Abstract
The onset of the Cold War in Europe had its repercussions in Southeast Asia as newly independent Southeast-Asian nations found themselves having to “choose a side” as they re-evaluated their relationships with both communists and their Western alliances. In Indonesia, the Cold War manifested as an extremely violent persecution of communists following a failed coup in 1965. With his assumption of power in 1966, Suharto’s regime actively oppressed and eliminated artists and intellectuals deemed sympathetic to the Left, or who had trespassed any acceptable censorship markers. As such, most of the political fiction that reassessed the nation’s violent past was overlooked until the early 2000s despite the seriousness and urgency inherent in its subject matter.
Despite tight control of the press, historical fiction that critically assessed the socio-political situation in 1965–6 Indonesia was plentiful. The coup in 1965 (or the September 30th Movement) and the bloody nationwide mass murders that followed were common subject matters for authors such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Putu Wijaya, Umar Kayam, and Y. B. Mangunwijaya. Most of these authors employ the use of the Wayang and a Javanised Mahabharata as they seek to represent the events of 1965–6 in their attempts to destabilize Suharto’s master narrative of the coup. However, what is particularly interesting and pressing is that which has been intentionally omitted from these works; for these stories and testimonies do not explicitly discuss the 1965 coup, even while they attempt to creatively represent the politicide which followed it. Through a reading of Y. B. Mangunwijaya’s Durga/Umayi and Umar Kayam’s Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, we can begin to understand how Indonesian authors engage with an Indonesian magical realism and, possibly, gain insight into the remembrance of the 1965 coup in Indonesian literature.
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Notes
- 1.
Anna-Greta Nilson Hoadley, Indonesian Literature Vs New Order Orthodoxy: The Aftermath of 1965–1966 (Copenhagen: NIAS, 2005), 7.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Hoadley, Indonesian Literature. Most of the texts included in Hoadley’s survey of Indonesian literature were written in Javanese or Bahasa Indonesia, with only a handful having been translated into English. Hoadley’s project helps draw attention to the wide selection of Indonesian writing which remains unavailable because of its subject matter and the language it was written in. This lack of translated writings presents a challenge to this project, thus the texts chosen for this chapter are all translated writings from Indonesian authors; John McGlynn, “Silenced Voices, Muted Expressions: Indonesian Literature Today,” Manoa 12, no. 1 (2000): 40, accessed December 18, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1353/man2000.0022.
- 4.
Tony Day, “Still Stuck in the Mud: Imagining World Literature During the Cold War in Indonesia and Vietnam,” in Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, eds. Tony Day and Maya H. T. Liem (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010), 132–3.
- 5.
Abdul Latief and Tim Behrend, “I, the Accused,” Manoa: Silenced Voices: New Writing from Indonesia 12, no. 1 (2000), accessed December 29, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1353/man.2000.0018.
- 6.
Daniel Lev, “Indonesia 1965: The Year of the Coup,” Asian Survey 6, no. 2 (1966): 105–7, accessed December 8, 2014, https://doi.org/10.2307/2642105; Helen-Louise Hunter, Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup: The Untold Story (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 8–11. The PKI (likely with President Sukarno’s consent) set up a “Fifth Force” consisting mostly of civilians and militants with communist inclinations. The “Fifth Force” was to provide additional support to the four security forces in Indonesia and its proposed mobilization was strongly rejected by Army General Nasution, who survived the attempt on his life on the night of the coup.
- 7.
The theory of a CIA-funded coup was plausible to the Indonesians because the United States’ support of Indonesia’s independence was largely motivated by the former’s concern about the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia as the world was on the brink of the Cold War. The United States’ aversion to communism would later become useful political capital for Suharto in his initiation of a New Order divorced from any communist ties.
- 8.
Theodore Friend, Indonesian Destinies (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 105.
- 9.
Hunter, Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup, 11. There have been suspicions of Sukarno’s involvement in the supposed coup, as he appeared to have known about the operation against his top generals. There were even suggestions he orchestrated the coup with PKI to undermine the growing powers of his own Army generals whom he felt were threatening his presidency.
- 10.
Friend, Indonesian Destinies, 108.
- 11.
Ibid., 114.
- 12.
Hoadley, Indonesian Literature, 47. As Hoadley observes, “[t]he scope and brutality of the massacre is unique in Indonesia’s history. Yet it is passed over in silence in the country’s history books. This applies to both the official work, Sejarah Nasional Indonesia [History of Indonesia], and all other presentations of history, a phenomenon which is then reflected in the school books used to teach the nation’s history.”
- 13.
