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THE APPEARANCES OF MEMORY
Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia
By Abidin Kusno Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4655-5
Chapter One
WHITHER NATIONALIST URBANISM? Public Life in Governor Sutiyoso's Jakarta
Beginning is not only a kind of action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness ... beginning is making or producing difference. -EDWARD SAID, BEGINNINGS: INTENTION AND METHOD
Since independence, Jakarta has loomed large as a powerful place in the Indonesian imagination. The significance of this city derives from the fact that it has been produced and reproduced over time, largely through state policies, as a space of power in terms of the concentration of capital exchange, political authority, and cultural assets. The most important sources of the city's power, however, are discourses of national prestige through which the political elites of the country produce Jakarta as a city of influence. By insisting that the nation needs all its development, infrastructure, and monuments in one place, they transform the physical spaces of the city. If a kampung (poor urban neighborhood) has to be demolished and the master plan changed, the further development of the nation provides sufficient justification. This-what I would call "nationalist urbanism"-aims at providing a unifying image of Jakarta as the center that represents the nation for citizens living in the city (as well as elsewhere in the country). Out of this ideology, the coexistence of two seemingly contradictory sets of relationships emerged during the reign of President Suharto (1966-98). On the one hand, there is a familiar Western economic liberalization (dictated by the International Monetary Fund) implemented through the discourses of development. On the other hand, there is the nationalist discourse of power centered on the authority of Jakarta. The difference between these two discourses does not add up to an opposition between economics and culture, or the global and the local. Instead, they coexist, and it is this coexistence that has made Jakarta a city of power and influence. As inhabitants of the capital city, the residents of Jakarta thus live city life as much as national life. Living in Jakarta, one thinks of oneself as experiencing a cosmopolitan globalscape, and yet as a citizen of Indonesia, one also consequently lives in deference to the authority of national discourses.
The riots of May 1998, which toppled the rule of President Suharto, have changed the lives of many people in Jakarta. To the amazement of the people, the powerful, relatively stable and repressive regime of Suharto was dismantled in just a few days by what seemed to be forces from below. The majority of the city populace had never seen in their lifetime how large-scale protests, demonstrations, and the physical destruction of the built environment could contribute to the overthrowing of an authoritarian regime. The damage that was done to the city and its inhabitants during the riots, however, was also deep and of lasting consequence. The riots and the spectacle of reformasi (a rallying word that accompanied the overthrown of Suharto) have profoundly changed the sensitivity of Jakarta's residents toward the nation and the governance of the city. They have also shown that people have the right to the city and that, as one resident put it, "people rejected spaces that have been created in the city."
The collapse of Suharto's New Order has finally brought down the framework of "nationalist urbanism" with which the state's elites have been playing since independence. The residents of Jakarta, from various classes, found themselves in a more advantageous position to criticize developmental projects in the city that seek to represent the image of the nation. More importantly, unlike in the past, Jakarta's inhabitants now know that their protests over city administration and planning will not easily be put down by using the apparatus of violence. This chapter tells one such story that unfolded in Jakarta during the few years after the collapse of the Suharto regime. It deals with the attempts of the authority of Jakarta to recreate another round of "nationalist urbanism" as the city witnessed the decline of its political and economic power. It considers the spatial effects of the city government's attempts to revive the image of the city by initiating the "nationalist urbanism" of the previous regimes and considers the critical responses of the public.
In this sense, this chapter deals with the politics of memory. It shows how Jakarta has been engaged in an unprecedented politics of memory that, on the one hand, involves the remembering of the city as the beacon of the nation and, on the other, the forgetting of national consciousness as the formation of city power. "Memory" in this chapter is thus not just a term referring to the state of the human mind concretely remembering and forgetting the past. Instead, it also refers, more abstractly, to the ways in which the past, consciously or unconsciously, structures how one lives the present. It concerns how a particular past continues to live on as traces of the normalized present while other memories are forgotten or return only to haunt the sense of that normality constructed in the aftermath of 1998. What is thus important is not what has been forgotten and remembered, but how and why certain memories are institutionalized, transformed, and invested with particular meaning for the reregulation of the public. The public, however, can, in turn, open these same memories for appropriation, contestation, and intervention. To account for both the condition underlying current urban change in Jakarta and its character, I analyze the operations of different networks of urban memories and their spatial consequences that coexist, as well as conflict, with each other. I suggest that while the moment of social, economic, and political crisis and the concomitant refashioning of the city have opened up the possibility for more responsible and democratic urban lives, it has also created spaces for new urban politics that are profoundly egoistic and violent.
