Trauma, Memory, and Transformation: Southeast Asian Experiences

This ebook edition is published by

Gerakbudaya Digital Sdn Bhd, 2016.

This ebook has a copyright and is not transferable. It cannot be scanned, copied, uploaded, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, and licensed via the Internet or other electronic means or publicly performed or used in any way except with the written permission of the publisher.

Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

In memory of Ben

The Strategic Information and Research Development Centre (SIRD) is an independent publishing house founded in January 2000 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The SIRD list focuses on Malaysian and Southeast Asian studies, economics, gender studies, social sciences, politics and international relations. Our books address the scholarly community, students, the NGO and development communities, policymakers, activists and the wider public. SIRD also distributes titles (via its sister organisation, GB Gerakbudaya Enterprise Sdn Bhd) published by scholarly and institutional presses, NGOs and other independent publishers. We also organise seminars, forums and group discussions. All this, we believe, is conducive to the development and consolidation of the notions of civil liberty and democracy.

Trauma, Memory and Transformation Southeast Asian Experiences

Edited by

Sharon A. Bong

Strategic Information and Research Development Centre

Malaysia

Editorial copyright © 2014 Sharon A. Bong

Individual chapters copyright © 2014 Individual authors

First published in 2014 by:

Strategic Information and Research Development Centre

No. 11 Lorong 11/4E, 46200 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia

Fax: (60) 3 7954 9202

Email: support@gerakbudayaebooks.com

Website: www.gerakbudayaebooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia / Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Trauma, Memory and Transformation: Southeast Asian Experiences /

Edited by Sharon A. Bong

Includes index

ISBN: 978-967-0630-22-9

e-ISBN: 978-967-0630-76-2

1. Traumatism.

2. Memory.

3. Southeast Asia–Social conditions.

I. Bong, Sharon A.

959

Copy-editing by Gareth Richards

Cover design and layout by Janice Cheong

Contents

Illustrations

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Glossary of Terms

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Trauma, Memory and Transformation in Southeast Asia

Sharon A. Bong

Trauma and History: Accepting Complexity in the Past and the Present

Farish A. Noor

Interrupting the ‘Roll Call’ of Suffering: Bearing Wit(h)ness Through Art

Flaudette May V. Datuin

Please Compose Yourself: Testimony, Remembering and Emotion at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

Sina Emde

Trauma and Transformation in Banda Aceh: Collective Memories of a City Through War, Tsunami and Peace

Michelle Ann Miller and Tim Bunnell

Storytelling as a Means for Healing Children’s Trauma: Peace Education in Southern Thailand

Erna Anjarwati

‘I am more than an ethnicity’: Resilience and Experiences of Trauma among Indian University Students in Malaysia

Christian Franklin Svensson

In the Name of Allah: The Containment of Trauma and Memory in Malaysia

Sharon A. Bong

Illustrations

2.1 Imelda Cajipe Endaya, Comfort Woman, installation detail, 2007 40

2.2 Tomasa Dioso Salinog or Lola Masing, The Malaya Lola Project,

Terry Berkowitz, installation detail, 2007 41

5.1 Art session at Nong Chik hospital, Pattani province, 23 January

2010 116

5.2 Muslim and Buddhist communities hand-in-hand in peace,

23 January 2010 117

Abbreviations and Acronyms

ACCIN Allied Coordinating Committee of Islamic NGOs

ASCENT Asian Center for Women’s Human Rights

Comintern Communist International

CPM Communist Party of Malaya

DCCAM Documentation Centre of Cambodia

DK Democratic Kampuchea

DOM daerah operasi militer (military operation zone)

ECCC Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

GAM Gerakan Aceh (Acheh) Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement)

INEE Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies

ISA Internal Security Act

JAIS Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor (Selangor Islamic Religious Department)

KR Khmer Rouge

MPAJA Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army

MUI Majelis Ulama Indonesia (Indonesian Ulama Council)

NGO non-governmental organisation

NUCC National Unity Consultative Council

PAS Parti Islam Se-Malaysia

Perwaris Majlis Permuafakatan Ummah

PKI Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party)