Budiawan, “When Memory Challenges History: Public Contestation of the Past in Post-Suharto Indonesia,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 28, no. 2 (2000): 37, accessed November 17, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1163/030382400X00046.
- 14.
Michael Bodden, “Woman as Nation in Mangunwijaya’s ‘Durga Umayi’,” Indonesia 62 (1996): 61, accessed October 20, 2014, https://doi.org/10.2307/3351392. Bodden notes that “[i]n interviews, the author has stated that in his works he endeavors to raise the issues that concern the poor and the ‘little people’ because such groups are most frequently the victims of social injustice.”
- 15.
Y. B. Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi: A Novel, trans. Ward Keeler (Seattle and London: University of Washington, 2004), 19.
- 16.
Ibid., 22. According to the myth presented in “Foreshadowplay,” Lady Uma was the virtuous and beautiful consort of Lord Guru. Once, as they were traveling in their chariot, Lord Guru was overcome with desire for her and demanded sexual intimacy. The virtuous Lady Uma, afraid of being seen by mortals and animals, refused her husband’s advances, and consequently angered him. Lord Guru then cursed Lady Uma and she turned into Goddess Durga, “a loutish femal lump/like a louche lizard bitch with a body like a slab/clownish ulcerous foul-smelling giving fright/with an ogress’s face the eyes of a sprite a flat stubby/nose,/grinning mouth, cassava-like breasts/only one hand that can move,/Togog’s fat buttocks and fungus-blotched legs.”
- 17.
Ibid., 26.
- 18.
Ibid., 29.
- 19.
Sukarno was also addressed as Bung [brother] Karno by the Indonesians—a move which endeared him to the masses. Suharto, however, portrays himself to be Pak [father] Harto to emphasize his role in the persecution of communists.
- 20.
Notably, Kayam’s Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, first published in 1975, portrays the events of 1965–6 with a large degree of neutrality as Kayam chooses not to perpetuate Suharto’s narrative of the coup despite his official appointments during the Suharto era. Kayam assumed official positions as Director-General of Radio, Television, and Film in the Ministry of Information until 1969, and as the Chairman of the Jakarta Arts Council from 1969–72.
- 21.
Umar Kayam, “The Blue Kimono,” in Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, trans Harry Aveling (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational [Asia], 1980), 163; “Sri Sumarah,” in Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, trans. Harry Aveling (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational [Asia], 1980), 105–106.
- 22.
Putu Wijaya and Mildred L. E. Wagemann, “Blood,” Manoa 3, no. 1 (1991): 39, accessed January 22, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1353/man.2000.0018. Prince Yudhistira is the eldest of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata.
- 23.
Ibid., 41.
- 24.
Michael Bodden, “Seno Gumira Ajidarma and Fictional Resistance to an Authoritarian State in 1990s Indonesia,” Indonesia, no. 68 (1999): 155, accessed October 11, 2013, https://doi.org/10.2307/3351298.
- 25.
Tony Day, “Still Stuck in the Mud,” 133.
- 26.
Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 113.
- 27.
See Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham and London: Duke Univeristy Press, 1995).
- 28.
Leila S. Chudori, “Seeking Identity, Seeking Indonesia,” Inside Indonesia 114, Oct–Dec 2013, http://www.insideindonesia.org/seeking-identity-seeking-indonesia.
- 29.
Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 70. Denning argues that the magical realism of Alejo Carpentier has resonance with authors from regions such as India and Indonesia because of magical realism’s potential to address the disillusion of postcolonialism and the rise of communism in these newly independent countries.
- 30.
Harry Aveling, “Some Landmarks in the Development of the Indonesian Short Story,” in Modern Short Fiction of Southeast Asia: A Literary History, ed. Terri Shaffer Yamada (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2009), 256. Aveling argues that “The use of fantasy and symbolism [used previously to criticize Sukarno’s Guided Democracy] could, nevertheless, still provide important literary strategies for finding ways of still speaking about the contemporary situation in Indonesia,” even with tightening control over the expression of public opinion.
- 31.
Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 80–1.
- 32.
Michael Bodden, “Woman as Nation,” 74.
- 33.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Taylor and Francis, Routledge, 1988), 92.
- 34.
Paul Tickell, “Writing the Past: The Limits of Realism in Contemporary Indonesian Literature,” In Text/Politics in Island Southeast Asia: Essays in Interpretation, ed. David M. E. Roskies (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1993), 258.
- 35.
