Setting History Straight Indonesian Historiography in the new Order

List of Abbreviations ASEAN : Association of Southeast Asian Nations BPUPKI : Investigatory Body for Preparatory Works for Indonesia’s Independence Badan Penyelidik Usaha-usaha Persiapa

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Center for International Studies of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Sony Karsono August 2005

INDONESIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE NEW ORDER

by Sony Karsono

has been approved for the Department of Southeast Asian Studies

and the Center for International Studies by

William H Frederick Associate Professor of History

Josep Rota Director of International Studies

Director of Thesis: William H Frederick

This thesis discusses one central problem: What happened to Indonesian historiography in the New Order (1966-98)? To analyze the problem, the author studies the connections between the major themes in his intellectual autobiography and those in the metahistory of the regime Proceeding in chronological and thematic manner, the thesis comes in three parts Part One presents the author’s intellectual autobiography, which illustrates how, as a member of the generation of people who grew up in the New Order, he came into contact with history Part Two examines the genealogy of and the major issues at stake in the post-New Order controversy over the rectification of history Part Three ends with several concluding observations First, the historiographical engineering that the New Order committed was not effective Second, the regime created the tools for people to criticize itself, which shows that it misunderstood its own society Third, Indonesian contemporary culture is such that people abhor the idea that there is no single truth

Approved:

William H Frederick Associate Professor of History

For Nurchayati, Kartini, and Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata

Without the unstinting moral support of my mother Kartini and my wife Nurchayati, I would not have had the energies to complete this thesis And it was my father, the late Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata, who, in 1987, awakened in me the desire to undertake a study overseas It is to them that I dedicate this work

For the funding of my master’s study in the United States, 2003-2005, of which this thesis constituted the final part, I relied on three institutions I am indebted

to the Fulbright Exchange Program and Ohio University for their generous

scholarships And I wish to thank the University of Surabaya in Indonesia for allowing

me to go on paid leave to undertake my study

I am grateful to many individuals in the United States and Indonesia who provided me with administrative assistance at critical stages of my study I wish to thank Drew McDaniel, Karla Schneider, Joan Kraynanski, and Jill McKinney at Ohio University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies I also wish to thank Piet Hendrardjo

at the AMINEF in Jakarta as well as Brenda Simmons and Christina Holdvogt at the IIE Midwest Regional Center in Chicago

The research I conducted from 2004 to 2005 for this work would not have been possible without the kind support from various individuals in the United States and Indonesia While hunting for and amassing various sources for Part Two of this thesis,

I received considerable help at Ohio University’s Southeast Asia Collection from Jeff Ferrier, Jeffrey Shane, Lucy Conn, Nurul Pratiwi, and Nurhaya Muchtar And, while working on parts of the thesis which deal specifically with students’ encounters with

who were willing to share with me their ideas and experiences: Asvi Warman Adam in Jakarta, Bambang Purwanto in Yogyakarta, Zunafi in Kediri, and Evilina Sutrisno and Ahmad Faishal in Surabaya

I wish to thank my thesis director, William H Frederick, for his wisdom, encouragement, and illuminating criticism To say this, however, is an understatement For in him, more than in anybody else, I find a teacher who has shaped my

fundamental understanding of Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and history as a discipline I

am also grateful to the other members of my thesis committee for their instructive and constructive suggestions: Elizabeth F Collins and Peter J Brobst All these people contributed a great deal to the writing of my thesis Yet, it is only I who am

responsible for any errors and misinterpretations that remain in it

Table of Contents

Page

Abstract 3

Acknowledgments 5

List of Abbreviations 9

Introduction 11

Part One Encounter with History in the New Order: Audience’s Point of View 15 1 Origins, Absence, and Forgetfulness 15

2 My Family, My Roots 20

3 Books and Libraries 27

4 School Books versus “Cool” Books 34

5 Documents and History 39

6 Love and the Destruction of Personal Archives 41

7 Museums: Official versus Unofficial 42

8 Flag Raising Ceremony and National Memory 57

9 The National Monument and Others 65

10 The Treason of G30S/PKI: A New Order “Historical” Movie 78

11 Mohammad Husni Thamrin on Television 90

12 Cemetery, “History,” and Personal Monument 93

13 My History Teachers 96

14 My Interest in History: Its Origins and Development 103

Part Two On the Rectification of Indonesian History: Major Themes 120 15 The Structure of This Part 120

16 The Elite’s Perspective: Debating Indonesia’s Genesis, 1946-1990s 124

17 Education That Went Awry: Students’ and Teachers’ Experience with

History in the New Order 174

18 The Plight of the Academic Historian in the New Order 191

a The Politics of Representation: Chaos, “Pornography,” and Purification .191

b The Economics of Historical Studies: Poor Facilities, Poor Human Resources 201

19 After the Collapse of the New Order: Questions 207

20 On the Rectification of the History of 1965: Themes in a Controversy 211

a Asvi Warman Adam 211

b Bambang Purwanto 222

c Taufik Abdullah 229

d Comparison, Contrast, Critique 237

21 The Problems of History Teachers in the Post-New Order Era 242

22 Students’ Problems with History in Post-New Order Indonesia 246

23 Afterthoughts 250

Part Three Concluding Remarks 253 Bibliography 265

List of Abbreviations

ASEAN : Association of Southeast Asian Nations

BPUPKI : Investigatory Body for Preparatory Works for Indonesia’s

Independence (Badan Penyelidik Usaha-usaha Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia)

BTI : Indonesian Peasant Front (Barisan Tani Indonesia)

FAO : Food and Agriculture Organization

G30S/PKI : September 30 Movement/Indonesian Communist Party

(Gerakan 30 September/Partai Komunis Indonesia)

GDP : Gross Domestic Product

Gerwani : Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia)

Golkar : Functional Groups (Golongan Karya)

GPA : Grade Point Average

HAM : Human Rights (Hak Asasi Manusia)

HIS : Dutch-language primary school for Indonesians

(Hollandsch-Inlandsche School)

HMI : Islamic Students Association (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam)

IKIP : Teachers Training College (Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu

Pendidikan)

IMF : International Monetary Fund

KITLV : Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (Koninklijk

Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde)

KNIL : Royal Netherlands Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlandsch

Indisch Leger)

Leknas : National Institute for Economic and Social Research

(Lembaga Ekonomi dan Kemasyarakatan Nasional)

