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Shadow imaginations: transpacific approaches to post-1965 Indonesian archives

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Shadow imaginations: transpacific approaches to post-1965 Indonesian archives

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SHADOW IMAGINATIONS:

TRANSPACIFIC APPROACHES TO POST-1965 INDONESIAN ARCHIVES

by

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

ii

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”

iii

For my brother,
Chicco Satya Lasmana (1976-2006).
~
“Love you more than you can imagine,”
you once wrote.

iv
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.
v
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
vi
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
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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.
viii
Table of Contents

Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgments iv
List of Figures x
Abstract xi

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

ix
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

x

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

xi

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
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.

1
-0-

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
2
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 re-
appropriated 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
3
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 then-
president 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
4
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,
5
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
6
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
7
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
8
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
9
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 anti-
authoritarian uses.

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
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 Indonesian-
born, 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
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.
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 20
th
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

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
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.

0.4 | Archive+
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’
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
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
18
as a way to ease the community’s access into learning about the suppressed history of the anti-
communist 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
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.

20
-1-

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

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 all-
encompassing: 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
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
23
late 19
th
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
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.
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,
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
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
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.
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
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:
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
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
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

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
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
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
21
st
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 21
st
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.
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
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,
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.
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)
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)

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.
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.
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-of-
power” 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.
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
it.
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
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
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 19
th
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.

48
-2-

“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 “de-
scribes” as soon as in-scription happens, but “does not mean that the disaster, as the force of
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
57
of no earth, I re-enter
23

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
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
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
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

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

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
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

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

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
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!
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.
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
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
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.
71
-3-

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.
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 anti-
imperialist 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,”
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
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
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).
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Figure 3: Mapping Memory Landscapes
Screenshot from http://nodegoat.net/blog.p/82.m/6/mapping-memory-landscapes-in-nodegoat-the-
indonesian-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
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.
78

Figure 4: Mapping Memory Landscapes Data Model
Image courtesy of Mapping Memory Landscape, http://nodegoat.net/blog.p/82.m/6/mapping-memory-
landscapes-in-nodegoat-the-indonesian-killings-of-1965-66

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
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
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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
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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
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.
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.
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
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 21
st
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,
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
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
89
Brecht, “functional transformation” is “the transformation of the forms and instruments of
production by a progressive intelligentsia—interested in the liberation of the means of
production and thus useful in the class struggle.”
35
Such a formulation of the transformation of a
cultural object seems closer to, for instance, Sukarno’s idea of an autonomous technology, and
“refunctioning” in the service of changing the status quo is critically important for my
understanding of remix as a theory and practice that can, indeed, shape and transform society.
Remix, too, has parallels with tactical media, which “operates both at the level of technological
apparatus and at the level of content and representation… [and is] not simply about
reappropriating the instrument but also about reengineering semiotic systems and reflecting
critically on institutions of power and control.”
36

Here, however, I want to point out a key difference that sets remix apart as a cultural and
technological practice. I argue that remix, in its use, recombination, and rearticulation of
disparate elements (text, image, sound, video, etc.), thrives in its affective and sensuous aesthetic
and experiential qualities. Indeed, remix exists in an “emergent discursive space”
37
that allows
for a transformation of not just form, function, and content, but also of the experience itself. It is
a form of critique and making that is at once technological, cultural, critical, and affective.
Remix possesses, in its theory and practice, a poetics that go beyond mere function.
Even though Edward Said does not explicitly address the concept of remix, it is through
his works that I find the most useful and transformative ways of thinking about what remix can
achieve, and how remix can be used in ethically powerful ways. As Said writes about the
contrapuntal, “each cultural work is a vision of a moment, and we must juxtapose that vision
with the various revisions it later provoked.”
38
The contrapuntal as site of resistance, as
articulated by Said in Culture and Imperialism, provides a productive lens through which we can
90
think about how remix can rethink master narratives. Said, as a lover and critic of music, utilizes
the musical notion of the contrapuntal, where two or more distinct melodies form a polyphony,
as a critical practice. Furthermore, the contrapuntal, or counterpoint, also refers to the backstitch
in sewing techniques, where stitches overlap and are not consecutively sewn, but rather in a back
and forth (non)sequence. The contrapuntal, like remix, has to do with bringing together
oppositional perspectives and thinking through disparate experiences: it is as much a knitting
together as it is a tearing apart. Beyond the contrasting visions that take into account both power
and resistance, the contrapuntal has roots in cultural activities like knitting and music, which
highlight the haptic, the affective, and care, making a concept like the contrapuntal deeply
provocative and effective for a potentially ethical practice that allows for polyvocality.
Said also calls for an intellectual spirit of amateurism that he defines as “an activity that
is fueled by care and affection,” and one that calls for a contrapuntal—and perhaps
collaborative—ethics. Amateurism is “the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love
for an unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and
barriers.”
39
Said’s definition of amateurism inspires and pushes my understanding of how remix
can be a form of making, practice, and theory that is critical, creative, and mindful of its relations
to the world. With its emphasis on care and love, amateurism is motivated by the origins of the
word itself: amateur comes from the Latin amare, to love, and it is in this spirit that Said sets out
to address the role of the intellectual and the ways in which the stifling pressures of
professionalism could be countered by amateurism. Roland Barthes also discusses the amateur;
he writes, “the amateur renews his pleasure (amator: one who loves and loves again); he is
anything but a hero (of creation or performance).”
40
The amateur or the remixer, therefore, as
someone who takes care in their craft.
91
The Video Slam project itself demonstrates such a practice of amateurism like the one
Said describes. Admittedly, the video remixes are a little rough around the edges, and have an
“amateur,” low-budget quality to them; this is also due to the fact that most of the videomakers
have little experience, and for some of the younger ones, watching the state propaganda film The
Treachery of G30S/PKI was their first time. As Maya Deren asserts, amateur filmmaking does
not mean that they are inferior to more professional productions: “Instead of envying the script
and dialogue writers, the trained actors, the elaborate staffs and sets, the enormous production
budgets of the professional film, the amateur should make use of the one great advantage which
all professionals envy him, namely, freedom - both artistic and physical.”
41
The choice of having
amateur videomakers produce these remixes is a powerful aspect of the Video Slam, and much
like a poetry slam, these videos have an improvisational and performative quality that come
across through their use of sound, footages, text, and music.

Figure 8: Screenshot from “Don't Be Afraid to Dance” (“Jangan Takut Menari”) by Azizah
Hanum

92
In one of the video remixes, “Don’t Be Afraid to Dance” by Azizah Hanum, selected
footages from The Treachery of G30S/PKI are set to two kinds of music—dangdut, a genre of
Indonesian traditional music for dancing, and the song “Come Walk With Me” by M.I.A, the
popular South Asian English artist and rapper from England. Hanum’s rhetorical choices are
purposeful and intelligent, and serve to ridicule the spectacle of the state propaganda film. The
text laid over the footages as commentary (such as the screenshot above), is often humorous and
flippant, and the catchy tunes of the soundtrack are stark and absurd contrasts to the harrowing
and violent scenes in the film. Incidentally, M.I.A’s high energy track, “Come Walk With Me,”
is also a song about the internet, surveillance, and digital technology: the lyrics “there’s a
thousand ways to meet you now/there’s a thousand ways to track you down” are paired with
M.I.A’s use of the sound an Apple computer makes when one turns up the volume, beeping
sounds when the computer alerts a user of a problem, and the iPhoto capture sound. One can
only speculate whether or not Hanum made the conscious decision to choose this particular song
as an additional commentary on both the invasive and networked nature of technology, but that
choice has proven to be a fitting and well-made one, especially considering the activist and
participatory-driven work behind the video project.
Although the video remixers make it clear that they are not trying to re-create a different
version of history, their work highlights a troubled history and how orchestrated the state-driven
narratives are—they call attention to the boundaries between fact and fiction, as well to the
constructedness of the state propaganda film itself. As Hill and Sen point out, the growing
number of public discussions of 1965 through media such as the Internet demonstrates how “in
the context of this increasingly open political dissent that disorderly, ‘against the grain’ readings
of some films become visible and viable as political activity.”
42
In opening up a space for further
93
dialogue about a traumatic part of the nation’s history that has been silenced, the remixes are
forms of contrapuntal making that uncover stories from communities that have been excluded
and silenced, and are a tribute to the bodies that have vanished and been obliterated. As the
videos suggest, there is no one single narrative or memory of the genocide—there are only
distortions of the truth, and erasures of what really happened in 1965-66.
The Video Slam remixes have not only been facilitated by new media technologies, but
also propelled by increasing political dissatisfaction of the citizens; such “dissident readings and
their circulation on the Internet [also] indicated some of the cracks in the New Order’s methods
of media control, including its governance of cinema through censorship and propaganda.”
43

These digital video projects, therefore, transform the landscape of cinema in Indonesia and
transcend the limits set by the state on filmmaking practices and film content. In redefining the
creator as both a reader and maker of culture, remix also blurs the boundaries between reader and
writer, author and audience. The possibility for polyvocal representation is an enactment of “the
essence of counterpoint [as] simultaneity of voices, preternatural control of resources, apparently
endless inventiveness.”
44
Within the cultural economy of digital media and in the space of the
Internet, the video remixes function as a transformative mode of knowledge production,
embodying the spirit of revolution that was invoked so powerfully in A Year of Living
Dangerously.
Nevertheless, even the affordances of technological platforms such as the EngageMedia
website and YouTube (where these videos are housed)—both of which have a wide global
audience—may not be enough to give small, alternative projects such as the Video Slam the
circulation, exposure, and recognition that other projects related to 1965 might get. What makes
a project travel widely, and what makes others stay within the reach of local communities? Here,
94
it is worthwhile to articulate the disparity between different works dealing with Indonesia’s
history of 1965. As I have argued, one cannot talk about the role of digital media in Indonesia
without thinking about film; I want to point out the lines of connection between projects such as
the Video Slam and the Indonesian Institute of Social History’s Oral History Project with works
like Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing and its sequel The Look of
Silence, which have gained international attention and heightened a worldwide awareness of the
1965-66 killings having taken place in Indonesia.
To return to the question of “why DH is so white” (and so male) is to reflect on the issue
of recognition I am raising here. It is no accident that these films gained immediate, global
success, as films that have been made by white male filmmakers (including Werner Herzog as
producer, which lends a certain kind of perceived legitimacy and prestige to the films), reflecting
an inequality of power in terms of how cultural productions get made, circulated, and received
by the larger public. In an essay published in the Film Quarterly’s special dossier on The Act of
Killing, Intan Paramaditha writes,
The Act of Killing is not the only source from which to learn about Indonesia’s
bleak history; instead, it has to be seen as a starting point to identify what has and
has not been done. The film’s most valuable contribution to Indonesia, which has
not been surpassed by previous projects of its kind, is the capacity to make the
issue travel. In the postcolonial context, particularly, travel ensures legitimacy.
45

Travel does ensure legitimacy and exposure, and Paramaditha’s statement actually points to the
problem of representation and who gets to say what: Oppenheimer’s strategy in distributing the
film, in enabling the film to travel through various technological platforms (BitTorrent, iTunes,
Netflix, YouTube) is something that no Indonesian can do safely—hence the rolling credits of
95
the “Anonymous” Indonesian crew, for the circulation of 1965-related materials is still as
stringently regulated and monitored as it was during the New Order era, despite increased
democracy in the country. The fact that Oppenheimer was able to disseminate his work without
repercussion reveals the imbalanced distribution of agency; thus, as I have argued, there must be
space for comparative readings of different kinds of projects, in order for there to be possible a
transformative approach to digital humanities and digital media that is attentive to difference.

