Eyewitness
by Seno Gumira Adjidarma
Eyewitness is an anthology of sixteen stories. I thank Jan Lingard and John H McGlynn whose translations have enabled me to read Adjidarma’s wonderful stories.
Premediated violence is always uncomfortable to read about. In novels the flinch it provokes in me is usually eased, at least a little, because intentional violence occurs as an episode in a wider narrative. As a reader I get some relief. Not in Eyewitness. There are sixteen stories in just 95 pages, and there is no respite. Brutality and its aftermath are ever present. Paragraph upon paragraph smites with a purposeful clout almost powerful enough to deflect my eyes from the page, except the narrative holds my disturbed line of sight.
Some background
Scartol, via Wikimedia Commons
Seno Adjidarma offers some background in an introduction (which mysteriously for an introduction appears after the final story in Eyewitness). A bare bones account goes like this. In November 1991 about 2500 people attended a funeral service for an East Timorese pro-independence activist assassinated by Indonesian forces. Activists among the mourners unfurled the flag of FRETILIN, the guerrilla force that had long pursued independence and had freed the colony from Portugal in 1975. Unfurling the flag in 1991 was enough to trip the triggers of watching Indonesian troops: more than 250 people were gunned down in and around Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, now the capital of Timor-Leste. One in ten mourners dead.
Australia’s relationship with Indonesia is an enduring interest of mine, as is the social, cultural and historical mosaic that is the extraordinary archipelago of what has come to be Indonesia. The Santa Cruz murders bit hard into my sense of amiability with Indonesia. The wound broke time and again as killings and horrors were incessantly visited on the people of East Timor over the following decade. Despite the shocking intimidation of Indonesia’s armed forces, and the militias to which they gave a free hand for terror, the East Timorese pressed their case for independence throughout the 1990s.
The crescendo of Indonesian sponsored violence swelled in the weeks before 30 August 1999, the date set for an independence referendum organised and overseen by the United Nations. The Indonesian government and its agents persistently and aggressively sought to undermine the will of the population and the credibility of the referendum. Nonetheless, four in five East Timorese voted for independence. Retribution came swiftly, overnight and during the first weeks of September. Indonesia’s agents upscaled their aggression. They killed and injured thousands. They relocated East Timorese over the provincial border to West Timor and held them there in camps. They destroyed East Timor’s infrastructure. They wrecked and burned family homes. The retribution was yoked to fear. Some in Indonesia’s elite, it seems, feared East Timor’s exit from the unitary state of Indonesia would give independence activists in the provinces of Aceh and West Irian cause to believe they too could successfully pursue statehood.
Good won out and Timor Leste became itself. Australia contributed, messily but eventually. It was a long ‘eventually’ given Australia’s egregious decision to support incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia once Portugal was sent packing in 1975. Soon after the violence in 1999, the Australian government made some hubristic propositions to the Indonesian government, straight out of a colonial mindset, about holding a referendum like France was doing in New Caledonia. (I kid you not.) So messily, and evenutally, in mid-September 1999 Australia was nominated lead nation in the United Nations’ International Force East Timor (InterFET) which called on personnel and defence assets from Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Thailand, and the USA. A few days after InterFET was formed I joined a protest outside Victoria’s Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne. I was surprised, and heartened, to find another 30,000 people had the passion and time to be there. The protestors sought more than UN peacekeeping: they wanted Indonesia’s intolerable behaviour held to moral account, and prodded our government to pursue justice.
Image via Takver
Unsurprisingly, Australia and Indonesia took some years to return to the same page, diplomatically and geopolitically. It took me some time to rebuild my confidence in the prospect for a settled Indonesian state. It seemed the long years of Suharto’s dictatorship – a generation of years, from 1967 to 1998 – may have ingrained in state agencies habits of repression that might take a generation to displace. I have returned to a place of confidence about Indonesia’s future and about the relationship between Indonesia and Australia. That’s optimism holds notwithstanding Australia’s cackhanded inability during the last decade to put see the world from a regional perspective, the lack of dash during Yudhoyono’s presidency, and Jokowi’s dismissive vacillations over democratic principles and human rights protections. As to the future of those nations’ relationships with East Timor, my optimism is less willing, more qualified. Indonesia deliberately inflicted unforgivable anguish on the East Timorese, as Adjidarma records in the Eyewitness stories. Australia betrayed the new nation with an unprincipled capture of financial flows, via a dodgy 2006 treaty, that gave Australian resource companies the lion’s share of more than AU$40 billion of oil and gas deposits. It was a steal and East Timor rightly exited the treaty in 2017.
Back to Adjidarma’s stories
After the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, Indonesia’s government faced withering international criticism. The government’s attempts to manage the fallout included increasing pressure on private media outlets to avoid bad news from East Timor. Adjidarma was a casualty of this assault on truth: he and several colleagues were removed from the editorial team of Jakarta-Jakarta magazine which had run a story about the funeral, the protest, and the shooting. What is a journalist to do in these circumstances? Adjidarma’s answer is simple and brave: ‘When journalism is gagged, literature must speak.’ So a muffled Adjidarma wrote stories, and those in Eyewitness speak loudly. They disclose silent soliloquies and snatched dialogues that fill the hearts, minds and voices of those who cannot run free. Maria waits, day upon long day, for her missing son to come home:
She prayed and dreamed that her missing son, Antonio, would return to her. When he returned … she wouldn’t ask him to tell about the blood and tears. Sad stories like that were no longer interesting because they’d become part of everyday life. Maria didn’t want to hear any more about feelings of being oppressed, despised and humiliated. Those feelings had for too long only given rise to resistance … which was always paid for with pain and lives. Oh, how great was the price that had to be paid so that they could walk with their heads held high.
