1957 gave the military control over not just matters relating to politics and the government, but also to broader areas of public life, including the general management of civil society and economic activities. As Sumit K. Mandal writes, While the measure was designed to put an end to most kinds of rural retail trade in the hands of Chinese, it was left to local military commanders to decide if a presidential ban was also necessary in the interest of security. […] Lack of === [PDF page 68] === 56 immediate compliance was dealt with ruthlessly: ‘[The army] literally threw hundreds of Chinese families into trucks and took them to hastily constructed relocation camps. Not infrequently, resistance met with harsh treatment.’19 Ethnic discrimination was, indeed, part of a strategy that helped uphold the military’s increasing power in the nation, and the attacks against the Chinese were in fact “signs of a larger menace: the growth of a powerful modern army and state apparatus as well as a repressive bureaucratic language.”20 The economic policy established to regulate Chinese-owned businesses was the beginnings of the path toward military-dominated rule—what eventually became Suharto’s New Order regime—under the guise of stabilizing and strengthening the country against the threat and evil of communism: “The New Order state was built on a male military model of discipline and repression in which any reference to social inequality was denounced as inspired by or related to ‘communist subversion.’”21 Even though the regulations were purportedly only to be applied to Chinese citizens (“aliens”), the ethnic Chinese who were born in Indonesia ended up being lumped into the same group, making them equally a target, and thus having the status of outsiders forced onto them, even if they were born in Indonesia and citizens of the country. “As anti-Chinese politics grew in force, especially after the army became a slave to it, ambivalence about the place of the Chinese in Indonesia gave way to their physical and political estrangement as ‘foreign.’”22 So it is that Li- Young Lee expresses this feeling of being constantly on the outside: my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned, in league with stones of the earth, I enter, without retreat or help from history, the days of no day, my earth === [PDF page 69] === 57 of no earth, I re-enter23 Loss after loss, journey after journey, the exile and the refugee experience are both doubly embedded in the forced transpacific crossings that Lee and his family had gone through. In the same poem, however, Lee maintains that he “never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain.”24 Despite the loss of a sense of home and a feeling of neglect from history, “words” and “dreams” still allow Lee to go back to the city in which he can be with his beloved. 2.3 | Imagining the World: Stories That Sustain In his poem, “Furious Versions,” Lee reproduces the traumatic period in which his father was arrested and his family torn apart by the soldiers’ force: “Soldiers sweep the streets for my father… It was a tropical night. / It was a half a year of sweat and fatal memory. / It was one year of fire / out of the world’s diary of fires.”25 1959, the year that Lee and his family escaped Indonesia, also becomes the penultimate remembrance in his memoir, The Winged Seed: … for many Chinese like my parents, a hopeless predicament. Escape was impossible, the purge had begun, weapons were being handed out to farmers as well as thugs, and all over the island, agents of the president were preaching the evils of Chinese and other foreigners. My mother, recalling that time, says there was not a single possible step to be taken in any direction. What was obviously about to happen, chaos and killing, had already begun.26 The devastation that had begun was all-encompassing, and the “agents of the president,” the military, had started taking control over much of the management of different aspects of civil life. Lee’s mother “was getting devoured” with his father’s absence in prison, “which ate her === [PDF page 70] === 58 daily, leaving her thin; her eyes stared and looked bruised.”27 The soldiers, as Lee recounts, raided houses and took the people’s belongings: By the time [the soldiers left], all of Ba’s papers, letters, and manuscripts were collected, boxed, and removed. Also taken away were any pictures we had of him, including the photograph on the little black table we prayed to each night. During the ransack Sheeti and Lammi, our nannies, cried, Give us Dwan’s pictures! Let the children have their father’s images! while our mother stood wooden, silent, all trace of feeling seemingly erased from her. Material belongings and the mental strength of those who suffered under the soldiers’ violence were not the only things destroyed: such violence was also meant to destroy memory. All traces of Lee’s father’s work, and his photograph—his image—were part of the destruction, making him “a virtual stranger,” “The Absent One,” to Lee and his siblings during this traumatic period.28 When all traces and evidence are meant to be completely destroyed, the imagination must remain. In Images in Spite of All, Georges Didi-Huberman writes, “To know, we must imagine for ourselves”; “to remember, one must imagine.”29 Could this be an instantiation of what we might call a shadow imagination? Here, Didi-Huberman is writing about the vital importance of the secretly taken photographs at the Auschwitz concentration camp—the only available images that depict the gas chambers and their surroundings—that “refute the unimaginable”30 horrors of the Holocaust. These images serve as a counterpoint to the Nazis’ intention of “obliterating every remnant,”31 of destroying any archival traces or proof of the killings and of the prisoners’ existenc: “to leave wordless and imageless.”32 I am in no way collapsing these two events (Lee’s history in Indonesia, and the Holocaust); they are singular in their own ways and come out of === [PDF page 71] === 59 very specific historical and political moments, but a connection is worth making here with regards to the significance of the image, and what gets destroyed in the absence of the image. Didi-Huberman’s crucial observation of the ways in which the obliteration of all archival traces has to do with “the machinery of disimagination”33 calls attention to how rendering something as horrific as the Nazi killing chambers invisible and unimaginable is also “the obliteration of the psyche and the disintegration of the social link… the obliteration of the language of their victims.”34 Language and image, says Didi-Huberman, are bound together in their ceaseless exchange of “reciprocal lacunae” in acts of remembering: “An image often appears where a word seems to fail; a word often appears where the imagination seems to fail.”35 Such inseparability of language and image as it relates to memory might mean, however, that the imagination never really falls away. Lee says, “There must be an ethical consciousness available… the only possible ethical consciousness available to humankind is poetic consciousness, because poetic consciousness accounts for the most of who we are.”36 Here, I argue that such poetic consciousness for Lee can be traced