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ENGLISH
Rommel Curaming is a PhD Candidate, Faculty of Asian Studies Australian National University page 1
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Reviewed
by Rommel Curaming The past decade or so has seen proliferation of studies on different facets of memory and history. The rise to increasing prominence of memory studies coincides with the mounting recognition of the limits within which conventional historical accounts have been formulated. It was to a great extent spawned by the need to allow space for people whose voices, for various but usually political reasons, have been muted. While memory is often framed as counterweight to history, the relationship between the two is extremely complex, and any study worthy of notice cannot but demonstrate and suggest ways through such complexity. To a great extent, this volume has achieved the first, and it takes some significant strides towards the second. The volume is a much needed, long-awaited contribution that fills a void in Indonesian, even Southeast Asian, Studies. The fall of Suharto in 1998 ushered in floods of commentaries, newspaper accounts, and conference or seminar papers indicating the spirited efforts to remember, interrogate, and re-write the past. However, seven years since then only a handful of serious memory-history studies in English (as in Indonesian) in the form of MA or PhD theses, refereed journal articles or monographs have appeared so far. Considering that Indonesia stands out along with few other countries for having experienced killings of genocidal proportion, and for having to deal with the crisis of historical representation such killings entails, one can only wish that there would be many more. The field is particularly fertile for new seeds to germinate and grow. |
There are 15 articles in the volume written by Indonesian and foreign scholars, artists and poets/writers. It emanates from a conference on ‘history and memory’ held at the UCLA in April 2001. While it is not unusual for conference-proceedings-turned-into-book to be beset by problems of unevenness of quality of the papers as well as lack of sustained focus, this volume fortunately avoids such pitfalls. Each chapter, if not truly gripping or deeply penetrating, is at least engaging and insightful. Moreover, all papers cohere in dealing with the complex facets of the memory-history interface, as well as with the difficulties attendant in such undertaking. The
first part of the book consists of 4 articles that are anchored in the
arts and the humanities. The first is Ki Tristuti Rachmadi’s powerful
autobiographical account of his sufferings under the New Order. He was
(still is) a dalang, a puppeteer in the shadow play wayang kulit, who
had been imprisoned for 14 years by the New Order government and upon
release experienced further difficulties and humiliations for having been
‘tainted’ by his past. The simplicity of the narrative, weaving a moving
story not just of tribulation but indomitable personal resistance, cannot
but drive home a message that personal memory is itself a political act.
A compelling autobiography is a fitting gesture to emphasize memory’s
individual character and there are, I think, only few other ways to usher
in a volume on memory and history better than this. |
The second article is the text of Goenawan Mohammad’s opera Kali: A Libreto. A brief preface written by Goenawan himself accompanies the text. As a political tool, the efficacy of poetry and theater, along with other art forms, is often not readily apparent. It is precisely in art’s indirection, however, that its power lies and one strength of this volume rests on paying much more than lip service to this. Laurie Sears’ piece, “The Persistence of Evil and the Impossibility of Truth in Goenawan Mohamad’s Kali,” is an intensely penetrating commentary on the opera, both the text and the performance. By unraveling the semantic knots, and by explicating the opera within the broader historical and theoretical frame, Sears unlocks its subversive messages. She also helps the readers in appreciating the sophisticated manner by which Goenawan had woven this tale of subversion. Her contribution however goes beyond interpreting Goenawan’s piece. By locating the open-ended character of this capability for subversion –what she calls the impossibility of truth—within the theoretically informed frame of reference, she in effect lays the benchmark for the analysis of sites of memory that, to me, aptly rejects the notion of ‘authenticity of space’—a notion that lends theoretical support to reified and essentialist claims. Such a benchmark has, to a certain extent, been successfully adhered to by some contributors in the volume. Others however did not, either by being silent about it or by transgressing it altogether. |
Completing the first part of the volume is Hendrik M.J. Maier’s provocative “How Malay Tales Try to Shape History.” It demonstrates the lack of precision of the Malay languages in expressing events, actions and progress, specifically their tenses or their ‘location in time.’ He argues that because of this, closure of meaning is difficult as readers are faced with an open-ended process of meaning-formation. He then draws connection between this ‘problem’ and the difficulty of creating a distinct memory that is supposedly imbued with ‘moral meaning.’ As ‘history,’ according to him, requires an ‘in-depth and well organized memories,’ this may have an adverse consequence on the writing and consumption of history in Indonesia. The importance of this article rests on three things. First, it provides hints on why Indonesians, as observers often note, have a very short memory. For that it occupies a salient space in the book. If other articles exemplify facets of memory-history interface, this explains the lack or the dubiousness of such interface. Unfortunately, however, an overly essentialist tone pervades his analysis. Maier seems bent on pinning down the ‘essential’ problem with Malay language and used it in explaining the difficulties of forming and retaining memories. He bewails several ‘lacks’ in it – distinct past tense, precision, temporal depth, temporal hierarchy – and inadvertently sends booming echoes of Orientalism through the pages of the otherwise critical and reflexive book. |
