Documenting Subaltern Narratives in Indonesia: Results of a Research Project

By Ratna Saptari

The Indonesian Oral History Project supported by the Open Society Institute held a second workshop in Indonesia this year (March 20-22, 2003), hosted by the Realino research Institute in Yogyakarta. This workshop was a follow-up of the first one held in April last year and brought together the participants of the project to discuss and reflect on the interviews they had conducted. Follow-up activities are currently being prepared which involve workshops, publications and the systematic collection of tapes and CDs from the interviews.

The Project
When it was conceived a year ago, this research project had what appeared to be a clear and simple aim, namely that of documenting the lives of subaltern groups. This meant recording those voices that had been silenced, hidden or obliterated from general history-writing either by scholars or policy-makers. The researchers (consisting of university researchers and NGO-members) were asked to collect life histories and stories of particular events of subaltern groups who had gone through significant periods in 'national history'. Although, the project is not yet entirely finalized, so far, more than two hundred tapes have been collected and await further conversion and processing. During the course of the project and in the discussions that followed, many problems emerged, methodological, political and organizational. Nevertheless this realization provides important grounds for careful reflection in thinking out future steps.

Situating the Narratives
Dramatic or conflict-based events have often been viewed as attractive themes for conducting oral history. Individual memories regarding such events, given a certain time-lapse, wrongly or rightly, is often regarded as a good complement or serve as a corrective to official versions. Those who concentrated on workers' groups have looked for instance, at various strikes, which occurred in the last ten years. One person looked at the wave of strikes occurring in Medan, culminating in the large strike in 1994 which involved more than twenty thousand workers; another person looked at a strike which culminated in a 45 day sit-in at the Ministry of Manpower in Surabaya, in 1996; yet another looked at a strike in Jakarta in 1998 which lasted for two months. All these strikes had received much coverage by the local or national press and therefore were subject to much attention and debate and interpretations by various sides.
In the case of the rural population, the focus was on land-conflicts. In Bengkulu, South Sumatra, land conflict between a state enterprise and a private company on the one hand, with local farmers from the sub-district Sukaraja, South Bengkulu on the other. Not only the men, women participated also in collective actions at the local parliament. These women were also active in their struggles to survive in periods when the husbands are away. The stories of the West Javanese peasants focus on the events when after the Revolution, when land in South Garut was appropriated by large plantations; and also on the experiences of small farmers who were allocated land through the land reform of the 60s lost their land again during the New Order period. Interviews were made of women, men and the children regarding the period after the revolution and the land reform programme in the early 1960s. The overlapping identities of 'peasantry' and 'ethnic minority' situated in a context of ethnic conflict through different periods in Indonesian history were highlighted by the case in West Kalimantan. Chinese leaders from Sarawak who obtained political sanctuary from Sukarno as an anti-Malaya strategy, and Chinese leaders from West Kalimantan were in 1967 hounded by the local community, because they were considered to be supporters of the communist-linked organizations. This resulted in mass killings of ethnic Chinese, where the survivors fled to the coastal towns such as Singkawang.
The narratives of women who are survivors of political and physical violence were collected by two women, one focusing on Aceh during the period between 1989 and 1998, and the other, focusing on three groups of women: a) the 'comfort women' in the Japanese Period; b) left-linked women activists who were detained or hounded by the government in 1965; c) and women who were raped in the Jakarta May riots in 1998. Apart from these stories, the project also includes Indonesian political exiles in Europe, who are/were intellectuals and writers. These exiles are twice-migrants, starting their career as students in Moscow (between 1950s and 1970s) and eventually moving to the Netherlands or Berlin in the post 1970s era.

Memory and Silences
The attempt to recover these hidden voices, can only be retrieved through recording memories. And yet when we start the discussion on memory we tend to treat it in the same way as we do written documents, as though they are in themselves 'facts'. The first step faced by most of the participants was indeed how to retrieve such memories. The problem became: how do we deal with silences; when to stop interviewing? Some of those who experienced sexual or physical violence were unable to proceed when the story came to the acts of violence themselves. Shame or fear were strongly underlying the unwillingness of some to tell their stories. And in such situations the tape recorder was an inhibiting factor. The narratives were often reflective of the social relations existing in the present. One interviewer, who himself was also an activist in the area, was faced by a situation where he was considered the most-qualified to 'tell the story'; others were told that they were not the right people to talk to, because they were 'only women' and did not have 'the whole picture'.

Reproducing Histories
History-writing has always been a political act, whether it is conducted by policy makers, by activists or by academics. Although the participants of this workshop realize that the idea of 'an alternative history' is flawed, that people conform or comply to official versions of history at the same time as they resist or ignore them; there is an agreement that the main task at hand is to show that people's histories and experiences are diverse. If through this diversity it can be shown that many versions of history exist rather than just one grand narrative, then the project will have achieved its aim. During and after this workshop, there was much discussion on the type of publications that should flow out of this project. Although plans are many, in the near future, a project is envisioned where these different stories are brought out through publications. A regional workshop is also envisioned to bring together people who have been working on similar topics. Foregrounding all this is the idea to establish an Institute of Social History based in Jakarta which will continue such activities in the future.

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