Lekra : People’s Cultural Association (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakjat)

LIPI : Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan

Indonesia)

Manipol : Political Manifesto (Manifesto Politik)

MULO : Dutch-language Junior High School (Meer Uitgebreid Lager

Onderwijs)

NRC : National Research Center

OSIS : Intra-School Student Organization (Organisasi Siswa Intra

Sekolah)

P2E-LIPI : Center for Economic Research-Indonesian Institute of

Sciences (Pusat Penelitian Ekonomi-LIPI)

PDI : Indonesian Democracy Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia)

PDIN : National Center for Scientific Documentation (Pusat

Dokumentasi Ilmiah Nasional)

Permesta : Universal Struggle Charter (Piagam Perjuangan Semesta

Alam)

Pesindo : Indonesian Socialist Youth (Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia)

PETA : Defenders of the Fatherland (Pembela Tanah Air)

PGRI Nonvaksentral : Leftwing Association of Indonesian Teachers (Persatuan Guru

Republik Indonesia Vaksentral)

PII : Indonesian Islamic Student Association (Pelajar Islam

Indonesia)

PKI : Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia)

PNI : Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia)

PPIA : Indonesia-America Friendship Association (Perhimpunan

Persahabatan Indonesia-Amerika)

PPKI : Committee for the Preparation for Indonesia’s Independence

(Panitia Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia)

PPP : Unity Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan)

PRD : People’s Democratic Party (Partai Rakyat Demokratik)

PRI : Youths of the Republic of Indonesia (Pemuda Republik

Indonesia)

PRRI : Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia

(Pemerintahan Revolusioner Republik Indonesia)

PSI : Indonesian Socialist Party (Partai Sosialis Indonesia)

PSPB : History of the National Struggle (Pendidikan Sejarah

Perjuangan Bangsa)

SDI : Islamic Traders’ Association (Sarekat Dagang Islamijah)

SMA : Senior High School (Sekolah Menengah Atas)

SMID : Student Solidarity for Democracy in Indonesia (Solidaritas

Mahasiswa Indonesia untuk Demokrasi)

SMP : Junior High School (Sekolah Menengah Pertama)

SPG : Special High School for the Training of Primary School

Teachers (Sekolah Pendidikan Guru)

SSN : National History Seminar (Seminar Sejarah Nasional)

TKR : People’s Security Force (Tentara Keamanan Rakjat)

TVRI : Television of the Republic of Indonesia (Televisi Republik

Indonesia)

VCR : Video Cassette Recorder

YMB : Foundation for Mutual Progress (Yayasan Maju Bersama)

INTRODUCTION

The New Order’s unanticipated downfall in May 1998 opened up a broader space for political expression As a result, people dared break certain political taboos The print media and television stations began to circulate previously marginalized

views of the nation’s past, for example the aborted coup in 1965 Politically

stigmatized groups under the New Order such as the leftists, Islamists, and

ethno-nationalists ventured publicly to articulate their versions of some major historical

events A number of professional historians maintained that the Soeharto regime had cooked up, disseminated, and imposed its fabricated version of the nation’s history.1They argued that straightening out Indonesia’s history should be one of the key items

in her agenda of transition from authoritarianism to a more democratic regime.2

While the “battle of historiography” was raging in such arenas as books,

newspapers, magazines, and television programs, its reverberations were heard in

schools throughout the country A hot debate emerged in the classrooms between

1

See, for example, Asvi Warman Adam, “Orde Baru Lakukan Banyak

Rekayasa Penulisan Sejarah” [The New Order performed a lot of historiographical

fabrication], Kompas, June 24, 1999 See also “Lebih Jauh dengan Anhar

Gonggong,”[More about Anhar Gonggong], Kompas, October 15, 2000, where Anhar

refers to the New Order as having produced “twisted” accounts of some historical

events Note that when the New Order was still in power, though Asvi and Anhar both worked for state institutions, they represented rather different political engagements with the regime While Asvi was attached to the Indonesian Institute of Sciences

(LIPI), Anhar was the protégé of Brigadier-General (titular) Nugroho Notosusanto, the army historian responsible for the production of the state-sanctioned national history

2

Asvi, for instance, suggested that Indonesians should abandon what he called

“the New Order’s standpoint in the understanding of facts from the past” and adopt instead “the perspective of reform,” which, he claimed, has become “the mainstream perspective among Indonesians nowadays.” See, Asvi Warman Adam, ibid

senior high school students who armed themselves with quotations from the media’s

“wild” versions of history, and teachers who remained bound by the imperatives of the state curriculum and had to stick to the official narratives in state-authorized

textbooks Accused by their students of telling lies, these teachers were worried that they might lose their credibility and, eventually, their job.3 For most of them, the multiplicity of historical versions signified cacophony that would spell chaos in the classroom

Those were some of the changes in the landscape of Indonesian history in the wake of the New Order’s collapse They have led me to ask myself a question: What

on earth happened to Indonesian history under the New Order (1966 to 1998)? I break the question down into three smaller questions: First, what kind of Indonesian history did my generation come into contact with and learn under the New Order? How and

by what agents was it taught to us? How did we react to it? What kind of intellectual journey over time did the generation undergo? It is with a view to exploring these issues that, in Part One, I shall present and critically examine my intellectual

biography and the biographical fragments of other people of my generation

Second, and by contrast, what are the major themes in the debate on the

“straightening out” of Indonesian history which involves Indonesian professional historians in post-Soeharto Indonesia? It is to this question that I shall devote Part Two My discussion will be focused on the debate concerning the incident of 1965

I deliberately compare the first and the second questions with each other It was professional historians who maintained that the New Order had fabricated

Indonesian history They further claimed that students had been victims of this

intentional distortion of history.4 But was it always the case? Were students always passive consumers of historical knowledge? Were they not able to say “no” to the New Order’s version of history?