back to mythic stories of the world during Lee’s first three years in Indonesia, stories of history, religion, superstition, and ghosts that his Indonesian nannies told Lee and his siblings. When Bill Moyers interviewed Lee in 1988 and asked how Lee would answer the question “where are you from?” Lee responds, I say Chicago, then I tell them I was born in Indonesia, but I’m adamant about insisting that although I was born in Indonesia, I'm Chinese. I don't want people to think I'm Indonesian—my people were persecuted by the Indonesians.37 One detects, in Lee’s answer, a tone of pain and defensiveness about “[his] people,” and understandably so. Lee’s relationship with Indonesia is fraught: almost thirty years later after the === [PDF page 72] === 60 interview with Moyers, Lee says, “We’re a version of Chinese Indonesians.”38 His attitude towards Indonesia becomes less definitively hostile: I don’t quite feel at home here in the United States; I don’t know what it is. I miss something, but I don’t know what it is. I keep thinking it might be Indonesia, but it might not be. […] I probably won’t return to Indonesia, so realistically speaking I’m destined to feel homeless for the rest of my life.39 Lee’s stance, it seems to me, shifted over the years, and not because of some fundamental change that allowed this shift to happen, but because, as I have conveyed here, that his ties to Indonesia has always been fraught, ties that include not just pain and anger, but also intense identification and attachment with what he experienced in the early years of his life as a toddler there. Lammi, one of Lee’s Indonesian nannies with whom he was closest, features prominently in The Winged Seed, and Lee’s startlingly deep connection to Lammi is recounted in a recent interview: When I first started speaking, it was Bahasa Indonesia. I didn’t say a word, and when we finally got on the boat that was leaving Indonesia, my mother told me that she was very worried because I didn’t make a sound. She said that when the boat started to leave the dock, I suddenly spoke in complete sentences in Bahasa. I said, I want to go back; where are we going? I wanted to go back, and I kept holding on to the cloth that my nanny used to wrap around one shoulder to put me in, like a sling. I picked that up and said, Lammi, take me back to Lammi. My parents were, on the one hand, so happy that I was suddenly speaking in complete Bahasa sentences. They thought it was a miracle, yet at the same time they were really heartbroken because my first words were I want to go back.40 === [PDF page 73] === 61 I argue that Lammi is a figure who was not only vital in Lee’s formative years, but more significantly, someone who nurtured and provided the foundations for Lee’s poetic consciousness, and his ability to see the world through an expansive, contrapuntal lens. Through Lammi, Lee produced, in his imagination, a whole universe accessible through stories. There is, however, a glaring absence of any mention of Lammi in the scholarship on Lee’s works. Lee’s childhood was a period in his life that is crucial for many reasons: Lee’s relationship with Lammi was formed during a time when his mother and father were mostly absent: “In a time during which we saw little of Mu and nothing of Ba, the stories [that the nannies, Lammi and Seeti told] carried us.”41 Those early years of anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia were tempered with Lee’s exposure to life through the experiences and stories that Lee and his siblings gained by spending time with their Indonesian nannies, Lammi, Seeti, and Ebu, who helped the Lee children get through this traumatic time by storytelling, as well as by taking them to see shadow puppet plays. Language becomes an inextricable part of the ways in which Lee and his siblings managed a double vision and awareness. Moving nimbly between Javanese and Chinese, Lee writes, Seeti and Lammi spoke our language, Javanese, the children’s language... Our lives began to grow into a double wakefulness, for even as we went casually about the diurnal activities which adhered to an adult world, something, or else someone, in each of us was continually poised, expectant and ready, in case something beyond that world should suddenly make itself evident. We felt both less substantial and more, for we couldn’t tell if we inhabited a world densely populated by three or four orders of beings, as the stories suggested we did…42 === [PDF page 74] === 62 These remembrances of the stories of religion, superstition, and history that Lammi, Seeti, and Ebu told the children are remarkable because they instilled, in Lee and his siblings, a feeling that the universe was larger than the island that they lived on, and a feeling of mystery that enabled “a double wakefulness” attuned to multiple planes of consciousness. It is not insignificant that these stories began when the house that Lee and his family was living in was attacked by icefall for several days, presumably by those who wanted to intimidate the family while Lee’s father was in prison. Because of the bizarre nature of the attacks, Lammi, Seeti, and Ebu explained that they happened as a result of the restless spirit that had lost its way and inhabited the house. What began as stories of superstition and of ghosts, however, then expanded to bigger stories of origins: “it was the stories behind the stories which felt true to us, those stories Seeti and Lammi would begin to tell only after the other stories were told… these stories were “the larger stories, the stories about the first men and women in Java.”43 These stories echo what Maxine Hong Kingston calls “talk-story,” the stories that Kingston’s mother tells her every night with, and which Kingston “couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began.”44 For Kingston, as a place of the elsewhere, and as a space that allows for parts of immigrant culture that often have to be suppressed, modified, or even erased to thrive, 45 the night’s journey into dreams reaches back into her family history and memory, in order to retrieve those “talk-stories” that are in her mother tongue, a language supplanted by the English language. These “impossible” stories that hold “great power” are of a surreptitious kind, forming what Kingston calls the “invisible world” built to sustain their lives in the United States.46 Like Kingston’s talk-stories, there is also a mysterious and mythical quality to the stories that Lee hears from Lammi, Seeti, and Ebu, in the Javanese language that, as Lee says, are “[their] language, the children’s language.”47 As the adult poet recounting these memories, Lee === [PDF page 75] === 63 understands the extent of the violence that his family experienced as exiles, outsiders, and refugees; amidst the trauma that entails from the multiple displacements, however, the presence of something larger still permeates Lee’s consciousness and enables him to maintain a poetic consciousness that brings together the complexities of the world: We were convinced by the stories behind the stories that our island of cities and rice fields, forests, rivers, and volcanoes was The World. The greater stories persuaded us that our father being jailed, along with so many other fathers of Chinese households, had