To every place there belongs a story . . .

Amba: The Question of Red

An article in the Jakarta Post by Emke de Vries October 26, 2015 follows Indonesian author Laksmi Pamuntjak Touring Europe.

Laksmi Pamuntjak's book Amba, released in Indonesia in 2012 and translated into German as Alle Farben Rot was recently named best International Novel on the Weltempfaenger list.

Her novel Amba is set against the backdrop of the historical 1965 tragedy, a period of Indonesian history she was able to study in Perth, while Indonesia was still under Soeharto's authoritarian rule. As a child, she recalled that she had always questioned the dark period of Indonesia's past. As I grew older, I heard more stories from friends who belonged to families that were affected by the events of 1965 and whose fathers were political prisoners and were stigmatized their whole life, she says. I knew of nobody who wanted to talk about it until I went to university. I went to a university with a very good Asian studies department and a lot of dedicated scholars; there I felt that it might be possible to explore the topic further. 

Pamuntjak draws inspiration from the Mahabharata, the Sanskrit epic that inspires much traditional puppet theater and dance drama in the Indonesian archipelago. The novel is set against the backdrop of the violent clashes between the communists on one side and the nationalists and members of Muslim groups on the other.

With the story, she wanted to show an older civilization than the current political Islam, which she says is creeping yet persistently becoming more and more dominant in Indonesia. I wanted to show an older Java, and that people, even though they call themselves Muslims, also inhabit and embrace animism, idol worshipping and superstition. This is all part of us and it's beautiful and a testimony of pluralism, which is the DNA of our country. She also believes that mythology can teach people to think less in black-and-white and more in perspective.

There is always a little bit of bad in good people or a little bit of good in so-called bad people. What really connects them is the ambiguity, the doubts, inconsistency, fears and desire, which are all not that easily categorized, Laksmi says. And in a way, not downplaying the fact that the genocide did happen and that the Suharto regime should be held responsible, both sides experience loss in the end. And this is one of the main messages in the Mahabharata; they all suffer, there is no real victor, what have you obtained by killing your brothers?

The title character, Amba, journeys from Java to the eastern island of Buru to look for her long-lost love, Bhisma, an East German–educated doctor who sympathizes with leftist ideals, three decades after he’s arrested and sent to the penal colony there.

In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, Amba is the eldest daughter of the king of Kashi, who considers the Kuru prince Bhishma responsible for her misfortune and her sole goal in life becomes his destruction.

The story goes that in order to arrange the marriage of young Vichitravirya, Bhishma attends the swayamvara of the three princesses Amba, Ambika and Ambalika, uninvited, and proceeds to abduct them. Ambika and Ambalika consent to be married to Vichitravirya. Amba, however, informs Bhishma that she wishes to marry king of Shalva whom Bhishma defeated at their swayamvara. Bhishma lets her leave to marry king of Shalva, but Shalva refuses to marry her, still smarting at his humiliation at the hands of Bhishma. Amba then returns to marry Bhishma but he refuses due to his vow of celibacy. Amba becomes enraged and becomes Bhishma's bitter enemy, holding him responsible for her plight. Later she is reborn to King Drupada as Shikhandi (or Shikhandini) and causes Bhishma's fall, with the help of Arjuna, in the battle of Kurukshetra.

Bharatayuddha (Sanskrit: भारतयुद्ध;, Bhāratayuddha) or Bharat Yudha (or similar) is a term used in Indonesia for the Kurukshetra War, and to describe the Javanese translation and interpretation of the Mahabharata.

According to the Javanese tradition, the war between descendants of emperor Bharata was already destined by the gods long before the Pandavas and Kauravas were born. The tradition also maintained that the Kurukshetra battlefield is not located in the present-day Haryana state of India, but rather in Dieng Plateau, Central Java. Therefore, the Javanese considered the Mahabharata epic happened in Java and not in India.

AMBA (NEW EDITION)
Comments posted on Laksmi Pamuntjak's website 

The way Laksmi Pamuntjak approached the traumatic events of the 1965 coup, the massacres and persecutions in Amba/The Question of Red shows her mastery as an author. By interweaving story lines and changing environments the writer engages her readers on various levels. For an Indonesian public that has been immersed in a one-sided state-organised presentation Amba offers a new perspective involving real humans while through The Question of Red an international public is offered an insight in the effects that the events of 1965 had on lives through a novel that is literary in its construction and language but very down to earth in its protagonists.

- Wim Manuhutu, historian and review editor of Moesson magazine in the Netherlands.