The "looseness" at the center, however, was ephemeral. A new powerful phenomenon of "antiterrorism" began to sweep through the city following the October 2002 bombing of Bali. The material for this chapter is largely based on my observation of urban discourses in Jakarta from 1999 to 2002 (prior to the Bali bombing) as represented in urban spaces as well as reported in the newspapers. I focus on the middle-class newspapers to back up my observations of the city for the public claim of the middle class is crucial to understanding the mentalitet of the political elites (with whom the middle class has been affiliated), as well as to grasping the un-represented voices that nevertheless speak, not always through their own representations, but in and through the hegemonic as well as ambiguous articulations of the middle class.
REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING JAKARTA
Toward the middle of the 1990s, at the time when Jakarta was optimistically making up its urban landscape with high-rise buildings, shopping malls, flyovers, and real estate housing for the middle class, Goenawan Mohamad, a noted contemporary Indonesian writer, wrote a reflective essay on the city. The essay, titled "City," is about the commodification of Jakarta and the mentalities of the middle class who live in it. The attraction of Jakarta however lay not only in its economic power. Instead, Goenawan saw Jakarta as the source of national power that attracted people from provinces to the city, recalling Pramoedya's satire more than three decades earlier that "the wind blows through the provinces whispering that one cannot be fully Indonesian until one has seen Jakarta." Going to the capital city meant more than finding a better life, however that may be defined. It included a sense of upward mobility and becoming a full "Indonesian," with the promise of "doing great things and being equal in mind and body to the opportunities one could find." Goenawan nevertheless moves ambiguously against this national myth of equality in Jakarta by showing the gap between the city and the nation. The city is shown as neither controlled by the "Dutch-style fortress," nor by the guiding spirit of the ancient Javanese "Mataram Kingdom," (a regime with which Suharto often associated), but by "something else, something stronger-the economic and political forces around it" that make "us all foreigners here." Perhaps the economic intrigue and political maneuver under Suharto's regime allowed Goenawan to see with unclouded clarity the gap between the imagined fullness of nationalism and the actual lived experiences of the city. Goenawan wrote that the capital city indeed offers many things to people but does not register any connection with them. Yet, people still come and stay in the city because Jakarta is the center for the person who does not "love his place of origin enough to stay there, but yet cannot tie his heart to his new place."
While Jakarta's residents or visitors desire to see themselves as hierarchically higher (and more powerful) than their fellows in their imagined hometowns or villages, we should also not lose sight of their sense of ambivalence toward the city. In reflecting this ambiguity, Goenawan explains that while the city tries to catch and hold people, the latter show themselves to be alienated souls who engage the city in buying and selling everything-"our things, our bodies, our spirits." Yet, the people Goenawan describes did not leave the city (except perhaps during the Islamic New Year-the Idul Fitri), but lived and worked in "the city of their second birth." In Goenawan's prose, there is no "national" glory of being in the city, but there is still a sense that the city is the center of human life even as it acknowledges the alienation of that life. It is this ambiguity-this sense of attachment-and-detachment to the city-that has given rise to official discourses of "nationalist urbanism" that aim to control the discursive link between the people and the city to further particular interests of the state and to offer an ideological attachment for urban residents to the nation.
The attempt to align the people in the city with the idea of the nation thus arose from the awareness of the political elites that "Jakarta citizens don't love Jakarta enough, because they have no emotional ties binding them to their city." In a city where it is assumed that everyone has "a place of origin elsewhere," as Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma states, it seems almost natural that the "nation" has become a powerful binding trope for everyone to imagine him- or herself as belonging to the city. Yet, as I have detailed elsewhere, the different nationalist urbanisms of Sukarno and Suharto, which aimed at turning the city into the subject of the nation, were essentially based on transforming the city according to the image of the regime in power. As we have seen from Goenawan's depiction of the city, the "national" and "cosmopolitan" inhabitants of Jakarta are simultaneously alienated by the "economic and political forces" around the city.
