Goenawan Mohamad

Published by the South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS) Amsterdam, 2003

It has been more than a year, since I spoke in Tasmania, of all places, about what it means being Indonesian, living in a cata-clysmic time, a time when different religious groups committed large-scale atrocities against each other in several islands of the Malukus, when gruesome TV footages told stories of native Kalimantan suku’s slaughtering Maduranese immigrants, when government soldiers shot a great number of angry citizens in Aceh and in West Papua, labelling them, or not labelling them, as “separatists”. The frenzy has generated widespread feeling of hatred and sense of loss among people at large. The nation’s mood was grim, and sad, and indignant. The Yugoslavian break-up, with much blood and iron (and Yugoslavia was always closer to the Indonesian understanding of the world than say, France) was sitting like a nightmare in the mind of many concerned people in this vast, intricate, perpetually precarious, archipelago.

During this period I met with some members of the Free Aceh Movement, as part of my job to disseminate stories of Indonesian military’s violation of human rights in various places in Indonesia, particularly in Aceh. During these meetings I learned about their harrowing, drawn-out struggle to have their own country, I learned about their pain, their hope and their ideas, and I began to have the feeling that someday these people will carry the day, and Indonesia will have no more Aceh – something which somehow made me very, very sad.

Months later I went to Wamena, a beautiful but listless, cheerless frontier-town in West Papua. Disguised myself, oddly, as a Jesuit, I met with a group of people jailed and tortured by the police – people, some of them are educated members of the local community, whose only crime was trying to hoist their flag, their Papuan flag, next to the red-and-white, the national flag, my flag, on a day they wanted to commemorate. Talking with them in a the small, quiet, Wamena prison, I noticed how strong was their belief in what they were doing, a belief uttered in the thick of their low-voiced expressions of rage, a rage that called their ‘them’ ‘Indonesia’, instead of ‘the government.’ On my return, I began to wonder why should this piece of geography, called “Indonesia”, which was essentially a historical accident, cover this area, so distant from, and so ignored by, the rest of the country where most people live. It was a disturbing piece of thought, I must say, especially because Papua, the land where my parents were interned as political exiles in the 1920s, and where one of my brothers was born, has always been a part of my family history.

But what is “Indonesia”, anyway? For decades it has be-come a self-naturalizing border of ideas, practices, desires, symbols. But my impression is that it is an idea that members of the Free Aceh Movement whom I met, and the Wamenese political prisoners who told me of their dream, do not believe.

It is an idea that began with, to use the famous Renan’s maxim, “forgetting.” “Forgetting”, Renan said in his famous lecture of 1882, “is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” [1] As I pointed out in my Tasmanian talk, Renan’s argument takes a point, like Anderson’s more elaborate thesis after him, that nations are not determined by language, race, geography, or religion. “A
nation is… a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future”, he said.

Any Indonesian who remembers the 1928 “Sumpah Pemuda” (the Pledge of Indonesian Youths) and solemnly sings the Satu Nusa Satu Bangsa (One Country, One People) hymn would readily acknowledge this. As the legend has it, on October 28, 1928, young people from different daerah’s and different suku’s became proponents of Indonesian nationalism by “forgetting” their pri-mordial heritage, or, to be more precise, by putting it under the rug for a significant while. They pledged to make themselves parts of a new entity, or an “imagined community”, called “Indonesia”. This bracketing of their old locality of the self was the beginning of a myth and a power.

But whose myth, and whose power? The Acehnese and the Papuanese whom I met do not think they are theirs. In fact, in a meeting in Stockholm, where the Free Aceh Movement has its most important foreign base, one of its leading supporters confided to me that Indonesia should first break up in different
countries, and later these new countries could negotiate to form a new union, as a way to create peace and justice in the archipelago.

To my regret, I forgot to ask, and he did not volunteer, how their borders should be drawn, or how each country, particularly Aceh, will define its “nation”, or its citizenship, and how it will avoid reproducing Indonesia’s bhineka tunggal ika, or “unity in diversity”, formula. In the village of Tablanusu, a small island several hundred kilometres away from Jayapura, West Papua, I heard an answer that could well be the leitmotif of many “separatist” movements, probably including the one in Aceh: i.e. a deep resentment against the “Javanese” – whatever the word means: “Yes,” said the village chief, “the pendatang’s (should I translate them as “immigrants”?) are welcome to stay. But they should respect the culture of the indigenous people, and they should not stay for an unlimited time.”

****

Sometimes I wonder what should the alternative of 1928 Sumpah Pemuda
be. Nationalism has its pathological bent, part of “darker modernity” as Anderson puts it. Both the “broom” and the “theme-park” allegories, prevailing especially during the New Order – allegories that I described in the paper that has been distributed to you — share something “nationalist” in common: they disguise indeterminacy. They tend to justify the desire to view a community as an architectural edifice, and end up practising exclusion of “the parasite”, of divergences, contaminations, impurities. I think it is against this trend that Hatta, the first Vice President of the Republic, warned the nation from turning the ideology of persatuan (national unity) into persatean
(treating every one like pieces of meat held fast together by a satay stick).

***

But to view the idea of persatuan, or Indonesian nationalism synchronically, as something with a linear and single genealogy, is to lose sight of the contingent nature of its history. To put the idea of “Indonesia” framed in the earlier part of the 20 century merely as an intellectual project of forgetting, or a dream hatched in the mind of ideologues of an empire without history – an
empire designed to homogenize the national future, and obliterate the national past – is to leave behind the poisoned soil that nurtured the dream.