to do with something much older and darker than what could be explained by adult words like politics or economics. The greater stories called to some correspondent thing inside us that resisted a name, something barely apprehended and timeless.48 Here, we begin to get a sense of what Lee describes as a poetic consciousness being an ethical consciousness. Crystal Parikh detects “Lee’s ethical poetics,” which “recasts the line between perpetrator and beneficiary to expand the terms and modes by which we assign responsibility.”49 As Parikh notes, “all subjects are vulnerable in their exposure and responsibility to the Other.”50 In distancing himself from a position of defensiveness and from blaming individuals and the government who arrested and imprisoned his father, Lee shifts our understanding of the line between perpetrator and victim by calling attention to “some correspondent thing inside us that resisted a name,” suggesting, perhaps, that there is an explicable, unnamable thing inside us that can lead us to defy adhering to “the clean binaries of villainous perpetrator and pitiful victims,”51 and thus pushes us to face the Other in the world, challenging us “to read and write otherwise, at the limits of intelligibility.”52 === [PDF page 76] === 64 This blurring of boundaries between perpetrator and victim, therefore, can reformulate how we approach the world in generative ways. The opening up towards an ethical, poetic consciousness is perhaps best articulated in the ways in which Lee tries to remember his father, Ba, when he was imprisoned, and when all of his images have been destroyed by the soldiers. The penultimate remembrance in Lee’s memoir intensifies this identification with the Other through Lee’s retelling of the Aba, the Javanese neighbor who stands outside her house every night to greet passersby selamat malam, “a peaceful night to you, in a tongue that rang of pilgrimages, uncharted deserts, veiled faces beyond lion-colored walls.”53 In this memory from 1959, awaiting his father’s release from prison, Lee’s struggle to remember his father coincides with his attachment to Aba’s nightly greeting, spoken in Bahasa Indonesia: I remember lying awake at night, trying to remember what Ba looked like, and finding a blank space where his face should have been. […] In the spell of Aba’s blessing each night, Selamat malam, I lay awake in the dark, searching my heart for a face I recognized… Selamat malam, and beyond Aba’s voice, from some other house, always came the strains of someone singing a song. Nights in Jakarta were filled with human sounds; not the racket of urban dwellings, but the sounds of other lives proceeding, a whole world of voices speaking outside the window, singing in the distance, calling someone home, passing over our sleep. And though I was mute my first few years of life, could not utter any of those human noises, I heard them fully, and as I listened to Aba, I began to match her sounds to letters my mother taught us—the two words she spoke, s-e-l-a-m-a-t-m-a-l-a-m.54 === [PDF page 77] === 65 Scrambling the letters in different orders, Lee says, “I lay many nights wondering if in fact I hadn’t discovered a great secret code embedded in the very alphabet and the words we spoke.”55 As if unlocking a secret code, as though discovering the Word that can unlock the mysteries of the universe, Lee’s intimate remembrances of these stories, told to him in “[their] language, the language of the children,” articulates a feeling of expansiveness that allows the possibility for a kinder, gentler relationship to the Other, to the world. Despite Lee’s resistance to his connection with Indonesia, it is in these moments of being in the linguistic space of his childhood that we see both an indelible identification and struggle with his identity that necessitates the “double wakefulness” that Lee alludes to. Lee’s blind spot, it seems, lies in his initial defensiveness with having an Indonesian identity, even as his memoir illustrates and depends upon his formative years surrounded by and supported by his Indonesian nannies, as well as carried by the Indonesian language. 2.4 | “The Word dreams, and worlds appear” The penultimate poem in Lee’s most recent book of poetry, “Changing Places In the Fire,” takes us on a passage from the Word to the world—the poem is an impassioned, momentous fifteen-page poem that wrestles with the various meanings and conditions of “the Word,” which signifies, for the speaker in the poem, a potential multitude of things ranging from the divine, the lover, the beloved, the singularity of a language apart from words, to the meaning of life itself, or a transcendent, nameless elsewhere. The poem begins with a tone of desperation and anger, What’s The Word! she cries from her purchase on the iron === [PDF page 78] === 66 finial of the front gate to my heart. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. the capitals of the world are burning.56 Here, the “sparrow with a woman’s face” cries in despair, pleading for a response or for an affirmation of the Word. The poem takes on a decidedly angrier, more frustrated tone than Lee’s earlier poems. The sparrow, positioned at the entrance to the speaker’s heart, suggests that the proximity between her and the speaker is one that remains bounded by a gate—the tension between the sparrow’s plea and the speaker’s nervous awareness of his limitations as a poet is immediately conveyed in the first few stanzas as she continues to admonish the speaker: “You call yourself a poet?... You publish doubt and you call it knowledge!”57 The question of what the place of the poet might be is an anxiety that is juxtaposed with and positioned alongside a Whitmanesque list of the violences in the world, on a global scale, as “the capitals of the world are burning”: Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, the forecast calls for more misery, more poverty, more starvation, more families fleeing their homes, more refugees streaming toward every border. You pretend to poetry and destroy imagination! Your words mystify, mislead, and misdirect! === [PDF page 79] === 67 The movements of words engender time and death. But The Word lives outside of time and death. Here, Lee articulates a vexed relationship with words and the Word, fluctuating between the meaninglessness of words and poetry, and at the same time affirming their very inevitability, for without words, there is no Word. John S. O’Connor points out, “Lee is clearly wary of the limits of language.”58 The anxiety about the function of writing is as much the sparrow’s as it is the speaker’s: as the title “Changing Places In the Fires” suggests, the “she” and the speaker become interchangeable as the poem progresses, the sparrow becoming the speaker’s beloved and lover who affirms that they are one and the same, and have “lived inside / each other from the beginning.”59 The “finial,” on which the sparrow initially rests, is a word that comes from the Latin fin, meaning “end.” If Lee’s writing is a writing of the disaster (which, as Blanchot says, “is the limit of writing”),60 the finial signifies, perhaps, a meeting of two boundaries or ends, between the heart of the speaker and the world, in which further tensions of the indeterminacies