About a decade after Goenawan wrote "City," Seno Gumira Ajidarma, a prolific young writer, wrote a short essay titled "From Jakarta." This essay grew out of the social environment of post-Suharto Jakarta and revealed a change in the status of the city. On first glance, the essay still seems to be about the centrality of Jakarta, recalling similar stances of Goenawan and Pramoedya. Seno writes, from Jakarta means "from a superior place ... it means excess, wealthier, more knowledgeable, more modern, and this has an effect of becoming more powerful." Yet, Seno's story shows a significant change in the perceptions of Jakarta. As in Goenawan's "City," there is no "national" glory of being in the city. However, if Goenawan shows the centrality of living in Jakarta, Seno emphasizes the importance of detaching oneself from the city. In "From Jakarta," there is a displacement of Jakarta even as the essay acknowledges the power of the city. "If you come to Jakarta, then you will become part of the symbol of superiority that, however, will be read by people (outside Jakarta) as oppression [penindasan]." In Seno's work, there is a suspicion of everything from Jakarta, and if one is close to the "hot spot" (the area of riots) outside Jakarta, the advice is: "Don't ruthlessly say you are from Jakarta, for the image of Jakarta has changed. It is now seen as a 'dirty' place where one is playing against another [pengadu domba] to maintain power." It seems to me that this unambiguous sense of disappointment with Jakarta appears only after the 1998 May riots, in contradistinction to the time Pramoedya satirically wrote: "The wind blows through the provinces whispering that one cannot be fully Indonesian until one has seen Jakarta." "How is Jakarta today?" asked Seno, "It used to be superior, but now it is inferior." These two imaginings of Jakarta, one from the inside-out (Goenawan) and another, from the outside-in (Seno), can be seen in tandem with discourses critical of state-imposed "nationalist urbanism."
In the following sections, I will explore the falling apart of the ideology of "nationalist urbanism" that for years sustained the transformation of both the physical and the mental space of the city. Perhaps the best way to show this is to demonstrate the change of sensitivity among Jakarta's residents and how the people of Jakarta responded to the policies and practices of the recently retired governor of Jakarta, Lieutenant General Sutiyoso, during the first term of his tenure (1997-2002).
GOVERNOR SUTIYOSO, THE ECONOMIC CRISIS, AND THE UNRULY URBAN MILIEU
Sutiyoso took over the office of the governor in 1997, at a critical juncture in the history of the city, the end of Suharto's regime, and he also inherited the immediate post-1998 social environment of Indonesia. Prior to becoming governor, he was deputy-commander in chief of the Kopassus, the army's Special Action Commandos responsible for warfare and atrocities in East Timor and Aceh. Sutiyoso inherited many techniques of governance associated with Suharto's New Order. Many of these techniques, as I will make clear below, are those of "nationalist urbanism." Throughout his tenure, he drummed up the national conscience of Jakarta's residents through a number of urban projects involving national sentiment. Consistent with the urban paradigm of his predecessors, he also devoted much energy to the basic issues familiar from the previous regime: demolishing kampungs, banning rickshaws, restricting motor-bike taxis, and catching vendors, street musicians (pengamen), beggars, scavengers, and sex workers. He also, of course, mismanaged public funds. However, unlike the previous forms of nationalist urbanism officially imposed from above at the height of the state's authority, Sutiyoso's version resulted from the "looseness" of power in the center and thus represents the crisis of that paradigm. Had Suharto stayed in power, I believe Sutiyoso's nationalist urbanism would have confronted only minor resistance, if not full acceptance, by the public.
However, the mood of post-1998 Jakarta is entirely different because the people seem to have found their critical voice. They are suspicious, skeptical, and often angry about urban projects that seek to represent the nation. While they used to be "passive" in resisting the city's programs of "national development" (apart from a few cases), their "passive" resistance has been replaced by explicit protests, rallies, and strikes. This active resistance comes from people's distrust of their national elites and the displacement of the power of the nation-state and the authoritative image of the capital city. The coherent image of "Jakarta as the center of human life" associated with the national ideology is today an obscure imagining. A new consciousness, critical of the nexus between the city and the nation, has emerged from the remnants of the violence associated with nationalist urbanism. But before I discuss the urban discourses of Sutiyoso, it might be useful to get a sense of the changing socioeconomic milieu of post-1998 Indonesia, given the turmoil since the collapse of Suharto's authoritarian rule that has forcefully shaped as well as limited the urban visions of the governor.
(Continues...)
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