My third question: What is the core of the problem? Is it that Indonesian

contemporary culture abhors the idea that there is no single truth? Is it that people do

not understand what history is? Is it that people do not have enough historical

evidence? Or is it that Indonesian historians are not courageous enough? Part Three will be devoted to the treatment of these issues

As I shall demonstrate in Part Two, the weakness of the distortion-oriented critics of the New Order history-writing is that they are preoccupied with the state’s role as producer of historical knowledge They tend to overlook the possibility that

4 The political scientist Rizal Mallarangeng argues that two regional rebellions, the PRRI and the Permesta, led to the failure of parliamentary democracy after the election of 1955 In his critique Asvi Warman Adam considers Rizal’s argument as evidence of how “the New Order’s propaganda… deeply affected the younger

generation who had learned history in school.” For Rizal’s point of view, see Rizal

Mallarangeng, “Akankah Sejarah Berulang?” [Will history repeat itself?], Kompas,

August, 16-17, 2000 For Asvi’s critique, see Asvi Warman Adam, “Demiliterisasi

Sejarah Indonesia” [Demilitarizing Indonesian history], Kompas, September 2, 2000

In “Perlu Reinterpretasi Penulisan Sejarah Masa Orde Baru” [Re-interpretation of the

New Order’s historiography is necessary], Kompas, September 4, 2004, Anhar

Gonggong is quoted as saying that “history-writing under the New Order was

dominated and tightly controlled by the government and the military As a result, much of the history-writing was dishonest, lacked balanced data, and glorified … the military.” He argues that the historian who served the New Order in the writing of such “palace-centric” history “intentionally deceived the audience.”

citizens are capable of using state-produced historical objects, such as films,

monuments, museums, and textbooks, in ways quite different from those intended by the New Order regime Absent in their critiques is the realization that as consumers of historical knowledge, people change over time The critics seem to forget that what people believe and disbelieve, their understanding of history, and the way they use history also change over time

To avoid making the same mistake that the distortion-oriented critics of the New Order history-writing have committed, I adopt a model of analysis that involves a three-way relationship among (1) the cultural objects for the teaching of history that include, among other things, textbooks, museums, and monuments, (2) the New Order’s ideological apparatuses, such as professional historians and school teachers, who produced and/or propagated the cultural objects, and (3) students as knowledge consumers who might have used such objects in ways quite different from what the New Order regime had intended.5 I situate the three-way relationship against the

backdrop of two analytical axes: continuities and changes over time that affect

Indonesian society at large, historical knowledge, professional historians, and their audience

5

I borrow this approach to cultural analysis from Mark Gottdiener,

“Hegemony and Mass Culture: A Semiotic Approach,” American Journal of Sociology

90, 5 (1985): 979

PART ONE ENCOUNTER WITH HISTORY IN THE NEW ORDER:

AUDIENCE’S POINT OF VIEW

1 Origins, Absence, and Forgetfulness

The European historian used to have an idol Marc Bloch called it “the

obsession with origins.”6 I cannot say what the contemporary Indonesian historian’s idol was under the New Order But at least as the anecdote below would show,

Indonesia’s origin was an important theme in the sort of history that school children had to learn in Indonesia in the late 1970s Thus in my first year in elementary

school—it was in Malang, East Java, somewhere in 1977—my lady teacher imparted

to me, by teaching us a song called “Independence Day,” that August 17, 1945 was

“the birth date of the Indonesian nation.” The nation’s date of birth, so the lyric goes, coincides with its date of freedom:

The seventeenth of August nineteen forty-five That’s our independence day:

The freedom day of our homeland The birthday of the Indonesian nation.7

What she actually did was introduce me, a seven-year-old schoolboy, to the historian’s idol, along with the obligatory gesture of paying obeisance to it: that of asking the insistent question “Where do things come from? When did they first come

into being?” Indeed, at the time I was unaware of the metaphysical nature of her instruction in the classroom (It was not until I was eighteen that I got acquainted with Heidegger’s idea that to inquire into the origin of something is to ask a metaphysical question about it.) All I knew was that learning to sing the song together with my classmates was real fun We had no idea of what the song meant My ears could not even tell where the lyric’s words began and where they ended, for they belonged to

bahasa Indonesia—the school language We had only just begun to learn this foreign,

this national, tongue At school, every morning from seven to ten, from Monday to Saturday, we tried to use it when we spoke to our teachers Anywhere else—at home,

at playgrounds, in dreams, and among ourselves—we kids spoke low Javanese

(ngoko)

Older than national history is Islam It too is very keen about origins Islam and national history first appeared in my life roughly at the same time When my family lived in Malang from 1975 to 1978, every evening from six to eight, I used to spend

my time in the neighborhood mosque with my buddies Some were about my age; some were a couple of years older than me Assisted now and then by his three

grownup sons, a kyai (Islamic cleric) named Abdul Salam, a man in his late fifties who

happened to be the mosque’s caretaker, taught us to perform prayers in congregation, proclaim the hours of the daily prayers, sing hymns in Arabic and Javanese, and recite

the Koran Aside from a few words like “Allah,” “Muhammad,” and “bismillah,”8 I knew no Arabic True, my seniors had taught me to recite Arabic verses in the Koran

8

The phrase means “in the name of God.”

But nobody in the mosque had taught us to speak Arabic Ironically, the mere

recitation of chapters from the holy book always filled my heart with joy and

tranquility

Most importantly, it was in the mosque that I learned, from my teachers’ lectures, that the whole world too had its ultimate origin It was God and He was called Allah Once upon a time, He uttered that momentous sentence: “Be!” And He thus called heaven, hell, and the earth into being To populate heaven, He also said,

“Be!” and He thus created two sorts of strange beings: some, made of light, were

called “angels” and they knew no evil; one, made of fire, was called “Iblis” (Satan) and he was a genius in the art of evil But in the beginning both the angels and Iblis

obeyed God The celestial balance was upset when God created Adam, the first man, from clay A humble substance indeed Later God removed a piece of bone from Adam’s rib cage and turned it into the first woman Called Hawa, she became Adam’s wife It is to this ancient couple that mankind traces back its ultimate genealogy God

told the angels and Iblis to bow down to Adam This unexpected move on Allah’s part outraged Iblis’ rigid and too keen a sense of hierarchy Due to his fiery origin, so Iblis

insisted, he belonged to a higher class than did the clay Adam He chose to defend his

dignity and defy God’s command God decided to kick the arrogant Iblis out of heaven

and into hell In response to the latter’s request, however, He put off the punishment

until doomsday Iblis swore that in the meantime he would tempt Adam’s and Hawa’s

descendants away from the Path of Light God said, “See if I care! If they follow you,

