Sarumpaet's play, well directed but contains flaws
Sarumpaet's play, well directed but contains flaws
Max Lane, Contributor, Jakarta
If you are interested in learning about Indonesian cultural life
since the overthrow of the dictator Soeharto, you should not miss
Ratna Sarumpaet's new play Anak-Anak Kegelapan (Children In The
Darkness).
Sarumpaet has continued her record of identifying and bringing
to the mainstream stage issues of political morality central to
Indonesia's future.
Her past plays in this genre have been Pesta Terakhir (Last
Party), covering the attack on the anti-Soeharto activists
holding free speech forums at the headquarters of the Indonesian
Democratic party (PDI) in 1996; Marsinah Accuses based on the
story of Marsinah, a tortured and murdered labor activist and
last year's Alia, whose story was based on the sufferings in Aceh
under military rule.
Children In The Darkness takes up the events that began the
criminal history of Soeharto's New Order, the mass murders
following a foiled coup in Sept. 30, 1965.
This issue has been discussed semi-openly in the media, books
and in non-governmental organizations for some time now.
Former president Abdurrahman Wahid began to speak of this as
an issue needing national moral correction but was only able to
take it so far. Sarumpaet's play is the first real attempt to use
mainstream cultural activity to confront society with important
questions concerning these events.
Sarumpaet's approach is fundamentally a moral one. The climax
of her moral challenge to society is focused in the last scene of
the play where her hero, Imam, the critical and independent-
minded son of a fascist general, confronts his father and his
father's lackeys with the fact of the mass murder of the members
of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).
"The country would have been destroyed if that party had come
to power," answer's one of the fascist ruler's military lackeys.
"Is that a reason to kill all these people?" replies Imam
passionately. Imam goes on to reject his father and his father's
wishes that he follow in his footsteps as a national leader.
This scene crystallizes Sarumpaet's moral challenge: a
negative assessment of the PKI by the military was not a
justification for mass murder. This injustice must be rectified.
This open moral stand taken on the stage in Taman Ismail Marzuki
in Central Jakarta is an important event in post-Soeharto
cultural life.
The play has good acting and, within in its aesthetic form of
moral statement, well directed. At the same time, Sarumpaet's
long play contains flaws which weaken its overall impact.
The story which she has decided to use distracts people,
especially young people still unfamiliar with the facts of 1965.
Her tragic heroine, Zuraida, is the granddaughter of a woman
imprisoned on suspicions of being a member of the PKI. She has
suffered as a result, the subject of discrimination and stigma as
well as of pressures from a mother in denial of reality and
riddled by guilt for not defending Zuraida's grandmother and for
accepting a position in the government of the oppressor.
But Zuraida's grandmother was not a member of the PKI.
Sarumpaet's story makes her somebody wrongly accused of being in
the PKI, the subject of plots to do with an extra-marital affair.
In fact, nowhere in the play do any of the consciously
targeted victims of the mass murder have a chance to speak: the
millions of people who consciously decided to join and be active
in the PKI, the largest legal party in Indonesia in 1965.
This weakness is underlined again in the opening scene where
again another victim is highlighted: a teacher of the Islamic
religion who was killed, again mistakenly accused of being PKI.
Sarumpaet misses the opportunity to address the key central
myth used to defend the New Order's immorality on this question
and upon which society's acquiescence is also based.
This is not the myth that the PKI was responsible for the
death of generals in 1965 or that the PKI was behind the 1965
coup or that the killings were a result of spontaneous popular
revenge.
In fact, Sarumpaet does raise the issue of the Soeharto
group's knowledge of the coup and makes it clear that she thinks
the military was responsible for the killings.
The real myth was that the PKI was made up of evil people who
deserved to be killed. It does not help in rebutting this myth by
not having any characters who can present a case for the PKI.
My criticism is not that Sarumpaet should have defended the
PKI or its ideology, but rather that she should have let them
speak. What were they struggling for? What motivated them? What
did they want for Indonesia? Only by answering these questions
can we begin also to answer the question: what were those who
organized the mass murders trying to stop?
This absence also creates an aesthetic flaw. By reducing the
substance of the play to Sarumpaet's moral statement devoid of
the necessary political elaboration, the aesthetic form of the
play becomes one of statement alone.
Her script is written not as a dramatic and evolving story,
but rather as a series of scenes mostly meant to provide an
opportunity to make a statement, usually in the form of angry
declamation or tragic soliloquy.
This flaw, the flaw of focusing on the "wrongly accused",
actually weakens the impact of her correct fundamental moral
statement in the final scene.
It is and was wrong. A great evil of the 20th century, to
carry out the 1965 to 1967 mass murders of between 500,000 and a
million people simply because they were suspected to be in the
Indonesian Communist Party.
But in raising an argument about this whole event, it is also
wrong, I think, to deny the members of the PKI a voice in
presenting their case.
This absence has the danger of reinforcing the very taboo and
stereotype that the ideas and actions of the PKI are indeed evil,
or biadab ("barbarian") to use Imam's word.
It seems that they are so evil indeed that they are too taboo
to be explained even in a play addressing the very issue of the
murder and suppression of these millions of citizens and their
views.