3.5 | A Diligent Humanities
Ann Stoler’s notion of “archiving-as-process” and her work on how “contrapuntal
intrusions emanated from outside the corridors of governance [and] erupted… within that
sequestered space” of the archive
46
provide a critical and nuanced foundation for my
formulations on how these digital projects generate transformative, emergent archives beyond
what the New Order state established in post-1965, post-genocide Indonesia—these are projects
that make impossible stories possible. My contention is that thinking about technology and how
it functions in various contexts is always a negotiation between insides and outsides; as Jacques
Derrida writes, “But where does the outside commence? This question is the question of the
archive. There are undoubtedly no others.”
47
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. A thinking of the outside, however, always starts with the inside,
rendering the play of inside and outside more a question of finding the gaps, breaks, and middles.
While examining how these projects emerge from the liminal spaces of silence and
trauma, and challenge the politics of seeing and knowing in radical ways, I have been inspired by
Lauren Klein’s essay on archival silences, where her forensic eye and thoughtful use of digital
96
tools uncovers the silent voice of James Heming, Thomas Jefferson’s former slave, in Jefferson’s
letters.
48
As Wendy Chun notes of Klein’s essay, Klein’s particular use of digital methods and
techniques, including computational linguistics and data visualization, epitomizes how the digital
“can be used to grapple with the impossible, rather than simply usher in the possible.”
49
A
writing and thinking from the shadows, an imagining that is revolutionary: here, Klein sharply
observes that going beyond the limits of the digital necessitates a rethinking of how and what we
know (hence, an object-oriented ontology of withdrawn objects will not suffice as it erases praxis
and knowledge production). She writes, “Illuminating [the connections between persons and
networks of communication and labor], through digital means, reframes the archive itself as a
site of action rather than as a record of fixity or loss.”
50
A careful and critical engagement with
digital tools and methods, therefore, can make visible the absences, and activate the shadowed
restlessness in the archive.
In a “Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities” panel, Alondra Nelson asked
astutely, “What does a transformed archive look like?”
51
My contention is that a transformed
archive has to exist in the collective, the transnational, the digital, and the contrapuntal. Laurie
Sears writes that “as old archives are reconfigured and new ones come into being, it is important
to cultivate new interpretive methodologies along with new accumulations of data and stories.”
52

Thinking, theorizing, imagining, and creating an alternative archive necessitates first
understanding the archive as a concept that has built within it the element of anticipation, a sense
that it is more than just a repository of records, but a shared space that can support collaboration
among users, as well as a transformation of ideas.
The question of making a 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
97
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.”
53
The archive in digital spaces 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 colonial archives
erupting reveal, and as Michel Foucault’s formulation of the archive as “the general system of
the formation and transformation of statements” suggest.
54

The ongoing collections of personal stories, information, and testimonies relating to the
1965 tragedy, together with a growing mass of exciting digital media productions and online
archives in Indonesia, will be vital in revisiting and reinterpreting a traumatic past and history
that deserve to be regained by different individuals and communities who have not had the
chance to speak up, and whose lives have been in the shadows during much of the New Order
era. What is needed is something akin to what Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich call “multi-
scale reading,” the ability to analyze and interpret data in terms of “both large scale patterns and
the particular unique trajectories, without sacrificing one for another,”
55
as well as what Matthew
Kirschenbaum calls the “forensic imagination,”
56
an imagination not just dedicated forensically
to the darkest of depths and shadows, but also devoted to the forensis, or forum, the public. A
more robust understanding of the various ways that digital media productions function in
Indonesia’s social, cultural, and political contexts necessitates an “awareness of the
mechanism,”
57
to borrow William Gibson’s words, although it would not be a perception that is
“absolutely alone,” as Gibson writes in Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), but an awareness borne
98
out of a commitment to the collective, to the voices of the dead and the missing, to the stories of
those exiled in the shadows and in the “dusty sunlight,” and to the future generations to come.
Like the films and testimonies discussed in Chapter Four, these are works “fueled by care
and affection,” and by the intellectual spirit that Said calls amateurism. If such an articulation
becomes the basis for an alternative digital humanities that is attentive to projects existing on the
periphery, is there still a need to name them as such, under the big tent, capital lettered DH? Or,
we could perhaps imagine and articulate a humanities that is always in the offing—a digital
humanities that is a diligent humanities, for to be diligent (from the Latin diligere) is not only to
persist, but to love and care for what one is doing, just like Said’s notion of the amateur as
someone who strives and thrives in their craft, without greed, and with a commitment to building
relations despite and especially because of differences.

99
-4-

A Polyvocal Archive:
Women and Collaborative Ethics in Post-1965 Indonesia

We have to keep trying. We want the walls to come down. Or, if they stay up, we
want the walls to talk, to tell our story. A story too can shatter: a thousand tiny
little pieces, strewn all over the place.
--Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017)

The National Commission on Violence against Women created a campaign, ‘Let’s
Talk the Truth,’ symbolized by a betel vine and an areca nut, because in
Indonesian tradition, these two items means friendship and kinship. In many
cultures, they are also a symbol of negotiation towards peace.
--National Commission on Anti-Violence against Women
(2009)

An image of the betel vine and areca nut serves as the logo for the Let’s Talk Truth (Mari
Bicara Kebenaran) campaign launched in 2009 by the Indonesian National Commission on Anti-
Violence Against Women (KOMNAS Perempuan). Their choice in using these two elements is
driven by what the betel vine and areca nut represent: friendship and kinship, as well as
solidarity and reconciliation. Such a campaign that strives to gather the experiences of victims of
violence bears affinity with another initiative, Women’s Narratives Circle (Lingkar Tutur
Perempuan), by the Indonesian Institute of Social History (ISSI), which facilitates a space for
women survivors to share their stories via interviews. As the ISSI co-director Agung Ayu Ratih
stresses, women’s voices have been the ones least heard and often considered too sentimental in
narratives about the 1965 anti-communist purge in Indonesia.
1

In the post-genocide context, storytelling—mobilized by communities of women whose
lives have been marginalized as a consequence of state patriarchy, repression, and violence—
100
functions as a political mode that makes possible a different approach with which the archive of
the nation can be revisited. Finding where the gaps and silences are in the archive, therefore,
means paying attention and listening to the polyvocality of the archive, and especially to the
multitude of women’s stories that have emerged in the post-1965 period. This chapter 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,”
2
as a vital work that reflects
post-1965 life and illuminates the lingering remnants of President Suharto’s militarized and
masculinist New Order regime (1966-1998), as well as contemporary Indonesia in a globalized
world. In a moment when the country continues to be beset by discrimination on the basis of
gender and sexuality, and by contentious backlashes against the LGBTQ community, films like
Children of Srikandi create what Sara Ahmed calls a “willful archive.”
3
As visual media, the film
also disrupts the “politics of visibility,” much like the digital media analyzed in Chapter Three.
4

Grounded in a transnational feminist and collaborative praxis with a spirit of amateurism,
Children of Srikandi makes visible the possibility of a transformative mode of relation that
destabilizes understandings of identity and belonging by stressing plurivocality and collectivity,
while simultaneously expanding the social and political meanings of friendship.
5

4.1 | The Spectre of Gerwani, the Indonesian Women’s Movement
The anti-communist purge of 1965-66 involved the suppression of more than just
suspected Communists: leftist scholars, activists, and women’s organizations were also
persecuted, and the Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Gerwani), in
particular, became heavily targeted because of its affiliation with the Indonesian Communist
Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) and its active participation in the political arena. As
101
Saskia Wieringa notes, “Suharto rose to power by orchestrating a campaign of unprecedented
violence, legitimized by accusations of sexual debauchery allegedly committed by members of
Gerwani.”
6

The emergence of President Suharto’s New Order regime—overthrowing President
Sukarno’s Old Order after the 1965-66 killings—was also dependent on the demonization of the
Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerwani hereafter), using their alleged sexual and moral
transgressions as legitimate grounds on which to persecute suspected Communists and
Communist sympathizers. In the most influential propaganda film produced by the New Order
state, The Treachery of G30S/PKI (1984), Gerwani is depicted as a group of corrupt and violent
women full of lust and rage: they are shown gouging out the eyes of army generals with razors,
and this violent sequence suggests that they proceed to castrate the men, after which they
celebrate by dancing around the generals’ dead bodies and engage in an orgy.
7

The construction of the New Order state, therefore, was based on the marring of Gerwani
as a group of perverted, wild women, and founded on “its successful repression of an alien
communist ideology that was alleged to have resulted in disorder and the sexual depravity of
women… speaking to male fears of castration.”
8
Gerwani’s active political participation in
society was seen as a threat to conservatives and their masculinist ideologies that required
women to subscribe to the kodrat, the Indonesian women’s ideological code of conduct, which
meant a certain adherence to women’s place in society as obedient housewives and mothers
without having any form of engaged role in public life. Thus, Gerwani was seen as traitors to
such formations of a hierarchical gender ideology as instructed by the state—they would be what
Sara Ahmed calls “willful subjects,” women who refused to acquiesce with authority,
9
and what
Lan P. Duong terms “treacherous subjects” in describing women deemed traitors to the nation.
10

102
The distortion of a group of politically engaged women’s alliance into something that
was portrayed as a barbaric orgy did not, however, end with the New Order’s propaganda
artifacts. The association of communism with politically active women and lesbianism returned
in 1999 when the chairperson of the Indonesian Women’s Congress (Kongres Wanita Indonesia,
Kowani), the umbrella organization of Indonesian women’s organizations, stated that “in the
early 1960s, Gerwani supported the understanding of lesbianism and endeavored to run a
complex of prostitution.”
11
Up until the late 20
th
century (and, arguably, through the 21
st

century), therefore, Gerwani continued to be depicted and seen as a danger to women’s lives and
thus stigmatized in Indonesian society—such an attitude was an extension of New Order
propaganda and an indication of how deeply it infiltrated the public’s conceptions towards not
just Gerwani as an organization, but also towards gender ideologies in Indonesia.
12

The vilification of Gerwani as a group that contributed a corrupt form of womanhood
meant that the post-1965 Indonesian state had to recuperate a version of womanhood that was
repressive and could be easily contained within a hierarchical gender structure. For instance,
even though it was supposed to represent women’s rights, Suharto’s Family Welfare Guidance
(PKK) in fact served a political function for the New Order regime, acting as an instrument of
control over women by pushing forward an ideology that located women’s position firmly in the
household under male leadership, and that promoted an image of the woman “as center of calm,
exemplar of submission and refined behavior.”
13
The PKK imposed their five principles for
women (Panca Dharma Wanita) that strictly emphasized women’s duties as a wife, mother, and
caretaker.
Julia Suryakusuma has coined the term “State Ibuism” (ibu denotes mother, or woman) to
describe such state-enforced ideology of womanhood.
14
State Ibuism, writes Suryakusuma,
103
“defines women as appendages and companions to their husbands, as procreators of the nation,
as mothers and educators of children, as housekeepers and as members of Indonesian society—in
that order.”
15
Consequently, State Ibuism became a penetrating, invisible force:
While women’s organizations that were concerned with women’s rights issues
were banned and their activities stigmatized as a result of the abortive coup in
1965, the PKK… [was] well placed, working from the top government offices to
the grassroots level, promoting their creed and causes.
16

Penetrating not just social life, but also national culture, State Ibuism changed the public’s
knowledge of history and national figures. Raden Adjeng Kartini, for instance, who remains
arguably the most prominent and well-known historical Indonesian female figure, was often
hailed as a 19
th
century national heroine and fighter of women’s rights and education during the
Dutch colonial rule; yet, after 1965, the New Order state transformed her image from a radical
emancipator and feminist to one that emphasized her abilities in maintaining a dutiful presence in
the home, and in being an excellent cook.
17

4.2 | Censorship and Women’s Stories
Hierarchical gender structures in the post-1965 era also translated to the enforcement of
stringent policies in media productions, including written and visual texts, with strict censorship
and scrutiny on media that might be considered transgressive. Intan Paramaditha points out that,
“even after the New Order authoritarian regime under President Suharto ended in 1998, film
policy still operates based on the old, repressive paradigm,” as demonstrated by the censoring of
the omnibus film Chants of Lotus (Perempuan Punya Cerita, 2007) produced by Nia Dinata’s
Kalyana Shira Foundation. Made by four women filmmakers (Nia Dinata, Upi Avianto, Lasja
104
Fauziah, and Fatimah Tobing Rony), Chants of Lotus was heavily censored by the Indonesian
Censorship Board for broaching topics that the Board deemed too inappropriate; these issues,
including sexual violence, teenage sex, abortion, HIV/AIDS, and human trafficking, continue to
be controversial women’s and human rights in Indonesia that, to this day, are still considered too
taboo to be discussed publicly.
Fatimah Tobing Rony, one of the Chants of Lotus directors, points out that the film
undertook substantial research for the background context of each of the four stories; in doing so,
Rony asserts, “Dinata’s film-making, which includes the research, the collaboration and the
bringing of films to audiences, is a political intervention.”
18
Chants of Lotus, therefore, not only
allowed four women directors to work together, use film as a medium of expression, and create
stories about fundamental rights especially as they pertain to women’s health, but it also aimed to
serve as a pedagogical piece that brings to light these taboo sexual and health issues.
Paramaditha notes that “the anxiety about sexual representation in cinema exemplified by
Chants of Lotus reveals how the discourse of sexuality has become an inseparable element of the
public debates in Indonesia.”
19
Indeed, the extent to which issues of gender and sexuality have
become so embedded in public controversy is further indicated by the numerous upsetting
accounts of backlashes against the LGBTQ community in Indonesia in recent years by
conservative groups and organizations, as well as politicians and policymakers. Tom
Boellstorff—following in the footsteps of Julia Suryakusuma and her coinage of “State Ibuism”
to describe the repressive state-enforced form of womanhood—terms the overtly
heteronormative and conservative turn “State Straightism,” in response to the growing number of
anti-LGBT violent incidents and attacks, which Boellstorff argues is more than just an issue of
sexuality or religion, but is about national belonging.
20
Those who fall outside the definition of a
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compliant citizen as instructed by the state, therefore, are considered outsiders, marginalized
others within the nation.
Despite the level of censorship, rising conservatism, and sectarianism in contemporary
Indonesia, there continues to exist and persist a robust, growing artist community that make and
produce works that resist oppressive state paradigms, with filmmakers playing a central role as
cultural producers in “conceptualiz[ing] sexuality differently from the state and deploy[ing]
sexuality to both question and reconstruct national identity.”
21
Paramaditha has also emphasized
how “on the one hand we have the conservative turn, but on the other hand we also have new
developments in terms of gender activism.”
22
How, then, have women filmmakers, in particular,
worked to disrupt the realm of knowledge production in reimagining a different identity outside
the purview of the state, beyond the nation, and apart from hierarchical gender constructions?
With women’s narratives as the focus, I argue that the increasingly transnational and
global nature of media productions allows for an alternative understanding and representation of
gender and sexuality by making possible a working relationship and alliance that cross
boundaries, thus providing the foundations for a politics of friendship built on transnational
feminism, cutting across differences and forging new spaces for collaboration. As Rony states,
the “antithesis of [the traditional single auteur in U.S. productions] would be a working
collective.”
23
The Children of Srikandi, created by a group of filmmakers who name themselves
the Children of Srikandi Collective, functions as one important and striking example of such a
multifaceted and radical articulation of a different mode of relation in, to, and through the world.

