When Brigitta Isabella wrote her piece in May 2016, I was in the middle of preparing for my travel to Manchester, UK, to study international development. I, back then, had no serious interest in history as a question because I was still convinced I would do work on policy analysis and such and such.

“1955, 1961, 1964, 1965, 1970, 1973, 1976, 1979, 1983, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2015, . . .” The title of her piece is intriguing. Thoughtful, although remains chronological. If readers are familiar with those years, they instantly know what she would talk about. For others, those years are daring. Gita’s early paragraph engages with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. That book is controversial, and Fukuyama is accused of committing a centrist (if not full-blown right-wing) position, endorsing the winner of the Cold War: Western neo-liberalism. But Gita has agenda. Fukuyama’s long, outdated notion is an entry to raise her inquiry about history. Gita’s question, “Yet, has History really ended?” is a cliche response to Fukuyama’s proposal, but her later exegesis of Derrida’s framework of the spectral enriches her attempt to provide an answer. She went back to the “years where the idea of future existed”: to the 1955 Bandung Conference, and the later years, and the later years, until the sixty years later, when the protest against the 6oth Bandung anniversary took place. Bandung is not a spirit (of the conference) but a ghost that haunts the present and exorcises it “opening up the specter of possibilities.” Not only does Gita offer a framework, but she also offers a way (read: method) to evoke this “speculation [that] necessitates imagination” by “a rigorous factual historical research” and “rigorous imagination.” The article ends with a series of what-ifs questions, and an invitation to “think of the lost future and importantly, of what we want for the future.”

I sit with this short piece for six years. Detouring. Turning. Changing my course of life. Pursuing history for my research. Altering my inquiries. Making friends. Falling in love. Frustrating with white institutions. Writing about rice. Writing about home life. Talking to Gita (not about that piece but other stuff lmao). Talking to other historians. Feeling strange. Feeling home. Coming out (partially). Recovering from covid. Screaming my lungs out. Tinkering with form, with style, with the sounds of my words. Can we write history in the form of poetry? Thinking about attending and abandoning. Then, April 2022.

Gita’s new article about the politics of time was just released, and I’m excited. The title now is more “academic”: Rewriting Solidarities in Juxtaposition. In my view, it’s a longer, revised version of her previous piece, in which her diligence and patience in working out with theory and different ways of approaching modern and contemporary history are materialized through her readings of Sugiarti Siswadi’s poem, “To Afro-Asian Friends” (1961) and Mega Vristian’s “After the Hurricane Embraced Poetry” (2009). Gita’s previous call for rigorous historical research and rigorous imagination is now grounded in postcolonial poetics, in which she juxtaposes Bandung with migrant workers’ struggles to evoke “refreshed meanings of Bandung, and for adding temporal depth to the present Third World decolonizing struggles.” Here, Gita conceptualizes postcolonial politics of time she calls “Bandung chronopolitics” that invokes “entanglements of past and present transnational struggles to propose the future otherwise.”

As I read Gita’s words, one by one, bit by bit, I constantly asked what “Bandung chronopolitics” here entails? In my reading, I feel like Gita’s exploration of reading back-and-forth is intriguing, but I also wonder whether her analytical result serves her method proposal. Her demonstration of the “entanglements” of the past, present, and future leaves out what I think is a core tension in chronopolitics: the sense and embodying position of being out of and in time. For instance, Gita has offered important clues in the way she writes her sections: “Flowers bloomed, flowers withered. Flowers withered, flowers bloomed” and “Family gathered, family scattered; family scattered, family gathered.” Both section titles have a similar reversal structure with different execution of capital letters and punctuations. However, in her paragraphs, Gita leaves her clues unexplained to insist chronopolitics as the connection of different times rather than the perpetual struggles of dealing with normative temporality.

In discussing Mega’s imagery of a disastrous hurricane, Gita only points out its metaphorical quality in depicting migrant workers’ situation and slightly undermines Mega’s repetition of the hurricane tempo and direction: “the whirling wind,” “the wind carried away butterflies and birds,” “swung by the wind, left to right,” “a big support behind the wind also carried away the shawl.” The velocity of the capitalistic mode of production, especially the quick pace of discarding migrant workers, is one key to Mega’s concern. Her articulation of the labor disposal time that was imposed on her body like a hurricane is her beginning to de-link the process of dehumanization she experiences. Meanwhile, in Sugiarti’s poem, the labor time of providing care and hospitality appears as a sentimental narrative of making kin. The different narratives of labor time put the two narrators of Mega’s and Sugiarti’s poems rather differently: the “I” in Mega’s poem is running out of time as she is pressured to reject oppression, and the “we” in Sugiarti is navigating normative time so they can serve the sweet drinks and love. In sum, while Gita offers a nice compare-and-contrast analysis of the two poems, her analysis misses a chance to ground the tension of being out of and in time as a tactic to imagine the future otherwise.

Another (perhaps more) critical point relates to how the sense of time appears in Gita’s article. Time of/for solidarity. Time of struggles. Time of sisterhood. All of these appear in the article almost as a synergy rather than dissonance. It intrigues me to ask a question: When does the time of solidarity? (The question of when to an article that offers a time-travel juxtaposition looks like an oxymoron lmao). What I mean by when is not about finding origins or end, but about tuning different moments of intensity and paucity, of bursting, of hiding, of blowing, of doing, grinding, gathering that allow solidarity to be imagined and enacted. When do they sit around the table? When does that fragrance of friendship bloom? When do they serve sweet drinks and sweet love? When does the mother forget to pick up her laundry? When does she remember? When does a mother’s longing?

Navigating these various whens, as Mega gestures, is like standing in the middle of a hurricane but you can see clearly what falls, what is being thrown away, and what remains. The past, present, and future do not connect but appear as un/recognized fragments that require certain bodies to move around in multi-directions, including conforming, perpetuating, or rejecting normativity. Gita’s method of nonsynchronous juxtaposition is brilliant and it invites more elaboration so we can explain different forms of chronopolitics that not only emphasize connection but are also more attuned to the negative detachment within and resulting from such connection. This exploration is not to deny the necessity of connection in transnational solidarity projects, but a cautious call to think of the multimodal values made by such labor of connection.

Gita’s continuing work on the politics and poetics of history makes me think of the mode of writing “entanglements” and what “connections” can make and cannot make. My engagement with Gita’s inquiry for a half-decade happened simultaneously with all life experiences that shape my understanding of history and what kind of history I want to write. It is far from coherence, and yet I try. In the end, I allow time to forge my feeling of history. Gita, thank you.