of the Word lies amidst “the swarming babble.”61 Lee’s writing of the disaster, therefore, is a necessary force of his poetic imagination. “The Word dreams, and worlds appear,” says Lee.62 The Word becomes, for Lee, the world: it is that which is “a brother and sister / telling each other / the missing parts / of one another’s stories,” and it is “the lover and the beloved / constantly changing places in the fire.”63 In the end, the speaker realizes that the Word is that which signifies the gesture and the connection to the embodied other: And of all the things we’re dying from tonight, being alive is the strangest. === [PDF page 80] === 68 Surviving our histories is the saddest. Time leaves the smallest wounds, and your body, a mortal occasion of timeless law, is all the word I know.64 The Word becomes love materialized, a love that marks the passage to the embodied other, As Parikh writes, in that exposure, we might also be received in a hospitality that opens new possible futures for ourselves and for others. Literary acts such as Lee’s stage, over and over again, our exposure to the Other, in ways that risk perjuring and perpetrating ourselves and leave us dismantled, so that we might respond, and respond justly, to the Other.65 Here, the passage is one that allows the speaker of the poem to recover a sense of hope, a consciousness that integrates the histories, wounds, and violences into no longer The Word, but the word—in lowercase letters—that is, for the speaker, the world. 2.5 | Elsewhere “A stranger to most when he was alive; an Asian come to a country at war with Asia; now a stranger in death.” In the first few pages of The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, Lee describes the feeling of being out of place for his father, an exiled individual, a stranger in the world. To be in exile, writes Edward Said, “is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being.”66 The exilic physical, temporal, and psychic experience, therefore, is one that is “out of joint.”67 Removed from their roots, history, and homes, exiled individuals are forced to live in and === [PDF page 81] === 69 contend with multiple cultures and environments, conditions that can lead to what Said calls “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.”68 The contrapuntal, or counterpoint, a musical term that means a polyphony of two or more melodies, is elaborated in Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a comparative approach that allows one “to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant.”69 Such a multitudinous, dissonant, or fractured perspective for exiled individuals living “life led outside habitual order”70 could, as Said notes, allow for an understanding of the world that is more expansive, despite also being a form of consciousness that could often be insecure, harrowing, and wearying. Lee’s contrapuntal vision and ethical, poetic consciousness is what makes possible metaphors such as “abyss and shuttle” in the poem “Night Mirror,” a contradictory yet hopeful image that suggests a world of impossibilities made possible.71 Such contrapuntal awareness, as I have argued here, stems from the world opening up for Lee through the world of stories. It is also what makes possible the movement from The Word to the word and the world, and that allows the speaker in “Changing Places In the Fire” to confront the catastrophes and horrors in the world yet still approach the beloved, the embodied other. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, To confront the war machine and to tell the true war story, the artist, the activist, and the concerned citizen, or resident, or alien, or victim, must climb to the high ground. This is an ethical and aesthetic move, a double gesture that involves both moral standing and strategic vision. Morally, one must be above the fray in order to renounce and to forgive the bloodletting, as well as to see the (potential) culpability of oneself and one’s allies in past, present, and future conflicts. Strategically, one must be able to see a vast landscape if one wants to comprehend === [PDF page 82] === 70 the war machine in its totality and its mobility, as well as the war machine’s other, the movement for peace.72 The “double gesture” in the “ethical and aesthetic move” requires, Nguyen says, an imagination that can exist and act beyond the nation. Lee’s works show us that the literary imagination can open up not just words, but worlds: as Lee writes of Lammi’s stories, it was “a spacious, impersonal near-singing that seemed to belong to no one, even as we felt gathered in it. By hearing that voice, we felt heard by it, as though it recognized, heard, and spoke everything we hid or could never articulate.”73 Might this be, then, an instance of a writing of the disaster, emanating from a shadow imagination? For if disaster has to be expressed even through silence, these stories activated something from the innermost depths, a silence that one cannot enunciate. In this passage from--and exchange of—being heard to being recognized, we also get a sense of a movement that Yunte Huang describes as “a cross-cultural terrain where knowledge is replaced by ‘acknowledge,’ cognition by recognition.”74 As Huang explains, “a poetics of acknowledgment” requires an acceptance of one’s responsibility in the relation to another.75 These stories, or “talk-stories,” become not just the sustaining mechanism for Lee and his siblings during a traumatic, violent time, but also became the catalyst that opened up the possibility of an ethical consciousness based on the imagination. The limit of writing takes us to ourselves, to an “infinity-inward flowering”76—and only with such an ethical, poetic consciousness can we come to know ourselves, but also know others. === [PDF page 83] === 71 Archives in Motion: Digital Cultural Productions in Post-1965 Indonesia As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. --Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1994) See what I have made, the tactical user says. See how I try to manage the ties that bind and produce me. --Rita Raley, Tactical Media (2009) 3.1 | Media Politics in Indonesia Tahun Vivere Pericoloso (TAVIP), or A Year of Living Dangerously,1 was the title of one of President Sukarno’s famous Independence Day addresses calling for the continued, undying rhythm of an Indonesian Revolution in countering the effects of colonialism and imperialism. The speech’s significance is marked not only by its content, but also its timing, given in August 1964, roughly a year prior to the 1965-66 anti-Communist violence in Indonesia, which then ended the Sukarno administration and led to the rise of President Suharto’s New Order regime (1966-1998). The title, A Year of Living Dangerously, recalls the revolutionary spirit of Indonesia in its post-1945, post-Independence years—a time that, as Ann L. Stoler describes, “held promise,” and that people would later remember as a progressive and optimistic period; it was, as some of the Javanese called it, “the years of living dangerously,”2 of feeling the potentiality of a vast universe opening up for a recently-independent nation. === [PDF page 84] === 72 A Year of Living Dangerously contains a striking passage in which Sukarno