The Dance That Makes You Vanish

Rachmi Diyah Larasati

Published by University of Minnesota Press

Larasati, Rachmi Diyah.

The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia.
University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/24889.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/24889
 i n t roduc t ion
Dancing on the Mass Grave

Many women gather in the yard in front of my house each evening

while children play and practice certain dance.1 Every day they in-
habit a kind of “no man’s land.” Except there is a man who hides
his gun in his bedroom, who comes and goes to the Air Force base
surrounded by sugar cane, in East Java. His body has the wounds
of war, seven in total. Holes and strange marks cover his skin. His
name is Mr. Soek. Those holes are deep, cutting his flesh and mark-
ing his skin weirdly because of their itchiness. My finger often wants
to caress those holes, and I once was able to enter one of them to
touch the scarred tissue that had replaced the skin at the bullet’s
entry point. I often ask him about the cause of those injuries. He
forbids me to keep looking at the scars, and furthermore to keep
asking him what was the cause of those injuries. Many people told
me that he is sakti, possessing divine power, because he is still alive
although many bullets entered him. For me he was sakti also, not
because of his wounded body, but because of his signature on a piece
of paper, which enabled me to be admitted to a school. Because of
Mr. Soek, I could go to school, although I had to leave my childhood
friends behind. They did not get the signature because many of their
parents were missing and they failed to submit proper letters from
the government about their “clean identity.”2 Mr. Soek was like a
magician. When I needed a new school, his name suddenly became
the name of my father, and he came to school wearing his Air Force

xiii
xiv Introduction

uniform and introduced himself as my parent. He was the only man

in the house where I stayed.3 One day he told me that his first and
second wounds were from the fight for independence; the rest were
from the civil war in Madiun. He explained that he was not sure
who shot him. In one of his missions he was facing many women in
Javanese sarongs, running around. It was confusing for him. He didn’t
know if they were a rebel group or just innocent civilians. He made
the decision not to shoot them, but suddenly from behind there was
gunfire and many bullets flew at him. He did not have a chance to
see where those bullets came from. He was very young and in the
middle of a teak forest in Madiun, East Java, in 1948.
I was never able to retrieve his memory and his unspoken wit-
ness in detail, including whether he killed the people who resided in
the teak forest, who, to my knowledge, were mostly farmers. Per-
haps before I was old enough to be trusted with such information, a
loaded truck of Army men came to the neighborhood and found me
on the street playing with neighbors, singing and dancing in a circle,
pretending to be a dance teacher. The leader of the Army asked if
we, the children who were playing on the street, knew where Mr.
Soek’s house was. All the children were pointing at me. I walked
slowly in front of them, bringing the soldiers to my home. Mr. Soek
was in the corner of the house, standing up straight like in the
photographs of Air Force training that I often saw in magazines,
yet his body was shaking. A month after that, I realized Mr. Soek
did not wear his uniform anymore; he had been forced to resign his
position because the office discovered his connection to the family of
the dancer in our house, and that was forbidden. He was married
(illegally) to a female dancer, who was accused of being a former
Gerwani member. Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia) was a
women’s movement during the time of Sukarno, the first president
of Indonesia. Although the group was legal under Sukarno, later,
during the rule of Suharto (the second president), it was blamed for
allegedly sympathizing with the communists and was banned and
persecuted. During and after the time when Suharto came to power,
many members of Gerwani simply disappeared.4
Membership in Gerwani became a monster of motherhood in my
house. For me, “Gerwani women” were my aunties, dance teachers,
 Introduction xv

neighbors, and the parents of many of my friends. Yet for Mr. Soek,
my aunt, the woman he loved, and whose family he had knowingly
protected with the strength of his name, position, and “clean” status,
had caused his uniform and good standing, in effect his entire life, to
be suddenly and violently revoked. For the remaining fifteen years
before he died, I felt he was never quite himself again.
At the house of the head of the village a few years after Mr.
Soek’s arrest, I saw a program on television about “Gerwani women.”
Confronted with the gap between enforced state discourse and the
familiarity of my own family, the words themselves began to sound
strange: ominous, but not in the direct, literal sense promoted by
the government. Instead they formed an uneasy, ill- defined space
around my memories of women, my women, and their dancing. The
knowledge of our own families was surrounded by the reconstructed
unfamiliarity of violence that sought to re- narrativize our own expe-
rience. Unable to avoid it, in spite of my fear I began quietly map-
ping each encounter with the narratives of Gerwani and of women,
moving, discussing, thinking, or “plotting.” We danced and grew
up with the unspoken struggle of memory ever present in our own
households.

