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| Of Spaces and Shadows | |||
| Goenawan Mohamad reads the history of modernism in Southeast Asia as a figure-ground illusion of interwoven yet separate spaces that simultaneously reveal themselves while evading the visibility and legibility of power. In his essay, published in the Indonesian journal Kalam for the first time, he reflects on forms and shadows of this history from its intersections, struggles, and negotiations, and points to recent closings by nationalist and fundamentalist movements. | |||
| Goenawan Mohamad |
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I Let me begin with shadows. In 2002 I was invited to attend a preparatory meeting for an exhibition of Southeast Asian arts; one of the notes proposing the idea for the festival’s theme was by someone who wanted to use the word shadow in its association with the most marketable word of our time, which was terror—something evil, foul, violent, and/or repressive. Coming from Indonesia, I contested such a signification, even though I understood why it prevailed: living in a world of contrasts, often flagrant ones, you cannot always appreciate the metaphorical shadow as a play of possibilities, implying the inherent incompleteness of light and darkness. The festival,1 organized in Berlin at a time when people were preoccupied with the issue of what Europe was and what it was not, could itself serve as a reminder of such contrasts, while unwittingly repressing other possible meanings of shadow. On one side, the host city was the capital of a reunited Germany, a member of a proud geography that enjoyed being, as it were, at the Hegelian end of history; on the other side, the focus of the festival was a cluster of countries distinct for being sites of anguish, beset by violence and lack of freedom. Anguish, however, can often be more eloquent. It is for that reason I would like to cite a case in which the word shadow strikes a totally negative tone—and then propose a different approach. What I have in mind are the words of a man simply called Blue, the fugitive in Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, a work that echoes the current painful disparity between what is Europe and what is not. Blue is one of the most attractive characters in the novel: handsome, passionate, angry. Living and hiding in Kars, a poor Turkish city on the Armenian border, protected by his lover and a group of admiring Islamic students, his bitterness is that of an injured soul. Here is one of his virulent but poignant utterances: “I couldn’t care less about your European masters. Where they’re concerned, all I want to do is step out of their shadow. But the truth is, we all live under a shadow.”2 A shadow, for him, is an oppressive entity, a dark extension of something solid, immense, and awesome that shrouds something else and thereby withholds from it a desired degree of visibility. His anger or discontent indicates this lack, and his metaphor betrays a readiness to transmute the politics of recognition into the logic of sight. Or, to put it differently, language is perceived like a stage light that ubiquitously beams in order to present or produce an identifiable self. Blue’s regret is that somebody else squarely bars the light from reaching him and his kind. The shadow engulfs them. Examined more carefully, however, a shadow is just a quasi presence; it is like a specter—one of its synonyms. It has no life of its own, no independence, no weight, no solidity; it signals the existence of an object without which it would not be. Thus it makes a beautifully improbable story (by Hans Christian Andersen, who else?) in which a scientist, working in a hot country in the blazing sun, finds his own shadow gradually taking over the role of his exhausted and discarded self. As I see it, Blue’s complaint of living under a shadow fails to address the basic question: Why should visibility be equal to self-respect or independence? Does it not underline the fact that the logic of light is also that of power? The logic of light, which is parallel to the logic of sight, puts everything under my gaze, brings it into the ambit of clarity and knowledge. Knowledge is an attempt to get rid of surprises. It aims for familiarity by letting things emerge in a form which I can recognize. “Light is that through which something is other than myself,” says Emmanuel Lévinas, “but already as if it came from me.”3 Thus this “something” that was other is no longer truly other. Obviously, by wanting to come into the light, Orhan Pamuk’s Blue does not foresee that as an illuminated object, he will be captured by a pre-existing set of significations. He should remember Frantz Fanon’s story. In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes his experience of being recognized by a white child in the streets of Paris: “Look, a Negro.”4 At this moment, he encounters a meaning that he does not make for himself. The meaning is always “already there, pre-existing, waiting”5 for him, inscribed in the color of his skin; his “appearance saps, invalidates all his actions.”6 He is, as it were, reduced to a complete object, without the “ontological resistance”7 to the colonizing gaze. He has no access to his own common humanity; he is fixed or identified by that gaze. In short, the frustration is not because as a non-European one constantly has to live under a shadow, as Blue complains; on the contrary, it is because one has to deal with the powerful’s logic of light. For that reason, I’d rather see the realm of shadows as that of a play of possibilities. Precisely in their being a quasi presence, having no life of their own, no independence, no weight, no solidity, shadows allude to fluidity. They bring to mind, as I mentioned earlier, the inherent incompleteness of light and darkness. I believe that the significance of the various Southeast Asian forms of puppet theaters lies in the fact that they underline shadows as a necessary part of human narratives—a productive, rich, and lively part. In the Indonesian language, the theater is called wayang, which has the same root as bayang (shadow). Particularly in the Balinese tradition, it is the shadow of the puppets that