fervently asserts how integral the relationship between revolution and technology is in reflecting an antiimperialist Indonesia: I am not saying that we do not need technology […] More than those [technical] skills, we need the spirit of a nation, the spirit of freedom, the spirit of revolution […] What is the use of taking over the technology of the Western world if the result of that adoption is merely a state and a society à la West… a copy state?3 Given the ways in which the New Order regime later relied heavily on audio-visual media to maintain its power by spreading state propaganda and intimidating the Indonesian public,4 Sukarno’s impassioned statements hold great weight when examining the turbulent cultural and political climate in Indonesia during this transition period between opposing regimes, and the central role technology played for the state before, during, and after the New Order. Even as media practices cannot be completely detached from technological developments beyond national borders, Sukarno’s declarations of the need for an autonomous nation complemented by an independent technology remain instructive. What would media infused with “the spirit of freedom, the spirit of revolution” look like? Considering the mobilization and violence of the militia that ensued in 1965 (with then- General Suharto in charge of the army) after a military coup was blamed on the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party) (PKI), the speech’s title takes on a different hue when revisited a year later, stripped of the energetic and bold quality it had intended to inspire. The New Order regime’s stringent watch over cultural production created a space in which “the conditions of possibility for Indonesia’s national culture after 1965” were based precisely on the impossibility for non-state sanctioned narratives to exist.5 The “conditions of possibility,” === [PDF page 85] === 73 therefore, were far from being unconditional: cultural practices and productions were appropriated by the state, enabling the control of national culture by means of the state’s propaganda machine. The horror resulting from the killings of suspected Communists and sympathizers, ethnic Chinese, and activists—as well as the suppression of women’s groups— then, was further intensified by the succeeding atmosphere of fear and intimidation fostered by the New Order government, which prevented forms of expression that were in opposition to the state’s masculinist and militaristic ideology. To read Indonesian life, as well as its representations in media, in its post-1965 years as one that is regulated and strangulated by an authoritarian regime necessitates a contrapuntal reading (to use Edward Said’s expression)6; contrapuntal analysis takes into account the dominant narrative set by those in power, as well as the gaps and spaces where resistance happens, and where projects outside the purview and sanction of the state can be created. Under the New Order regime, audio-visual media was central to the Indonesian nationalist project. The first national, state-owned television network, Televisi Republik Indonesia (Television of the Republic of Indonesia) (TVRI), and the operation of a domestic communication satellite were both deployed “to extend [Suharto’s] political authority, sugar-coated with developmentalist logic.”7 Beneath the developmentalist narrative of production and progress, however, were the New Order regime’s acutely strict censorship laws. Intan Paramaditha notes that “censorship can thus be seen as one of the language codes that sustain national consciousness.”8 Indeed, the tenor of life under the New Order state was one carefully managed by the constraining of what people could create and consume. At the same time, however, the stringent regulation of the kinds of media content and cultural representation the public could access was at times offset by the existence of global media, which “had a liberationary aspect in so far as they breached the === [PDF page 86] === 74 capacity of national governments to control what their citizens could see and hear.”9 Despite the state’s suppression of freedom of expression and innovation, interfaces with global media have also made possible anti-authoritarian and transformative uses of technologies in Indonesia. This chapter emphasizes the ways in which networked technologies impact the public’s relationship to historical trauma, with examples from digital projects that re-engage the ghosts of the past and gesture toward a future in which mediascapes afford robust spaces for community collaboration, social recovery, and cultural transformation. These digital projects will be situated and discussed within the larger framework of Digital Humanities (DH hereafter) as it has been developed as a field in the (mostly) Western, Anglophone context. Although these are disparate projects, they are linked by the same commitment to offering a different lens to the state’s version of history (particularly as it pertains to 1965 and the subsequent years) by putting pressure on the importance and pedagogical value of community-based knowledge, personal narrative, and the ethical use of technologies. As Wendy Chun and Lisa Marie Rhody point out, digital projects with a historical awareness can, indeed, “elucidate ‘shadows’ in the archive.”10 In other words, in talking back to official narratives, these projects demonstrate what Stoler describes as emanations—radiations—from outside the master archive.11 It is in these gaps, then, that we can most clearly find the contrapuntal possibilities in digital cultural productions. 3.2 | The Politics of Visualization The Indonesian public’s ways of knowing its history have been complicated not just by the oscillation between visibility and invisibility, but they have also been obscured by the grey spaces in between, where truth and fiction, official and unofficial narratives, collide. Indonesian politics, notes film scholar Eric Sasono, is “a politics of visibility,” and that “the truth depends === [PDF page 87] === 75 on how they are visible to the general public.”12 As a method that concentrates on presenting data and telling stories in a visual, graphical format, a data visualization project may illuminate shadows in a nation’s archive that is laden with unspoken histories and stories. Launched in 2014, “Mapping Memory Landscapes and the Regime Change of 1965-66 in Semarang” is a collaboration between the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) and the Universitas Katolik Soegijapranata (Soegijapranata Catholic University) (UNIKA) in Semarang, Indonesia. Mapping Memory Landscapes is an analogue project as much as it is a digital one: it involves workshops where UNIKA students conduct interviews with a handful of 1965 survivors, after which data from the collected stories are visualized into “memory landscapes” on Nodegoat, a web-based data visualization platform. The creators of the platform cite their use of object-oriented ontology (OOO) and the influence of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory: “this methodology asks researchers to transform each entity they encounter (e.g. humans and non-humans; events and emotions) into an object and to describe every relation and association