Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • The Look of Silence: A Review

    The Look of Silence, by Joshua Oppenheimer, is a powerful new film about history, memory, conflict, and the Indonesian killings of 1965-66. As part of Cornell Modern Indonesia Project’s recent film series Observing the Silence: Remembering 1965, I had the opportunity to see The Look of Silence for the first time yesterday. It is a remarkable film, and if you are reading this right now, you should see it.

    The film centers on Adi, whose older brother was one of those murdered during 1965. The exact perpetrators are not known, but we see extensive footage of individuals describing the process through which Adi’s brother was killed. At least some of these people live near Adi; he claims to know them, but they claim not to know him. (The one exception is his uncle, who was a guard at the jail where Adi’s brother was detained.) In an interview with Adi’s mother, who is still alive, we hear her describe the pain of knowing that the people who lived nearby had killed her son.

    The main “action” in the film, though, is Adi’s interviews with the perpetrators. These are just amazing. Most of the interviews follow a similar structure. Adi speaks with individuals about the killings, and they proudly—sometimes boastfully—describe their roles. Then Adi informs them that his brother was among those killed. At this point nearly all of the interviewees begin to distance themselves, blaming the killings on “the people” or the Army, and saying that they played no direct role in the violence. But Adi presses on, and pushes them to acknowledge what they know to have happened. Some of those involved at this point begin to get angry, and to threaten Adi indirectly by raising the possibility of “this happening again,” and in one case obliquely suggesting that Adi is a “hidden communist” himself.

    On several occasions, interviewees describe the process of revisiting the events of 1965 as opening an old wound. On other occasions, interviewees describe drinking their victims’ blood in order to avoid going crazy. These moments are powerful.

    But for me, even more powerful are the moments when younger generations are confronted with their parents’ actions. One woman insists—I believe genuinely—that she had no idea of the scale of her father’s crimes, hugs Adi as he leaves while her father looks on, and claims that they are now family. In another case, an elderly woman swears up and down that she had no idea of her husband’s crimes, even when presented with a book that her late husband penned about the people he murdered (she claims never to have read it) and even when shown a video of herself with her husband as he describes the crimes while holding the book.

    As great as The Look of Silence is, it would not have received such attention had it not been for The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer’s previous film. I have complex thoughts about The Act of Killing (see here and here). My thoughts about The Look of Silence are rather less complex. This is for several reasons. First, the translations are much better—although many of the older characters speak only in Javanese, which I do not understand, so I could be wrong. Second, I do not think that this film is as hard for non-experts and non-Indonesians to fathom.

    But I would emphasize that a film like this—with just a very cursory historical presentation, focusing narrowly on the stories of one family—should raise as many questions as it answers. I hope it encourages viewers to learn more rather than to accept what they see as self-evidently all they need to know.

    So in the spirit of providing more, here are two things that occurred to me as I watched this film.

    Silence

    One is the role of silence. Oppenheimer uses silence very effectively throughout the film. We repeated see long close-ups of faces of Adi and his interlocutors during their conversations, with no one saying anything. As we look into their eyes, this is “the look” of “silence.” As a viewer, this weighs on you.

    And yet, this seems incomplete to me without knowing something about Indonesian conversational practice. It is striking, for Westerners, the extent to which many Javanese and many other Indonesian ethnic groups will welcome long stretches of silence in the midst of a conversation. For those raised in Western environments, these silences are uncomfortable. Our urge is to fill that conversational pause with something, anything. The fact is, long silences are just not that uncomfortable for most Indonesians. Understood in context, my guess is that these conversational pauses are not as meaningful as they appear to the viewer.

    Disorder

    Another, perhaps more meaningful, thing to note is the role of anonymity in justifying what happened in 1965. English speakers might be interested to know that one of the only words that English has borrowed from Indonesian/Malay is the word amok. It means the same thing in Indonesian. It describes a condition in which a faceless mass is beyond control, disruptive, unpredictable, violent. It is something that Indonesians fear [amuk massa = the masses run amok], and regimes warn against.

    And yet unless I missed it, amuk is pointedly not the word that any of the perpetrators use to describe the killings and the social and political condition at the time. They always describe a movement [= gerakan] of the people [= rakyat], or something controlled or directed by the Army, or by the United States itself. They took part in mass behavior that was organized, perhaps instinctual and spontaneous and surely violence, but in no way disorderly.

    All of this reflects how the perpetrators run a fine line between order and disorder. The crimes are unspeakably horrible, and many people cannot accept their own participation, yet they are remembered as part of an orderly response to an actual threat.

    Now, imagine a perpetrator remembering these events otherwise. Imagine someone saying “Adi, it wasn’t my fault. Society had broken down. I killed because I fear being killed myself, and we were out of control. We had run amok, and some of those in power stood aside as we did this, and the rest helped.” Is that kind of memory or post-hoc justification for killing “better?” I can’t see how it is.

    But how different this memory would be! And how much easier it would be to build a process of national reconciliation on such a foundation.

  • When Did the Malay Identity Become Porous?

    In contemporary Malaysia, the Malay identity is a socially constructed identity that lumps together a number of people of a wide range of regional and national descents. Even legally, the definition of Malayness refers to practice, language, and self-identity. The percentage of the population of peninsular Malaysia that identifies as indigenous but not Malay is vanishingly small; and among that population, the vast majority identify as orang asli, Thai, or as members of one of the bumiputera ethnic groups from Sabah and Sarawak.

