Gender, Violence and Power in Indonesia

Across Time and Space

Katharine McGregor, Ana Dragojlovic, Hannah Loney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367901974
• eBook ISBN: 9781000050387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to chart how various forms of violence – domestic, military, legal and political – are not separate instances of violence, but rather embedded in structural inequalities brought about by colonialism, occupation and state violence. The book explores both case studies of individuals and of groups to examine experiences of violence within the context of gender and structures of power in modern Indonesian history and Indonesia-related diasporas. It argues that gendered violence is particularly important to consider in this region because of its complex history of armed conflict and authoritarian rule, the diversity of people that have been affected by violence, as well as the complexity of the religious and cultural communities involved. The book focuses in particular on textual narratives of violence, visualisations of violence, commemorations of violence and the politics of care.

1 Narrating intimate violence in public texts

Women’s writings in the Sumatran newspaper Soenting Melajoe¹

Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones

With grief I write,	Dengan doekatjita saja karangkan,
Of a wretched destiny,	Oentoeng jang malang saja seboetkan;
I hope my sisters the editors will approve,	Harap oeni Red. soeka masoekkan,
It as to appear in Soenting.	Kedalam Soenting minta’ tompangkan.
A girl I remember,	Seorang perawan saja ingati,
I knew her by the name Aminah;	Aminah konon namanja sitti’;
Shooting the cause of her death,	Tertembak sebab makanja mati,
It felt like my heart was destroyed.	Hantjoer loeloelah rasanja hati.

Siti Jasinah’s 18 February 1916 ‘Poem of a Girl Shot to Death’ implored readers to remember her fellow Pariaman student and friend, Aminah.² This poem was published in Soenting Melajoe, the first newspaper to be edited exclusively by women in the Netherlands East Indies. Printed in Padang, on Sumatra’s West Coast, Soenting Melajoe’s weekly editions between June 1912 and February 1921 offer windows into the experiences and emotions of women and girls who suffered from or witnessed intimate violence.

In the first surviving editorial of prominent West Sumatran journalist and educator Roehana Koedoes (27 July 1912, p. 1), she referred to this newspaper as a ‘garden’ for women to ‘plant the seeds’ of knowledge. As a garden of print, Soenting Melajoe stretched over two thousand typeface-filled pages which were sent back-and-forth across Sumatra’s West Coast before being published in the bustling port capital, Padang. More broadly, as a ‘garden’ of minds, Soenting Melajoe’s contributors looked far beyond newsprint margins: they envisaged societal changes, distant lands and alternative futures for generations of educated women. Soenting Melajoe was a unique forum for women to pose normative questions concerning morality, womanhood and power relations, and to protest against inequalities that they faced. However, when dealing with intimate violence, women writing in the newspaper encountered serious constraints in terms of what they felt could be expressed openly in this public forum.

This chapter analyses women’s employment of symbolic schemas and expressive strategies to articulate intimate violence and critically reflects on our textual encounters with Soenting Melajoe contributors. I first provide historical context and situate Soenting Melajoe as a source that can be used to challenge a limiting gaze in historical studies of Minangkabau women. The chapter then explores affective literacies and solidarities through three case studies: power and the supernatural in marital conflict (1912–13); a young woman’s plea for public acknowledgement of her friend’s murder (1916); and initiatives to support victims of domestic violence (1918). I examine how women described gendered power relations in marriages, families and communities, and the ways in which these power relations shaped how contributors directly and indirectly narrated violence perpetrated by husbands and partners within the home.

The press and the pen

Soenting Melajoe’s foundation editors, Roehana Koedoes and Zoebeidah Ratna Djoewita, underscored how their newspaper was exclusively edited by women, distinguishing it from Poetri Hindia (Daughter of the Indies), a newspaper that had been founded by Raden Mas Djokomono Tirto Adhi Soerjo in Batavia in 1908. Soenting Melajoe was supported by a male patron, Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja, a prominent journalist in the political faction labelled Kaoem Toea (Old Group). Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja founded the daily newspaper Oetoesan Melajoe (Malay Messenger) in 1910 as the flagship publication of the Association of the Minangkabau Realm’s Snelpersdrukkerij (Fast-Printing Press) (Adam 2003, p. 131). When Soenting Melajoe was founded in June 1912, his Snelpersdrukkerij and others associated with Kaoem Toea politics advocated for Western-style education and modernity within Minangkabau matrilineal customary law and norms derived from local traditions (adat) structures (Abdullah 1971, p. 12). Instead of engaging with a binary between the progressive, adat-promoting Kaoem Toea and modernist Muslim Kaoem Moeda (Young Group), this chapter analyses how women drew upon co-existing normative bases and understandings of tradition, progress, modernity, justice and religion, whilst crafting their own political agendas.

Soenting Melajoe literally translates as Malay ‘Headdress’. However, it could also denote ‘Editing Malay’, possibly a pun on its intentions to celebrate Malay women and advocate for reformed gender expectations (Hadler 2000, p. 22). According to biographer Fitriyanti (2005, p. 99), Roehana, in the small town Kotogadang, sent copy to Ratna Djoewita (the patron Maharadja’s daughter) at Snelpersdrukkerij. From November 1913, the paper’s printing house was in the predominantly ethnic-Chinese business district of Pondok, near Padang’s harbour, which enabled the paper’s wide networks of circulation. The map (Figure 1.1), which I created, charts Soenting Melajoe contributors’ approximate locations from 1912–13, 1915–16 and 1918–19. This map depicts how Soenting Melajoe’s community of writers was most concentrated in Sumatra’s western interior, but how contributions also came from villages throughout Sumatra and further afield.