In some sense, this book is a response to the experiences of my

childhood and of my later life as a performer and young scholar, as
infused with my inheritance of both a powerful dance practice and a
well-hidden yet horrifying political identity. As I attempt to theorize
my own history and that of the millions of others who were targeted
and persecuted or killed by the “New Order” regime, the state’s
narrative use of the female dancing body as a symbol of great power,
albeit often an “evil” power, becomes a point of departure to discuss
the theorization of bodily mimesis in relation to historical context, as
discussed by Edward Said in The World, the Text, and the Critic.5
Following Said, in my book, the creation of “text” refers to ex-
pression through writing, bodily representation, or other media as
a methodologically conscious reconstruction of identity. Here it is
used as an attempt to interrogate the official unquestionable-ness of a
ubiquitous, hegemonic, and mythical text: Indonesian national reality
as produced by the military and state in collusion with the forces that
xvi Introduction

determine global political, economic, and artistic alliances. Yet my

writing is in many ways a paradox, indebted to and enabled by the very
texts and forces it confronts with all the strength I can muster. In this
context, I engage with the process of subject formation, the creation
of “self ” that, under pressure from the external forces of myth, is af-
fected by dominant narratives that vie to replace embodied memory,
even, and particularly, within the private space of family and house-
hold. The concept of myth, however, which is often understood to
be the source of “primitive” ritualistic behavior in groups of humans
outside of our own, is in this context critically expanded. Here, myth
also follows the modern practice of ritualistic violence and functions
to categorize certain unwanted bodies from within our own ranks
as Other, as belonging to a group whose alleged actions threaten the
very foundations of what we must think of as “ours.”
Mimesis in this context is a creation of text that simultane-
ously departs from and resembles the particularities of Indonesian
history, the weaving of a complex fabric of myth and experience.
The resulting cloth appears as a continuous and unedited whole, yet
is riddled with gaps through which millions of actual bodies have
both physically vanished and been mythologically expelled. These
real, vanished bodies are then replaced with simulacra that cover
the holes left behind; in my writing, I use the word replica to make
this connection. Replication occurs as new, historically, politically
“clean” dancers are employed to absorb and embody the practices of
artists targeted by the state, recreating the image of corporeality in
the traditions of those who no longer officially exist. The vanished
dancers and their families, and those women put in prison or left at
home but stripped of their practice, serve as the point of departure for
my choreography of theory in this manuscript. While ethnographic
research and oral history are tools I use to recapture memories and
interpretations of those events, the narratives and embodied experi-
ences I gather surround me, intertwining with the texts, and the
corporeality of oppression that I must revisit. I combine my memory,
corporeal experience, and interpretations to craft my own historical
representation, in the form of a book, attempting a structural resis-
tance through the precise mapping of forced political relocations and
dislocations enacted by the New Order and simultaneously hidden
 Introduction xvii

within the discourse of a “natural” reaction to a universalized frame-

work of good and evil.
This book is also based on my experiences growing up and
making my way through the national educational system during the
Suharto era. In the classroom, I learned that Suharto, the second
president of Indonesia, was a national hero. At school, I was repeat-
edly taught that on many different occasions, such as in 1965 and
during the Madiun clash, the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai
Komunis Indonesia or PKI) was responsible for the murder of Army
generals and high-ranking officers. The PKI, then, was to be seen as
a group that had betrayed the nation’s strength and thus constituted
a threat to our national unity and security. Therefore, every citizen
had an obligation to involve himself or herself in opposing commu-
nism and in taking certain precautions against the perceived threat
of its continued spread.
My schooling, however, never enabled me to learn the fate or
whereabouts of my neighbor’s mother, or my dance teachers, my
grandfather, or all of the men and women by whom I had been sur-
rounded who disappeared one by one and never returned. Some of
the women who were left always sat in the front yard and never men-
tioned anything related to these disappearances. Every two weeks
most women went to the military district office, leaving early in
the morning and coming back after dark. I did not understand what
they were doing and why they always went there, except that they
all seemed very nervous and tried to put their corsets on very tightly,
just like when my friends and I put on our costumes before dancing
Gandrung and Tari Bondan, two dances in the Javanese style practiced
by women. Although my teacher always told me that each dance
consisted of different values and class markers, I danced them both
enthusiastically.