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4.3 | Children of Srikandi (Anak-Anak Srikandi, 2012)

A transnational production with a German producer, an Indonesian executive producer,
and a German art director/advisor, Children of Srikandi is the “first film from queer women
about queer women in Indonesia,”
24
an omnibus of eight interwoven stories, with the directors
featured as characters in not just their own short films, but in the other directors’ films as well:
1. “Hello World” by Imelda Taurinamandala
2. “Jlamprong” by Eggie Dian
3. “Acceptance” by Oji
4. “Edith’s Jilbab” by Yulia Dwi Andriyanti
5. “In Between” by Hera Danish
6. “Deconstruction” by Stea Lim
7. “No Label” by Afank Mariani
8. Wayang Kulit (Shadow Puppet) Performance by Soleh and Anik

As the Children of Srikandi Collective writes, this film is an “anthology of stories on the state of
alternate sexualities in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world.
The result is eight highly personal and profound perspectives on lesbian, bisexual and trans-
identity in Islamic Indonesia.”
25
Each short film is an original story, exploring the respective
first-time directors’ experiences as gender non-conforming individuals living in Indonesia and in
the world, and reflecting on various issues such as familial relationships, religion, state violence,
societal norms, as well as friendship and love.
Children of Srikandi is inspired by the figure of Srikandi from the Mahabharata epic,
whose story of genderqueerness—Srikandi is female-born but switches genders so that she can
fight as a warrior among men —becomes the guiding metaphor for the film. Srikandi is also a
character frequently portrayed in Indonesian shadow puppet plays (wayang kulit); in this film, a
shadow puppet performance by the transgender shadow puppeteer and singer, Soleh and Anik, is
107
interspersed throughout the films, making the shadow puppet performance of Srikandi’s story the
fulcrum of these diverse, but interconnected, stories.
The film begins with a remarkable sequence of transformations: it opens with an
animated version of Srikandi as a shadow puppet, who shoots her arrow into the sun, releasing
rays that change into a video camera. At the moment when Srikandi catches the camera with her
hand, the world turns upside down, ostensibly placing Srikandi on the other side—the
underside—of the earth.
26
She flies through the clouds dressed in heels, lighting her way through
the dark with the camera. The camera held by Srikandi the animated shadow puppet serves as not
just a tool, but represents the Children of Srikandi Collective as agents in creating, producing,
and transforming narratives and images. Like Srikandi, a genderqueer character, the film defies
categorization, experimenting with various genres and storytelling techniques as it merges
narrative, performance, documentary, animation, and fiction.

Figure 9: Screenshots from Children of Srikandi: from bow and arrow to camera and heels

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Foregrounding the mythical figure of Srikandi as the film’s guiding framework is
purposeful in envisioning the possibilities of a fluid identity not bound to heteronormative
structures or societal expectations. In the Mahabharata, the hero of the story, Arjuna, has
multiple wives, one of whom is Srikandi—not coincidentally, instead of Arjuna’s other wives
who are typically portrayed as representatives of traditional notions of womanhood defined by
being an obedient wife, Srikandi, being the more radical of the few, is the figure on which
Gerwani, the Indonesian Women’s Movement, founded their organization:
Although [Gerwani] accepted the notion that women should find their main
vocation in wifehood and motherhood, they introduced the notion of ‘militant
motherhood.’ Gerwani’s militant mothers did not limit their action range to the
household and the social, but extended their ministrations to the political. Their
symbol was the wayang [shadow puppet] hero Prince Arjuna’s warrior-wife
Srikandi, and not his meek wife Sumbadra. […]
Gerwani’s glossy periodical Api Kartini (AK) [The Fire of Kartini] carried
pictures of uniformed girl students carrying weapons, and the woman volunteers
were regularly compared with the warrior-wife of the wayang prince Arjuna,
Srikandi (AK February 1962).
27

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Figure 10: Cover of Api Kartini; image courtesy of Dodit Sulaksono.
Sulaksono, Dodit, “Api Kartini: Warisi Apinya, Bukan Abunya” (The Fire of Kartini: The Fire Inherited,
Not Its Ashes), 23 April 2017, http://pocer.co/read/api-kartini-warisi-apinya-bukan-abunya.

Gerwani’s notion of being a woman is not without its contradictions when we attempt to
comprehend their definition of womanhood with a 21
st
century lens that allows us access to
contemporary, cosmopolitan understandings about what it means to be a radical woman in the
world unfettered by and resistant to conventions of wifehood and motherhood tied to the
domestic space. The point here is that, far from being the wild and dangerous women they were
made out to be, Gerwani still held on to ideas of the dutiful wife and mother, but with a more far-
reaching dimension by asserting the importance of women’s education and engaged involvement
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in the political arena alongside their male counterparts during a time when the New Order state
seeked to forcibly return to the hierarchy of gender roles. Gerwani’s definition of what it meant
to live as a woman, therefore, allowed for an expanded, revolutionized version of state-instructed
womanhood.
As a genderqueer character, Srikandi’s queerness becomes the pivot of Children of
Srikandi, and this queer representation of Srikandi is one that the film adheres to. According to
director/executive producer Stea Lim and producer Laura Coppens of The Children of Srikandi
Collective, they had discovered that many LGBTQ NGOs and women’s rights organizations in
Indonesia use Srikandi as a symbol because of her non-normative qualities:
She is gender-transgressive, she is powerful, she is a warrior, and does not reflect
the normative picture of a woman in Indonesia. She’s strong, she has her own will
[…]
There’s this normative story that’s been told in Indonesia, which is that Srikandi is
a wife of Arjuna, and she is obedient. But these organizations use the more
subversive version, and we wanted to have that for our film also.
28

Lim and Coppens go on to say that they wanted the film to “play with gender” and allow for a
more fluid representation of the kinds of gender identities that could be available and possible to
identify with.

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Figure 11: Soleh and Anik
Image courtesy of The Children of Srikandi Collective

The puppet master (dalang) and singer (sinden) featured in Children of Srikandi, Soleh
and Anik, are male to female transgendered artists (they are waria, an Indonesian word that is an
amalgamation of wanita, woman, and pria, man). “The dalang,” say Lim and Coppens, “is
typically a man; in this film, when Soleh is performing, he is performing as a woman […] In a
sense, we could see him as a mirror image of Srikandi.”
29
Featuring Anik and Soleh in their
professions is a significant choice for the film, especially as the dalang (puppet master) has
traditionally been and continues to be a male-dominated profession. It breaks away from the
wayang kulit (shadow puppet play) as a space typically occupied by male performers, and also
departs from the narrative of transgender Indonesians—despite their visibility in society—as
merely consumption for entertainment. As Coppens states, “it was very important to show [Anik
and Soleh] in a very serious and well-acknowledged job.”
30
With Srikandi’s story functioning as
the film’s framing device and inspiration, Anik and Soleh’s performances—in giving voice
(Anik’s singing) and expressions (Soleh guiding the shadow puppets)—become the embodiment
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of that mythical story. Their everyday lives and wayang kulit performances, as documented in
Children of Srikandi, bring the Srikandi narrative to the present and extend it, making possible
the representation of queer intimacy in the Indonesian context. Alongside the other stories in the
film, Anik and Soleh’s relationship points to a non-normative, queer understanding of the notion
of friendship.
31

Here, it is important to note that the analogy of President Suharto being a dalang was one
often made as a commentary on his role as a mastermind in the New Order political theater, with
many players on his screen; furthermore, wayang kulit was also a cultural production
appropriated by the New Order state, with the Mahabharata’s “feudalistic ideology… used to
legitimize [the state’s] power and enhance its programs.”
32
The significance of Children of
Srikandi showing the ways in which wayang kulit can be repurposed in subversive ways,
therefore, is noteworthy, not just in terms of expanding gender representation in wayang kulit,
but also in reappropriating it as a genre not representative of the state.
The wayang kulit scenes in Children of Srikandi are also particularly fascinating for their
mobilization of the voice: we see and hear, in the performances by Soleh and Anik, the feminine,
the masculine, and the in-between—the “I” made up of the tangling of a multiplicity of voices
and subjectivities, a counterpoint to the masculine voice of the state, particularly that of the New
Order regime, whose repressive and military-run dictatorship provides the backdrop that this film
(along with other activist and subversive cultural productions) responds to.
Jacques Derrida’s discussion of sexual differences is illuminating and useful for reading
the importance of Children of Srikandi as a polyvocal film that moves beyond a single
perspective. In Safaa Fathy’s film, D’ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida’s Elsewhere, 1999), Derrida and
Fathy film a scene on the location that inspired the Spanish playwright Lorca’s Blood Wedding.
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In this scene, Derrida reflects on the symbolic death of the female character, as well as the ghosts
of those who died in the play:
…it is necessary that these ghosts, i.e. these voices, male, female, compose
amongst themselves, entangle themselves or weave amongst themselves. […] In
the same way, when one talks, when I talk, when an “I” talks, this “I” is
constituted and rendered possible in its singular identity because of this
interweaving of voices. […] In this way, repression, all kinds of repressions and
especially sexual repression, begins as soon as one attempts to silence one voice,
or to reduce this interlacing or this weaving of voices to one voice, to a kind of
monologic. Therefore, the multiplicity of voices is also from the start, the space
open to… all that has been repressed excluded, forbidden. In this case, I would try
to think together the multiplicity of voices… with regards to murder, repression,
sexual difference, women, etc.
33

Such plurivocality that is not repressed to a monologue, I argue, can be seen at work in not only
the wayang kulit scenes in Children of Srikandi, but also throughout the film in its various
narratives and storytelling techniques. Soleh the dalang, for instance, plays up to three hundred
characters—he “lives and breathes the characters,” as the directors observe.
34

Derrida’s reflections here on the “multiplicity of voices” and on what constitutes a
subjectivity are instructive for thinking about the polyvocality inherent in Children of Srikandi. If
one of the qualities of repression is a stifling of the multitude of voices, then Children of
Srikandi’s deployment of polyvocality is, in fact, not aberrant, but a way out of repression—it is,
in other words, a critique of heternormativity, and that what is normalized in society is, in fact,
already a straying away from a wholesome, holistic, plurivocal subjectivity.
114
Children of Srikandi’s emphases on shadow puppetry, the creative imagination, and the
ability to tell stories—that would otherwise be suppressed—invoke the double meaning of the
word “shadow”: in Indonesian, the word for shadow, “bayangan,” contains two meanings: it
means shadow, but it is also the same word for “imagination,” or “vision.” Shadow imaginations,
then, become the very basis for concrete transformations, as embodied in the Children of
Srikandi through its centering on the shadow puppet, and through the film shedding light on
communities that exist in the margins, or in the shadows, of the Indonesian community. Through
acts of the imagination, the directors transform their experiences by the enactment of their life
stories. In Children of Srikandi, transitional spaces—the grey spaces in between—are key in
allowing the directors to express themselves apart from the purview of the state. These spaces are
not just locations of change and movement, but also of the marginalized, of those who live in the
shadows of mainstream society.
Eggie Dian’s story is one that tells the story of violence, religious conservatism, broken
family relationships, but also the possibility of kinship with others she has met on the streets of
Yogyakarta. In her film, “Jlamprong,” Dian reveals the multi-layered violence she had endured
for being a lesbian. Disowned by her biological family, she started living on the streets (“this
bench is my life’s witness,” Dian says), endured physical and sexual abuse by the police and a
local conservative male religious group, and was once arrested and thrown into a jail cell on
accusation of kidnapping a man’s wife. This anecdote of being thrown into jail and suffering
physical abuse is reenacted with Dian standing behind bars, with her face painted black and
white.

115

Figure 12: Eggie Dian
Image courtesy of the Children of Srikandi Collective

Dian’s film is moving and powerful: in addition to her reenacted performance, we see her
singing and playing music with her friends in the urban streets of Yogyakarta—these scenes are
intermixed with archival footages of the police and FPI, the Islamic Defenders Front (a far-right,
conservative Islamist organization), during a protest saying “Look at these disgusting film stills!
Boys kissing boys! Girls doing other girls! And foreign governments support this!” Despite these
harrowing experiences, Dian says, “the truth is, I was happy to live [on the streets] because I
could create things, and it made me strong. I’m a free woman.” The ability to “create things” in
the form of music and performance is one that sustains Dian beyond the violence of the state, and
beyond the conditions of displacement—it is a sustaining mechanism borne out of the power of
the imagination, a shadow imagination.
The film’s performative and storytelling aspects can also be understood through Diana
Taylor’s work on the archive and the repertoire—if the archive signifies the law of things that
can be said, Taylor’s concept of the repertoire bridges the divide between enunciability and
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silence by considering how the repertoire, which she articulates 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, allowing us to expand the production of knowledge, and to highlight
the ability for lived experience to talk back to the archive.
35
Dian’s story from the margins of
society is one that fills a gap in narratives about what it means to live as a citizen; her story is
one of displacement, violence, and strength, as well as one that reconfigures what mobility and
identity mean.