If I was allowed only one word to describe Laksmi Pamuntjak’ s The Question of Red, I would say: stunning! If two, my other word would be: stylish. In the Indonesian/Indian world, the Mahabharatha is what Homer’s Iliad is to the Occident; having influenced their lives for millenniums, still continues to do so. Pamuntjak’s clever use of characters and allusions to events described in the epic, underscores the significance and weight the events of the mid-sixties bear on all Indonesians to this day, and will continue to, way into the future. The author’s unemotional, deadpan rendering will scare the life out of you. Is this what men do to other men?

- Raman TRR Krishnan, Author, publisher, editor, critic, bookshop owner, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In the book The Question of Red Pamuntjak takes the reader on a moving journey of a young love set against the turmoil of 1965. Based on thorough research but also interwoven with the great myths of our time, Pamuntjak manages to bring back to life these turbulent years with amazing details. Despite the film The Act of Killing, little is known about the terrible massacres that took place in 1965. The enormous success of the book in Indonesia shows at what crucial time the book was published. Now an international reception of the book is crucial. The Question of Red is one of the best Indonesian books I have read. I was drawn into the story immediately and it wouldn’t let go off me for many weeks.

- Katrin Sohns, Program Director, Goethe Institut Jakarta.

In 2015 Laksmi Pamuntjak began writing for the Guardian newspaper. On 27 Oct 2015 her opinion piece; Censorship is returning to Indonesia in the name of the 1965 purges was published.

A week ago I received a message from Janet DeNeefe, director of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

“I just wanted to let you know that the UWRF is being censored this year, and we have been told to remove all programs to do with ‘1965’,” she wrote. “Or else next year they will not give us a permit to hold the festival.”

I felt a chill when I read these lines, and a faint sense of absurdity that accompanied the sting. For one, I was on my European book tour, having done almost nothing else in the past one and a half month but speak to German and Dutch audiences about my novel, an epic love story set against the backdrop of the Indonesian anti-communist purges of 1965.

In Düsseldorf or Erfurt, Amsterdam or the Hague, I encountered nothing but genuine empathy and solidarity for Indonesians’ collective struggle to come to terms with our violent past as well as to render tangible justice for an untold many. It was particularly so in Germany, with its experience of national trauma.

This brings us to the irony of current domestic politics. For have Indonesians not, in the past 17 years since the fall of the Suharto regime, enjoyed a measure of hard-earned freedom from fear, censorship, and from restrictions to creativity?

Have we not witnessed the unprecedented burgeoning of new expression, in forms and language so alien to the 32-year pit out of which it was born? Have we not experienced, in the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, a literary forum which for 12 years has been able to keep the “1965” discourse alive without any state intervention?

Have we not pledged ourselves to the quest for alternative histories, for new ways of seeing and thinking about the world? Have we not seen the infrastructure of freedom so long devalued – bookstores, publishing houses, the press – finally standing up for themselves and giving people their voices back?

Have we not heard of private screenings – known by the abbreviation nobar (nonton bareng; watching together) – of Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing? Screenings that keep popping up despite crackdowns by the authorities, suggesting that Indonesians know what they want and are resourceful enough to get it?

Up until a month ago, we still tended to look on the 17 years of political and cultural renaissance as a triumph of the collective memory. Or, rather, the failure of Fascism’s central conceit: that domination does not breed resistance to itself.

If the calamity of authoritarianism gave Indonesian democracy its cause, this past month threatens to show that the rifts Suharto tore in our body politic may never be mended. That censorship should coincide with the 50th anniversary of the genocide might be the key to understanding why that is.

However, if in the past month I was tentative in my public discussion of the festival censorship – stopping short, in other words, of saying that there is a rise of neo-anti-communism in Indonesia – it has become harder to do so now. Similar incidents that occurred within a few days of each other smack of a disheartening return to old tropes of official neurosis: taken together, they suggest an eerie revival of the Suharto era.

Take the case of Tom Iljas, a 77-year-old former political exile in Sweden. He was arbitrarily arrested and deported earlier this month for visiting a mass grave of 1965 victims in West Sumatra, in search of the final resting place of his father.

The irony of having been barred from coming home 50 years ago, only to be banished once more in so-called peaceful times, tests the limits of humiliation. In a statement, Iljas and his supporters said: “[J]ust to look at the mass graves of family members we still get terror and intimidation ... We recognise that what is happening is the result of efforts for reconciliation and the fulfilment of the rights of victims.”
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Even by the standards of post-totalitarian nations, with their lingering paranoia and tendency to be consecrated to the memory of official ideology and legitimacy of power, this incident was quite stunning in its audacity. It was utterly lacking in substance – legal, moral or otherwise.

