for they who write history 
for they who make history 
for all of us,
who are and will be history

memory

I sat with Mbak Anna. It was in Yogya, last year. I visited some good people there as I tried to find a place of collaboration where I can share my question. I always respect her; she’s the one who firstly understood my discomfort in a room of discussion when someone punched me down. She stood up for me in her subtle yet efficient manner. Until now, I’m still touched by her small gesture. I’m not a woman, and she gave me space to breathe. In the middle of our question, she asked: “Nik, kita masih butuh nggak sih sejarah perempuan?” Her question startled me. I know how passionate she is with this question of political economy and working-class women and their places in history. I know sejarah perempuan matters to her. She writes an important book on the sexual politics of fascism in Indonesia: comparative and daring. But she still asked that question after listening, affirming, and inquiring about my criticism about the genre of sejarah perempuan.

I make an argument: sejarah perempuan is an obsolete framework of genre because it perpetuates gender binary and heteronormativity. Indonesian writers of this genre, in my opinion, have not yet (or do not want to) escape from the fixed notion of “womanhood”: women always be women, never become, not until they encounter trans bodies using them as a token. What a problematic approach. Try to change the genre category into sejarah seks dan seksualitas, consider asexuality as a spectrum, think about bodies and disabilities, this is not about gender nor gendering. Until that happens, women’s history would only repeat and reproduce gender binary as it cannot be written as a history of relations. I propose a history of women without womanhood. (And I sit with this idea with queer history too; that queering history is not only to identify and locate visible bodies of queers in time and place but also to understand their ontological positionings and historical re/orientations.)

I then answered her question: “Sejarah perempuan tetap perlu, Mbak, sampai kita ga butuh lagi.” What I want to abolish is the persisting compulsion of repeating normativity, not people’s work in finding historical truth and dismantling patriarchy. My vision is to ground women and their stories as an existential history, not theology nor cult of femininity. But we need to find more ways to deal with perpetual disappointments, not clinging to the cruel optimism that reproduce normative life, but cruising utopia and at the same time embracing no future. We need confronting paradoxes and ambivalences for the project of liberation. Sejarah perempuan needs to start shaking off their assumptions of keperempuanan, that even for postcolonial cis-women, the question of “what does it like to be and become female” in a racist capitalist world requires works of reckoning; recognizing matters and it is never enough. Aren’t perempuan also subjects of overlapping sociological and historical arrangements?

Mbak Anna held thought. I picked up my glass of tea only to sip nothing. Her works will continue. Her works have not done yet.

filling hours

I contacted Sony Karsono, congratulating him on the deserving awards he receives for the publication of his short story collection. also, fan-boying on how Happy I am that his stories find new readers. I kept thinking about his journey as literary writer and historian–a literary writer first, a scholarly historian later. I declared my dream to him when he asked what I want to do after graduate school: pengen jadi kritikus, mas. It’s a rather tricky label though, even for me. I do not even write critic pieces as much as I want to (or need to do). Here’s a clumsy bullshit: I once tried writing a piece of fiction, and it only brought self-loathing. What a bad fiction writer I am lmao sadar diri hurts. I’m bad at making fiction, I’m good at seeing and judging them. I then slowly make peace with the fact that I’m better with my nonfiction: my book reviews, essays, exam papers (lmao), research notes, annotations, twitter bacot threads or igstory notes–and tbh I like them more. This is how in the past few months I keep reminding myself of what I really like from Mas Sony’s dissertation. That chapter on Motinggo Busye still makes me think; it’s one hell of a great literary criticism. It works so well that the first time I read it I was like “oh I have to learn from him.” And I did, I am, and will do.

So what intellectual historians/literary critics do?

First, they tap into the question of ideas and their structures: how and why ideas emerged, how they were circulated, modified, appropriated, changed, etc etc. The key here is to get the right category of analysis and ask questions about the formation of such a category. Mas Sony uses a socio-biographical method to answer a question on how ideas of modernity and senses of moving toward progress were shared among the urban class groups. This method weaves the understudied intellectuals’ life stories and social networks with their texts and/or institutional projects. I am not as diligent as Mas Sony or my advisor, Haydon Cherry, in tracing people’s biographical lives. Also, I always have problems in playing detective and I’m not really in favour of delving into the lives of one’s proper name” when they appeared in their time as anonymous or pseudonymous. In other words, I prefer to just let “Tjamboek Berdoeri,” “Tangan Mait,” and “Langganan Baru di Bogor” as they were and read them as always relevant strings in a larger nebula of thoughts mediated by printing forms. So I choose a socio-textual method that is closer to what a philologist does: weaving life stories of words and texts with the social practices of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Intellectual biographies play a very minor part; textual biographies are my focus. The goal is similar: to answer a question on how ideas emerged and were shared.