4.4 | Collaborative Praxis as Feminist Pedagogical Practice
In Children of Srikandi, the repertoire spreads itself across the various stories, and also
extends to the film’s mode of production. What Taylor describes as “a praxis, an episteme, a
mode of transmission” get mobilized in generative ways through the Children of Srikandi’s
Collective’s process of coming together. The idea for Children of Srikandi was born when
Coppens and Lim met at the Q! Film Festival, one of the largest LGBT film festivals in Asia.
The film then started with a workshop, led by German filmmakers Angelika Levi and Laura
Coppens, with almost all of the participants as first-time amateur filmmakers (Stea Lim had
previously made another film about queer women, Birthday Gift, in 2009), and included
collaborations with the Goethe Institute, as well as In-Docs, a local organization dedicated to
promoting documentaries in Indonesia as well as connecting Indonesian filmmakers with the
international community.
The film’s transnational collaboration is striking, and is another example of the plurivocal
character of Children of Srikandi. Coppens is Berlin-based but was a visiting scholar at New
York University, while Lim is Jakarta-based but also pursued her degrees at universities in the
117
United States. The other filmmakers, Yulia Dwi Andriyanti, Hera Danish, Eggie Dian, Afank
Mariani, Oji, Imelda Taurinamandala, and Winnie Wibowo are Jakarta-based and from different
parts of Indonesia. As Intan Paramaditha also notes, “the transnational collaborative processes
should be underlined as they would potentially lead to more affiliations and exchanges on gender
and sexuality issues in a wider cinematic and social landscape.”
36
Such a collaboration makes
visible, as Rachmi Diyah Larasati notes, how a “new networking of international artists can
provide a space for Indonesian feminist practices to look for transitions in a location where the
state’s power is less clear and absolute.”
37

The significance of the collaborative process means returning to the word’s very roots;
collaboration is more than just working together, but also about making the labor visible:
collaborate comes from the Latin laborare, to work. The poster for Children of Srikandi further
emphasizes the film as a holistic body of work—instead of each of the filmmakers’ names, the
poster highlights “Children of Srikandi: A Film Directed by the Children of Srikandi Collective.”

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Figure 13: Screenshot of the Children of Srikandi poster

Indeed, the filmmakers are not just involved in directing and making their own pieces in the
anthology, but they also switch roles with one another and help with each step of the production.
Each person becomes part of another filmmaker’s both on-screen and off-screen, in some cases
handling the sound, and in another, acting as one of the characters. The plurivocal braid,
therefore, is not just about the different stories and voices, but also about the film’s mode of
production: each individual is not restricted to simply playing one role, or using one skill.

119

Figures 14 & 15: Children of Srikandi production and workshop stills
Image courtesy of the Children of Srikandi Collective

Even though none of the filmmakers knew each other before the film, there is a certain
kind of camaraderie and ease with which the filmmakers relate to one another—a result, perhaps,
of the scaffolded experience of making the film. Their story-sharing circle on the first day of the
workshop became an integral foundation for the collective:
It is a collaborative concept and collaborative work, and we all came in together,
and we got to know one another’s stories. I think what’s important to point out is
that it’s very hard for everybody to talk about their stories in the beginning,
because they’re very personal. It really takes a lot from someone to trust strangers
in a room of 15 people and to talk about your personal life and story.
38

This way of working together does not just emphasize the affective bonds that are created when
these women come together and form a collective, but it also offers a different understanding of
authorship: instead of the single auteur, authorship is displaced, and what the collective has
formed is a non-hierarchical pulling together of elements braided together in the film’s assembly
of stories and genres in an associative logic, instead of them being disparate parts of a whole.
120
José Muñoz’s work is relevant here in terms of formulating the ties between queerness
and collectivity. Describing “the need for understanding queerness as a collectivity,” Muñoz
cites Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of the “singular plural” to rethink what it means to speak as a
collective.
39
Muñoz’s rethinking of how one lives in the social world is grounded on a queer
poetics of relation, and Children of Srikandi offers, perhaps, an instantiation of the possibility of
a transformative relation to the world, with its transnational and collaborative praxis in
Indonesian filmmaking. I argue that such a praxis provides a pedagogical model with a feminist
and collaborative lens.
We can find parallels here with another film, Grey White: Women’s Past (Putih Abu-Abu:
Masa Lalu Perempuan, 2006), a compilation of six short documentary films produced by
secondary school students after a filmmaking workshop by the Syarikat Indonesia, a grassroots
activist Muslim organization, and the National Commission for Anti-Violence Against Women
(KOMNAS Perempuan). These students conducted interviews with various individuals who
were persecuted by the New Order regime, including Gerwani, activists, women survivors, and
ethnic Chinese Indonesians. Grey White documents the research that the students have done in
preparation for their interviews, and also showcases the video and filmmaking skills that they
learn through the workshop. In one of the scenes, a student asks in a wonderfully optimistic and
curious tone, “How do we capture history? It seems so difficult.” This seemingly simple
statement is complex on many levels, and I argue that what this film achieves, like the Children
of Srikandi, is not only an important visual archive of women’s stories that would otherwise go
unheard, but it also mobilizes a filmmaking practice that becomes a collective act and that form
an alliance. What might be called amateur filmmaking functions in transformative ways in these
films, or what I would describe as willful visual archives.
121
We can also find threads of connections with other films employing a transnational,
feminist lens. One particularly productive line could be drawn with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname
Viet Given Name Nam, which weaves different genres in examining the lives of women after the
Vietnam War, and that also mobilizes storytelling as “an agentive practice.”
40
The film is
complex in its many contours and modes, probing different topics such as the question of
representation in media, translation and translatability, nationhood and gender, as well
documentary filmmaking itself as a genre. The historical and cultural context out of which these
films were born make them striking examples to compare, and their focus on women’s stories is
significant: both Children of Srikandi and Surname Viet Given Name Nam come out of a context
in which women were demonized and bracketed as traitors to the nation, or to use Lan P.
Duong’s phrase, “treacherous subjects.”
41

Duong’s emphasis on the double meaning of the word “collaborator” is critical in
informing this chapter’s analysis of what a feminist collaborative praxis might resemble, and also
adds to the historical context that this chapter began with. Duong calls attention to
“collaboration” as a gendered term, and how “the collaborator is often figured as a female traitor,
an ‘outsider’ who enables collective solidarity against the menace of the treacherous subject that
she embodies.”
42
Similarly, in the Indonesian context, Gerwani was seen as a group of dangerous
women who worked together with the Indonesian Communist Party, which was both a sign of
their moral depravity, and also what the New Order state painted as the cause of the coup d’etat
and the subsequent chaos in the country.
Here, I want to highlight specific parallels between Surname Viet Given Nam and
Children of Srikandi, in the ways that these films are made. Duong highlights the collaborative
processes that make up the film’s “spine” and discusses how she “plait[s] the fragments of
122
stories together to contend that they comprise a partial archive, one that pivots on affective ties
amongst women and stands collectively opposed to masculinist narratives that abound in national
and community discourses.”
43
Like the braid of voices that constitute Children of Srikandi, here
is a plaited set of stories. Like Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Children of Srikandi can be
considered as part of what Duong describes in her essay as “a deconstructive undertaking that
enables a broader critique of the structures of power that silence women’s stories and obscure
female bonds.”
44
Paramaditha’s commentary on the significance of the transnational filmmaking
process of Children of Srikandi is of note here—articulating the parallels between Surname Viet
Given Name Nam and Children of Srikandi is one way that a transnational feminist mode of
making could begin to be articulated, charted, and formed.
These films share similarities as material products that display a feminist repertoire and
that cut across differences through the collaborative acts and processes of filmmaking and
storytelling, as well as through the collective sense of agency. In Surname Viet Given Name
Nam, Trinh demonstrates the “radical multiplicity” that the women in the film represent, and that
the “active cooperation among the women—the ethnographer, documentarian, and storytelling
subject—points to a pact of the imagination, one that lays the groundwork for the ‘staging of
action.’”
45
If, as Rachel Silvey explores in her essay examining “the politics and possibilities of
transnational feminist film,” one of the goals of transnational feminist filmmaking is “to find
common cause across geographic and social differences,” a way to begin to respond is to identify
the parallels in these different films.
46
As I have suggested, Surname Viet Given Nam Nam and
Children of Srikandi serve as examples that draw from the experiences of women in different
nations in the decades following the anti-communist era, and they offer concrete ways of
123
building alliances and imagining a different kind of relation to the nation, one that goes beyond
borders.
It is important to note how this working collective becomes a concrete way of grappling
with or transforming historical memory itself, particularly as it relates to the specter of the 1965
purge. Gerwani was seen as not only collaborators to the threat of communism, but also became
the scapegoats for the very basis of anti-communist killings and violence against women.
Children of Srikandi, therefore, presents a different articulation of the meaning of collaboration,
and in this case it is something more affirmative and nuanced than the dark connotations of the
word as it relates to an anti-communist sentiment.

4.5 | The Amateur and the Willful Feminist Archive
In her book on the concept and praxis of willfulness, Sara Ahmed begins by recounting
the Grimm Brothers’ “The Willful Child,” in which an inobedient child continues being punished
even after she dies of an illness; being the willful child that she is, her arm keeps emerging time
and again from her grave, and only put to rest by the eventual striking of a rod. Ahmed links
such condemnation of undesirable behavior to the notion of “conditional hospitality,” that is, as
Ahmed writes, “when a host welcomes the guest only on condition the guest behaves or ‘is’ a
certain way, a restriction of hospitality that is not, Derrida suggests [in Of Hospitality], very
hospitable.”
47
When a guest does not act within the acceptable boundaries, Ahmed says, “the
willful guest might be understood as spectre that haunts hospitality, the menace that threatens the
loss of a good relation.” Ahmed’s concept of the willful subject is helpful in providing a feminist
and counter-hegemonic, non-phallocentric view of what a transformative mode of relation might
resemble. We could also characterize the stories discussed in this chapter as forming an ongoing
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willful archive of women’s lives and experiences, especially those of women who have been
deemed as outsiders to the nation because of their non-compliance to the state ideology.
“How do we capture history?” asks one of the student filmmaker in Grey White:
Women’s Pasts. What might be described as amateur filmmaking—as almost all of the directors
in Children of Srikandi and Grey White are first-time filmmakers—functions in transformative
ways in these films. As Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr asserts,
Claiming more spaces for dialogic praxis necessitates constant renegotiations and
retheorizations of power through alliances, languages, and critiques that disrupt
dominant logics and imaginaries—not simply by resisting the celebration of the
‘expert,’ but also by creating radicalized practices for institutional transformations
and sociopolitical justice.
48

There are, perhaps, lines of convergence that could be drawn between a praxis of amateurism
and willfulness: if being an expert means having the ability to speak in the right language and
perform according to standardized norms, a willful archive borne out of a feminist, collaborative
framework attentive to the radical possibilities of amateur practice could provide an alternative
way of talking back to history, and finding a language that goes beyond the purview of history.
49

These films offer an opening into one of the ways that stories could be reclaimed, even when
they were meant to be erased or suppressed from the nation’s archive. Such a practice and a
language of amateurism and willfulness make possible a representation of history that comes
closer to reviving the remnants of genocide that are outside of the archive, and to approaching
the gaps at the heart of historical trauma. What a film like Children of Srikandi achieves is not
only the creation of important visual archives of women’s stories that would otherwise go
125
unheard, but also the mobilization of a filmmaking practice that becomes a collective act and that
forms an alliance.
To return to the opening scene of Children of Srikandi, the contemporary, animated
revision of the mythical narrative and the figure of Srikandi, retold for a transnational audience
and a globalized Indonesia, is accompanied by the theme song, sung by Indonesian female
rapper, Yacko, accentuating one of the film’s central themes about queer sisterhood in Indonesia:
“No, no, it ain’t always that easy, to have friendship amidst the whirlwind of negative
stereotypes, which becomes the foundation for discrimination” (my translation in italics).
50

Children of Srikandi’s deliberate choices, made with the vision of what a transnational, feminist
collective might look like, include not just the representation of one of the few female rappers in
Indonesia who moves in transnational circuits and performs internationally, but also the use of
both Bahasa Indonesia and English throughout the stories. In the penultimate scene of the film,
the directors come together, holding labels of what each of their sexual identification might be.
The scene ends playfully with one of them grabbing all of the labels and throwing them one by
one on the ground, reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues video, in which
Dylan flips through each cue card of the song’s lyrics. This playfulness, while making a nod to
one of Dylan’s songs, is also political: while non-normative sexuality remains a serious threat to
the state, and thus producing the palpable risk of violence for the LGBTQ community, the
Children of Srikandi Collective subverts this narrative by their light-hearted jokes about labels,
while making an identification with a song about the 1960s counterculture movement in the
United States.
As Fatimah Tobing Rony writes, “the collective voices of the film make a stand and call
out the complexity and the joy of what it means to be Indonesian and a woman in the early part
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of the twenty-first century. The eye of the camera becomes the ‘we’ of Indonesian women and
Indonesian cinema.”
51
These filmmakers present a politics of affiliation that go beyond the
canonical model that Derrida critiques as phallogocentric, and that has no acknowledgment of
women having a part in the formation of a discourse on friendship. With a praxis focused on a
feminist ethics and the collective, these films make visible communities that work toward a
democracy to-come, and make possible a mode of relation that affirms the building together of
an ongoing willful archive.

