X-URL: http://latitudesmagazine.com/content/6/00,6,1,1.htm
Goenawan Mohamad
I chose the title of this essay without knowing whether I should put a
question mark after the last word. Terrible things are happening in
many parts of Indonesia. We have heard about different religious
groups committing large-scale atrocities against each other and
government soldiers shooting angry citizens labelled as "separatists."
We have learned that not long ago, native ethnic groups ran amok and
slaughtered immigrants from other parts of the country. Such frenzy
has generated widespread feeling of hatred and a sense of loss among
people at large.
What do the words "being Indonesian" mean today, after such
destruction, after such cataclysm? The question is not only of great
political urgency; it is also a painful existential compulsion.
Someday, I hope, we will have a chance to retreat and to rethink. I am
persuaded that what we are witnessing is an explosive exposure of a
nation's ambivalence, marked by a conceptual indeterminacy which has
become more and more pronounced. One can hear undeterred cries for
freedom -- meaning freedom from a repressive political structure
identified as "Indonesia." One can also notice an upsurge of identity
politics, sometimes expressed in "local" nationalisms colored by
ethnicity. One can register the noise of exclusionary religious or
racial rhetoric, or simply angry displays of "narcissism of small
differences." At the same time, there has always been the insistence
on the legitimacy of the existing polity, as if Indonesia is as old as
history, promising endless time.
To be sure, similar trends have been noticeable worldwide. They have
become a special feature of the post-Cold War condition. But
particularly for an Indonesian of my generation, these special
features have become disturbing signs of disenchantment - when a myth
is shattered by the violence of remembering.
* * *
"Remembering," as I see it, is an inverted form of "forgetting." I am
using the latter word with the historian Ernst Renan's proposition in
mind. "Forgetting," he said in his famous lecture of 1882, "is a
crucial factor in the creation of a nation."
Renan's argument makes the point - like the more elaborate thesis of
Benedict Anderson after him - that nations are not determined by
language, race, geography or religion. "A nation," Renan said, "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."
Any Indonesian who remembers the 1928 Sumpah Pemuda (The Pledge of
Indonesian Youth) or who solemnly sings the hymn Satu Nusa Satu Bangsa
(One Country, One People) would readily acknowledge this. For as
legend has it, on October 28, 1928, young people from different
regions and different ethnic groups became proponents of Indonesian
nationalism by "forgetting" their primordial 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
localities and their own definitions of the self was the beginning of
a myth and a power.
Both this myth and this power are now in deep trouble, or worse, they
have been shattered. The forgotten, as it were, are coming back with a
vengeance. And we know that remembering, like forgetting, can entail a
violent politics of memory, transforming political position and
self-perception. The notion that Indonesia is "a large-scale
solidarity," or, to use another of Renan's metaphors, "a daily
plebiscite," could no longer hold, after 1976.