I shall grill you all in hell.”9

It was, undoubtedly, a “cool” and concise history of all things It goes without saying that as a five-year-old lad I had no idea of what the narrative was all about beneath its literal surface This much I was able to conclude: To be a good boy was to fear Allah more than anything else (No one knew, though, that what I did fear most of

all was not Allah but a type of wandering ghost called pocong: a dead man wrapped in

white shroud who woke up from his grave to scare the living The dread of pocong had

its origin in my shocking encounter in 1977 with his visual images in Setan Kuburan

[Graveyard Ghost] a horror movie starring Benyamin Sueb.) One thing stands out in

my memory of those brief learning years in the neighborhood mosque The first time

he saw me, the kyai mistook me for a Chinese kid This he did on account of my “fair” face It was in fact dark brown But by comparison to his sun-scorched, sun-blackened complexion—for in the daylight he toiled at his paddy field—my visage might have looked in his eyes yellow enough for him to misrecognize me as a “Chinese” boy

As a little kid, I readily believed the stories about the origins of Indonesia and the world (In fact, I would embrace as true almost any story that was enchanting.) I was in no position yet to be skeptical about the truth of those stories For I was not there at 56 Pegangsaan Timur Street, when at 10:00 AM on August 17, 1945 Soekarno and Hatta declared Indonesia’s birth and independence Nor was I there when, through

9

At nineteen I read Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Les litanies de Satan” [The

litanies of Satan] and it occurred to me that Iblis was “cool,” that he was arrogant in a

“cool” way, and that being a creature of fire he would no doubt feel at home in hell

His performative utterances, God created the cosmos To be sure, I was aware that my lady teacher and my kyai were not there either when the geneses of the nation and the cosmos took place Yet since they had lived longer than I did, I supposed they were much more knowledgeable about a lot of things For as a little child I knew I was lousy at establishing origins I was unable, for instance, to give an eyewitness account

of my own origin Although I was there when my mother gave birth to me, it seemed

to me that my memory of the event had vanished forever Luckily, in my forgetfulness

I could always rely on my mother for stories about the circumstances of my birth Sometimes she let me take a look at my village-level birth certificate It was a little, brittle, blue, oblong card that contained such details as where and when I was born, what my name officially was, and who my parents were At the foot of the document was the village head’s signature More concrete to me than Mother’s eyewitness accounts and the birth certificate were all those black-and-white snapshots that Father took of me when I was a baby The infant looked bizarre in the pictures: When it cried

it cried forever; when it slept it slept forever Mother still kept—and sometimes

showed me—the old diapers, shirts, gloves, and caps that she said I used to wear in my infancy

Were it not for the redeeming acts of my parents, all the eyewitness accounts

of my origin would be lost forever in the black hole of oblivion Yes, they are the

guardians of my origin.10 Their role is indispensable For in my beginning oblivion was the master

When I was born, I was born into a nation-state and a religion I was not there

when they were born In their beginnings was my absence The ummah (community of

believers) and the nation-state provided me with myths to remedy that absence and to enlighten me on their geneses

2 My Family, My Roots

On April 8, 1971, I was born in Prigen, Pasuruan, East Java, near Tretes, a tourist resort at the foot of Mount Arjuno The tall, greenish-blue volcano always greeted me with a friendly “peek-a-boo!” every morning when my mother opened up

my bedroom’s windows to expose me to the fresh air and warm sunlight I was born into a strange alchemy of a family My father, Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata, was a middle-ranking officer in the Military Police He came from the ethnic Sundanese gentry His class origin enabled him to attend Dutch schools, the HIS (Hollandsch-Inlandsche School, or Dutch-language primary school for Indonesians) and the MULO (Meer Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs, or Junior High School), in West Java in the 1930s and early 1940s, when the territory now called Indonesia was still a Dutch colony My mother, Kartini, comes from an ethnic Javanese, landless peasant family in

Tulungagung, East Java Due to extreme poverty, she stopped her education in the

10

In this respect, I am a lot luckier than my mother Poverty had prevented her from enjoying photography’s power of preserving memories When she was a baby, Grandfather and Grandmother took no picture of her They did not even try to get her

a birth certificate

fourth grade of primary school She later attempted to compensate for her own lack of education by insisting that all her children have at least a bachelor degree

My father lived in two different worlds: one was a Dutch world founded in his colonial education; the other was a Sundanese, Muslim, petty aristocratic world of his ancestors He spoke Dutch to his brothers and sisters at home and to his friends at school They called him “Henky,” a Dutch name he adopted at some point in his adolescence He drank beer and danced to European music It seems to me that he aspired to be a Dutchified young man Yet people—Sundanese, Javanese, Chinese, and Dutch alike—often mistook him for a Chinese.11 In his youth he acquired most of his knowledge about the contemporary world by reading books, magazines, and newspapers printed in Dutch His parents, however, did not fail to provide him with instruction in Islam It was for this purpose that they once sent him to a certain Islamic boarding school in Banten, West Java Islam was a significant cultural element in his family His paternal grandfather, for instance, worked for the colonial government as a

hoofdpenghoeloe who was in charge of the religious affairs of Muslim natives There

was also an enigmatic aunt, a mystic who knew in advance the exact day of her death When she passed away, my father inherited the essays she had written on Islamic

mysticism His Dutch-school-mediated encounter with the Dutch colonial culture led

my father to be a hybrid person He grew into a creature of both Dutch and Muslim cultures At first he seems to have felt it more as a synthesis than as a conflict His hybridity intensified when in 1950, at twenty-one, he married Yvonne Minks, a Protestant Dutch woman, who later gave him six children In the household, my father, his wife, and their six Eurasian children lived in a mixed world resulting from the amalgamation of a Christian, Dutch culture and a Muslim, Sundanese culture Two languages—Dutch and the Eurasian dialect of Indonesian—were spoken in the family With regard to religion, my father remained a Muslim and his wife a Protestant, while the children were divided among Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam

Sundanese-At the close of the first decade of his marriage, that is, when he turned forty, the sustained exposure to Christianity personified by his wife and some of his children led my father to go through a religious crisis He started to ask himself such questions

as “Who am I: a Muslim or a Christian? Shall I remain a Muslim? Why? Shall I convert to Christianity? Why?” To cope with the crisis, he embarked on a spiritual exploration There were quite a few ways in which he pursued the exploration He joined the local theosophical society in Surabaya, East Java He attended its meetings and discussions, engaged in yoga meditation, and read the holy texts of Islam,

Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Javanese mysticism

He became the disciple and adopted son of a Javanese mystic in Pare, Kediri, East Java, whose power of suggestion was so great that he could make people fall ill only

by declaring to them “You are going to fall ill.” The only way to cure the victims was

for them to drink the mystic’s urine My father soon abandoned the mystic because he considered him too cruel and greedy to be a true spiritual teacher At last, there was a night, when my father meditated under a huge banyan tree in the archeological site of the fifteenth-century Hindu kingdom of Majapahit in Trowulan, Mojokerto, East Java,

he had a vision He saw, inscribed on the dark after-midnight sky, a glowing

calligraphy in Arabic that turned out to be the Muslim’s credo: “There is no god but God; Muhammad is God’s messenger.” Thereupon he decided to remain a Muslim He was convinced that Islam was the best religion for him He held that all religions were but different paths to the same truth The revelation under the banyan tree—or was it a hallucination?—helped him achieve an unshakeable sense of religious identity

Father’s spiritual crisis took place in the early 1960s It coincided with the time

of protracted political turbulence under Soekarno’s Guided Democracy The PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) and the Army were involved in a fierce struggle for power The ailing President Soekarno appeared more and more to take sides with the PKI At all levels of the society political antagonism intensified From left to right, political parties were aggressively mobilizing villagers Here and there people engaged

in mass demonstrations, mutual intimidations, and street fights Since 1955 no general elections had been held So it was not clear to anyone if the overheated political struggle would ever come to a peaceful conclusion The putrid smell of impending Bharatayudha12 filled the air In 1990 Father and I had a memorable talk in which he

12

In the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, the Bharatayudha is the ultimate battle between two conflicting groups of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas In the

told me that a couple of months prior to the massacres of the communists in 1965-66 a number of old, eccentric, legendary masters of Javanese mysticism, who normally lived in seclusion somewhere at the slope of Mount Semeru, started to appear in Surabaya, the capital of East Java Some of those ascetics made speeches before the crowd in the city square On one such occasion, the great seer Eyang Semeru

(Grandfather Semeru) pronounced a sinister prophecy “Be prepared!” he called out

“Be prepared! Verily I say unto you: Chaos is at hand!” The military police arrested him on a charge of disturbing order Holding him in great respect, however, they soon released him They only objected to his revealing a political prophecy in public

In the late 1960s, it was Father’s marriage that underwent a crisis It turned out

that he was no longer happy having a Dutch wife He felt she was kasar (crude,

unrefined) and overbearing She did a poor job of caring for the children and the house Rather, she spent much time smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, and shooting the breeze with her friends More importantly, she did not maintain her good looks Nor did she treat him tenderly and lovingly as would a native wife The Sundanese in

him yearned for a native wife, one who would be modest and alus (smooth, refined),

who would take care of his needs as a man, and who would treat him tenderly and affectionately This was the big picture that I, much later, managed to piece together from those stories that I had overheard in my parents’ conversations Strikingly

missing in the picture, though, was my father’s sensitivity to his wife Yvonne’s needs and desires as a woman A woman, that is, who had sacrificed a lot when in 1950, a 1960s many Javanese on the right likened themselves to the Pandavas, the good guys, while referring to members of the PKI as the Kauravas, the bad guys

year after the transfer of Indonesia’s sovereignty from the Dutch to the Indonesian government, she chose to abandon her career in a Dutch shipping company and marry him, rather than return, with her parents and siblings, to the Netherlands and start there what would probably be a much happier life than she could aspire to as the wife of a native officer in Indonesia

Anyway, in 1970, without Yvonne’s knowledge or consent, he married Kartini,

a nineteenth-year-old Javanese Muslim woman, who later gave him four children, of which I was the first-born This marriage was problematic too As an army officer, Father was subject to the military regulation that a soldier was forbidden to practice polygamy unless he had a written approval from both his first wife and his superior It being impossible for him to get Yvonne’s permission to undertake the polygamy, he decided to marry Kartini secretly The marriage was performed in accordance with Islamic law In order not to break Yvonne’s heart and to keep his marriage to her intact, for about nineteen years my father kept his marriage to Kartini a secret What

my father did was manipulate his culture He broke the mores of the army to which he belonged but he legitimized his second marriage by adhering to Islamic law In 1990

my mother Kartini could no longer bear the burden of the secret She disclosed it The time-bomb exploded It smashed Yvonne’s life-world into smithereens It plunged my father into the dark abyss of unbearable guilt It shattered my mother’s simple dream

to pieces: that of growing old together with her husband In November 1994, my father died of a heart attack

Some months before Father died, I often called on him at the hospital In a time

of troubles and pains like that I guessed he needed me to be by his side We did not do much talking, though I massaged his arms and legs, spoon-fed him, combed his hair, kissed his forehead, and pushed his wheelchair when he needed to go to the bathroom

In those moments it often dawned on me how tragic his life had been Here was a man who had to hide one chapter of his own history, one half of his present life, from the gaze of his loved ones and from that of the public He caused his first family to live a lie because he thought his first wife would not be able to handle the truth Had she known the truth right at the start, so Father thought, she would have sued for a divorce and the family would have broken into pieces At any rate, he felt a gnawing sense of guilt, for he had promised her that he would never ever break her heart My father’s tragedy showed me how complicated a man’s relation could be to his own past It also taught me how a man had had to live a lie so that he could keep his life-world from disintegrating

My troubled relation with the past is by no means a unique experience Imam Muhtarom, for instance, a young fiction writer, a friend of mine from my college years

at Airlangga University in Surabaya, has uncles who, armed with machetes, hacked each other to death during the purge of the communists in Blitar, East Java, in 1965-

66 This is a painful chapter, a still smarting wound, in his family history Once he told

me of how in family talks an allusion to the event was enough to make everybody hurt He was comfortable working with non-autobiographical materials to write his surrealistic stories But it seems to me he had troubles confronting the painful episodes

in his personal history As a result, he was unable to use autobiographical materials to write realistic stories