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-5-

Coda

Remember:
home is not simply a house, village, or island; home
is an archipelago of belonging.
--Craig Santos Perez

In the introduction to their anthology, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field,
Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen write that transpacific studies is “a counterimpulse [that]
realizes itself in the desire to build coalitions, alliances, and imaginations among the poor, the
oppressed, and the disempowered [… as well as] to enact their own agency against transpacific
forces, and to see themselves as part of transpacific communities.”
1
In following such a
“counterimpulse,” this project is concerned with scholarship that is moved by what Edward Said
calls “love for and an unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across
lines and barriers,”
2
and that has at its heart an engagement with a hermeneutics of love, an
extension of Chela Sandoval’s notion of revolutionary love that “lives through differential
movement between possibilities of being” and is a necessary tool for “forging twenty first-
century modes of decolonizing globalization.”
3
Why love, and why Sandoval’s “revolutionary
love”? Love propels all of the works examined in this project, whether it is out of belief in a
national revolution, the persistence to survive, the desire for reconciliation, or the need to fill in
the gaps of a history laden with archival silences, this project considers love as transformative.
Furthermore, a hidden meaning of love is contained in each of the analysis that this project
undertakes: “amateur” comes from the Latin amare (to love), or amator (lover); the amateur as
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someone who practices their craft with love and care, and amateurism, a praxis and ethics that
enable spaces for collaboration, affective bonds, and an openness to encounters with others in the
world.
I see such a scholarly practice being articulated in different—yet parallel—ways by
scholars whose works have informed mine deeply, and that have influenced this project in
expansive ways. Not to be mistaken as a reductive flattening of the nuances of these various
articulations, bringing the different terms into conversation with one another points to the
profound ways in which collective, intertextual imaginings and expressions are not only possible,
but crucial to practice. What Said describes as “contrapuntal analysis,” Chela Sandoval terms
“differential movement,” Nicholas Mirzoeff formulates as “countervisuality,” Viet Thanh
Nguyen articulates as “an ethical and aesthetic move, a double gesture,” and Yunte Huang calls
“counterpoetics” combined with “a poetics of acknowledgment.” Part of the movement to
acknowledge and to re-cognize (to know beyond mere cognition), after all, is an understanding
of manifold perspectives and oppositional experiences.
What all of these distinct formulations have in common is the seeking of a method that is
critically invested in carving out spaces of resistance against power (in the various ways that
power has been deployed in imperial and colonial spaces), but that is also care-ful enough that
the method does not, as Said suggests, become a “destructive politics.”
4
This project, then, is
driven by a desire to think beyond finite sets of knowledge in order to find generative counter-
consciousness, actions, and ways of imagining that do not get overwhelmed by state power,
forces of globalization, and neo-imperialism. Such a contrapuntal approach that would allow for
shadow imaginations is crucial for my analyses of how Indonesian and Indonesian-American
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cultural works in the transpacific sphere can function powerfully and subversively in intervening
spaces.
Several musical terms have come up in this project: the first chapter deals with
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Buru Quartet and The Mute’s Soliloquy, which, when translated
directly from the Indonesian title, is “The Silent Song of the Mute”; in the second chapter, the
stories that sustain Li-Young Lee in his traumatic childhood and that nurtured a sense of ethical,
poetic consciousness in him are described as “spacious, impersonal near-singing”; the omnibus
film, The Children of Srikandi, in the third chapter is permeated with not just the singing from
the shadow puppet plays, but also from the characters themselves; the video remixes and digital
productions that I discuss in the fourth chapter involve soundscapes and music that would
otherwise not make the projects whole.
These musical terms, whether consciously or unconsciously used in this project, perhaps
emerge out of an acknowledgment and recognition that all of us not only must speak from
somewhere—even if it is a speaking that comes from silence—but also sing, whether alone, in a
quartet, or against many other melodies, together. This is a project that aims for an understanding
of the self in relation to others, and an acknowledgment that every voice, especially ones that
have not been heard, matters.
One of my hopes is for this project to engage in the contrapuntal in productive and
transformative ways. I want to reiterate what I began with: this is a project that is about the
traumas and violences of the past, but also about finding revolutionary love in intervening spaces
gaps, and as a consequence create futures that contain within it spaces of democracy and
freedom. If, as Catherine Choy and Judy Wu note, the “methods [used to study the transpacific]
have increasingly turned from the print archive to digital and multimedia forms,”
5
my research
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seeks to be at the forefront of emergent scholarship in transpacific studies, literary studies, and
digital humanities. The multimedia practices I engage in, such as video essays and digital
scholarship, reflect my philosophy inspired by Edward Said’s amateurism, the “love for an
unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers.”
6

Alondra Nelson asked astutely in the “Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities”
panel at the 2013 MLA conference, “What does a transformed archive look like?”
7
My
contention is that a transformed archive has to exist in the collective, the transnational, the
transpacific, the digital, and the contrapuntal. In this way, I contend that we ought to look
towards a digital humanities that is a diligent humanities, for to be diligent is not only to persist,
but also to care for one’s craft. A diligent humanities, therefore, inextricably linked with a
diligent amateurism grounded in an ethics of care.
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APPENDIX

“Everywhere Is Home to the Rain”:
A Conversation with Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee is an ethnic Chinese writer born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957, whose
parents were Chinese political exiles. In 1964, he and his family arrived in the United States as
refugees, after leaving Indonesia in the midst of heavy political turmoil and anti-Chinese
violence, and after making multiple transpacific journeys across Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan.
He is the author of five books of poetry, including Rose (1986), The City in Which I Love You
(1990), Book of My Nights (2001), Behind My Eyes (2009), and The Undressing (2018); a
chapbook, The Word from His Song (Spring 2016); and, a memoir, The Winged Seed: A
Remembrance (1995).
Lee’s ability to think and write across multiple—and at times conflicting—temporal and
psychic spaces makes his poetry and prose utterly expansive, mesmerizing, and haunting. Such
mindfulness and alertness to language, to metaphysics, and to the multitudinal contours of life
itself are what make possible metaphors such as “abyss and shuttle” in the poem “Night Mirror,”
a contradictory yet hopeful image that points at the world of possibility making impossibilities
possible.
On Sunday, June 26, 2016, Viola Lasmana spoke with Li-Young Lee about beginnings,
rain, the ethical consciousness, Indonesia, food, amateurism, love, and much more. This
conversation took place via phone, across Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.

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VL: I have always been drawn to the richness of the language, the lyricism of the prose,
and the layered personal and political transpacific histories that emanate from your
book, The Winged Seed. It also makes me think a lot about my own family, and
about growing up as a Chinese Indonesian. Do you consider your work as a form of
poetic resistance writing against the trauma, violence, and sense of displacement
that you and your family had experienced?
LYL: The older I get, the more I feel that there is no way to understand this stuff only
politically or socially, that somehow metaphysical paradigms of the world will have to be
engaged. The stake for me, the opus—the real work—isn’t even the literature or the
poetry: it’s me. I’m trying to become a man who is capable of loving, and I feel as if the
early violence done towards me and my family has contributed a lot to our insularity.
Because our family was threatened, we kind of clung together, and we became suspicious
and afraid of the world. My sense is that somebody who is too suspicious and fearful of
the world will never be able to love deeply and truly. I’m thinking of love as a path to
real knowledge; love as a manifestation of the deepest interest we have in somebody else.

This word “interest” is very interesting to me; I’m interested in the nature of interest. The
word interest means between beings: inter (between) and est (beings). The highest or the
deepest level of interest is love. When violence, insult, or injury is done repeatedly to a
person, that person will find it very difficult to be deeply interested in another person; it
hobbles them and makes it difficult for them to love, and that is tragic. For me, the whole
mission is to learn to love across culture, distance, and time. Poetry, for me, is a path to
divine love. The answer isn’t always political. It becomes political, but the first circle of
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encounter is: can I love, honor, respect, and nurture even the other? When my experience
of being the other has been violent and unhappy, is it possible for me to still see that
experience of otherness in a person?

VL: The word love is very interesting to me, and reminds me of the word amateur, which
comes from the Latin amare, to love. It is also a word that you use in one of your
poems, “Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics,” and you have said in an
interview that you feel you are an amateur. Why do you think of yourself as one,
and what does it mean to be an amateur poet?
LYL: I was just thinking this week, I thought to myself, I’m an amateur poet. I don’t feel like a
professional. I don’t spend that much time nurturing my career and getting to know other
poets. I was kind of beating myself up. I thought, why aren’t I more connected; why
don’t I know more poets? Then I thought, oh, because I’m happy this way. I’m an
amateur. I’m not a professional poet. I love poetry, and I read it all day and think about it.
It’s all I do all day long. But I realize I do it as an amateur.

VL: Even after having written and published six books?
It’s all been a very happy accident. I got very lucky when I was young. I was sharing
poems with a friend, and this friend had a sheaf of my poems. I was living in Chicago,
and my friend was living in New York, and we were sending poems to each other back
and forth. I sent him some poems and he had left them on his dining table, and he had
another friend who was an editor of a publishing company who saw the poems sitting on
the dining table. He said, “Whose poems are these?” And my friend said, “Oh, that’s my
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friend Li-Young.” The editor said, “I really like these poems; I’d like to write to him and
ask to see some poems.” That guy was A. Poulin, the founding editor of BOA Editions.
He wrote to me and I sent him some poems, and after a couple of years, he published my
first book. That was very lucky.

It’s actually a struggle for me, the whole publication process. I sometimes resist it, even. I
just love the writing, the poems. I love what it does for me to write and to think about
poetry. Even my book right now is three years late. I signed a contract. It might just be
four years late. I hope it’s not that late. I don’t know, but I’m not dying to publish. But, I
guess I want to be read; I think I want to be read. More than wanting to be read, I want
the knowledge that comes to me through the writing of poems. In my case, I’ve been
practicing a martial art all my life. It never occurred to me to be the famous martial arts
guy, or to open a school or anything. I just study it because I love what it teaches me.

I’m an amateur martial artist and an amateur poet. I do it because I love doing it.

VL: What kind of martial arts do you practice?
LYL: I do a bunch—I do Tai Chi, Shotokan and Taekwondo. I was raised in doing martial arts.

VL: My brother, who has passed away, had a black belt in karate.
LYL: It’s beautiful; it’s its own kind of poetry. How did your brother die, if I may ask?

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VL: He was murdered in Indonesia, but to this day my family haven’t been able to get
justice for what happened.
LYL: Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that. That’s horrible. It’s terrible to live in a country where
you can’t get any justice.

VL: Does Indonesia factor in your writing or imagination at all? Do you still think about
Indonesia?
LYL: Oh my god. I just keep fantasizing that I want to go back. 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.

But stories like the one you just told me about your brother reminds me that I can’t live in
a place with that kind of blithe disregard for human justice. Cases like that has really
made it difficult for me to love, and to love the people around me. I don’t like being
scared, suspicious, and paranoid. Very realistically, I probably won’t return to Indonesia,
so realistically speaking I’m destined to feel homeless for the rest of my life. That’s what
I’m dealing with.

VL: There’s a very poignant part in your poem, “Folding A Five-Cornered Star So the
Corners Meet,” where you write, “Lord, remember me. / I was born in the City of
Victory, / on a street called Jalan Industri, where / each morning the man selling
rice cakes went by / pushing his cart…” Do you see your writing as a form of
testimony or witnessing?
136

LYL: I do, and I also see it as a form of knowledge. I end up saying things that I didn’t know I
knew or felt. After I wrote that poem, “Folding A Five-Cornered Star,” I was amazed. I
didn't know that I had all these personalities in me, like this somebody in me that is kind
of like a nobody, somebody in me that is somebody else, all of that.

Here’s the thing, when a human being sees something, say a flower or a sunset, it’s so
beautiful and moving that they want to save it. So they take a picture or write a poem or
paint a painting to save that image. I think artistic work is salvistic that way. It salvages;
it saves the world. If somebody else looks at the photograph you took of that sunset or
flower, and they save that photograph, they keep it, so that not only has that flower been
saved, but also your vision of it—your representation of it has been saved, because
somebody else was interested in it. And if enough human beings like it, they save it and
put it on a museum or a textbook. So this is the way human beings, I think, perform
salvation. They save things; they put them in museums, in the cannon—the literary
cannon—so I think cannon-making is really important for that reason, because it’s a way
to save what we love.

Human beings also get it wrong. They don’t always save what should be saved, and a lot
of time they save a lot of stuff that shouldn’t be saved. There’s a lot of garbage that get
saved. Then I think, is there a divine salvation going on? If the universe is gone, is there
anybody who remembers? In that poem, “Folding A Five-Cornered Star,” nobody
remembers that man pushing that little cart down the street. I don’t even know if they
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have that anymore in Jakarta. So nobody saved that. And pretty soon, industrialization
will come in and that would change.

I wonder, is the human witness all there is? Is that all the hope there is, that human beings
witness and save? Because we’re not perfect at it. I just keep wondering, is there another
kind of salvation going on in the universe metaphysically? If we’re incarnated, something
gets saved. I guess that’s what I was wondering about in that poem. But I didn’t even
know that I was thinking about these things until I wrote the poem. I was thinking about
something, but it wasn’t clear to me when I wrote the poem. It clarified my experience to
myself. So the writing of the poem was a way to knowledge, self-knowledge. The Daoists
think that self-knowledge is a path to wisdom. I think writing poetry is part of that path
for me.

VL: How did growing up in Indonesia with stories in which religion and superstition
were entwined shape the ways that you now think about the world, spirituality, and
God?
LYL: I think the biggest thing that experience did for me was it opened me up to the possibility
that there is an unseen world. There is an unseen world that we are trying to give
representation to, an unseen depth to the world that the ceremonies and rituals were
trying to give, trying to embody, trying to materialize. That really influenced me deeply
because that’s the whole work of art. Science is another way, and I suppose scientists are
always trying to understand the unseen depths, the quantum level of things, the
astronomical level of things, everything from the biggest to the smallest. They’re trying
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to understand what is going on in the background. I think I was introduced to that very
early in Indonesia because of the culture there and my father’s own bend towards
spiritual and soulful things.