Michael Bodden, “Modern Drama, Politics, and the Postcolonial Aesthetics of Left-Nationalism in North Sumatra: The Forgotten Theater of Indonesia’s Lekra, 1955–65,” in Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, eds. Tony Day and Maya H. T. Liem (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010), 45–6. The Cultural Manifesto was delivered in 1963 by members of the intelligentsia who disagreed with LEKRA’s radical opinions that art and culture are controlled by politics, and that any artist or scholar who disagrees with Sukarno’s doctrines should be considered counterrevolutionary.
- 36.
Day, “Still Stuck in the Mud,” 144–5. Day was referring to Heinschke’s argument in “Between Gelanggang and Lekra” in which Heinschke points out the conflict between the Gelanggang writers (rightists) and those outside this group, as each defend their understanding of the relationship between culture and politics.
- 37.
Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 116.
- 38.
Umar Kayam , “Fall in Connecticut,” in Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, trans. Harry Aveling (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational [Asia], 1980), 93.
- 39.
Ibid., 91.
- 40.
Ibid., 92.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid., 89; 90.
- 43.
Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 121.
- 44.
Kayam , “Sri Sumarah,” 130; Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 121.
- 45.
Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 121.
- 46.
Ibid., 125.
- 47.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 2006), 614.
- 48.
Ibid., 128.
- 49.
Ibid., 129.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ibid., 131–2.
- 52.
Kayam, “Sri Sumarah,” 139.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Umar Kayam , “Bawuk,” in Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, trans. Harry Aveling (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational [Asia], 1980), 72.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Mark Woodward, “Only Now Can We Speak: Remembering Politicide in Yogyakarta,” Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 26, no. 1 (2011): 47, accessed November 12, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1355/sj26-1c.
- 57.
Ariel Heryanto, “Where Communism Never Dies: Violence, Trauma and Narration in the Last Cold War Capitalist Authoritarian State,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 152, accessed November 17, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1177/136787799900200201.
- 58.
Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 129.
- 59.
Ibid., 147. OK stands for Organisasi Kiri [Left Organization] and EM stands for Eks Merah [Ex Red].
- 60.
Woodward, “Only Now Can We Speak,” 41. Woodward was referring to Jeff Sluka’s expression in the latter’s essay, “Cultures of Terror and Resistance in Northern Ireland.”
- 61.
Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 87.
- 62.
Paige Johnson Tan, “Teaching and Remembering,” Inside Indonesia 92, Apr.–June 2008, http://www.insideindonesia.org/teaching-and-remembering.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Bodden, “Modern Drama,” 46.
- 65.
“Indonesia’s ‘Red Scare’ Stokes Unease over Military’s Growing Influence,” Reuters, May 18, 2016, accessed May 19, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-military-idUSKCN0Y933F.
- 66.
Hal Hill, Indonesia’s New Order: The Dynamics of Socio-economic Transformation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1994), xxviii. According to Hill, “[s]ymbols, institutions and ‘order’ have been an important part of the New Order’s ‘nation-building’ process,” which proves there was a strict enforcement of laws and censorship to ensure the nation continued to function in a post-coup era.
- 67.
Hendrik Maier, “Flying a Kite: the Crimes of Pramoedya Ananta Toer,” in Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam, ed. V. Rafael (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1999), 258.
- 68.
McGlynn, “Silenced Voices,” 41.
- 69.
Mangunwijaya, Durga/Umayi, 129.
- 70.
Woodward, “Only Now Can We Speak,” 47.
- 71.
Barbara Hatley, “Cultural Expressions,” in Indonesia’s New Order: The Dynamics of Socio-economic Transformation, ed. Hal Hill (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1994), 220.
- 72.
Bodden, “Modern Drama,” 46.
- 73.
Robert Cribb, “The Indonesian Massacres,” in Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, eds. Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 237–8. The screen, on which the shadows of the puppets are cast, is divided into two sides and, traditionally, puppets on the right are the heroes while those on the left are the villains. As with the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the story ends when the heroes defeat the evil villains.
- 74.
Ibid.
- 75.
Kayam, “Sri Sumarah,” 132.
- 76.
Kayam, “Bawuk,” 77.
- 77.
Mangunwijaya , Durga/Umayi, 129. Pancasila is the state philosophy formulated by Sukarno in 1945. There are five principles to Pancasila: belief in the one and only God; just and civilized humanity; unity; guided democracy; and social justice.
- 78.
Harry Aveling, Introduction to Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, trans. Harry Aveling (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational [Asia], 1980), x. Aveling points out that “Kayam does not take sides, neither for or against his characters … This is how life was; there was dignity and stupidity on both sides. Humanity matters more than political parties.”
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Lye, K.Y. (2018). Can One Speak of the September 30th Movement? The Power of Silence in Indonesian Literature. In: Wong, J. (eds) Asia and the Historical Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_2
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