Retracing First Performances:

the Genealogy of Reappearances and Erasure
It was the middle of the 1970s, the day of my first performance, my
feet stepping on the pot made of clay and lightly dancing above it, my
right hand holding an umbrella. A teacher had told me that I should
xviii Introduction

imagine “travel” and “optimism,” but in an elegant way, when per-

forming those movements. Although too young to understand what
she meant, I would soon be traveling to different regions across the
country, and a few short years after that I would begin to perform
abroad. Slowly, as I became more practiced in the forms required
for official dancers, I began to forget about the people I knew who
had disappeared. I was busy practicing and rehearsing for my many
performances in villages, for television or government offices on
Independence Day, and always on October 1, when the Army cele-
brates Kesaktian Pancasila. This day, commemorating the sacred
power of Pancasila (the five principles of Indonesian state ideology
endlessly drummed into the minds of the citizenry by every teacher
and government officer) was the day in 1965 when attacks, allegedly
by Communist Party members, were dispelled by both troops and
civilians allied with then-general Suharto. Yet of course the com-
memoration, based around the events of a single day, does not re-
mind us of the hundreds of thousands of accused “communists” who
lost their lives at the hands of the military shortly afterward. In con-
nection with the many artists and dancers who were targeted and
disappeared during and after these attacks, I take the state’s imagina-
tive transformation of a day, September 30, into the ultimate national
“zero hour”— during which our country was said to be saved from
destruction and born anew— as a point of departure for my argument
on amnesia and remembering.
As an important condition of possibility for such an argument,
and to some extent for this entire book, I reflect further on my in-
clusion in the “clean” household of an Air Force family. This move,
while itself traumatic, finally enabled me to reconfigure my alien-
ation from the social and political mainstream. This thorny gift of
acceptability in the eyes of the state, for which a number of grave
sacrifices were made, has ultimately provided me with greater access
to the dis-familiarity and disconnects within my own memories, and
by historical/theoretical extension, those of the many, many others
less “lucky” than myself.
From within the relative safety and obscurity of my grandmother’s
yard, where I learned to dance, my life began to change quickly and
permanently. I rarely looked back, as new alliances were formed and
 Introduction xix

old ones erased and forgotten. After performing nationally for a few
years as a teenager, one day I was told to undergo a skrening (screen-
ing), after which I received a kind of agreement letter to become a
government employee of Indonesia. During the skrening I was asked
to make a diagram of my family tree, to see if there were any sort of
connections to the Communist Party in my family; even a distant
relative known to have been in an “affiliated” organization would
have disqualified, and probably blacklisted me, or far worse. This
was my final test, and with the sakti-ness of Mr. Soek’s signature, my
“dirty” genealogy was officially made invisible, obscuring my con-
nection to a disappeared grandfather and many other “subversive”
relatives. Soon afterward, I was inducted as a member of the civil ser-
vice and began teaching at the Indonesian state Institute of the Arts
(ISI), in Yogyakarta, where President Suharto, the person mainly
responsible for the killings in 1965 and the “antisubversive” policies
that followed, visited in 1984 for the opening ceremony. By that time
I had become a member of the Indonesian Cultural Mission, an of-
ficial, state-sanctioned dance troupe whose function was to promote
Indonesia’s national identity abroad. Thus, drawing on my experi-
ence as a dancer, civil servant, and national cultural representative,
and my transformation from a so- called unruly, unwanted body, I
look at the study of travel and mobility, of “feminist” resistance and
co-optation from a dislocated perspective that might approximate
that of Said’s worldly exile.
During one such cultural mission in 1994, in the corner of a
library in Europe, I found a picture from 1973 of dancers who were
identified as Indonesian “political prisoners.” Recognizing the style
and location as close to home, I moved closer, thinking I might pick
out some familiar faces; instead, I found something that made me
begin to question aspects of my education, particularly much of the
history I had learned in school along with my fellow Indonesian
citizens over the past few decades. Three years later, in 1997, while
studying with a former staff member of the Amnesty London head-
quarters at UCLA, I was suddenly struck by an awful realization, as I
was flooded again with the memories of my neighbors, many of them
dancers like myself and my family, who had disappeared and never
returned. Thousands of miles from home in an English- speaking
xx Introduction

