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Writing about historical violence takes a special touch. Straying too
close to or getting mired in difficult materials carries the risk of
creating pornography, even if unintentionally. Keeping too much distance
from the subject matter and sources risks dehumanising people who have
already been supremely stripped of their personhood, transforming them
into data rather than seeing them above all as humans. Finding a balance
between exposure and analysis is tricky business, particularly when the
stories are little known, and analyses of the case have been few.
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Annie Pohlman has taken on this challenge with great skill in her important new book, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965–66
(Routledge, 2015). Based on over a decade of engagement with her
subject, and on over 150 first-person interviews with survivors of the
political violence that wracked Indonesia in 1965 and beyond, Pohlman
treads important new ground. Superbly, she both stares down and exposes
the horrific details of these episodes of violence without ever once
moving into exploitation, and analyses and organises them theoretically
in a critical feminist frame without losing sight of the women whose
lives and experiences she discusses. This balance makes her book a
significant new title in feminist discourse in both Indonesian studies
and in the comparative history of sexualised and gendered violence in
the twentieth century.
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To write this book, Pohlman confronts two critical problems. First, as
with all historical work on 1965 and its aftermath in Indonesia, she is
faced with the historiographical vacuum imposed by Indonesia’s New Order
regime, which overwrote history and enforced silences on its victims
for well over three decades. The most basic sources that exist in
comparative cases—pictures of Nazi death camps, portraits of Khmer Rouge
prisoners just prior to execution—and the exhaustive documentary
evidence of many other such cases simply are not available in the
Indonesian case. As filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer reminds us in his
recent documentaries about this era, we should imagine what it would be
like to write the history of the Holocaust if the Nazis had won World
War II and ruled Europe until the 1970s.
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Second, Pohlman takes important steps to argue that the violence in
these cases is fundamentally gendered at its core, an important point
building on the writing of Saskia Weiringa and in line with the emerging
work of other feminist scholars of the period.[1]
Unfortunately, Weiringa’s heavily detailed work is often dismissed by
Indonesianists because of its explicit Marxist and feminist lenses,
which at times leads her into what can appear to be a less than
even-handed use of her sources. Pohlman, on the other hand, takes
explicit pains to cover some of the same materials in ways that
contextualise them more evenly. She is careful not to claim more than
her sources permit, but this historiographically ‘conservative’ approach
also allows her to introduce her emotionally difficult primary source
materials with the care they clearly demand. This reflects an academic
modesty that I find most welcome, particularly in works exploring
morally difficult subjects.
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One element I wish Pohlman had addressed more explicitly than she does
is that much of the theory she must engage with on these issues is based
largely in western contexts and from western thinkers. This is not to
say Pohlman is not thinking carefully about the cultural specificity of
the Indonesian case, much to the contrary. But coming at the book from
my own Indonesianist background, I kept wishing she would interrogate
whether there is something that this specific set of circumstances could
bring to expand broader theoretical discussions. In particular when
dealing with experiences of peasant women (rather than Communist Party
cadres), Pohlman is correctly attuned to the importance of local
geography and body politics. She is aware that Javanese, Sundanese or
Balinese local cosmologies and magical understandings and body politics
were at play. She gives us a fascinating discussion, for instance, of
the increased cultural shame involved in Javanese women who were raped
standing up rather than lying down, a discussion I have never seen in
any other context. Looking more closely at these elements, including
various Indonesian understandings of identifying marks that are said to
appear (magically) on bodies of Communists, will undoubtedly enrich
future iterations of this work.
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But, that said, this is clearly a first major step in what I hope will
be an on-going project. Pohlman clearly cites the appropriate sources to
allow both herself and others to mine this territory further. Whether
that be the classics such as Benedict Anderson’s ‘The idea of power in
Javanese culture,’[2] or the less well known but critically insightful work of Laine Berman on gender, emotion and violence in Java,[3]
the material is there for deep and profitable future engagement on
what might be universal and what might be more local in the histories of
sexualised and gendered violence still to be produced.
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It is important to note that Pohlman came to this particular work with a
very clear objective—to tell women’s stories. In the words of one of
her principal informers, Ibu Lia, ‘people must know what happened.’ And
Pohlman’s deft use of survivor interviews and testimony is the star of
this book. In the often too illusive goal of many authors, she lets her
subjects’ lives and words speak. Over and over again, the reader is
drawn to the details of these women’s testimony, not only as it was
spoken, but often, and particularly when discussing the sexual nature of
violence, in their gestures and facial expressions. At times, these
stories are completely horrific, and the reader is left wondering if
indeed she has just read what she read. But it is Pohlman’s skill that
keeps even the most explicit details from seeming gratuitous. Rather,
these stories are deftly interwoven as examples of specific types of
sexualised and gendered violence that Pohlman is careful to distinguish
and discuss in separate chapters covering sexual assaults, mutilation,
humiliation, and sexual slavery and forced marriages, even where these
different experiences overlap.
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This specificity of analysis is a great strength of Pohlman’s book.
Unlike too many authors on sexualised violence, Pohlman gets the problem
of scale correct.
Each of these [150] women [I interviewed] … experienced these events in
both unique and common ways. As will be shown throughout the book,
commonalities amongst women’s experiences only emerge when balanced by
numerous, individual stories of great exceptions, unexpected
consequences and moments in which situations changed in an instant. In
short, while patters of how women experience the aftermath of the coup
do emerge, these cannot be essentialised in any way (p. 3.).
In keeping this question of scale always present in her writing, Pohlman
does the women she writes about the ultimate service of allowing them
to speak their own lives while connecting them to an emerging larger
theoretical exploration that still has room for growth and debate. As a
result, this book strikes me as being an excellent source for university
graduate and undergraduate courses on women and violence. It is one
that can be read for both content and theory, and how the two can
interplay profitably. It is one that raises important methodological
questions for feminist research in accessible ways without either losing
or exploiting the power of its sources.
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Slim, sparely written and elegant, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965–66
should become a critical source in the emerging literature on women and
the gendered and sexualised experience of mass violence.
Notes
[1] Saskia Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave/Macmillan: ISS, Institute of Social Studies, 2002.
[2] Benedict R.O'G. Anderson, Language and Power, Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. See in particular, 'The idea of power in Javanese culture.'
[3] Laine Berman, Speaking Through the Silence. Narratives, Social Conventions and Power in Java. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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