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Ubud writers festival debates massacre 'that we're not supposed to talk about'
The Guardian (Australia) - November 3, 2015
Amid the bright floral garlands, free yoga sessions and Bintang beer bottles that dotted 38 venues across Bali's self-styled "cultural capital", politics hung heavy in the humid air. The year of 1965 wasn't so much the elephant in the room as the monkey, popping up wherever it could to add punch and bite to the debate.
Just days before opening the festival, now in its 12th year, the founding director, Janet DeNeefe, was forced to cancel three sessions about the massacre and its aftermath, as well as a screening of Joseph Oppenheimer's critically acclaimed documentary, The Look of Silence, and a photography exhibition, The Act of Living, inspired by the US film-maker's work.
The response from the international literary community was unequivocal. More than 200 writers, including several guests of the festival, signed a PEN International statement condemning the "enforced silence" as a "deeply shocking" violation of free speech. DeNeefe reassured journalists that 1965 would still be discussed, if not actually named. But in the event it was referred to repeatedly, either directly or as "that thing we're not supposed to talk about".
Ubud's major drawcards this year included Pulitzer-winning author Michael Chabon, foreign correspondent Christina Lamb, New York Times critic and photographer Teju Cole, and Mpho Tutu, daughter of Desmond. Of 168 speakers from 25 countries, homegrown talent made up the largest portion, with 61 Indonesian novelists, poets, journalists and food writers taking part.
This year's tagline – 17,000 Islands of the Imagination – was shared with the recent Frankfurt book fair, where Indonesia and authors from across the archipelago were guests of honour. History, memory, trauma – subjects so common to Indonesian literature – popped up in thematic talks across the four days in Ubud. But on Saturday a replacement panel, Uncensored, tackled the 1965 controversy head on.
Did the cancellations signal a return to the dark "post-purge" past or a new, more insidious form of censorship? Where, ultimately, had the orders come from? And was a boycott of the festival – as some had proposed on social media – the correct response? No one could say.
"That's the beauty of censorship," said Andreas Harsono, an Indonesian journalist and researcher for Human Rights Watch. "It is an art. And only the censors get to talk to all sides."
Indonesians needed to mind the gap between takut (fear) and takluk (surrender), he stressed: "Kita boleh takut tapi jangan takluk" ("We might be scared but never give in").
The Indonesian author Eliza Vitri Handayani, who spoke from the floor about the pressures to self-censor and changes publishers made to her first book, wore a series of T-shirts featuring the text of her latest title, From Now On Everything Will Be Different, which was due to be launched at one of the cancelled sessions.
As this one came to an end, sections of the crowd stood up, raising hidden banners that read: Censored, Freedom of Speech = Human Rights, and Rezim Ini Memangsa Rakyatnya Sendiri ("This regime curbs its own people").
All this on the day that new restrictions on public protest in Indonesia's capital made the front page of the Jakarta Post. A practical move by the city governor, Basuki Tjahaha Purnama, or a sign of increasing restrictions in president Joko Widodo's democracy? Again, the panelists could not agree on an answer.
It was Balinese police who demanded DeNeefe drop the 1965 talks and there was a small presence of blue shirts outside the festival hub, Indus – one of three Ubud restaurants she owns – throughout the festival. But they were outnumbered by the locals crying "Taksi! Taksi", in the hopes of winning passengers from the tens of thousands of festival-goers trudging up its more-than-usually steamy streets. Environmental problems are political, too
"Are you hot?" journalist and poet Debra H Yatim asked the audience during Going Under, a session on climate change and the very real threat that some of those aforementioned 17,000 islands would soon be underwater. "Heat like this, it's not normal for October!"
The panel talked at length about the devastating fires raging through Sumatra, spreading a thick haze across Indonesia and huge swaths of south-east Asia. Blame deforestation and the ravenous palm oil industry, they said. But also blame poor employment opportunities for poverty-stricken communities paid to do the dirty work of torching the ground at night.
Indonesians call them "land fires", not forest fires, because it's the land that's burning – in deep pits of peat, three metres down. Australian academic Thor Kerr filled us in on the rest of the horrifying stats: a 5% spike in greenhouse emissions in the past month alone; half a million people facing acute respiratory problems.
A humanitarian crisis, then, as well as an environmental one. Yes, said Yatim. "Babies are dying right now. I must stop talking or I will cry."
Kerr was due to speak at a second session, For Bali – cancelled more quietly amid the hoo-ha surrounding the 1965 panels – about Bali Tolak Reklamasi, the planned reclamation of 700 hectares of land by Indonesian developers. "We cannot talk freely about local environmental problems because they are political too," he said.
And he should know. Kerr's latest book, To the Beach, tackles coastal reclamation by property developers in Western Australia. As long as the media is in hock to big business, he lamented, these stories won't be told – in Australia or in Indonesia.
Media Watch saw academic Ross Tapsell, human rights lawyer and Guardian contributor Sunili Govinnage and Drew Ambrose of Al-Jazeera English in spiky debate about the negative impact of foreign bureau cuts in the region, the poor training and equipment available to local stringers and the colonialist approach to news reporting – "like a David Attenborough documentary", said Govinnage.
It was only a shame there were no Indonesian journalists on this panel. But right across the festival, Indonesian and Australian writers did share stages, casting recent diplomatic relations between the two states – including the Bali Nine executions – into harsh relief, while throwing up troubling commonalities, too.
'A collective resistance to memorial'
In a session on memory and writing, Indigenous Australian playwright Jane Harrison mapped the common ground between Indonesians struggling with the legacy of 1965 and Aboriginal communities dealing with the lasting impact of the stolen generation. "There can be a collective resistance to memorial," noted novelist Michael Vatikiotis. "In Indonesia, I don't find it always comes naturally."
There was widespread fear in Indonesia that bringing 1965 back into the collective consciousness would bring new conflict, he said. As if on cue, from across the island came news that in the west Balinese village of Batuagung the bodies of nine victims had been peacefully exhumed to stop their spirits haunting the community.
"Victims never forget," observed Vatikiotis. "Given the right circumstances, they want to remember."
It was no coincidence the Batuagung story sounded like the start of a book by Eka Kurniawan. The rising star of the Indonesian literary scene returned a hero to this year's festival. His bawdy but epic novel, Beauty is a Wound – self-published in 2002 – has now found a global readership, thanks to a PEN award-winning English translation by Annie Tucker and publishing deals in 10 countries and counting.
Kurniawan's Q&A, the penultimate session of the festival, was a fitting end to what was ultimately, for all the politics, a books event for readers and writers. The author first started writing when he ran out of things to read, he told the audience, adding that early publishers rejected his novel for being "too literary", "too thick".
Not so for punters at the festival bookshop, where Beauty is a Wound sold out in record time. Nor for the long line of fans queueing up for Kurniawan to sign their copies of his sometimes mad, always moving take on Indonesian identity and the legacy of 1965. That line is only set to grow.
[Nancy Groves' flights and accommodation were provided by the Bali Tourism Board. Guardian Masterclasses held a writers' workshop at the festival.]
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