of this object.”13 Such an object-oriented method levels all entities without privileging the human over the non-human; a person is categorized as an object, an actor (or agent) that is part of the larger system of networks between human and non-human things, facilitated by the technologies that make those interactions possible. This particular project holds place as a primary focus, centering on how “sites function as carriers of memories existing beyond the official state discourse.”14 The name itself, Mapping Memory Landscapes, points to the significance of location—of the spatial—as central to the project’s aims to map and make visible the relationships between survivors and locations related to 1965 and subsequent years (locations include places in which people were detained, imprisoned, tortured, murdered, or buried). === [PDF page 88] === 76 Figure 3: Mapping Memory Landscapes Screenshot from http://nodegoat.net/blog.p/82.m/6/mapping-memory-landscapes-in-nodegoat-theindonesian-killings-of-1965-66 If, however, “the work done by the union of the digital and the humanities… will not be in the clearing… but rather, […] in the shadows,”15 then Mapping Memory Landscapes presents a challenging and fascinating conundrum in its representation of memory landscapes, and of history. To elucidate shadows in a historical archive requires knowledge production that allows us to understand the texts and contexts surrounding the events, to see difference, and to discover narratives that have been kept in the dark; in a way, it is about “the desire to speak with the dead.”16 An object-oriented approach to history, or thing-based ontology, however, runs the risk of obfuscating the historical context and particularities that are crucial when revisiting tragedies like the 1965-66 killings. Critics of object-oriented ontology have described the impenetrable nature of objects, that “objects are withdrawn from one another and from themselves.”17 Ian === [PDF page 89] === 77 Bogost has called such withdrawal “elusiveness,”18 and as he points out OOO founder Graham Harman’s statement, “things recede into inaccessible, private depths.”19 Indeed, the difficulty of interpreting relations between nodes on the map parallels and is an indication of the students’ struggle with representing the non-verbal reactions that happened during the interviews, to which the researchers responded by creating a new category, “moment,” for classifying such emotions. Such a dilemma reveals the attendant limitations to visualizing history in information aesthetics; as Alex Galloway notes in his essay on network visualization, “there are some things that are unrepresentable.”20 The nuances that cannot get marked up—the gestures, the affect—elide the role of survivor testimony, and lies outside the realm of what is visible in data visualization. === [PDF page 90] === nodegoat data model for the project ‘Memory Landscapes and Legend Type [Birth] Sub-Object Relation - Source Relation phical Relatior Nuclear Family [Marriage] Date / Location Reference % Date End / Location Re! ation Reference % Workshop 1 Name \ y, Description \ [Venue] - A, 4 Date Start - Date End - [Organisation] f “4 Date Start - Date End ame [Birth] Date / Location Reference a [Location] a ation] “4 Date Start - Date End ~ ¢ Start - Date End / Location Reference % x. [Unreadable] Notes \ “4 Date Start -\Date End —— ation [Member] —~ L Date Start - Date End / Location Reference << —~ Organisation [Occupation] [Cderdination] Date Start - Date End / Location R < — Start - Date End Date Start - Date End / Location Reference ~ X Notes Sy esidence] Organisation = Date End / Location Reference % < Type of organisat jon Description [Detained] Date Start - Date End / Location Reference % ~ — Natur ai Notes > Date End / [Death] Date / Location Reference % 7 [Executive] Notes - S=4 Date Start - Date End - Person [Resting Place] Date Start - Date End / Location Reference = Notes Date End Longitude [Used as] Date Start - Date End isation % the Regime Change of 1965-66 in Semarang’ Moment Interview % Interpreter Time Code © ration R to % [Location] Sq Date ation Reference City Name Geoname ID ASCII Name [Located] ate Location Reference Unika® SOEGIJAPRANATA Figure 4: Mapping Memory Landscapes Data Model 78 Location Reference Location Reference % Location Location Reference @®LAB"°9° Image courtesy of Mapping Memory Landscape, http://nodegoat.net/blog.p/82.m/6/mapping-memorylandscapes-in-nodegoat-the-indonesian-killings-of- 1965-66 === [PDF page 91] === 79 One of the dangers of using a thing-based ontology in this case, therefore, has to do with a myopic view of an object’s perceived inaccessibility, which might serve to only further mystify history and render it inscrutable. In his criticism of OOO, McKenzie Wark states, “the futural, essential, withdrawn object becomes the fetish, at the expense not only of any particular sensory one, but of the collaborative praxis needed to work these partial, mediated apprehensions that are the real into some workable relation to each other.”21 The mystification of history and potential fetishization of unfathomability may thus render the database of information and narratives unknowable in Mapping Memory Landscapes, with nodes on a map that indicate important relations and networks with regard to the killings, but that inadvertently—and perhaps unintentionally—flatten the complex, layered, and subjective aspects of that history. Other than indicating the spatial, what do the nodes signify, and what kinds of relationships are being drawn across the map? Wark’s critique is all the more uncanny here, as Nodegoat is a collaborative research platform, and Mapping Memory Landscapes is itself a participatory research project; yet, at the same time, its object-oriented approach blurs the importance and necessity of such a collaborative praxis and endeavor because of the method with which it gets carried out, and in fact reinforces the impossibility and challenge of historical representation. Are some things really unrepresentable? One thing that this failure reminds us, though, is that data is never transparent or pure. Speaking of the challenges in structures of information and modes of knowledge production, Virginia Kuhn notes that some kinds of knowledges “cannot, and should not be codified.”22 What is not reflected in the data visualization provokes a critical reflection of the realms of the visible and the non-visible—the politics of visibility—and how we can think deeply about the traces embedded in the haunted media that surrounds us, traces that are not === [PDF page 92] === 80 readily visible by wave length optics, and that a digital platform may not be able to fully visualize and represent. As David Kim writes, “all spatial phenomena [is] comprised of intersecting layers of ‘reality,’”23 and we cannot simply take everything we see positivistically as empirical realism. At the onset, an object-oriented ontology makes it difficult to have an analysis of difference and of the contrapuntal in its fetishization of an object’s withdrawn, unknowable quality. Yet, at the same time, this emphasis on visualizing historical information based on a thing-based ontology could work as a useful documentary accompaniment to survivor