creates the enchantment of the play. In other words, the theater negates any totalizing impulse coming either from the realm of light or that of darkness. It recognizes the fact that shadows only signify a lack of visibility, not a lack of self-respect and independence. In fact, shadows can serve as a metaphor of resistance. My theory is that in its long history of repression and rebellion, Southeast Asians have developed habits of resistance against the logic of sight by using certain languages, symbols, and signals; in various forms of verbal and nonverbal texts, the weak or the subordinates adopt discourses that are excluded under a pervasive domination. James Scott, in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance, calls these expressions (“gesture, speech, practices”) a “hidden transcript.”8 The word hidden may not be accurate, since they are not totally indiscernible. I prefer shadow as its metaphor. Shadow makes the imperative of visibility a delusion of grandeur or, better still, of control. II Now let me speak a little bit about this imperative of visibility and its relation to space, which is a story of Southeast Asian modernity. For this purpose, I will borrow liberally from Henri Lefebvre’s magisterial work, The Production of Space.9 Despite its rather Eurocentric scope, the book leads me to a more insightful perspective on the issue of space, as well as of shadows. Lefebvre relates visibility to readability (or intelligibility). Originally, he says, space was produced before being read; it was not produced in order to be read or grasped, but rather in order to be lived by people. Yet there are cases in which space is produced in order to be read. Lefebvre’s caveat is that one has to be aware of things concealed by the impression of intelligibility. He urges us to keep in mind what the visible/readable and its traps are. To discuss the issue of visibility a little bit further, let me introduce you to my two concepts of space, obviously inspired by Lefebvre, although I am more susceptible to the habit of dichotomy than he is. There is a time when space appears as something conceptualized. This representation presents space as it appears to builders of houses and fields, architects, urban planners, bureaucrats of regional administration, national economy technocrats, and social engineers. I will name that the L space, with L for linear. In Indonesian, this L also stands for lurus (straight) and lekas (quick). The role of L space in every society is immense, and it is primarily this space that shapes modernity. It is easily translated into design, letters, and numbers. It is as clear as black on white. It is easily controlled and easily used to control. But it is not everything. Another space occurs when social space is produced in history—something directly occupied by man and his body, out of which customs, legends, and various symbolic acts are born. This is a space called upon in recollection, hope, and anxiety, and as such it is not easily transcribed into characters and blueprints. I label this representational space R, with R for recalcitrant. In Indonesian, R can also stand for rumit (complex) and redup (blurry, shadowy). The history of Southeast Asia is one of frequent engagement, crisscross, and negotiation among the L space, the R space, and the people who interact with the two, either simultaneously or by turns. The L space pushes us to draw a straight, single line. Here, conformity and uniformity play a significant part. On the other hand, the R space keeps bobbing out of the L space’s complete enclosure. It is not always clear, it is an annoyance, and it is persistently at variance. In the L space, man manages differences as if managing a large theme park: a chain of mainlands and islands, an amalgam of dialects and languages, and goodness knows how many customary laws and faiths are represented as a regular series of units, like stages with the same backdrop. But this kind of management, for all its spirit of multiculturalism, ignores the R space. Supervisors of the L space tend to standardize (and hence immobilize) the differences among various incompatible, even conflicting, currents that are obscure, volatile, and generally evade any classification. Those who perceive the world as an L space—departmental officials, territorial military officers, real estate executives, and official clerics—will never fully succeed in producing the space they aim for. For the R space is alive; it speaks in symbols and signs, echoing memories and traumas, with the residue of history or its social subconscious. In diagrams and scripts within the L space people capture only some aspects of the R space. A large part remains unearthed as forms of hidden transcripts, as shadows. The vast multitudes living consciously and unconsciously in the R space do not always reject the transposition of their lives into the L space. At times they may even enjoy it. But more often they object. Eventually, in rebellion or otherwise, users of this space are at odds with the producers behind the grand design. In today’s Southeast Asia, the grand design is mainly that of the imposition of visibility on the nation-states. As I see it, the birth of the nation-states in Southeast Asia was symbolically marked by the construction of readability: since then, we have had definite borders drawn on the map previously produced by former colonial powers. For practical purposes, the marking has been faithfully reaffirmed by the succeeding powers-that-be, which came into being during the revolutionary twentieth century. However, at the local level, say, at the border between Indonesia and Malaysia in the northern part of Kalimantan, people saw the newly imagined communities—like the preceding colonialized societies—not as a continuity of their time-honored sense of territory. The marking of the borders was not the outcome of their lived experience. This, in turn, creates a constant fear of centrifugal breakdown of the existing national entities, as in the case of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. This implies not only the need for constant communication, but also the perpetuation of violence. Lefebvre, a Marxist with a highly incisive mind, is