Figure 1.1 Soenting Melajoe contributor locations, based on a map from Robert Cribb (2010) Digital Atlas of Indonesian History (Copenhagen: NIAS Press). Square: July 1912–July 1913; triangle: July 1915–July 1916, not including a forwarded letter from Amsterdam; circle: July 1918–July 1919. Reproduced with permission.³

Many Soenting Melajoe writers referred to their ‘sisters’ (saoedarakoe perempoean), invoking a commonality as members of a ‘nation of women’ (bangsa perempoean). Some suggested that the readership belonged to a Malay ethno-nation. For instance, a 20 March 1914 (p. 1) letter from Batavia celebrated how ‘essays written by children of our Malay nation […] produced by a Malay printing house’ allowed the writer to ‘see how intelligent and developed the women of my Malay nation are’.⁴ This coheres with other invocations, like that of Javanese woman Raden Ajoe Mangkoedimedjo who, when writing in Poetri Hindia in 1909, used the phrase ‘nation of women’ to refer to Javanese women (Mangkoedimedjo and Salmon 1977, p. 125). According to Lynn Parker (2001, p. 61), middle-class Balinese women in the 1920s also self-identified as the ‘bangsa perempoean’. ‘Bangsa’ could be translated as nation, race, people or a category underpinned by a sense of ‘sameness’ often understood as ethnic homogeneity, informed by its Sanskrit etymologic root vaṃśa, meaning lineage (Milner 2002, p. 51).

However, some of Soenting Melajoe’s contributors invoked the ‘bangsa perempoean’ to elicit a multi-ethnic community. This included Siti Fatimah (30 January 1913, p. 1) from Riau, who conceived of an all-encompassing female community: ‘We women are of the same nation / Every year for all time’.⁵ Soenting Melajoe’s writers therefore challenged Sartono Kartodirdjo’s (2001, p. 119) contention that ‘there were no networks available going beyond ethnic boundaries’ before the emergence of nationalist sentiment. Zoebeidah Ratna Djoewita’s editorial ‘The Intelligence of Us Women’ (3 August 1912, p. 2) provided an introductory glimpse into this network’s basis. Ratna Djoewita contrasted male detractors to Soenting Melajoe writing in other publications who she thought possessed minds ‘as new as a child’ with women’s divinely granted strength and intelligence:⁶ ‘We women have been destined by God to be a noble-hearted nation, to become the nation of mothers, the nation who gives milk’.⁷

It was through this newspaper that women and girls sought to reform the expectations of a ‘polite and upright’ (sopan dan santoen) woman. Frequent correspondent and Bengkulu teacher, Amna Karim, wrote on 30 January 1913 (p. 2) that this ‘nation’—which she mapped onto the Netherlands East Indies—sought to promote literacy, craft skills and health information whilst challenging oppressive practices like polygamy. Contributors sketched a womanhood which encompassed upholding familial and cultural responsibilities, articulating opinions on social issues, and seeking education and employment. This was a hybrid conceptualisation of progress (kemadjoean) which, in Amna’s words, would empower women so that they could ‘drink the nectar of the sweet-smelling flowers’ of opportunity.⁸

Attempting to determine the boundaries of the bangsa perempoean and the ‘garden’ of Soenting raises epistemological challenges. Soenting Melajoe was written in non-standardised Malay, influenced by but not obeying standardised van Ophuijsen Malay orthography, which was introduced in 1901. The newspaper contains linguistic fluidity, fusing Minangkabau, Dutch and occasionally English words, as well as Minangkabau-Malay pantun poetics which house meaning within a sometimes seemingly unrelated ‘hook’ This feature presents a translator with the complex if not impossible task of conveying layers of rhetorical meaning. Motivated by literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Spivak’s ([1993] 2009, p. 202) advice to ‘surrender to the text’ as the site where the ‘self loses its boundaries’, where possi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction: Gendered violence in the making of modern Indonesia
• 1. Narrating intimate violence in public texts: Women’s writings in the Sumatran newspaper Soenting Melajoe
• 2. Living in a conflict zone: Gendered violence during the Japanese occupation of the Netherlands East Indies
• 3. Home at the front: Violence against Indonesian women and children in Dutch military barracks during the Indonesian National Revolution
• 4. The sexual and visual dynamics of torture: Analysing atrocity photographs from Indonesian-occupied East Timor
• 5. Memory on stage: Affect, gender and the performative in 1965–66 survivor testimonies
• 6. Commemorating gendered violence two decades on: Chinese Indonesian women’s voices in the diaspora
• 7. Caring for the un-speakable: Coercive pedagogies, shame, and the structural violence continuum in Indisch intergenerational memory work
• 8. The politics of care: A case study of domestic violence in Aceh
• 9. Gendered violence, gendered care: Nonintervention, silence work and the politics of HIV in Aceh
• Afterword: Gender, violence, power: The pervasiveness of heteropatriarchal moral orders in Indonesia across time and space
• Index