testimonies. On the flip side, therefore, an object-oriented ontology may in fact be an efficacious method, especially in light of recent developments in debates related to the 1965 killings. On April 18-19, 2016, Indonesia’s Chief Security Minister, Luhut Panjaitan, opened a 2-day conference, “National Symposium: Dissecting the 1965 Tragedy, Historical Approach,” bringing together individuals from opposing sides of the spectrum, including survivors, scholars, activists, government officials, and members of the military. Even though the symposium was itself a breakthrough in being the first meeting in Indonesia dedicated to discussing the 1965 tragedy, the event was troubling on many levels. Heart wrenching stories from survivors who demanded an apology from the government were met with all too familiar expressions of denial: a retired general suggested that only one person in Central Java was killed during his military operation there, while Panjaitan challenged the extent of the killings by asking the audience where the graves are located if a massacre did, indeed, take place. Panjaitan later adamantly stated that no apology or reconciliation is possible unless the mass graves are located. The importance of location in confronting the history of 1965 is of particular interest here. Mapping Memory Landscapes’ emphasis on every entity as an object, coupled with an aerial, drone’s eye view of === [PDF page 93] === 81 the map of Indonesia, afford it a visual representation that does not rely on the affective and the subjective. As a mapping project, it makes visible those sites out of sight, the places that have not yet been represented visually in this format. When considered alongside other historical accounts and testimonies, the project can offer another layer of information related to the events surrounding the 1965-66 tragedy. Thus, despite the problems with the methodology used by Mapping Memory Landscapes, the project is laudable for its well-intentioned efforts in revisiting a silenced past and in striving to present new ways of thinking about the 1965 killings in a relational network that has not been done before. The project website states that “since there is no combined narrative in place on the killings and suffering around 1965, this project may function as a first step that enables a more inclusive approach in addressing this episode in Indonesian history.”24 Although Mapping Memory Landscapes is the first of its kind to present and visualize data from the 1965 killings in a digital mapping project, it is incomplete to read on its own, and the project has to be taken into account with other existing projects such as the Indonesian Institute of Social History’s Oral History Project, whose research spans more than sixteen years, gathering hundreds of interviews with survivors from 1965 (including women’s stories, which have been the least heard and known about). 3.3 | Comparative DH and Pedagogies To consider these projects together ultimately provides the most inclusive approach to history, and to excavating the archive of the nation. A comparative analysis of survivor testimonies from both the Indonesian Institute of Social History (ISSI) Oral History Project and Mapping Memory Landscapes would offer valuable pedagogical function and an exploration of === [PDF page 94] === 82 the transformative knowledge that may have emerged from the exchanges between the UNIKA student researchers and interviewees. Reading the two projects side by side is to also take a more expansive view of the digital humanities, one that emphasizes a historical approach and puts social justice concerns at the forefront. Furthermore, understanding the inextricable link between such projects serves as an intervention in the typically Western and Anglophone formulations of the genealogies of DH. Tara McPherson has pointed out the lack of diversity in DH projects: “We must take seriously the question, why are the digital humanities so white?”25 I argue that a robust understanding of DH must pay attention to the vital intersections of digital culture and social justice, and to works that may not name themselves or be named DH—again, this is about the politics of visibility. In this case, the ISSI Oral History Project is one that eludes the mainstream DH world, not because it lacks value, but because of its minimal level of global circulation and exposure in North America, as well as a myriad of infrastructural issues having to do with institutional, technical, cultural, and political contexts. On the other hand, as a data visualization project built on a platform by LAB1100 (a research and development lab in the Netherlands well connected to digital humanities practitioners), Mapping Memory Landscapes is readily recognizable as DH and legible to a Western audience. In fact, I chanced upon the project precisely through a North American network of digital humanities scholars interested in data visualization, rather than through scholars studying the histories of Indonesia, who have not been exposed to this particular project. My contention, therefore, is that reading these two projects together is one way to approach the digital humanities as a global, comparative, and transnational field, rather than—as it typically assumed—one whose main focus is Western and Anglophone digital productions. Knowledge is === [PDF page 95] === 83 situated, and one must be able to traverse the various types of knowledges that are formed in different scales of productions. The pedagogical function of the Indonesian Institute of Social History (ISSI) online archive is explicit—for the ISSI, it has a mission to bridge the gap with the younger generation born decades after the 1965 tragedy, most of whom do not know about the history of 1965. Figure 5: Indonesian Institute of Social History’s Oral History Project Screenshot from http://sejarahsosial.org Mobilizing these stories and histories by making them accessible online opens up the archive as a dynamic, generative site that makes possible a collective cultural and political expression. The research value of the ISSI online archive is manifested in the various educational resources they make available for educators and students, as well as the larger public. === [PDF page 96] === 84 Figure 6: Indonesian Institute of Social History: “Through the Lens,” an interactive timeline of Oey Hay Djoen’s life Screenshot from http://sejarahsosial.org Through the Lens,26 for instance, uses the archive of photographs and documents that the ISSI has been entrusted with by the family of Oey Hay Djoen,27 a Chinese-Indonesian cultural revolutionary whose life history forms the basis of the interactive timeline. The Indonesian Institute of Social History’s co-director, Hilmar Farid, has spoken about the use of visual artifacts, like the digitized photographs, as a critical part of the ISSI’s mission to bridge the gap between the Indonesian community and Indonesia’s history. Making multimedia accessible for people to engage with and learn from, as Farid says, opens up spaces for more people to access the history in dynamic ways.28 The interactive timeline is a key part of the pedagogical use of the archive, a way of encouraging students to fill the timeline with their own experiences, and