The other case, no less Suhartoesque, concerns the confiscation and burning of the Satya Wacana University student magazine Lentera. The students produced a special 10 October edition, which explored the 1965 purges in Salatiga. Reportedly, the mayor, police and military complained after the magazine was distributed. The student editors were interrogated on 18 October, and the whole 500-copy print run was torched. Editor Bima Satria Putra told Tempo magazine that the university – incidentally no stranger to reformist activism and progressive thought – was also reprimanded by the police.

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,” Heinrich Heine famously said, and yet, in present day Indonesia, there is something almost caricatural to this offence.

For one, it brings us right back to the second half of the 80s and the first half of the 90s, when you couldn’t count the number of student arrests for producing and distributing “subversive” material. The normalisation of campus life (Normalisasi Kehidupan Kampus) decree of April 1978 and coordinating body for student affairs (Badan Koordinasi Kampus) formed the NKK/BKK policy that forced Indonesia’s system of higher education to its knees. That acronym became shorthand for the death of universities and the death of thinking in Suharto’s Indonesia.

The other inglorious incident that occurred within the past month happens to concern myself, although I would not lose sleep over it. The morning I arrived in Frankfurt, some 10 hours before the opening of the 67th Frankfurt Book Fair in which Indonesia was the guest of honour, the press officer of our National Committee informed me that some Muslim groups had been demonstrating against me and a fellow author in front of one of the ministries in Jakarta.
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When I asked whatever for, he replied: “For being at the forefront of the national committee’s alleged active promotion of Communism at the fair.” My first instinct at the time was perversely self-congratulatory in nature. Not for being demonstrated against, but, rather, for encountering some kind of confirmation of a deeply-held personal theory: that in the past 17 years, the great dichotomy that used to characterise the Suharto dictatorship – the state, versus civil society – has been replaced by the increasing aggression of hard-line Muslim groups seeking to force their values on the vast diversity that is Indonesia. Yet I came to this conclusion before the news of the repatriation of Tom Ilyas and the barbaric act committed against the student body of the Satya Wacana University had reached my ears.

Indeed, there appeared a darker, older supervising power that has kept this process under surveillance all along, and the realisation that this was the case hit me quite hard. For the truth of the matter is that political Islam in Indonesia rarely ever acts alone in its quest for hegemony. Its alliance with the military has seen its members, particularly from the Nahdlatul Ulama, committing many of the killings between 1965 and 1968.

Stoked by frequent evocations of the Madiun Affair of 1948, in which Communist rebels murdered some Muslim leaders before they were defeated, many Muslims were sold on the idea that they were victims of Communist aggression. For many youths, executing Communists was a religious duty.

This symbiotic relationship was demonstrated again less than a month ago at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the murder of six army generals and one lieutenant – part of an attempted coup that was attributed by Suharto to the Indonesian Communist party. At the start of the event, both the Jakarta chief of police and the head of the menacing hardline Muslim group Islamic Defenders Front grandly denounced Communism in one of the starkest public shows of their partnership to date.

I should have realised it then, as I should have heeded an earlier portent: the moment the chief of South Jakarta police turned up with a militant Islamic group at an art centre three years ago, to crack down on a public lecture by the reformist Muslim intellectual Irshad Manji.

However, to say Communism is an empty threat, given Suharto made sure that nothing was left of Communism in Indonesia, is of course to miss the point. Anti-Communist propaganda has worked before as a legitimising basis of power and control, and a variation on it will work again given how deeply conditioned a large majority of Indonesians still are by the old regime’s official history.
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What we are witnessing is not the rise of neo-anti-communism per se, even if it seems that way on the surface; instead, anti-communism is merely a pretext for state terrorism and heightened control in the larger, and a more concerning scheme of a re-militarisation of government.

To many seasoned analysts of Indonesian politics, this volte-face might come as no surprise. Yet the hard-earnedness of reformasi – the period of democratic transition that followed Suharto’s reign – may have imprinted a certain intractability upon those who had fought for it, if not a downright refusal to accept the possibility of a regression of any kind.

Still. There is no denying the telltale signs. The return to anti-communist rhetoric as a pretext for state intimidation. The return to the culture of fear when there is nothing to fear of except for the healthy probings of historical inquiry that are essential to a nation’s healing.

President Joko Widodo has not helped matters much through his refusal to apologise to victims of the anti-Communist slaughter. His last message on the issue – that an apology is impossible when both sides claim to be victims – may give us no relief. However, despite civil society’s best efforts, it may be the clearest picture yet of where we are in our struggle against forgetting. This does not mean we should lose hope. We may be on the brink of sliding back into the dark ages, but we have always known how to fight back.

Genocide?  Purge?  Politicide? Or "the 1965 tragedy"?