Second, Maier does not find comfort in the notion, quite pronounced in most other articles in the volume, that memory is a contested terrain—that it is constituted by an open-ended process of meaning formation. While most other articles see strength in such fluidity, he complains about it. It seems to deny the notion that there is such a thing as ‘memory and history.’ At the very least, there is only history, and memory is nothing but one among many building blocks needed to write it (history). The autonomy, and the power, of memory, well recognized in the editor’s introduction as in most other articles in the volume, is thereby lost. For that, Maier’s article occupies the distinction for being the volume’s odd-man-out. On a positive note, the oddity of Maier’s article is a glaring reflection of the controversial character of ‘memory and history’ project. There is simply no consensus as to what constitutes memory and how it differentiates itself from and how precisely it interacts with history, if in fact the two are separate entities. Zurbuchen’s introduction, while recognizing the tension between individual and social memory, nevertheless settles to the idea of ‘historical memory’ that hardly helps in clarifying the issues. Memory as analytic category cries out for definitive conceptualization, the lack of which could result in the erasure of its autonomy, as Maier in fact did in his article. Or perhaps, Maier wants to send a message that we could not in fact claim conceptual autonomy for memory—a debatable yet certainly not an insensible suggestion. |
The thread that binds the second set of articles is yet another contentious concept—the notion of collective of memory. Andi Bakti’s Collective Memory of the Qahhar Movement demonstrates how various, sometimes conflicting other times complementary, memories of Qahhar—the charismatic leader of separatist movement in Sulawesi circa 1950s-1960s—coalesce as ‘collective memory’ to serve different purposes in contemporary South Sulawesi and beyond. Although the author does not appear interested in questioning the notion of collective memory, he nonetheless provides clear picture that can serve as basis for doing so. The article succeeds in laying bare whose interests will be served by emphasizing, in the face of appearance of diversity, the collectiveness of memory of Qahhar. In a manner less than straightforward, but nonetheless thought-provoking, Fadjar Thufail’s “Ninjas in the Narrative of the Local and National Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia” explains, among other things, why the idea of ‘collective memory’ may be dubious at best in the context of Post-Suharto Indonesia. He used the multiple and conflicting narratives about the ninja killings in 1998 not only to demonstrate the contested character of the public sphere but also to extract possible insights on how people cope with the anxiety which may be attendant to the emerging new political culture. One could only wish, however, that the theoretical aspect of his analysis had been handled in less contrived, less arcane manner so as to maximize, not subvert, the heuristic function of theories as tools for illuminating relevant empirical data. |
Problematic the concept of ‘collective memory’ maybe but the fact that it is often invoked gives one no recourse but to confront it. Essential in such effort is asking the question whose collection of memory is it, and how has such collective appearance been attained? Certainly, before a fairly high level of homogeneity was achieved, conflicts and contestation marked the process. Anthony Reid’s “Remembering and Forgetting War and Revolution,” perhaps without intending to, threads along this line. Initially, he wonders why the year 1995, 50th anniversary of the 2nd World War, was not a focus of enthusiastic remembering in Indonesia, as it was in other countries. To him, this collective forgetting seems striking considering the centrality of the period in the formation of Indonesian nation. He then traces back the historical roots of the sharp contestations for meaning and resulting ambivalence which marked the attitudes of Indonesian political elites towards the event. His paper thus reminds us of the historicity of every ‘collective memory’ and that can help in resisting the tendency to reify such a notion. The third set of articles revolves around the formulation and consumption of ‘official’ and non-official histories. Gerry van Klinken’s The Battle for History After Suharto provides a comprehensive, yet penetrating look both at the context and the on-going efforts to define and re-define various Indonesian historiographies. He hints at the multipilicity of Indonesian histories and that the efforts to present a unified picture reflect nothing but the structure of power relations within the country. |
The idea of contested public sphere raised in Thufail’s article (on the Ninjas) is greatly reinforced and expanded here. More than that, van Klinken’ article underscores the place of history in the on-going contestation for a space in the public sphere. What van Klinken describes as ‘battle for history’ is a forceful reaction to the monolithic and overbearing posture of Suharto regime’s ‘official history.’ So much has already been said to critique such version of history but not much has been done to understand the process of its formulation. Katharine McGregor’s article “Nugroho Notosusanto: Legacy of a Historian in the Service of an Authoritarian Regime” is an important contribution towards such understanding. The article describes the life and major works of Nugroho Notosusanto, the main architect in Suharto regime’s engineering of history. Rather contentiously, McGregor describes him as historian who has “willingly compromised his integrity as a scholar in order to further legitimate the New Order regime…” (p. 209) She weaves a compelling story of the man’s life as possible answer to the questions why Nugroho made such a choice and why he was so devoted to the military. Of particular interest here lies in the intersection of Nugroho’s double life as a historian and as a military man. |
Despite the clarity of expression and the lucidity of analysis, I was left with a nagging feeling that the author may have missed something important. I suspect that the problem lies in that the author allowed herself to fall into Manichean trap characterised by false dichotomy between ethical scholarship and politics. She seems to carry the taken-for-granted liberal assumption that scholarship and politics should not mix. But in the context of authoritarian-dominated societies like Indonesia, the importance of a Nugroho Notosusanto precisely lies in the fact that he personified the fusion of the two. Judging Nugroho as bereft of integrity merely exposes the author’s or other observers’ political stance. It does not help illuminate the process that made a Nugroho Notosusanto possible, nor does it confront the question what does a Nugroho Notosusanto imply? It also tends to draw us away from the often ignored yet very important question, why and how do scholarship and politics constitute each other. Rather the seeing history merely as tool for legitimation, as is often done, how about we also ask why should the process of legitimation be framed within historical template, and what does this imply on the interface between knowledge and power. |