- From the fourth story in the anthology, ‘Maria,’ p. 19
Many stories in the collection, like Eyewitness itself, are wrapped in magical realist madness. Others, says Adjidarma, faithfully record real events conveyed to him by East Timorese, like the story Manuel in which empathy is a double agent. Adjidarma reports to us through these stories of violence as a form of degraded performance. Violence is not always serious business. Soldiers had laughed and larked about as they ineptly balance Rosalina’s head on the fence to better attract her father’s attention. Other villagers were the first to see the cause of their mufffled amusement:
‘It’s Rosalina.’
‘My God, Rosalina!’
Now two pairs of frightened eyes stared through the darkness.
‘Rosalina… Why did they kill Rosalina?’
‘Why did they cut off her head?’
‘And stick [it] on the fence of her father’s house?’
- From the anthology’s penultimate story, ‘The Head on Da Silva’s Fence,’ p. 82
Political violence is sometimes inept on its own terms. In The mute’s soliloquy,¹ Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote about Sugeng, the first person he knew to die on Indonesia’s Buru island where they were both exiled political prisoners. Toer recalls Sugeng was ‘[c]onsummately polite and forever easygoing,’ and ‘carried on his shoulders a wealth of experiences valuable to mankind. Yet he was tortured to death.’ Toer then poses a plain question: ‘Strange isn’t it, in this day and age, to think of torture as a form of persuasion?’ It’s a question that might flicker behind the lines of ‘Electricity,’ one of Adjidarma’s stories. The interrogator stops flicking the switch that sends electric shocks through his prisoner’s armpits only because it is time for a break:
Januario convulsed with pain. With each question, he was given an electric shock that made his body thrash about like a fish in a basket.
The clock struck twelve. Moonlight shone brightly through the bars.
‘Wakijan!’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Clear up in here and tell someone to rustle up some food. None of us have had anything to eat for a while.’
- From the anthology’s seventh story, ‘Electricity’, p. 36
Every East Timorese can list relatives lost to violent incidents they know will continue to play in their homes and villages, fields and cemeteries, sometimes as set pieces, sometimes as improvisations on brutal themes. They do not forget their tortured, lost, disappeared, murdered loved ones. Memories accumulate. They rapidly outnumber fatalities. They are more solid than headstones, more substantial than vanished faces. They are vivid, alive, immediate, wistful, sorrowful. Soulfull.
I counted everyone in the house. There were seven occupants.
‘So there are seven of you altogether, are there lady?’
‘There’s really eight of us.’
‘I see. One of you died, is that right?’
‘No, he’s not dead. He was actually killed. But he’s not dead yet.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s here with us.’
- From the ninth story, ‘The mystery of the town of Ningi (or the invisible
Christmas),’ p. 47.)
The stories in Eyewitness, first published between 1992 and 1997, put on trial stage-managed, punch-card, business-as-usual violence. They are stories about East Timor. Their protagonists are East Timorese. Their realities are universal, not limited by their historical genesis. In his introduction (p.120), Adjidarma writes of his stories:
The context of their birth which I note here will neither enhance nor detract from their worth as short stories. What I mean is, these stories don’t need to be connected to the Dili incident – they are open to be read just as stories, if in fact anyone wants to.
In my edition of Eyewitness there are occasional errors in the text that fumble meanings, and a few that are simply annoying distractions. But these errors are of little consequence in an anthology that throws telling sentences at the blunt force of laisse-faire violence. Eyewitness is a testament to a people whose original sin is to grow their own apple tree, to cultivate their own Eden, rather than eat from blighted trees planted by colonial and post-colonial invaders. The stories depict harsh truths about how paradise was won.
I regard history teachers with reverence (perhaps because for a short while I was one of them!). My reverence is contingent on their determination to reflect on what actually happened. When they do they give us the wondrous ability to faithfully recall events we did not observe, to search in the shadows for why. History teachers can offer young people guidance in grasping what led to them being right here, right now. Alfonso was a history teacher. Sometimes he took his primary schoolers to the cemetery in Dili:
Alfonso had learnt for very many years that their hopes rested on the children, but he realised those hopes could only become reality if the children could understand history… The fact was that it wasn’t all that easy to reach an understanding of the meaning of spraying bullets.
- From the collection’s eighth story, ‘The history lesson,’ p. 43
Nomad Tales via flickr
Eyewitness was published in 2015 by The Lontar Foundation. ‘Eyewitness’ is the anthology’s title story, first published in 1992.
The Lontar Foundation describes itself as ‘an independent, not-for-profit organization based in Jakarta, Indonesia, promoting Indonesian literature and culture through the translation of its literary works.’
You can read more about Lontar, and sift through its publication lists, here.
1 The mute’s soliloquy, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, translated by Willem Samuels. Another example of the work of The Lontar Foundation which cooperated with Hasta Mitra to publish Toer’s book. The passages quoted in the post are on page 66.