3 Books and Libraries

From their marriage Sjarief and Kartini had four children: me, Eddy, Tri, and Rosmarin My mother Kartini cared very much about her children’s education She made sure we could get everything we needed: tuition and fees, school uniforms, textbooks, stationery, schoolbags, incidental costs, and so on She always insisted on the importance of reading anything: books, magazines, newspaper, and comic books Thanks to her, I grew to be a bibliophile A huge irony, to be sure, that one’s love for something turns out to be derived from someone else’s insistence It should be noted here that Mother’s insistence played its decisive role only at the start, that is, when I did not know yet what books had in store for me But once I found out that I could

“get high” on trips to text-mediated alternative worlds, nothing could stop me from becoming an incurable book addict

There were times in my childhood and adolescence in Jakarta (1979-1987) when life was so bleak and bitter that it broke my heart, for instance when Mother—who had to raise us all by herself almost all year round while Father was a long way away in Surabaya, living with his first wife and their kids—flew into a rage for things

I did or failed to do, or simply because of her own misery I began to know sorrow In

my sorrow I would pick up a book that could transport me into a world of fairy tales,

of astronomy, or, much later, of Western philosophy: an alternative world, that is,

where I could heal my wounds, regain my sanity, and restore the courage to cope with the real world

When we lived in Malang during the years 1975 to 1977, Mother subscribed to

the Jakarta-based weekly newspaper Buana Minggu (The World on Sunday) I read

avidly almost everything in the newspaper, including the advertisements of fancy restaurants in Jakarta No doubt I barely understood what I read But that was not the point I did not read for understanding; I read for pleasure No one knew the ecstasy I derived from the mere act of staring at those sentences on the newspaper’s page No one knew that such an act could trigger off, in my mind, flashes of bizarre thoughts, feelings, sounds, and images I first discovered this magical trick when at about the age of five I realized that if I stared at a certain object long enough—more often than not it was a broken, discarded toy I found in my neighbor’s dumpster—I would go into a trance When I entered literacy, junk of that sort gave way, gradually but

ultimately, to texts For they could best serve my purpose

Later, when I was seventeen, Mother began to give me pocket money Now I was in a position to build my private collection of books in philosophy So everyday I chose to have lunch at home rather than at the school cafeteria In so doing I could save enough to buy a book by the end of the month I became obsessed with books not only as texts but also as objects I touched my books like a tender lover would touch his beloved I dressed them all with plastic cover Once a month I unloaded them from the bookcase to dust them off When I read my book, I did not have the heart to mark

it Folding, marking, underlining, and highlighting struck me as acts of vandalism I came to treat books as fetishes and libraries as temples

From the age of thirteen to the age of sixteen, I started to explore alternative sources of authority and knowledge, outside the orbit of school curricula, the sermons

of Muslim clerics, Mother’s advice, and the Pancasila I began to be acutely aware of life’s mysteries First, my body changed at a dizzying speed Owing to the rapid maturation of my reproductive organs, I often found myself choking with passion for the opposite sex: a passion I could not explain And there was this weird feeling inside that unless I was desired by the girl I desired, I would remain what T S Eliot calls “a hollow man, a stuffed man.” Unfortunately, I found banal and unpersuasive the

“theories” that the clerics offered in their sermons to explain the human body and its desires Second, my father’s long absences and my mother’s frequent fits of anger led

me to think that mine was an “abnormal” household I had the uncanny feeling that my father was already a ghost before he even died And I could not understand why, despite their love for each other, people often hurt each other It was at the age of thirteen that I began to ponder over what I saw as the bizarre circumstances of my family Ponderings of this sort often led me to melancholia The trouble was, in

Mother’s advice, the Pancasila, and the clerics’ interpretation of Islam I found nothing that could help me understand both my family and my melancholia Thus, I began to feel the need for more powerful systems of thought that could help me deal with the mysteries of life It was after a year of random exploration that I discovered three alternative granaries of power and wisdom: the tiny library of my school (State Junior

High School 40), the three-storied library of the municipality of Central Jakarta, and the small private collection of books owned by my friend’s father who lived on

Bendungan Hilir Street, Central Jakarta

During class breaks my friends had their snacks and drinks in the school cafeteria or flexed their muscles at the basketball court In contrast, I killed the time by reading old books in the tiny, crowded room of the junior high school library One fine afternoon, I hit upon an amazing book on paleontology It dealt with the natural

history of the mighty dinosaurs The stories and pictures of the gigantic reptiles

enthralled me I was struck by the fact that natural history could get me in touch with formidable beasts and an enchanting world from an ancient era on earth that had long gone A sort of textual ecstasy overwhelmed my whole body

In the library of the municipality of Central Jakarta I fell in love with Tintin, a

series of comic books written by the Belgian Georges Remy The pictorial images of various nations, countries, occupations, civilizations, and technology in Tintin’s adventures enabled me to imagine different realities beyond the narrow world that I inhabited as a Jakartan teenager Thanks to Georges Remy’s comic books, I was able

to imagine the Incas, the great pyramids in Egypt, the Tibetans landscape, expeditions

to the moon, the customs of various European nations, and a great range of

occupations: sailor, journalist, detective, guerilla fighter, international bandit, and scientist It was the character of Professor Calculus that, once and for all, inspired me with the icon of a scientist who is a genius in his discipline but an idiot in other areas

of life The ridiculous Professor Calculus kindled in my teenage soul a desire to be a

great scientist one day in the future Back then I had a dream of being a zoologist with

a profound research interest in the life of the rhinoceroses in Ujung Kulon National Park, West Java

It was in the living room of my friend Syahrul Wahab’s house that I first came into contact with great books Displayed in a glass case in the living room, his father’s

fine small collection included complete sets of Encyclopædia Britannica and

Encyclopedia Americana as well as H B Jassin’s Indonesian translation of

Multatuli’s Max Havelaar It was in one of the encyclopedias that I first read about

Napoleon Bonaparte My English was so bad I hardly understood what I read The encyclopedias told stories about things I cared about: the life of the Italian violinist N Paganini, the history of the great Stradivarius violins, and the origin of the universe

according to astronomy I read Max Havelaar, but the novel’s convoluted structure

prevented me from understanding what it was all about So I gave up before I finished

it But I loved one episode in the novel very much: an episode that I took to be a tragic love story between Saidjah and Adinda

Eight years later, in Goenawan Mohamad’s essay in the weekly Tempo, I

bumped into an amazing quotation from, I believe, Max Havelaar’s speech in Lebak:

“Tell me: Are not the peasants poor? Do not the paddies often ripen and grow yellow

to feed those who did not plant them?”13 In defense of the oppressed native masses,