    I have long wondered if this was always the case. One place to look is censuses, which Charles Hirschmann argued three decades ago is a particularly productive way to observe how political actors surveyed the landscape of people in front of them. The feature of censuses in Malaysia, both under British rule and after British rule, is the urge to classify people into types. Uniquely, British colonial census officials often reflected upon the nature of that task. Those reflections contain within them evidence of what they believed to be the structure of the society in front of them.

    And contrary to the widely held assumption among many scholars of colonialism, and certainly among most scholars of Malaysian history, the British census reflects both thoughtfulness and uncertainty about how to classify the people of British Malaya.

    We can actually read from as early as 1921 about the challenges of defining what a Malay is. From the Census of British Malaya, 1921, page 22.

    Under the heading “Malays” are grouped all the native peoples of the Malayan Archipelago and considerable difficulty was experienced in coming to a decision as to which of these races should be tabulated separately, and which amalgamated under the heading “Malay.” The difficulty does not arise in respect of the Malayan peoples from the islands in the South and East of the Archipelago. The Japanese [sic], the Banjarese and Dyaks [sic] from Borneo, the Boyanese from Bawean and the Bugis from Celebes are distinct races with separate languages and customs and, after emigrating to this country, they preserve their distinctive features for generations and are not merged in the native Malay population. The child born in British Malaya of Javanese and Boyanese parents would invariably be described as Javanese or Boyanese on the Census schedules. It is in dealing with the Malays of Sumatra that a decision is difficult.

    If we can take the census author’s words as reflecting something of the social reality of the time, we see that as late as 1920 “Malay” as an ethnic identity did not encompass all indigenous peoples of the region. Malay could be used as a short-hand for a perceived racial or descent category, but this would be different than an ethnic identity. It was therefore possible to speak of industrious “Javanese Malay” in the late 19th century (for examples, see The Myth of the Lazy Native, p. 74).

    Now let us look to a more recent census, from Malaya: A Report on the 1947 Census of Population, p. 72.

    The distinction between the Malays and the Other Malaysians is not very great and is, indeed, ignored in the compilation of Malayan vital statistics; for the Malays themselves are, to a large extent, descended from the Malays of the east Coast of Sumatra from whom they…are ethnographically indistinguishable. For that matter, on the occasion of the 1921 census when the classification employed was based on ethnographical rather than social consideration, all Sumatran Malays exception the Achinese, Korinchi, and Mendeling were actually included with the Malays proper in the specific race tables; while through the remainder of the tabulation all Malaysians were lumped together under the head “Malays.”

    As for the Other Malaysians, all but a handful of them are of the Muslim faith and speak the Malay language and are, although to varying degrees, readily assimilable with the Malays of the peninsula with whom, in fact, they tend to form a single community.

    Just twenty-six years later the sharp distinctions between Javanese, Boyanese, Bugis, etc. and Malay are beginning to fade. They are still tabulated separately—the State of Selangor in 1947 was inhabited by 53,859 Javanese versus 103,456 Malays, plus another 14,322 Banjarese—but the task of distinguishing them is recognized to be difficult and imperfect precisely because of changing local understandings of identity.

    This 1947 census is particularly interesting as it is completely and utterly constructivist with respect to questions of “race” or ethnicity. Take a look at this, from p. 71, my emphasis added:

    Enumerators were instructed that, unless it was manifestly absurd or impossible, the statement made by the person questioned should be accepted….Very few Indonesian immigrants, for example, would claim to be Malays unless they were accepted as such by the village community. So, too, the girl of Chinese blood adopted in infancy by a Tamil would be entered as a Tamil unless she insisted upon being described as a Chinese. These were merely the natural consequences of insistence upon community; for the Chinese girl in the illustration would almost certainly speak Tamil and no Chinese, would live on a typically South Indian diet and be bound by Tamil custom and would, in due course, marry a Tamil according to the Hindu rites. To argue that she was a Chinese would be wholly to misconceive the meaning of “race” in the special sense in which it is used in this context.

    By the 1970 and 1980 censuses, carried out by the independent Malaysian government, there was indeed no separate category at all for Javanese, Boyanese, or any of the other non-Malay groups meticulously recorded by the British. There is only a subcategory within the general Malay category of “Indonesian,” numbering 228,126 in Peninsular Malaysia in 1980, and it is not clear who would have so identified.

    By 1991 things have changed yet again. Now there is a category termed “other Bumiputera,” and the category “Indonesian” has moved under the general category “Other,” alongside Europeans and Vietnamese. “Other Bumiputera” in peninsular Malaysia number 120,685 in 1991, far less than 228,126 “Indonesians” of 1980, whereas “Other” number 397,394, far higher than the total of 68,910 of 1980. This is might be evidence that those groups identifying as Indonesian in 1980 and counted under the category of “Malay” have preserved that under the category of “Other” were it not for the fact of migration from Indonesia. To be clear, the figures I am citing are only among Malaysian citizens, but it is difficult to know how many of these citizens are recent migrants who have taken citizenship versus descendants of migrants from generations ago.

    I would note as well that neither the 1980 nor the 1991 census contains any of the reflexive discussion about defining identity that the two censuses of British Malaya did.

    The message in all of this is necessarily incomplete, because we are looking only at figures and how a couple of colonial administrators described their tasks. Yet with those caveats, we can begin to see evidence that the porousness of what has become the modern Malay identity is a relatively recent phenomenon. We also see evidence of constructivists thinking on ethnicity and identity by colonial bureaucrats, long before constructivist approaches to identity gained ascendance in academia.