classroom, my sense of historical identification was radically re-

oriented, as I read that in 1965, more than a million Indonesians
were killed and thousands more imprisoned without trial on iso-
lated islands. When I returned to Indonesia in 1998, with much of
the “common sense” I had developed as a child and young woman
altered or lost, I began to ask questions. Many people were shocked
that I would even speak of such matters, others told their stories and
versions of events excitedly, and others, still, simply refused to re-
spond or react in any way at all.
Later that year, driven by these questions and seduced by the
opportunity to obtain an international degree, I accepted an invita-
tion to go back to UCLA as a master’s candidate in world arts and
cultures. However, even there I found it difficult to free myself from
the constraints of being known as a dancer, and therefore asso-
ciated with the context of official Indonesian culture missions and
expected to report on issues of traditional art, which are assumed
by many Western scholars to be completely unrelated to politics.
(For me, such intellectual positions appear eerily similar to those of
the Indonesian state itself.) Furthermore, in the year 2000 I stood
trial in Yogyakarta, accused of “victimizing” my then-husband by
leaving him behind at home during my schooling abroad, which
was considered shocking and inappropriate behavior, especially for
a female dancer and civil servant. As a result, the process of gaining
a Western education became a geopolitical negotiation of the loca-
tion of rights: I gained crucial access to a new perspective on my
nation’s history,6 yet I lost my rights to my own house and with it
many highly personal belongings associated with my history, includ-
ing several of Mr. Soek’s letters to me while I was completing my
undergraduate education.
Drawing on this experience, I discuss the interconnectedness of
state patriarchy, citizenship, and mobility in the context of the (inter)
nationalized female dancing body. Must the fleeting promise of femi-
nist resistance contained within global mobility be counterbalanced
by slippage and loss of access within the space of the nation? Even
as I move on and off far-flung performance spaces and the Western
academic stage, I am continually reminded that I am expected to re-
turn “home,” that I am still “working” for the government (despite
 Introduction xxi

my long absence, my attempts to step down from my position as an

Indonesian civil servant have been held up at various levels of local
and national bureaucracy for more than a decade), and that I must
reiterate and reproduce Indonesian culture and obey the require-
ments of the state as I promised. To this end, I am also well educated:
in order to become a civil servant and traveling state performer, I
was required to attend several month-long courses entitled Penataran
P4 or “Upgrading Course on the Directives for the Realization and
Implementation of Pancasila.” 7
This is, however, also “useful” for the crucial project of histori-
cal reflection in the context of this book. From the deeply ingrained
experience of learning at the hands of the government, I depart on
an analysis of the Indonesian state’s emphasis on certain kinds of in-
doctrination. Further, I examine the ways in which culture, art, and
performance are made ideologically inseparable from national his-
tory and the politics of memory, the reconstruction of which serves
to erase the extreme violence and chaos on which Suharto’s New
Order state itself was founded. Thus, I trace the history of the female
dancing body that vanishes and is then “replaced,” its experience
and the fact of its disappearance erased from view by new, highly
indoctrinated, strictly trained female bodies—not unlike the ideal-
ized Indonesian citizen that lives within myself. The art forms once
practiced by the vanished dancers, after being reclaimed and ideo-
logically retooled by the state, are considered sufficiently cleansed
of the “subversive” aura of those who once mastered and embodied
them, and, as such, safe to be included as part of the official concept
of national tradition.

a Note on the Ethics of categorization and Publication

As I began this research and book project, I interviewed people who
could be considered victims of recent Indonesian history, as well as
those often thought of as perpetrators (both terms are problematic
and I apply them sparingly) of the violence in 1965 and the years that
followed. In Indonesia, these two categorizations have very differ-
ent implications and interpretations, depending on where you stand
in relation to the events of this period. In the course of my work, I
xxii Introduction

documented people’s stories through photographs, as well as occa-

sionally with video and audio recordings. The ethnographic notes in
this manuscript mostly reflect my childhood memories and familiar-
ity with the oral histories of the women surrounding me as well as
the violence perpetrated against them, including rape, imprisonment,
and murder. Because of the continuing political sensitivity of infor-
mation related to 1965 and the treatment of suspected communists,
the stories and impressions I gathered have become elements of an
ongoing process of negotiation. At stake are difficult decisions as to
which parts of this long journey it is possible to mention specifically
or describe in detail in order to support my arguments in this book
while minimizing the potential to cause harm or put others at risk.
This research also looks at written reports, magazine articles,
and newsletters by Human Rights Watch, documents prepared by
Amnesty International, Komnas Perempuan (National Commission
on Violence Against Women), and certain nongovernmental orga-
nization (NGO) reports. Because of the continuing sensitivity of the
issues dealt with in this book, all people involved or who have been
interviewed for this text remain anonymous, except those who spe-
cifically wished to speak out regarding the Suharto regime and asked
that their names be included. To respect them, I follow each person’s
individual requests. As a consequence, there are some inconsisten-
cies in my approach, especially regarding interviews with specific
individuals.