13

The Indonesian version by H B Jassin is a lot more beautiful than my English translation can render: “Katakan kepada saja, bukankah sipetani miskin? Bukankah padi menguning seringkali untuk memberi makan orang jang tidak

menanamnja?” See Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Atau Lelang

Havelaar, a romantic colonial civil servant, in his capacity as the Assistant-Resident of Lebak, West Java, delivered a scathing speech to the native chiefs in his jurisdiction, lecturing them on how to rule wisely and justly In his view, the local aristocrats, who served the colonial government as bureaucrats, had abused their power and exploited the peasantry The first time I read the quoted sentences, I did not understand them I had not yet learned literary language Not until I was a college student that I was able

to appreciate the beauty

When, in my early twenties, I read, for the second time, the poem that Saidjah wrote for his beloved Adinda, I couldn’t help but weep in silence As an illustration, let me quote the poem’s first and last stanza:

I do not know where I shall die

I have seen the great sea on the South Coast, when I was there making salt with my father;

If I die on the sea, and they throw my body into the deeper water, sharks will come They will swim round about my corpse, and ask: “Which of us shall devour this body, descending through the water?”

I shall not hear

[…]

I do not know where I shall die

I have seen many at Badur who had died They were wrapped in a white garment, and were buried in the earth

If I die at Badur, and they bury me outside the village, eastward against the hill, where the grass is high,

Then will Adinda pass that way, and the hem of her sarong will softly sweep the grass in passing…

And I shall hear.14

Kopi Persekutuan Dagang Belanda [Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company], trans H B Jassin (Jakarta: Djambatan, 1972), pp 113-14

14

Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions

of the Dutch Trading Company, trans Roy Edwards (Amherst, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) pp 263-64

Now that I had known the joy of reading texts that had brain, heart, and soul, I could no longer stand the tedium that characterized most of our school textbooks It was as though they had been written by zombies or robots instead of by living human beings

I was sixteen and study at school began to feel like a sort of necessary mental slavery Except for mathematics and English, which happened to be taught by

inspiring teachers, all subjects in junior high school had lost their intellectual appeal The strongest reason why I did not quit school was because I loved my mother I did not want to let her down The success of her children at school was the sign of her accomplishment as a mother at home This I had understood since I was ten She was a true believer in the vision that modern secular education is an indispensable means for poor but talented individuals to achieve upward social mobility “What school does,”

she argued, “is to make it possible for you to grow up to be someone (supaya kamu jadi orang) Don’t end up like me I didn’t even finish primary school And don’t be

like your illiterate grandpa, toiling all his life as a servant and a seasonal farm

worker.” I did share my mother’s belief that with good schooling I would not have to grow up to be an industrial coolie in the future

I was also well aware that I loved good grades Teachers always looked with approval on students with good grades So I remained a hard-working student: I wrote copious notes, did all the homework assignments, and read all the textbooks School was still tolerable also because it served me a number of latent functions It was the special space where I could see my best friends every day to share thoughts and

feelings, joys and sorrows, silly hopes and crazy fears It was the perfect setting where

a good girl appeared whom I could admire from afar It was the special institution where I met one or two good teachers whose loving kindness brought out what was good in the souls of the troubled teenagers that we were Consider, for example, Pak Ali (Mr Ali) We loved and respected this skinny, sad-looking, and exhausted sports teacher, not because he was a genius in sports science, but because when he taught, he taught with all his heart I remember how I had to hold back my tears one day in the classroom as he pointed out that despite their love for their children parents were not always good at expressing it “Life is often so brutal,” he said “It hardens your Mom’s and Dad’s hearts So rather than hug and kiss you or just be there for you, they ignore you, yell at you, or beat you This is their tragedy One day when you grow up and have a family of your own, you will understand Then you will realize how much your parents have silently loved you all along Then you will want to love them back But you can’t Because then you will have to take care of your own job, your own spouse,

your own kids, your own life This—this will be your tragedy.”

4 School Books versus “Cool” Books

As a boy I was a reader with catholic tastes and interests I even read trash I remember how Mother used to look at me with disgust every time she caught me in the act of reading those damp, dirty, stinking newspaper scraps that the grocers used to wrap the items she bought from their shops in the market: things like red peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, tofu, anchovy, and salted tuna “As if I had never bought you a

brand new newspaper!” she would say She did not know that news of the world took

on magical qualities once the medium that carried it had turned into garbage In conscious manner, today’s newspapers supply you with bits of news as important as a cup of coffee and a plate of fried rice that constitute your breakfast Yet it is the old newspapers—reduced to rubbish or reused as grocery-wrapping material or recycled into archives—that would reveal to you the world’s secret history That is, if you approach the rubbish with the attitude of a child, an oracle, a poet, or a historian

self-Texts of all kinds were the opium of my childhood During my adolescence they took on more functions: as fetishes, to be sure, but also as “scriptures.” When I was sixteen, my classmate Oktaviansyah—an excellent guitar player with whom I happened to share the bench and the desk in the third grade of junior high school—once made a revealing remark: “Man! Your life is haunted by books.” He intended the remark as a reproach but I took it as a compliment He observed that every time I needed to defend my standpoint in our talks I would refer to books I had read And they were never those textbooks that we students had to use in classroom study One

of the books that I liked to cite in my chit-chats with friends was Mahbub Djunaidi’s

often amusing Indonesian translation of Michael H Hart’s The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History I first read it in 1984 or 1985 I borrowed it from

Andika Putranto, my classmate in the first grade of junior high school At the time, due to my naivety as a thirteen-year-old boy, my sloppy reading of the book led me to think that Hitler was a cool guy: a mediocre postcard painter who turned into a great dictator At twenty, however, I read Marianne Katoppo’s Indonesian translation of

Elie Wiesel’s The Night and understood for the first time the meaning of the Holocaust

and the magnitude of Hitler’s wickedness in World War II

Little by little I began to classify what I read into two categories: cool books and school books Increasingly I felt that in terms of prestige, authority, beauty of the prose, and the power of engaging the reader, those school books could not match the

“cool” books that I read beyond the confines of the curriculum, such as encyclopedias,

comic books, Indonesian translation of Time Life series on the natural sciences, and the monthly pocket magazine Intisari.15 The latter, modeled on The Reader’s Digest,

often featured the biologist Slamet Soeseno’s witty, brilliant essays on the life of animals His fresh sense of humor was already evident in the very titles that he chose for his essays: “Sex Scandal among Eels” or “Goldfish as Stargazers.”