correct in describing how nations are formed: first, through intersectional commerce, and second, through violence. These two energies unite in producing a national space. Let us remember that there is a hyphen in the word nation-states. To me the hyphen indicates that symbiosis is not always stable between the L space and the R space, or between a constructed structure and the expanses of land that have existed throughout history. It is nationalism that attempts to provide a discourse for this symbiosis. It is nationalism that forms part of what Lefebvre terms metaphorization, when “violence is cloaked in rationality and a rationality of unification is used to justify violence.” There is, however, one important omission on Lefebvre’s part: he mentions only rationality. In fact, nationalism as metaphorization reinforces the symbiosis between the L space + programmatic and progressive elements and the R space + affective and conservative elements. Benedict Anderson’s musings in Imagined Communities (1983) indicate that this ideology was born in the shadow of the religious fervor it replaced, including its irrational aspects: it is nationalism that generated a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, of contingency into meaning, of chance into destiny.10 But it is for this very reason that a successful discourse of nationalism is a highly uncertain thing. The space that is formed, as I have stated, is also a political space where power, conflict, and rivalry occur. An imagined community is never universally imagined. It is always the product of the one that dominates the imagining—that is, the one who holds a transient hegemony. What is admirable about nationalism is that in its uncertainty, it emerges to break through destiny—while posturing itself as the voice of destiny. But its uncertainty remains. In fact, since the last decade, there has been an alternative voice of destiny in the making: Islamic revivalism. Its impact on the region of Southeast Asia is sporadic and yet visibly increasing, both in its violent and nonviolent expressions. At any rate, it believes in the capacity of religion (and not nationalism) to transform fatality into continuity and contingency into meaning. Even if, superficially, it carries the language of conservatism, Islamic revivalism is by no means a rejection of modernity. In fact, in line with the spirit of modernity, it tends to dehistoricize tradition. To these revivalists, the historical sediment of the local carries a trace of impurity and therefore has to be gotten rid of—indeed, this is one of their leitmotifs, to protect the faithful from the lure of what they call superstition brought by pre-Islamic myths of magic and paranormal forces. In their view, the Word of God is a completely readable text—at least to them, if not to others. In other words, they share, to borrow Gadamer’s words, the “prejudice of the Enlightenment” 11: a presumption that truth is, in principle, obtainable by those endowed with the ability to see the light and command meanings. Thus, despite its current position as a half-shadowy discourse, Islamic revivalism shares the modern preference for L space. The “Islamist” faith is linear, straight, and impatient. For that reason, I am not sure whether ultimately it will make a sustainable alternative to the prevailing discourse of nationalism and modernity in Southeast Asia. Every form of power, including the one exercised on behalf of Allah, implicitly recognizes resistance. For better or worse, the death of shadows remains distant. |
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| Appendix | |||||||
| Goenawan Mohamad is a writer, editor, activist, and poet. He is founder and editor of Tempo magazine, Indonesia’s most widely circulated weekly, founded in 1971, which was twice forcibly closed by Suharto’s New Order administration because of its vocal criticism of the authoritarian regime. Mohamad’s writings include Potret Seorang Penyair Muda Sebagai Si Malin Kundang (1972), Seks, Sastra, Kita (Jakarta, 1980), The “Cultural Manifesto” Affair: Literature and Politics in Indonesia in the 1960s: A Signatory’s view (Clayton, 1988), Sidelines: Thought Pieces from TEMPO Magazine, translated by Jennifer Lindsay (Jakarta, 1994, republished 2005), Kata, waktu: Esai-esai Goenawan Mohamad, 1960–2001 (Jakarta, 2001), and Selected Poems/Puisi Pilihan, edited and translated by Laksmi Pamuntjak (Jakarta, 2004). | |||||||
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| 1 | |||||||
Räume und Schatten – Zeitgenössische Kunst aus Südostasien (Spaces and Shadows – Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia), festival, September 30 – November 20, 2005, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. |
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| 2 | |||||||
Orhan Pamuk, Snow (London, 2004), p. 280. |
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| 3 | |||||||
Emmanuel Lévinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1987), p. 64. Originally published as Le temps et l’autre (1948/1979). |
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| 4 | |||||||
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1967; London, 1991), p. 112. Originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). |
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| 5 | |||||||
Ibid., p. 134. |
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| 6 | |||||||
Ibid., p. 214. |
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| 7 | |||||||
Ibid., p. 110. |
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| 8 | |||||||
James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990), p. 27. |
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| 9 | |||||||
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991). Originally published as La production de l’espace (1974). |
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| 10 | |||||||
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), rev. ed. (London and New York, 1991). |
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| 11 | |||||||
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, rev. 2nd ed. (New York, 1991), p. 270. |
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