Roy Voragen

The Thinker: Search for Identity Requires Open Mind

Earlier this month, the poet Goenawan Mohamad gave a lecture on identity, language and Indonesia at Parahyangan Catholic University. He is the founder of the Utan Kayu Community, Salihara, which opened almost a year ago, and Tempo Magazine, which was shut down during the regime of Suharto. He still writes weekly columns for Tempo, criticizing narrow-minded views while encouraging readers to think for themselves.

More than 25 years ago, Goenawan wrote: “We are afraid. And censorship is an institutionalization of that fear.” He added that “people who think that there is one accepted Truth, it follows that all potential diversity must be wiped out. Pluralism is not important, but a nuisance, bringing problems, frustrations, and so on. It is the one Truth with a capital ‘T’ that must be promulgated.” These words still ring true.

Goenawan also said that unidentifiable entities are being transformed into foreigners by rejecting the strangeness of strangers — the discrimination of Chinese-Indonesians and Ahmadis are examples. Through metaphoric space, borders function to exclude the alien. Identity must be readable and is therefore shaped by fixed demarcations; for example, indigenous (pribumi) versus non-indigenous.

But boundaries do, in fact, shift. The 1945 declaration of independence resulted in the casting of a big net around disparate cultures, drawing them together under a single identity as Indonesians. But the borders are sometimes volatile. This signifies a desire that is never fully realized: to achieve clarity without surprises.

Borders signify a philosophy of difference, a separation of those that are the same from the “others.” “We” represent ourselves in public, but this is a misrepresentation because we have to use a symbolic order embodied in language, law, community and/or the state. We portray ourselves with pre-existing significations that reduce our identities into fixed abstractions. The “we” is defined by a “them” — the gaze of the other. This gaze can be experienced as a violation, because it signifies power and not choice.

However, identity is a never-ending search, an ongoing formation, always tentative. A frontier can therefore also be seen as an invitation to other, unknown places — anxiety as a move toward freedom, as Albert Camus writes in “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In his latest book, “On God and Other Unfinished Things,” Goenawan writes: “Traces of passage, signs with multiple meanings, something that may be wiped clean tomorrow by a new journey.”

And language is of utmost importance for identity. Language is the infrastructure of our voice and thus our identity. The Dutch colonial regime and Suharto’s New Order ossified this infrastructure. Countless army boots trampled upon the language to enforce uniformity. Symbolic markers were created by decree and became, over time, fixed in countless euphemisms.

It is, therefore, no surprise that Goenawan employs techniques of deconstruction to create new spaces, new vistas. In Goenawan’s work, deconstruction is not mere philosophy for the sake of philosophy. His work has political implications. He is very critical of defining the identity of Indonesia once and for all. He shows that present-day Indonesia is not only defined by experiences during the New Order and Sukarno’s Guided Democracy, but also by experiences during colonial times: from selecting Solo-Javanese as the Javanese language to the territorial structure.

The notion of the nation-state is a Western, 19th-century concept with romantic connotations: one people, one nation and one state. Benedict Anderson claims in Imagined Communities that the nation is defined as an “imagined political community ... because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, yet in the minds of each live the image of their communion.”

The historian Eric Hobsbawm claims that most of our national traditions are of recent date; they were invented in the 19th and 20th centuries. What we overlook isn’t only that new sociopolitical needs require different symbols and institutions, but also that if we want to keep these symbols and institutions alive we need to recommit to them from time to time. Nation-building remains, therefore, always an ongoing, tentative process.

Goenawan wants us to see identity openly. He urges us to become poets: to be playful, ironic and recognize the contingency of language, solidarity and community.

Roy Voragen teaches philosophy at Parahyangan Catholic University and can be contacted at fatumbrutum.blogspot.com.

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