VL: The Winged Seed begins at 2:00 am, in the rain, and in “Hurry Toward Beginning,”
you write, “Everywhere is home to the rain.” I feel that rain might have particular
significance to your work; can you speak a little bit about what rain means to you?
LYL: I think it might have rained a lot in Indonesia. My memory of Indonesia is that it’s rainy
there, isn’t it? Then, when we came to this country we ended up in Seattle, which is a
really rainy place. From Seattle we came to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is a really
rainy place. When I get up in the morning and it’s real sunny, other people are really
happy, and I get depressed! I had a teaching gig at Stanford, and I would fly back and
forth between Stanford in California and Chicago, and every time the plane touched
down in Stanford, it looked so sunny and bright I got really depressed.

I’m trying to be rational here but what I want to say is, it’s my mother. The rain is the
first voice I heard. It’s like my mother’s voice. It precedes me. It rained here this
morning, and it was so beautiful. I thought, this rain is fresh rain but it’s the oldest thing
in the world. This rain has been traveling around the planet since the beginning of time.
Not this specific rain but this water. I don’t know, I just feel like it’s my mother’s voice,
my mother’s body. It’s bigger and older than me.

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VL: You have mentioned in interviews that you didn’t really speak until you were about
three years old. Can you tell us more about your coming into language?
LYL: 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.

I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life. I’ve been trying to find my soul. I
want to go back. I keep thinking I want to go as far back past my own birth. I want to find
God. I want to find the original ground of my being. So this kind of homesickness, I
think, is like missing God. Or maybe it’s missing my mother’s womb. This sounds
terrible; I should be a well-formed man in the world. I’m so regressive and I keep trying
to go back into the unconscious, or the imagination.

VL: It’s bigger than just locating a beginning in a physical place.
LYL: I think so. It’s becoming something else as time goes on. It’s becoming this other thing.
Maybe there’s some sort of psychological explanation. Maybe a psychologist or linguist
will say, “Well, your first language is a language you have no connection to now.” I don’t
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use Bahasa. I don’t know how to speak it anymore. That was my first language. So it
would be kind of like being taken from my mother. If that’s my mother tongue and I
don’t use it anymore, then I’m orphaned.

I want to remind both of us, there is Orphic poetry—I do feel that poetry is an orphan
voice. For me, that’s what it is: poetry is a voice of an anonymous center. That orphan
voice, that orphan experience, is very real to me. My mother is alive; my father is dead.
I’ve always loved them, though our relationship has been complicated; I also feel that all
my life I have felt orphaned.

VL: Does poetry become a vehicle through which we work out these like longings and
desires? In the state of constant homelessness and unsettledness?
LYL: Yes, and I’m coming to the conclusion that that’s our actual condition as human beings,
but we hide it from ourselves. It’s like when Rilke says that our impermanence is always
concealed from us. So I think our homelessness—our rootlessness—is concealed from us.
The practice of art reaffirms for me that we’re in fact not really as rooted as we think, in a
place or in a language. I think that comes late. I think it’s deeper than all of that—where,
I don’t know, something beyond our culture, beyond even our mother tongue.

VL: Is there a place that you would consider your ideal place now, whether physical or
psychical?
LYL: I have to say, for me, when I’m close to my beloved, that’s the best that I can do. But
even then it feels insecure but there’s no actual place. It might be a real failure of
141
character, actually, that I can’t seem to feel at home. I wonder sometimes whether or not
it’s just a failure in my character. That if I were a normal human being, I would feel at
home.

VL: I’m curious to know if food was what really inspired you to be a poet. The first
poem you wrote was about a fish, and that memory involves your mother who
would be simultaneously cutting up vegetables and reciting poetry to you and your
siblings.
LYL: Food is just so important to me. I really do think that food was maybe my introduction. In
fact, when I was in junior high school—I think it was seventh or eight grade—my teacher
selected a little composition I wrote and said this was just the best thing she’d ever seen,
and that was the thing I wrote about food and the joys of eating. I remember writing
about that and being amazed that I could reproduce in my head the flavors, colors, and
textures of this food that I was trying to remember. The magic of that.

It was food that inspired me to write when I was very young. I still sometimes think of
poetry as food; it’s a kind of food. Sometimes I read a poem and think, it doesn’t have
enough flavor, not enough sweetener, not enough salt, not enough meat, that kind of
thing.

Food is a huge thing. I used to run a restaurant with my brother. It was an American
luncheonette with a Chinese twist. We made sandwiches, hamburgers, and everything
had a kind of Asian flair. I guess maybe we were ahead of our time. We didn’t do well;
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nobody was ready for it. We went bankrupt in a year. But, we won that year’s best fried
chicken wings in Philadelphia. It was Chinese fried chicken and it was a huge success,
but we couldn’t make enough money, and we ran into the mafia who came and tried to
extort money from us, and when we said no, they set our awnings on fire. They broke our
restaurant’s front windows and we thought, wow, we’re getting out of here. We’re not
making any money, and we’re getting harassed.

VL: Do you listen for poems when you cook, or is that a different space?
LYL: No, all day, it’s the same space. My problem is that I’m in that space all the time, and I
end up leaving the house with no shoes on because I’m so distracted. Cooking is
absolutely poetic; it’s a feeling kind of poetry. I love it.

VL: How do you see the relationship between poetry and media, especially the Internet?
Do you think that poetry might get lost in the massive world of information?
LYL: My feeling is poetry is going to be fine. Anybody who wants to go there, to that very
deep well inside him or herself, it will be there. Any young person—and it always
happens to somebody who is kind of on the fringe of things—can find or discover that
there are depths inside herself or himself, that every time they write a poem it touches
that depth, and it will always be there. But if that person gets distracted by all the trivia,
the nonsense, and the information that are swimming, then they might lose touch with it.
But poetry itself will be fine. That will be there whether we want to touch it or not.

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I do think if we live too much on the surface of things, it’s dangerous to ourselves. I think
it will make us feel that our lives aren’t connected to anything—initially it might feel that
we’re connected if we are on Facebook or Twitter, but that’s not real connection.

For me, the paradigm of real connection is the lover and the beloved, and as long as that
connection is still possible, poetry is fine. I feel as if we have a composite nature and a
prime nature. A composite is like the number 12 or the number 49. Number 12 is a
version of the number six—it’s six times two. Number 12 is a version of number two, is
in the version of the number three, and it’s a version of number four. But a prime number
is not a version of any other number except itself and one.

I feel what is going on right now is that there is a lot of composite stuff going on out
there. In a way it’s not bad. You are a version of your mother. You are a version of your
father. So am I. We’re a version of our brothers, our sisters, and we’re version of our
peers in the culture. We’re a version of Chinese Indonesians. We’re a version of people
alive in the 21
st
century. These are all versions of people. But there is something about us
that is not a version of anyone. There is something in you, Viola, that is not a version of
your mother, not only a version of your father, your peers and other students in California
and other people writing dissertations. There is a you, there is a me that is a prime, like a
prime number. We are not like anybody except one and ourselves.

My feeling is the only way we can get in touch with that primacy is through art.
Somehow, through Facebook, Twitter, and all of these media, we’re just versions of
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everybody else. How do we get to that place where we are unlike anybody? I think the
practice of art is a path to that. The great therapeutic religions, Buddhism, Taoism—they
practice meditation. That meditation has always been seen as a path to our primacy. That
is our connection to the cosmos, to God, or whatever you want to call it. That is no
mitigated. It’s not conditioned by anybody else. There aren’t other personalities in there.
It’s just a raw and open relationship with our deepest unconscious imagination.

My real concern about all these media is it’s all just versions of each other getting
repeated. I’ve been noticing that even in Hollywood, I feel like there are these faces in
Hollywood that get repeated like every 50 years, and we find new versions of them. But
if you’re really know the old movies and the new movies, you start to see: “Oh, he’s is a
version of that guy 50 years ago,” and so on. It’s just recycled stuff. There is no other
way to our primacy except if we practice some sort of meditation or art.

VL: Could you elaborate on what you mean by poetic consciousness as the only possible
ethical consciousness available through humankind?
LYL: Yes. Let’s take a flower: we can approach that flower scientifically. We can take it apart,
label the parts and study other flowers to understand this flower, and study this process.
That leads us to an understanding of this flower, but leaves out a lot. When you bring art
to it, you are trying to understand the flower in a whole new level. It doesn’t exclude the
scientific view; it has to include it, in fact. But it sees that flower in relation to me, and
suddenly that’s different. Suddenly I’m trying to reserve this flower.

145
Let’s say the flower is a person. We can study the person as a social construct, as a
political entity, or as a member of certain demographic, but that never lets you get to the
person. If you try to write a poem about that person, you’d have to really know that
person to write a poem. It would take years, because the knowledge that goes into a poem
is so comprehensive. I’m talking now about the best poems. For us to understand a
person, to write a poem about a person, you’d have to do more than understand them as a
social construct, political entity, or some sort of demographic. You’d have to understand
them emotionally and know their particular history. I feel that that kind of depth is the
only possible ethical approach to the world, because it’s comprehensive.

William Blake talked about Jerusalem a lot, and it took me years to understand what he
meant by Jerusalem was a psyche, a mind, a being well informed of its own parts. That is,
our thinking self has to be aware of our feeling self; our feeling self has to be aware of
our sexual self; our sexual self has to be aware of our spiritual self. All of those things
aware of each other, not leaving anything out and we bring that whole thing through any
subject: a person, a sunset, a flower, any obsession, cooking. When we bring that much to
our approach to something, that kind of comprehensiveness, it seems to me like that’s the
only possible ethical approach because it doesn’t leave anything out.

All social and political problems we see are rooted in what sociologists call
representational deficit. There are parts of the population and culture that are not
represented, and that causes a crisis. My feeling is that our culture is the psyche projected
onto persons, onto people. And if there are representation deficits in our psyche, those
146
representational deficits get projected out. If I don’t know that there are problems inside
of me, I think the enemy is out there. Do you know what I mean? Then I start pointing
fingers at Muslim, the Chinese, the Vietnamese during the Vietnamese war, Japanese
during Japanese war, African Americans during slavery. If we could only recognize that
no, you’re projecting the enemy out there, and that the adversary is first in here, and if we
could resolve the things in here through the rigorous practice of art.

VL: It’s about the space between inside and outside?
LYL: Exactly, that struggle between the outside and the inside is exactly what it is about. If we
don’t get the inside right, we’re not approaching the outside with all of who we are.
We’re leaving too much out and stuff gets projected out there, and I feel as if art is a way
to withdraw our projections in order to understand it. It seems to me that art is a more
comprehensive approach to reality, that science is not comprehensive enough because it
doesn’t account for the observer and for feelings. For years, scientists kept saying that
there is an objective feel of observation, but they’ve left themselves out. They say that
life behaves differently when it’s being observed, and because of that they had to start
accounting for the observer. But art has been doing that forever. Art is the most
comprehensive field of reality that we have.

VL: In a way, I think we are circling back to what we began with: love and interest.
Doesn’t that also have to do with the ethical consciousness?
LYL: Yes. My wife said this incredible thing to me once, and I put it on a poem that I’m
working on now. It’s a long, erotic love poem to my wife. She said, “Li-Young, I want
147
you to touch me as if you want to know me, not arouse me.” My mind blew open and I
thought, “Oh, my God.” That’s the way we should be in the world. We shouldn’t be
going through the world on the one hand trying to get something out of the world, and on
the other trying to get a reaction from the world. We should move through the world
trying to know the world, the way a lover knows the beloved. A bad lover either just
wants to satisfy himself or to use the beloved for some sort of projection of his own
problem. I think that the kind of love that wants to know the world, not manipulate the
world, is the ultimate love, and I think that that’s poetry’s approach.

VL: Yes, and it is also immensely difficult to do.
LYL: You have to be willing to go into the unknown. You have to surrender what you think
you know about the person or the world. You have to give up all preconceptions, to walk
into the world not knowing anything, being like a baby. That’s why on the one hand I feel
that it’s so important for people to have a capacity to be open, vulnerable, loving, and
loved. All that gets damaged if a person is treated violently, is insulted or injured over
and over again. That person will close up and be incapable of the kind of openness we
need, the kind of fearlessness that we need to love the world. I look to the world right
now and I feel there is so much suffering in the world, so much suffering. I feel as if
we’ve got to move through the world with more love, and we have to do it locally first:
our neighbors, our parents, our siblings, not to even speak of the bigger stuff like Doctors
Without Borders and all those other wonderful things. Even if we could just practice love
locally. There is so much suffering going on in the world, so much paranoia and fear, and
unloved people creating more harm in the world. I just feel, what can be done here?
148

Notes

Abstract

1
Laurie Sears, Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 20.
2
Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), 5.