PRK People’s Republic of Kampuchea

PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder

RI Republic of Indonesia

SSCP South Seas Communist Party

UMNO United Malays National Organisation

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation

UNTAC United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia

Glossary of Terms

adat customary law

amor propio pride

angkar organisation

aram feelings

babar rice gruel

bantu aram feelings are released

bracheachon chas base people

bracheachon mouladthan new people

dapat ought to, must, should

fiestas feast days

indios pejorative term used by Spanish colonisers for Filipino natives

jihad holy war

jin mischievous spirit

kafir infidel or unbeliever

kailangan need

kapwa fellow human being

karangalan sense of dignity

karapatan entitlement or right

karapatdapat proper or right thing to do

keris Malay dagger

la bajo dela campaña under the church bells

makatao humane

marhaban verses praising the Prophet Muhammad (sometimes sung unaccompanied)

pagiging tao humanity

pagkatao dignity or personhood

pakikipag-kapwa treating human beings as part of, and not separate or distinct from, oneself

pantay pantay na karapatan equal rights

pungo crazy

sa ilalim ng kampana under the church bells

shari’ah Islamic law

stres stress

tawheed oneness of God

tulong help

ulama Islamic religious leaders

wat Buddhist monastery temple

rakyat citizenry

Notes on Contributors

Erna Anjarwati is a peace researcher holding two masters’ degrees in peace and conflict transformation from the UN’s University for Peace, Costa Rica in 2008 and from the UNESCO Chair for Peace Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria in 2010. She is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania, Australia. Her fields of interest are prescriptive and elicitive conflict transformation, peace education and nonviolent methods to peace studies, culture of peace(s), humanistic psychology, intercultural and interfaith dialogue, arts-based peace building (theatre, music, storytelling and dance), the Balkans, Latin America and Southeast Asia. She speaks, writes and reads in Spanish, English and Bahasa Indonesia, and also understands some words in Dutch and Portuguese.

Sharon A. Bong is an associate professor in gender studies with the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University, Malaysia. She is the author of The Tension Between Women’s Rights and Religions: The Case of Malaysia (Edwin Mellen, 2006) and coeditor of Re-imagining Marriage and Family in Asia: Asian Christian Women’s Perspectives (SIRD, 2008). With research and methodological interests and expertise in feminist standpoint epistemologies, rights and sexualities in religions, qualitative researching and analyses using ATLAS.ti (computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software), she has published in journals such as the Asian Christian Review, Journal of Bisexuality, Marriage and Family Review and Historical Social Research. She is the former coordinator of the Ecclesia of Women in Asia (2007–2009), an academic forum of Catholic women theologising in Asia, forum writer for Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church and a patron of the Catherine of Siena Virtual College.

Tim Bunnell is associate professor at the Asia Research Institute and in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. He is an urban geographer with research interests in Malaysia and Indonesia as well as in interurban connections between Southeast Asia and other regions. He is author of Malaysia, Modernity and the Multimedia Super Corridor (Routledge, 2004) and co-editor (with D. Parthasarathy and Eric C. Thompson) of Cleavage, Conflict and Connection in Rural, Urban and Contemporary Asia (ARI-Springer, 2013).

Flaudette May V. Datuin is associate professor with the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines. She was recently appointed as visiting research fellow of the University of New South Wales, Australia (2010–2013). She was also the recipient of a visiting fellowship at the Australian National University (2008). Her previous research grants from the Asian Scholarship Foundation and Asian Public Intellectuals fellowships enabled her to conduct pioneering research on contemporary women artists of China, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan. This research informs her curatorial projects, including ‘trauma, interrupted’, an international art project on trauma, art and healing in 2007 and ‘Nothing to Declare’ (http://nothing2declare2011.wordpress.com/), another international art project held in Manila in November 2011.

Sina Emde is an anthropologist with a PhD from the Australian National University. She was a research fellow at the research cluster of excellence Languages of Emotion at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research project focused on emotion, memory and violence in the context of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. She is currently a lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Heidelberg, Germany and continues to work on memories of violence in Cambodia.

Farish A. Noor is associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He heads the research cluster on Contemporary Religio-Politics in Southeast Asia and has been writing about the politics of history in Southeast Asia. His publications include: Disapora: The History of the Indian Muslims of Southeast Asia (MSRI, 2013), Islam on the Move: The Tablighi Jamaat in Southeast Asia (Amsterdam University Press, 2012) and Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party 1951–2003 (MSRI, 2004).