A large number of literature about the 19 and the early the decades of the 20
century are stories of the way the Dutch the colonial administration set down its policy of cultivating “bourgeois bodies and racial selves,” to borrow Ann Stoler’s words in her excellent study of “the colonial order of things.”[2]
To be sure, this was more an expression of vulnerability than of omnipotence, and the outcome was not always coherent. All the same, the colonial society that was created was not only marred by “visual markers of difference”, but also impaired by “the relationship between visible characteristics and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence.” It was reduced into entities [3] wrapped up and segregated by categories decided by the authority.

In the meantime, native elites, trying to put right their deflated prestige, asserted their version of identity politics, and by doing so, legitimised the colonial politics of exclusion: thus, as Pemberton points out, a discourse on “Java”, promoted by one of the noble houses of Surakarta, in Central Java, began to flourish in Javanese texts, and as Florida suggests, Dutch Javanologists and conservative native elites produced the idea of “pure high Javanese culture” [4]– something that was not always acceptable to Javanese from different places and different, lower, classes.

Against such a mottled background, afflicting the colonized with day-to-day wounds, the Indonesian nationalist movement was born. It was, and still is, a creature with a medley of voices. But all share the conflicts and the tension of the colonial discourse: while one side tried to impose, to use the words of Edward Said, the “panoptical vision of domination,” demanding for identity; the other side formed a counter pressure insisting on difference; while with a zeal to classify the colonizer wanted to construct authorized versions of otherness, implying control and conquest, the colonized opted for change, emphasizing the freedom of the particular. The idea of modernity, of progress, and the desire for “forgetting” – you can discern them in educational texts published in the 20s, intellectual and political arguments of the 30s, and the lyrical poetry of the late 40s and early 50s — are basically expressions of desire for this freedom.

The outcome of these conflicts and tension was not neces-sarily a stark dichotomy; there were negotiations and compromises that Homi Bhaba calls “the ambivalence of mimicry.”[5] In fact, many expressions of nationalist project of modernity have noticeable traits of this ambivalence; you can find them in the use of Kartini’s letters in the nationalist discourse, for example,
or in the promotion kroncong musical performances instead of the gamelan,
or in insistence of using the Indonesian language at schools and in the popular media. They all articulate “those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority.” [6]

Somehow, this reminds me of Nyai Ontosoroh, the heroine of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s “Earth of Mankind” (Bumi Manusia). Her story is the story of Indonesia, which is about a struggle to overcome various kinds of domination in a colonial space: the race-based hierarchy imposed by the white, the ancient familial patriarchy of the Javanese, and the ideology of submission of the lower orders. In her case, the whole quest is tantamount to forgetting, with vengeance, her subjugated past and her previous site in the colonial environment, by learning to write and read, acquiring Dutch, mastering the skill of trade, accumulating wealth, sending her children to good school, and remaining aloof to the claims of society. In a way she succeeded; she gained a
certain degree of privilege, and maintained an interiority that allowed her to be herself most of the time. In short, a self-respect, or it could also be a half-concealed grudge about the way the colonial world created her.

But who was she or what was she? She was a nyai. And nyai s or concubines were not totok (pure white), not mestizos, and could even be said not to be native. “They are secret mountains”, the hero of the novel says, which could well be a short description of people who lived (either by design or by default) on the shifting cultural and social borders.

Therefore a nation is a mixed bag, and basically it is a process of commutation of different agencies. To be sure, there are voices refuting this metaphor, not only in Aceh, West Papua, Java, Bali and other Indonesian localities, but also in other parts of the world, voices like Solzhenitsyn who wants Russia and France to switch the national emphasis from “forgetting” to “remembering” – insisting on the respect for traditions and orthodoxy, a longing to return to the land, a privileging of “below” against a disfiguring and artificial “above”. [7]

The Solzhenitsynian appeal (like that of Johann Gottfried von Herder in the 18 century) has its attractive side, especially in a time when there is little confidence in the universality of things, in the project of modernity, and in the virtue of strong, homogenizing, state. However, the Solzhenitsynian appeal writes off the legitimacy of viewing a nation as a process, something like an “empty signifier,” and not as something with a definite identity or presence. To fill in the “empty signifier” is where the political, meaning a democracy with an acute sense of limitation, takes place; this is perhaps the best way to make a nation survive.

Will it make Indonesia survive? Today, under Megawati’s presidency, the mood is a little bit different. In Aceh, murderous struggle for control is still going on, and in many other daerah’s, assertive local voices remain clamorous. But Indonesia, more or less in its old, bulky shape, has “lumbered along… a bundle of parochialisms that somehow adheres.”

The words belong to Clifford Geertz. [8] It is interesting to note that he describes Indonesia’s survival, if you will, as the outcome of its own curious form of “cultural politics”: It is “less consensus that is at issue than a viable way of doing without it”, Geertz says. It is a “working misunderstanding”. You may suspect that Geertz, who has always a fascinating way to articulate his thinking, is trying to be elegantly optimistic. But I would like to interpret him as endorsing what I would like to see as a legitimate vision: a process of creating a community that can remain a place of commonality and yet lacking, wanting, and therefore stay open.

In short, it is an Indonesia with a large measure of humility.

Endnotes

[1] The lecture, “What Is a Nation?” is one of the essays published in Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1993),
pp. 8-22.

[2] Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 95-136.

[3] Ibid., p. 8.

[4] John Pemberton, On the Subject of ‘Java’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Nancy Florida, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). See also Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire, Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 9.

[5] Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire, pp. 153-160.

[6] Ibid., p. 155.

[7] In Pierre Birnbaum, The Idea of France (New York: Hill and Fang, 2001), pp. 3-24.

[8] In Available Light, Anthropological Reflections in Philosophica Topics (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 255.