0. Introduction

1
Rachmi Diyah Larasati, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstructions in Post-
Genocide Indonesia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xxi.
2
Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge:
University of Harvard Press, 2008), 10.
3
The relationship between US imperialism and the Indonesian postcolonial state becomes
especially complicated considering the fact that in 1955, a decolonial strategy was proposed at
the Asia Africa conference organized by Sukarno (which was, as Walter Mignolo points out, one
of the beginnings of when Western colonial power was being questioned). 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, activists, ethnic Chinese, left-wing groups,
and women’s organizations. The processes of decolonization and deimperialization were
therefore, in many ways, left incomplete and put to a halt.
4
Benedict Anderson, “A Time of Darkness and a Time of Light,” in Spectres of Comparison:
Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 79.
5
Eric Tagliacozzo, “The Lit Archipelago: Coast Lighting and the Imperial Optic in Insular
Southeast Asia, 1860-1910,” Technology and Culture 46, 2 (2005): 306-328.
6
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011).
7
Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 4.
8
Ibid., 5.
9
Anonymous, The Act of Killing Press Notes (2013). http://theactofkilling.com/press-notes/.
10
Rachmi Diyah Larasati, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstructions in Post-
Genocide Indonesia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 13.
11
Ibid., 6.
12
Intan Paramaditha, “Tracing Frictions in The Act of Killing,” in Film Quarterly 67.2 (2013),
45.
13
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 7.
14
Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 5.
15
Laurie Sears, “Reading Ayu Utami: Notes Toward A Study of Trauma and the Archive in
Indonesia,” in Indonesia: Southeast Asia Program Publications at Cornell University, No. 83
(April 2007), 18.
149

16
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 36.
17
Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2005), 104.
18
Ann L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009), 20.
19
Wendy Chun. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 292.
20
Children of Srikandi Press Notes, http://outcast-films.com/films/cos/cos_presskit.pdf.
21
Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
22
Edward W. Said, “Professionals and Amateurs,” in Representations of the Intellectual (New
York: Vintage Books, 1996), 77.
23
Ibid., 76.
24
Ibid., 78.
25
Ibid., 79.
26
Ibid., 82.
27
Roland Barthes, “The amateur,” in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 52.
28
Li-Young Lee, interview with Viola Lasmana. See Appendix: “Everywhere Is Home to the
Rain”: A Conversation with Li-Young Lee.
29
Li-Young Lee, interview with Tina Chang, “The Totality of Causes: Li-Young Lee and Tina
Chang in Conversation” (Academy of American Poets, Feb 21, 2014),
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/totality-causes-li-young-lee-and-tina-chang-conversation.
30
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 20.
31
Derrida, Archive Fever, 8.
32
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; And, the Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 130.
33
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 15.
34
Hilmar Farid, “Does the Past Matter? Archiving Injustices in Indonesia,” Human Rights
Archives Symposium, UCLA, Los Angeles, California (October 19, 2013).
35
Derrida, Archive Fever, 36.
36
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), 43.
37
Ibid., 32.
38
Li-Young Lee, “The Subject Is Silence,” in A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, eds.
Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler (Massachusetts: Tupelo Press, 2012).

1. Stories from the Margins

1
Pramoedya Ananta Toer in conversation with Andre Vitchek ad Rossie Indira, Exile (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2006), 73-74.
2
Joesoef Isak, epilogue to Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy (New York: Hyperion
East, 1999), 371.
3
Pramoedya’s bookseller, Richard Oh, in conversation with Viola Lasmana, Jakarta, Indonesia,
9 June, 2015.
150

4
The original Indonesian title of Pramoedya’s memoir, The Mute’s Soliloquy, is Nyanyi Sunyi
Seorang Bisu, which literally means “The Quiet Song of a Mute.”
5
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind, trans. Max Lane (New York: Penguin Books,
1990), 111.
6
In Chapter 4, “A Polyvocal Archive: Women and Collaborative Ethics in Post-1965 Indonesia”
I chart the history of how the Indonesian Women’s Movement came to be demonized by
Suharto’s repressive New Order regime after 1965, and how, as a consequence, women were
then expected to occupy a subordinate role in the household, separated from any form of political
engagement. For Pramoedya to write such a radical character into his novel, therefore, is a
defiant act of the imagination during a time in which the freedom of expression was stifled by
the state.
7
Faiza Mardzoeki, “Nyai Ontosoroh,” interviewed by Rizal Lim, June 12, 2010,
https://youtu.be/rKfMmMaKVtE.
8
Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 48.
9
Ibid., 48.
10
Toer, This Earth of Mankind, 89.
11
Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 78.
12
Jean Gelman Taylor, “Nyai Dasima: Portrait of a Mistress in Literature and Film,” in
Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, ed. Laurie J. Sears (Durham: Duke University Press,
1996), 233.
13
Toer, This Earth of Mankind, 87.
14
Ibid., 77.
15
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 49.
16
Taylor, “Nyai Dasima,” 226.
17
Christopher GoGwilt, “The Vanishing Genre of the Nyai Narrative: Reading Genealogies of
English and Indonesian Modernism,” in Comparative Literature Studies, 44: 4 (Winter 2007),
414.
18
Toer, This Earth of Mankind, 47.
19
Ibid., 110.
20
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), 66-67.
21
Taylor, “Nyai Dasima,” 233.
22
Hilmar Farid and Razif, “Batjaan liar in the Dutch East Indies: a colonial antipode,” in
Postcolonial Studies, 11:3 (2008), 281.
23
Laurie J. Sears, introduction to Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, ed. Laurie J. Sears
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 10.
24
Taylor, “Nyai Dasima,” 236-242.
25
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and You-me Park, “Postcolonial Feminism/Postcolonialism and
Feminism,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta
Ray (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 53.
26
GoGwilt, “The Vanishing Genre,” 413.
27
Ibid., 412.
28
Sebastian Tong, “Unexpected Convergences: Bakhtin’s Novelistic Discourse and Pramoedya
Ananta Toer’s ‘Epic’ Novels,” in World Literature Today, 73:3 (Summer 1999), 482.
151

29
Toer, This Earth of Mankind, 49.
30
Ibid., 111.
31
Ibid., 280.
32
Ibid., 286-287.
33
Ibid., 336.
34
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997), 19.
35
Farid and Razif, “Batjaan liar,” 277.
36
Ibid., 289.
37
Ibid., 278.
38
Toer, This Earth of Mankind, 336.
39
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 7.
40
Ibid., 7.
41
Taylor, “Nyai Dasima,” 248.
42
Ibid., 67.
43
Toer, This Earth of Mankind, 335.
44
Christopher GoGwilt, “The Voice of Pramoedya Ananta Toer,” in Cultural Critique, No. 55
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 228.
45
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, “Perburuan 1950 and Keluarga Gerilya 1950,” Indonesia 36, trans.
Benedict Anderson (October 1983), 42.
46
Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 5.
47
Christopher GoGwilt, The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys,
and Pramoedya (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 154.
48
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 44.
49
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy, trans. Willem Samuels (New York: Hyperion
East, 1999), 315.
50
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44-45.
51
GoGwilt, “The Voice of Pramoedya,” 220-221.
52
Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy, 13.
53
Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy, 315.
54
Toer, This Earth of Mankind, 17.

2. “Abyss and Shuttle”

1
“I began with the desire to speak with the dead” is the provocative and earnest opening line in
Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations. See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean
Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1.
2
Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Minnesota: Hungry Mind Press, 1995), 11.
3
Ibid., 145.
4
Li-Young Lee, “The Subject Is Silence,” in A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, eds.
Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler (Massachusetts: Tupelo Press, 2012).
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_lee.php.
152

5
Ibid.
6
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986),
11.
7
Ibid., 7.
8
Lee, “The Subject Is Silence.” http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_lee.php.
9
Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 5.
10
Lee, “The Subject Is Silence.” http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_lee.php.
11
Li-Young Lee, in conversation with Reamy Jansen, in Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Breaking
the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (New York: BOA
Editions, 2006), 77.
12
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2016) 264.
13
Crystal Parikh, “Perpetrating ourselves: reading human rights and responsibility otherwise”, in
The International Journal of Human Rights (Taylor and Francis: 2015), 648.
14
Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2008).
15
Li-Young Lee, “Night Mirror,” in Book of My Nights (New York: BOA Editions, 2001), 19.
16
Lee, The Winged Seed, 98-99.
17
Thee Kian Wie, “Indonesia’s Economic Policies and the Ethnic Chinese,” in Southeast Asia’s
Chinese Businesses in an Era of Globalization, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 2006), 85.
18
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Chinese in Indonesia (Singapore: Select Publishing, 2007), 193-
194.
19
Sumit K. Mandal, “‘Strangers who are not Foreign,’” in The Chinese in Indonesia (First
published in 1960) (Singapore: Select Publishing, 2007), 38.
20
Ibid., 45.
21
Saskia Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 5.
22
Mandal, “‘Strangers,” 37.
23
Li-Young Lee, “The City in Which I Love You,” in The City in Which I Love You (New York:
BOA Editions, 1990), 57.
24
Ibid., 57.
25
Li-Young Lee, “Furious Versions,” in The City in Which I Love You (New York: BOA
Editions, 1990).
26
Lee, The Winged Seed, 194.
27
Ibid., 116.
28
Ibid., 63.
29
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2008).
30
Ibid., 20.
31
Ibid., 21.
32
Ibid., 19.
33
Ibid., 20.
34
Ibid., 20.
35
Ibid., 26.
36
Lee, “The Subject Is Silence.” http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_lee.php.
153

37
Li-Young Lee, in conversation with Bill Moyers, in Breaking the Alabaster Jar:
Conversations with Li-Young Lee, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (New York: BOA Editions, 2006), 30.
38
Li-Young Lee, interview by Viola Lasmana, June 26, 2016 (see Appendix).
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
41
Lee, The Winged Seed, 126.
42
Ibid., 122.
43
Ibid., 123.
44
Maxine Hong Kingston, “White Tigers,” in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 19.
45
Maxine Hong Kingston refers to the suppressed aspect of Chinese immigrant culture as “the
deformed… which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories.” See “Shaman,” The
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 87.
46
Maxine Hong Kingston, “White Tigers,” in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 20.
47
Lee, The Winged Seed, 122.
48
Ibid., 124.
49
Parikh, “Perpetrating ourselves,” 650.
50
Ibid., 654.
51
Ibid., 656.
52
Ibid., 657.
53
Lee, The Winged Seed, 197.
54
Ibid., 201-202.
55
Ibid., 202.
56
Li-Young Lee, “Changing Places In the Fire,” in The Undressing (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2018), 79.
57
Ibid., 80.
58
John S. O’Connor, “The Undressing by Li-Young Lee,” in The Plougshares Blog (Feb 20,
2018), http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/the-undressing-by-li-young-lee/.
59
Lee, “Changing Places In the Fire,” 90.
60
Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 7.
61
Lee, “Changing Places In the Fire,” 79.
62
Ibid., 86.
63
Ibid., 86-87.
64
Ibid., 93.
65
Parikh, “Perpetrating ourselves,” 658.
66
Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 177.
67
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.210-211. In this scene, Hamlet says of dissonant
temporality, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”
68
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 186.
69
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 32.
70
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 186.
71
Lee, “Night Mirror,” 19.
72
Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 264.
154

73
Lee, The Winged Seed, 127.
74
Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 155.
75
Ibid., 155.
76
Li-Young Lee, in conversation with Reamy Jansen Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations
with Li-Young Lee, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (New York: BOA Editions, 2006), 76.

3. Archives in Motion

1
Many would associate this title, rather, with Peter Weir’s 1982 film starring Mel Gibson and
Sigourney Weaver, The Year of Living Dangerously, based on Christopher Koch’s novel with the
same name. It is important to trace the title back to Sukarno’s speech, especially as the
Hollywood film verges on an Orientalist approach to its representations of both Indonesia and
Sukarno as mysterious and unknowable to the West. For more on the problem of the film’s
setting up of Indonesia as “inscrutable” and the lack of a connection with what really goes on in
the life of Indonesian society, see Max Lane, “The Year of Living Dangerously,” Inside
Indonesia, Nov, 1983, 31. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-88227234.
2
Ann L. Stoler, “Untold Stories,” Inside Indonesia, Oct-Dec, 2001.
http://www.insideindonesia.org/untold-stories-2.
3
“Tahun Vivere Pericoloso” (A Year of Living Dangerously), address on Aug. 17, 1964,
Djakarta, quoted in Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno: Ideology and
Politics, 1959-1965 (Singapore: Equinox Publishing, 2006), 82-83.
4
The most influential of any type of media disseminated by Suharto’s regime was, and arguably
still is, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treachery of G30S/PKI), a harrowing film produced in
1984 and endorsed by the New Order regime. The film runs for a hefty 4.5 hours, and was
required viewing for all Indonesians until the New Order era ended. Pengkhianatan depicted the
violence of the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) and the alleged involvement of the Gerwani
(Indonesian Women’s Movement) in the 1965 military coup. As Ariel Heryanto points out, “the
New Order state terrorism [was linked to] its enthusiastic investment in film as a popular
medium for its propaganda machine.” The significance of the connection between visual media
and the history of 1965, therefore, cannot be overlooked. See Ariel Heryanto, Identity and
Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014), 77.
5
Rachmi Diyah Larasati, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-
Genocide Indonesia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 6.
6
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
7
Videochronic: Video Activism and Video Distribution in Indonesia (Yogyakarta, Indonesia:
KUNCI Cultural Studies Center & EngageMedia, 2009), 16.
8
Intan Paramaditha, “Cinema, Sexuality and Censorship in Post-Soeharto Indonesia,” in
Southeast Asian Independent Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 71.
9
David T. Hill and Krishna Sen, The Internet in Indonesia’s New Democracy (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 10.
10
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Lisa Mary Rhody, “Working the Digital Humanities:
Uncovering Shadows between the Dark and the Light,” in Differences 25, no. 1 (2014): 1.
11
Ann L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
155