Michelle Ann Miller is a senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She previously taught in the Masters of International Development programme at Deakin University, Australia, and on subjects related to participatory development at Charles Darwin University, Australia. She has conducted research in Indonesia for 15 years, focusing particularly on Indonesia’s westernmost province of Aceh. She has authored, edited or coedited a number of books including: Rebellion and Reform in Indonesia: Jakarta’s Security and Autonomy Policies in Aceh (Routledge, 2009), Autonomy and Armed Separatism in South and Southeast Asia (ISEAS, 2012), Ethnic and Racial Minorities in Asia: Inclusion or Exclusion? (Routledge, 2012) and Asian Cities in an Era of Decentralisation (Routledge, 2013, with Tim Bunnell).

Christian Franklin Svensson is a lecturer and PhD fellow at the Department of Psychology and Education, Roskilde University, Denmark. He has an MA in educational anthropology from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he specialised in nation-state construction, national and social cohesion, minority research and policy analysis, and ethnicity studies with a focus on ethnic communities in Malaysia. His recent work is on experiences, identifications and cultures among employees in social enterprises. The focus in this research project is on solidarity, community building, boundary construction and imagined futures. He has spent a large part of his childhood in Malaysia and has travelled extensively in India and Southeast Asia.

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt appreciation to the seven contributors whose scholarly work so richly adds to the multidisciplinary study of trauma, memory and transformation in Southeast Asia that this edited volume uniquely offers. I thank you especially for faithfully staying on the book project which had, for a variety of reasons, taken longer to materialise than originally projected from its inception following Monash University’s School of Arts and Social Sciences’ inaugural international conference held in June 2010.

The cover design draws from the conference logo which is the creative product of Cyren Wong Zhi Hoong, presently a PhD candidate with the School.

The conference and, by extension, book project are funded by the School’s research strength budget.

My appreciation is also extended to Dr Andrew Ng for his early editorial comments. I would also like to acknowledge the professionalism of the publishing team, and especially to Chong Ton Sin for his support. Gareth Richards undertook the copy-editing and oversaw the production process to completion, ably assisted by Jaime Hang, while Janice Cheong did a fine job with the layout and book cover design.

The edited volume embodies the vision of our dear friend and colleague, Benjamin McKay who had sadly passed on a couple of months after the conference. This book is thus lovingly dedicated to Ben in memory of his warmth, zany humour and joie de vivre.

Sharon A. Bong

Kuala Lumpur, December 2013

Trauma, Memory and Transformation in Southeast Asia

Sharon A. Bong

This multidisciplinary edited volume is a unique contribution to the field on two counts. First, it addresses an underresearched area – trauma and memory studies in the context of Southeast Asia. The seven chapters offer ethnographic, qualitative and textual methodologies of the lived experiences of trauma by survivors of violence in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines: rewriting trauma and memory into Southeast Asian history (Farish A. Noor); making sense of a colonial past/postcolonial present, involving, among other subjectivities, Filipina ‘comfort women’ framed by the concept of art as a process and methodology for healing (Flaudette May V. Datuin); experiencing justice at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) on the Khmer Rouge atrocities (Sina Emde); surviving civil conflict and the 2004 tsunami by Acehnese people (Michelle Ann Miller and Tim Bunnell); overcoming ethnoreligious tensions and conflict among children in southern Thailand through storytelling (Erna Anjarwati); fashioning a politics of identity by Indian Malaysian university students in the face of discourses of racism (Christian Franklin Svensson); and the containing of trauma and reconstruction of national memory following the Allah controversy between Christian and Muslim communities in Malaysia (Sharon A. Bong). These contributions are selected and revised papers first presented at a conference organised by the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University, Malaysia, themed ‘Trauma, Memory and Transformation: The Southeast Asian Experience’ in June 2010.