In addition, Oktaviansyah also observed how cool books had shaped the way I saw the world For instance, I abandoned the Koranic theory of the origin of the world and embraced the big bang theory that I had read in a book on astronomy And a certain book, whose title I have now forgotten, had converted me to the bizarre idea that true love did not involve sex Soon after, it dawned on me that the girl I had a crush on was not an ordinary girl She was, I thought, the incarnation of the Sublime, which, in my view, was even greater than the Holy When my close friends asked me what the Sublime was, I said, “No one can describe it But perhaps listening to a great

cellist play Saint-Saens’ The Swan would give you some idea.” Too much reading,

they thought, had driven me insane

15

It should be noted that many of these texts had not been available in the Old Order I am grateful for Dr William H Frederick for calling my attention to this fact

Life in junior high school was tough There was this struggle for peer

recognition Unless I could prove that I was excellent at something, I would not truly exist in the eyes of my peer group at school I would be a socially invisible boy—a ghost The struggle for recognition took place in a small number of peer-recognized arenas such as sports, intellect, bravado, and physical attractiveness I was a flop in sports Every time there was a practical examination, say, in volleyball, I became everybody’s laughing stock because I could not even serve a ball I was not born with good looks to be a school idol Nor did I have enough guts, charisma, and brutality to

be a school bully The only remaining field where I could hope to win peer recognition was scholastic achievement That is to say, I had to be one of the school’s

distinguished eggheads With this goal in mind, I worked hard I hit the books, the school textbooks, because reading them “religiously,” memorizing their contents, was instrumental in getting excellent grades Blind diligence paid off: In the third grade of junior high school I managed to rank second in the state final examination, above all other students in my school I did this for two purposes: to win peer recognition and to impress a girl But my exploit was fruitless It turned out that, like most girls, she was not very fond of eggheads In girls’ view at the time, eggheads were very much like extraterrestrial beings I learned a lot from my fiasco Thus in senior high school I adopted quite a different strategy I abandoned school textbooks My grades dropped significantly but as long as they were not below school average I did not care I started

to take on a “macho” style of behavior: street fights against students of other schools;

smoking a clove cigarette in public, especially in front of girls; and drinking cheap, stomach-churning liquor with friends

In senior high school, the more I read “cool” books, the less I cared about school books I relied on the former for insights into life’s mysteries and problems The latter were no more than necessary tools for me to ensure my survival in quizzes and exams In 1987 I started to read serious books on psychology, philosophy, and

literature These included Kees Bertens’ Indonesian translation of Sigmund Freud’s Über Psychanalyse: Fünf Vorlesungen (On Psychoanalysis: Five Lectures), Fuad Hassan’s Berkenalan dengan Eksistensialisme (Getting Acquainted with

Existentialism), and Iwan Simatupang’s novel Ziarah (Pilgrimage) Reading those

books forever changed the way I saw the world So when I was sixteen, my world was not Teacher-Knows-Best anymore I ceased to respect the authority of those who did not write intelligently and beautifully I still respected my schoolteachers as persons as long as they showed wisdom in the way they handled youngsters If they didn’t, I saw them merely as nasty adults whom I had to put up with during my years in an

institution that people called “senior high school” but that I experienced, increasingly,

as a sort of prison

I could not integrate the stuff I received at school with the stuff I learned in my independent exploration I could not juxtapose the stupid school stuff and the brilliant non-school stuff I did not know the scholarly reputation of the authors who wrote the

Sejarah Nasional All I knew was that it presented facts without integrating them in an

intriguing interpretation And the prose was awful I could not help but compare the

authors of this textbook with, for instance, those dead great writers to whose

masterpieces the Surabaya Goethe-Institut library had exposed me: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hermann Hesse The failure on my part to reconcile school learning with independent intellectual adventure led to a state of chronic boredom, which often turned into juvenile resentment against the existing school system

5 Documents and History

“The historian works with documents,” write Charles Langlois and Charles

Seignobos in their famous Introduction to the Study of History Documents are so

central to historiography that they declare, “[T]here is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history.”16 It was my mother, though, not Langlois and Seignobos, who was the first to introduce me to the idea of documents and their importance for the preservation of memory I was five and we lived in Prigen, Pasuruan, East Java My father did not stay with us because he was stationed in Malang Once a week he came

to visit us in Prigen Most of the time, only the three of us were at home: Mother, Eddy and I One afternoon, Mother had to go shopping to the local market She locked the door and asked me to watch over Eddy while she was away Mother provided us with two little boxes of black-and-white photographs of our family to kill the time We played with the pictures I had not yet identified with my own images that I saw in the photographs It occurred to me that the photographs were objects that were good to play with rather than good to contemplate I got hold of a pair of scissors I cut up all

16

Ch V Langlois and Ch Seignobos Introduction to the Study of History,

trans G G Berry (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), p 17

the photographs to pieces It was fun Eddy followed suit When Mother got home and found out what had happened, she was angry She scolded us I came to learn that photographs are objects to be treasured Later on, Mother began to develop our family albums From time to time, she would ask her children to have a look at the albums She would say, “Look! This was you as a baby Look! This was me when I was a young girl, not yet married to your father.” I learned to take pleasure in contemplating the images of the past But it was not until my adolescent years that I came to think of photographs as “documents.”

The word “history” first appeared in my life when I was in primary school In the fourth grade, schoolchildren began to receive instructions in the “social sciences.” These were actually an introduction to the concept of “society.” The subjects covered included the market, system of government, religious and ethnic diversity of the Indonesian nation, bits of national history, stages in Indonesia’s economic

development plan, and the natural resources of Indonesia Rote learning was

emphasized I remember that in the fifth grade we schoolchildren were assigned to

read a book entitled A Collection of General Knowledge, which contained a wide

variety of disjointed information Those students who loved memorizing raw facts received good grades Teachers considered them to be smart Those who hated rote learning got bad grades And people thought they were dumb In retrospect, I think the way I learned at school conditioned me to look at the world as a huge mass of

unrelated things The more I progressed in this fragmentary learning, the harder it got for me to think synthetically It was not until I fell madly in love that I learned