to knit their stories with the nation’s larger history. === [PDF page 97] === 85 The potential of the ISSI online archive in unburying lost voices from the 1965 tragedy is not, however, without practical factors that might pose a barrier to those who want to engage with the materials in the archive. During the Institute’s inception, the group wanted an infrastructure that could safely store and archive the interviews and other materials gathered in their research. The progress in getting the online archive more fully populated with the materials they already have in their repository, however, has been slow. As Ratih says, getting the interviews and testimonies digitized in the online archive has been halted due to infrastructure and labor issues: the lack of a reliable computer technician and programmer, for instance, has a lot to do with how much the archive can grow and get utilized by the community. Indeed, “digital” does not always mean that it is networked or online. Here lies the dark side of the digital humanities: while ISSI is doing important work in obtaining and documenting survivor testimonies and visual materials, practical considerations such as labor, funding, and infrastructure are issues that often get in the way of the sustainability, efficacy, and dissemination of digital projects. These are issues that often make or break a digital project, and that eventually force the challenge of what kinds of projects, then, should have access to funds and resources, which in turn will determine a project’s visibility or invisibility. The Indonesian Institute of Social History archive, therefore, highlights these significant issues that haunt all humanities projects in very real ways, but especially the digital humanities as a field, given the technological background and needs. For now, the oral histories and testimonies exist in the online archive in the form of transcriptions, or summaries. Even though it may be a challenge to access the testimonies in their oral and video formats (the more dynamic formats are currently only accessible in the ISSI office in Jakarta, Indonesia), the value of the existence of a compilation of hundreds of survivor and === [PDF page 98] === 86 eyewitness testimonies cannot be underestimated. The very fact that the oral testimonies have to, for the time being, remain in a physical repository with some degree of protection should remind us that not all digital projects can be assumed to always be openly available to the public, despite the purported democratization of access in 21st century media, or the digital humanities ethos of openness and accessibility. What is at stake is the issue of agency: what is an archive for, who does it empower, and who gets left out? When such an archive deals with a difficult history that is still not yet past, accessibility and representation become critical issues of contention, and as I will discuss in the next section, it is no accident that some cultural productions—depending on where they are made, who makes them, and who funds them—gain traction, while others do not. 3.4 | Poetics of Remix In 2013, together with the Common Room Networks Foundation in Java, EngageMedia (a non-profit, transpacific media, technology, and culture organization) organized the Video Slam 2013: Remixing the 1965 State Propaganda Film,29 a project that brought together local videomakers in Indonesia to remix Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treachery of G30S/PKI), a harrowing film endorsed by Suharto’s New Order regime depicting the purported violence of the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) in murdering six generals, and the alleged involvement of the Gerwani (Indonesian Women’s Movement) in the coup d’état. The film runs for a hefty 4.5 hours, and was required viewing for all Indonesians until the New Order era ended. It was by far “the single most-broadcast Indonesian film and, if the ratings for 30 September 1997 can be trusted, it is also, almost without doubt, the single most-watched Indonesian film.”30 Indeed, this particular film was the most influential media artifact produced and disseminated by Suharto’s regime. As state propaganda, it showed the Indonesian Communist Party as bloodthirsty killers, === [PDF page 99] === 87 and the Indonesian Women’s Movement as corrupt and violent women full of lust and rage (in one scene, they are shown to gouge out the eyes of the generals and also castrate them, after which they celebrated by dancing around the generals’ dead bodies). Ariel Heryanto notes that the “New Order state terrorism [was linked to] its enthusiastic investment in film as a popular medium for its propaganda machine.”31 The significance of the connection between film as a visual medium and the history of the 1965 killings, therefore, cannot be overlooked. Figure 7: EngageMedia, Video Slam Project (2013) This section calls attention to the significance of the power of film and digital video in Indonesia, and how people have responded to historical trauma by means of video making and remixing Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treachery of G30S/PKI). Any discussion of the place of digital media, and of the question of the digital humanities, in Indonesia must include a === [PDF page 100] === 88 reflection on how film has played a major part in the shaping of the nation’s culture, both in the ways in which the state has appropriated it for its specific agendas and also how filmmakers, scholars, artists, and activists have found ways to react to a silenced and traumatic history. Heryanto writes, Not all things are enforced top-down from a major industry to the rest of the population. From the first decade of the century, young Indonesians across many islands of the archipelago discovered a new preoccupation with making shorts and documentary films with extremely low budget and simple digital devices.32 In the world of film and video making, we can find the intersection of the power of digital media technologies and the spirit of experimentation and innovation that, perhaps, harkens back to Sukarno’s assertions about technology and the revolutionary in his A Year of Living Dangerously speech. Indeed, “circulation on the Internet of dissident readings of a propaganda film… makes these readings at once accessible, collective and political.”33 In Remix Theory, Eduardo Navas writes that "remix affects culture in ways that go beyond the basic understanding of recombining material to create something different.”34 With the affordances of technology, remix allows (prod)users to reuse and recombine existing elements in order to make something new. Video remix itself is not a wholly new theory and practice, and has roots in and an affinity with other creative practices such as sampling in music. Furthermore, the affordances of digital technology provide ways of reusing and recombining semiotic elements that result in a production that is similar to and an extension of theories like Bertolt Brecht’s “refunctioning” (Umfunktionierung). Brecht’s “functional transformation,” as Walter Benjamin describes in his essay “The Author as Producer,” has similarities with remix in its work of changing the form and material of an apparatus as a revolutionary practice. For