(New Jersey: Princeton, 2010), 2.
12
Eric Sasono, Twitter post, October 25, 2015, 4:39 a.m., http://twitter.com/ericsasono.
13
Nodegoat. “Mapping Memory Landscapes in nodegoat, the Indonesian killings of 1965-66.”
Last modified December 4, 2014. http://nodegoat.net/blog.p/82.m/6/mapping-memory-
landscapes-in-nodegoat-the-indonesian-killings-of-1965-66.
14
Martijn Eickhoff, “Memory Landscapes and the Regime Change of 1965-55 in Semarang,”
accessed October 10, 2015, http://www.niod.nl/en/projects/memory-landscapes-and-regime-
change-1965-66-semarang.
15
Chun and Rhody, “Working the Digital Humanities,” 22.
16
“I began with the desire to speak with the dead” is the provocative and earnest opening line in
Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations. See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean
Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1.
17
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 116.
18
Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012), 62.
19
Ibid., 77.
20
Alexander R. Galloway, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” in The Interface Effect
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 86.
21
McKenzie Wark, “From OOO to P(OO).” December 5, 2015.
http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/12/from-ooo-to-poo/.
22
Virginia Kuhn, “Web Three Point Oh: The Virtual is the Real.” In High Wired Redux:
CyberText Yearbook (Research Centre for Contemporary Culture: University of Jyvkaisuja
Press, 2013). http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/articles/155.pdf.
23
David Kim, “LA as Subject in Digital Lab Pedagogy,” Teaching Los Angeles: Innovative
Strategies, Possible Pitfalls, with Anne Cong-Huyen, David Kim, Craig Dietrich, Alex Tarr,
and Michelle Chihara (Scalar: 2014), http://scalar.usc/edu/aclsworkbench/teaching-la.
24
Nodegoat. “Mapping Memory Landscapes.” http://nodegoat.net/blog.p/82.m/6/mapping-
memory-landscapes-in-nodegoat-the-indonesian-killings-of-1965-66.
25
Tara McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of
Race and Computation,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 139-160.
26
Institut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia, accessed January 13, 2016,
http://sejarahsosial.org/ThroughtheLens/ThroughtheLens.html.
27
Oey was a member of the Institute for People’s Culture (LEKRA) and imprisoned for fourteen
years, without trial, under the New Order regime, for his leftwing connections and suspected
Communist-related activities.
28
Hilmar Farid, “Does the Past Matter? Archiving Injustices in Indonesia” (Human Rights
Archives Symposium, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, October 19, 2013).
29
“Video Slam 2013: Remixing the 1965 State Propaganda Film,” EngageMedia, accessed
November 19, 2015. https://www.engagemedia.org/Projects/g30s_remixed.
30
Hill and Sen, The Internet, 148.
31
Ariel Heryanto, Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture (Singapore:
NUS Press, 2014), 77.
32
Ibid., 11.
156

33
Hill and Sen, The Internet, 147.
34
Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (New York: Springer Wien, 2012),
3.
35
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review (Jul 1, 1970), 89.
36
Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 16.
37
Virginia Kuhn, “The Rhetoric of Remix,” Transformative Works and Cultures 9, 2012.
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/358/279.
38
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 67.
39
Edward W. Said, “Professionals and Amateurs,” in Representations of the Intellectual (New
York: Vintage Books, 1996), 76.
40
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 52.
41
Maya Deren, “Amateur vs Professional,” in Film Culture 39 (1965), 45-46.
42
Hill and Sen, The Internet, 148.
43
Ibid., 150.
44
Edward W. Said, Music at the Limits (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 5.
45
Intan Paramaditha, “Tracing Frictions in The Act of Killing,” Film Quarterly 67.2 (2013): 45.
46
Stoler. Along the Archival Grain, 20.
47
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 8.
48
Lauren Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James
Hemings, American Literature 85.4 (December 2013): 661-688.
49
Chun and Rhody, “Working the Digital Humanities,” 22.
50
Klein, “The Image of Absence,” 665.
51
Alondra Nelson, “Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities (Modern Language
Association Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, January 4, 2013).
52
Laurie Sears, “Reading Ayu Utami: Notes Toward A Study of Trauma and the Archive in
Indonesia,” Indonesia, No. 83 (April 2007): 17-39.
53
Derrida, Archive Fever, 36.
54
Michel Foucalt, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And, the Discourse on Language (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1972), 130.
55
Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich, “Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the Local
through Social Media,” First Monday 18: 7 (July 2013),
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4711/3698.
56
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2008). Kirschenbaum theorizes the activation of a “forensic imagination” in
conceiving the computer as both archival and writing machine, and in envisioning digital texts as
ultimately and always material, diachronic, and social objects.
57
William Gibson. “Agrippa (The Book of the Dead).”
http://williamgibsonbooks.com/source/agrippa.asp.

4. A Polyvocal Archive

1
Agung Ayu Ratih, “Works of Memory and Narratives of Survival” (International Association
of Cultural Studies Conference, Surabaya, Indonesia, August 9, 2015).
157

2
Children of Srikandi Press Notes, http://outcast-films.com/films/cos/cos_presskit.pdf.
3
Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
4
In Chapter Three, I discuss the politics of visualization through Eric Sasono’s assertion that
Indonesian politics is “a politics of visibility”—that “the truth depends on how they are visible to
the general public.” Eric Sasono, Twitter post, October 25, 2015, 4:39 a.m.,
http://twitter.com/ericsasono.
5
I argue for the importance of rethinking friendship from its historically and traditionally male-
oriented origins—the genealogy of friendship and fraternity that Jacques Derrida critiques in The
Politics of Friendship is a model that bears parallels with the New Order’s hierarchical gender
structure. Rethinking the notion of friendship allows for a critical understanding of constructions
of gender ideology in the post-1965 era, as well as expands the possibility of active participation
in the public arena for women and LGBTQ individuals/communities beyond the heteronormative
and hierarchical model.
6
Saskia E. Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1.
7
Directed by Arifin C. Noer, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treachery of G30S/PKI, 1984) is a
harrowing film endorsed by Suharto’s New Order regime. It runs for a hefty 4.5 hours and was
required viewing for all Indonesians until the New Order era ended in 1998. The film depicts the
purported violence of the Indonesian Communist Party in murdering six army generals, and
implicates the involvement of Gerwani in the coup d’état. This film is also discussed in Chapter
Four in relation to the indispensable role of film as a visual medium for New Order propaganda,
and how contemporary videomakers reimagine the film in remix projects and offer an alternative
lens to historical trauma.
8
Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia, 6.
9
Ahmed, Willful Subjects.
10
Lan P. Duong, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).
11
Saskia E. Wieringa, “Communism and Women’s Same-Sex Practises in Post-Suharto
Indonesia,” in Critical Regionalities: Gender and Sexual Diversity in South East and East Asia
(Oct-Dec 2000), 445.
12
Saskia Wieringa notes in her essay, “Communism and Women’s Same-Sex Practises in Post-
Suharto Indonesia,” that Gerwani was far from promoting same-sex relations or lesbianism, and
in fact reinforced traditional, heteronormative structures; what Gerwani did that set them apart
from other women’s groups, however, was to stray from conservative gender ideologies by being
politically active in the public arena, thus unsettling the mindset of the hegemonic, masculinist
New Order state.
13
Jean Gelman Taylor, “Nyai Dasima,” in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996), 248.
14
See Julia Suryakusuma, State Ibuism: The Social Construction of Womanhood in New Order
Indonesia (West Java, Indonesia: Komunitas Bambu, 2011).
15
Julia Suryakusuma, “The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia,” in Fantasizing the
Feminine in Indonesia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 101.
16
Saraswati Sunindyo, “Murder, Gender, and the Media,” in Fantasizing the Feminine in
Indonesia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 125.
17
Many essays in recent years have since been written by women writers in Indonesia seeking to
reclaim Kartini as one of the first feminists to emerge out of the Dutch East Indies and as a
158

warrior of women’s rights. For more on the problematic misrepresentation of Kartini and the
importance of honoring Kartini Day with a critical eye toward gender inequalities in Indonesia
(instead of simply celebrating Kartini as a symbol of meek womanhood), see Faiza Mardzoeki,
“Manipulation of Kartini Symbol Must End,” Jakarta Post, 21 April, 2016.
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/04/21/manipulation-kartini-symbol-must-end.html.
18
Fatimah Tobing Rony, “Transforming Documentary: Indonesian Women and Sexuality in the
Film Pertaruhan [At Stake] (2008),” in Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 162.
19
Intan Paramaditha, “Cinema, Sexuality and Censorship in Post-Soeharto Indonesia,” in
Southeast Asian Independent Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 69.
20
See Tom Boellstorff, “Against State Straightism: Five Principles for Including LGBT
Indonesians,” E-International Relations, 21 March, 2016. http://www.e-
ir.info/2016/03/21/against-state-straightism-five-principles-for-including-lgbt-indonesians/.
21
Paramaditha, “Cinema, Sexuality and Censorship,” 70.
22
Intan Paramaditha, interview by Jemma Purdey, Talking Indonesia: women, gender and
activism, April 21, 2017. In terms of women’s movements, Paramaditha calls a new wave of
activism “viral feminism,” characterized by feminist artists and activists engaging in feminist
digital media practices and utilizing media in subversive ways, making women’s issues visible in
the public sphere by making them go “viral” on the internet.
23
Rony, “Transforming Documentary,” 174.
24
Children of Srikandi Press Notes, http://outcast-films.com/films/cos/cos_presskit.pdf
25
Ibid.
26
These opening scenes suggest that we are seeing an animated version of a shadow puppet
(wayang kulit), which makes the turning upside down fascinating and complicated: although the
world is flipped, it does not look different from the one Srikandi has just been in moments before
she catches the video camera. In other words, since shadow puppetry comes to life with the play
of shadows behind a screen, the scene invites the possibility of Srikandi going to the other side
(the front) from behind the screen—where she is a shadow—into visibility. Or is it the other way
around?
27
Wieringa, “Communism and Women’s Same-Sex Practises,” 447-448.
28
Stea Lim and Laura Coppens, interview by Viola Lasmana, make/shift: feminisms in motion,
Spring/Summer 2013: 7.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
Queer intimacy inspired by the Mahabharata has also been explored by a New York-based
mixed-race, Indonesian American multimedia artist and performer, Zavé Martohardjono, in his
experimental play, “Brother Lovers,” which “reinterprets the Mahabharata to reimagine two
mythic heroes in a timeless queer tale of love, exile, and disco.” See
http://zavemartohardjono.com/myportfolio/brother-lovers/.
32
Ribut Basuki, “Panakawan’s Discourse of Power in Javanese Shadow Puppet during the New
Order Regime: From Traditional Perspective to New Historicism,” K@ta, 8, no. 1 (2006): 86.
33
Jean-Paul Martinon, On Futurity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 110-111.
34
Stea Lim and Laura Coppens, interview by Viola Lasmana.
35
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 20.
159

36
Intan Paramaditha, “Reviews of Tales of the Waria and Children of Srikandi,” in Pacific
Affairs, 86, no. 4 (2013), 970-971.
37
Rachmi Diyah Larasati, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-
Genocide Indonesia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 16.
38
Stea Lim and Laura Coppens, interview by Viola Lasmana.
39
José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York
University Press, 2009), 11.
40
Lan P. Duong, “Traitors and Translators: Reframing Trinh T. Minh-ha’s ‘Surname Viet Given
Name Nam,” Discourse 31, no. 3 (2009), 196.
41
Lan P. Duong, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).
42
Ibid., 3.
43
Duong, “Traitors and Translators,” 197.
44
Ibid., 209.
45
Ibid., 204.
46
Rachel Silvey, “Envisioning Justice: The Politics and Possibilities of Transnational Feminist
Film,” in Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 199.
47
Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 53.
48
Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr, “Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis,” in Critical
Transnational Feminist Praxis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 18.
49
Chapter Three expands on the concept of amateurism as a critical and ethical mode of practice.
In “Professionals and Amateurs,” Edward Said defines amateurism in “as “the desire to be
moved not by profit or reward but by love for an unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in
making connections across lines and barriers.” Said’s definition of amateurism, with its emphasis
on ‘an activity that is fueled by care and affection’—is motivated by the origins of the word
itself: amateur comes from the Latin amare, to love. The amateur, therefore, is someone who
takes care of their craft, and who builds on a certain kind of persistence.
50
The Indonesian lyrics are as follows: “Bersahabat diantara stereotip negatif, yang dijadikan
dasar diskriminatif.”
51
Rony, “Transforming Documentary,” 175.

Coda

1
Janet Hoskins, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014), 27-28.
2
Edward W. Said, “Professionals and Amateurs,” in Representations of the Intellectual: The
1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 76.
3
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000), 187, 2.
4
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), 18.
5
Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World:
Diaspora, Empire, and Race (Brill, 2017), 13.
6
Said, “Professionals and Amateurs,” 76.
7
Alondra Nelson, “Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities (Modern Language
160

Association Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, January 4, 2013).

161

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Abstract (if available)

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.” 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 authoritative regimes of epistemology serving those interests.” 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? This dissertation is itself part of an emerging, alternative archive in the aftermath of the 1965-66 killings

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Asset Metadata

Creator Lasmana, Viola (author)

Core Title Shadow imaginations: transpacific approaches to post-1965 Indonesian archives

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 09/20/2018

Defense Date 05/01/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1965,amateur,amateurism,archives,Asian Studies,contrapuntal,counterpoetics,digital humanities,feminist,Genocide,Imagination,Indonesia,Indonesian-American,Literature,media politics,OAI-PMH Harvest,remix,transpacific,transpacific studies

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee chair), Bernards, Brian (committee member), Kuhn, Virginia (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email lasmana@usc.edu,viola.lasmana@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-72771

Unique identifier UC11672497

Identifier etd-LasmanaVio-6777.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-72771 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LasmanaVio-6777.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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