Second, in describing this process, a historian/critic needs to delve into and be tuned with the structure of the studied texts and how the texts become historical objects. This includes analyzing forms, contents, and styles of the books (“close reading”), searching the means of its production and circulation, and examining the textual operation and its cultural and political effects (i.e., what did this text do and not do, what did it make or no make). In his study, Mas Sony performs this mode of analysis by putting together social, institutional, and literary history of the subjects. I make another performance: I’m trying to put together senses and affects mediated by written words (and if I have a time to explore this, visual works).

Writing dissertation side by side with Mas Sony’s works, together with other works of historians, literary critics, theorists, and philosophers by my side (bibliography here I come), always fulfill my hours. I do not yet know the whole shape of my dissertation, or whether I should declare myself as a critic. It doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, I just do. 

listening

A seminar would happen in UGM: “Dari Sartono Kartodirdjo, Soedjatmoko, dan Moh Ali Menuju Penulisan Sejarah Masa Depan.” I saw the announcement and I rolled up my eyes. Another memory struck me (I once raised a question to a historian and his comment was, not verbatim, “sejarah perempuan bisa nyusul nanti yang penting fafifuwasweswos sejarah baru Indonesia.”) An acquaintance shared the call-for-papers, and they recommended my previous speculative writing about Hoedjin and Nie Hiang No to be shared in the forum. I thanked them but I couldn’t manage my time and labor to make any abstract or paper on that. So, I decided to just listen. I’ve talked so much this year (yes two events are already too much!)

I decided to watch the youtube record (I like to pause for a moment and let some ideas sink in and arise by themselves.) Bambang Purwanto’s and Gani Jaelani’s presentations and conversations arrived to me as a generational dialogue of historians. Both have the same ends with some paths they choose branch out: Kang Gani and his interest on microhistory and “Ginzburg’s razor,” and Pak Bambang with his long concern on the limits of binary Dutch-colonial/Indonesia-nationalist historiography. I listened and listened and listened, until Pak Bambang mentioned his discussion with researchers of Ruang Arsip Perempuan (RUAS), a place where Mbak Anna also contributes. He made a statement about sejarah dalam perspektif korban, that the category of “korban” is often imposed by the perpetrators, and to use it to some extent might perpetuate victimhood.

I was struck. Not because what Pak Bambang said is wrong, but because I think it is polemically true. History, though often written in the tradition of pelipur lara, is not and perhaps cannot be entirely melipur lara. Memories might be better sources for pelipur lara, spaces for meratap, but even they often betray solace because memories require one’s soul to recall both joy and horror, which we do not always know which one would come out more aggressively. In affirming the question of victimhood in history, we need to read violence as relations and machines, thickets of ideas and arrangements, not mere events with characters that could be categorized as protagonists and antagonists. Grace Leksana’s study on 1965 memories has done so much on this. At the same time, I also understand RUAS initiative to use history as a means to pursue justice. Justice, not therapy. Justice, not feel-good history. Justice, not a sense of justice, within which sejarah perspektif korban is at the centre of its pursuit. RUAS work is an attempt of historical reparation. 

To what extent historical narratives can fix or repair the damage of history? I make a difficult conversation here on whether we truly can make distinctive qualities between objective justice and subjective sensibility of justice with history as tools. Some victims may not want to pursue litigations because they just want to move on with whatever they have in life, but then find out their perpetrators freely move around making theatrical performances so the population votes them for president. Others put in motion their labor for advocacy, legal works, and political  rehabilitation and may find themselves in the loop of repetitive and dead-end works where hope could become less. How does history help us merawat ingatan merawat harapan? How do we do justice with history? Or perhaps, history is one source among many other sources, networks, ways, tactics, and strategies? And yes, the answer is in this rhetorical question.

“We need to put things together,” that what Pak Bambang says as a scholar, a historian. It makes me remember what Kang Gani once said in 2019 about my first piece of history, that I need to look at other sources, opposing actors, more forms of texts, more angles, put different things together, a method of history. For me, this chant has framed my eyes in seeing people in the past, that their lives were the result of things put together and they were ones among many agents that put things together. To work out justice, and liberation (which for me is more appropriate) is to put complicated things together and exercise political, affective, and moral clarity. In history, it’s not about both sides, it’s about all sides that constitute structures of life and death. It’s always already for the sake of the once alive, the living, and the ones who will live.         

practice practice practice …
practice practice practice …

grieving

It has always been perpetual. And now it is eternal. Genocide, expulsion, dispossession, losing loved ones, of father, mother, uncle, aunt, children, losing jobs for defending non-white students, losing lives for defending land, losing losing losing and so on and so forth and they want us to keep sane? Insane! Madness is not pathology. Lamentation is not suffocating. We push and push and push together until Palestine free, West Papua free, Congo free, Sudan free, Rohingya free, we keep a promise: we’re not free until all of us are free. This is not a groundless optimism. This is a political work, no no no this is politics, politics of making liberation, rehearsing freedom.

Now, friends, let’s write, make, become history.