Second, the book makes visible the ways in which trauma, memory and transformation are contested realities. In this deconstructive vein it foregrounds the resistance and resilience of survivors evidenced through testimonies, interviews, media texts and art. The (re)construction of memory, both individual and collective, shows how trauma and transformation are mutually constitutive as embodied in the memorialisation of time and spaces, and the rearticulation of cultural, religious and national identities. The volume uniquely provide responses from scholarly experts from the Southeast Asian region to trauma through an analysis of archival, empirical and extant texts that are informed by memory, and that reveal, as a result, narratives of transformation that have arisen. In doing so, it raises the following critical reflections: How do individuals and communities in Southeast Asia respond to trauma? What role does memory play in the process of healing and transformation? What particular features do the Southeast Asian experiences of a range of traumas add to our understanding of trauma and memory at a global level?

Contested Realities

‘To ignore this quest’, of recognising and engaging with the saliency of trauma and memory, is, as Duncan Bell (2006: 29) asserts, ‘to miss one of the most intriguing, intricate and important dimensions of world politics’. This volume is an endeavour to not ‘miss out’ on such a political and intellectual engagement with contemporaneous concerns at a global level by foregrounding a Southeast Asian social, cultural and political context. In this undertaking, one is also cognisant – along with a host of mostly Western scholars from multidisciplinary fields of study that have deployed trauma and memory as theoretical categories – that these concepts are heavily contested. And given the intersections of trauma and memory with transformation, the third concept – which involves managing national identity, effecting reparative and transnational justice, and memorialising time and space – is, by logic of extension, contested too. While it is beyond the limits of this introduction to rehearse key debates within or to provide an extensive literature review of the multidisciplinary fields of study pertaining to trauma and memory, it does modestly offer a consideration of the implications of such contested meanings in the understanding and practices of trauma, memory and transformation in Southeast Asia.

The fields of study represented in this volume – anthropology, arts studies, geography, history, ethnicity and race studies, gender studies, memory studies, peace studies, policy studies, the study of emotion (or affect) and Southeast Asian studies – depart from the dominant disciplines commonly associated with trauma studies. These include pathology, psychology and psychoanalysis, which have each subsequently been applied to literary and film studies beyond medicine and psychiatry where much research is centred on post-traumatic stress disorder. This shift importantly opens up definitions of what counts as trauma (for example, its nature, effects and treatment) and who decides this and for whom. The ‘Greek trauma, or wound’, originally refers to ‘an injury inflicted on a body’, as Cathy Caruth (1996: 3), who is frequently cited in this volume, explains. The wound, in precursory fields of study, is prominent: physically in pathology, psychically in psychology and repressed in psychoanalysis (Bell, 2006: 7). ‘Trauma’, as Bell puts it, ‘implies a breakdown of both meaning and trust – in a world that has been shattered, overturned’ (Ibid.: 8). Global commentators, as such, look to catastrophic and horrific events in history that result in large-scale, often macabre even apocalyptic death, torture and suffering as indices of massive trauma which radically disrupts a sense of national, communal and/or personal safety, security and overall well-being. Trauma perceived this way serves as a ‘mechanism and cause of mortality and morbidity on a global scale’ and encompasses, among other instances, large-scale disasters, both natural (e.g. 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami) and man-made (e.g. ethnoreligious conflict in southern Thailand), random everyday accidents or ‘intentional violence’ (e.g. crimes against humanity during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, sexual slavery of comfort women during the Japanese occupation in Asia, and church arsons and desecration of places of worship in Malaysia following the Allah controversy) (Leppäniemi, 2009).

What has become an almost instinctive and universal categorisation of what counts as trauma is its unproblematised ‘absolute indispensability in characterising acts of extremity’ (Ruth Leys cited in Bell, 2006: 9). Equally problematic is the ‘debased currency’ of the notion of trauma, ‘in an age in which it is used to describe the simply unpleasant or uncomfortable’ (Ibid.). In the context of what counts as trauma in this volume, both pitfalls – counting the particular as opposed to counting everything as traumatic – are eschewed in two ways. First, the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ that posits some ‘extreme events … as naturally traumatizing’ and inadvertently valorising a victim culture (Jeffrey Alexander cited in Bell, 2006: 7) is tempered with the authors’ critical assessment of the nature and effects of the healing of wounds in its myriad forms, reconstruction of memoryscapes and reparative justice – the degree to which these are transformative, for whom and at what costs. Trauma, when reflexively interpreted, ‘is entirely a social construct’ (Ibid.). Second, the interpretation of what counts as trauma is opened up with a