MATERIALITY, LOSS AND REDEMPTIVE HOPE IN THE INDONESIAN LEFTIST DIASPORA

Abstract

This article explores how notions of loss and absence are constituted through Indonesian eksil (exile) life narratives including their development of private collections of leftist literature, personal diaries, obituaries and personal documents, in order to explore the inter-relational aspects of materiality, acts of mourning and their place in the memorialisation of the left in diaspora. I suggest that both the acts of collecting and the individual narratives of failure, loss and absence have unifying effects and act as different agentic modalities that work towards redemptive hope for the future.

Notes

¹For various cultural and political implications of loss see Eng and Kazanjian (2003).

²The close relations between Indonesia and China generated a large number of Indonesians residing in China in the early 1960s (Sukma 2004).

³Scholarly debates about categorisation of refugees and forced migration and voluntary migration are ongoing ones (Adelman and McGrath 2007).

⁴Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid used the term klayaban, to refer to citizens who were prevented from returning to their homeland, and forced to move from one country to another (Setiawan 2010).

⁵Throughout this article pseudonyms have been used to protect the privacy of my interlocutors.

⁶Interview, 12 June 2009.

⁷Komitee Indonesia published the journal Indonesie Feiten en Meningen (Facts and opinions about Indonesia), giving information about the ‘other Indonesia’, in order to influence political opinions and decisions that would help improvement of human rights and the independence of East Timor. After the fall of President Suharto, the organisation's activity gradually declined and ceased on 1 December 2000. This organisation has to some extent been succeeded by the Wertheim Stichting (Wertheim Foundation) which organises scholarly lectures and presents the annual Wertheim Award to a living Indonesian for merit in promoting freedom of speech and human rights.

⁸Personal conversation with Ariel Heryanto, 5 February 2010.

⁹Interview with Pak Merta, 12 June 2009.

¹⁰Here governmentality is understood after Michel Foucault (2000) as a set of organised practices (techniques and rationalities) through which subjects are governed.

¹¹David T. Hill and I had numerous conversations on this topic in 2008 and 2009.

¹²For a detailed discussion see Dragojlovic (2010).

¹³ For a detailed discussion on kesadaran sejarah in Indonesia, see K. Strassler (2008).

¹⁴The smaller part is kept at the Sekolah Brosot in Yogyakarta, a school and a cultural centre run by Setiawan and his wife Fatia Nadia.

¹⁵ < http://www.iisg.nl/collections/silencedvoices/index.php> Accessed 7 October 2011.

¹⁶Communist Tan Malaka wrote his prison memoir in 1946–47, in which term penjara (prison) has a specific symbolic and metaphorical value (see Watson 2000: 81).

¹⁷Writing about Indonesian exiles' commemorative poems, Dorothea Schaefter (2011) argues that rather than being merely eulogies these poems stand as important sources of information on exiles' ideologies and life trajectories.

¹⁸See also Setiawan (2010: 17).

¹⁹Anthropologists have increasingly begun to stress the importance of acknowledging texts as objects whose values are derived both from their official and material qualities (Messick 1993; Pellegram 1997; Tarlo 2003; Strassler 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Dragojlovic

I wish to express my most sincere gratitude and appreciation to Tyrell Haberkorn, Ken Jurriëns-Setiawan, Dunja Cvjeticanin and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.