Review Essay II: Leslie Dwyer
Mary Margaret Steedly's book, Rifle Reports: A Story of Indonesian Independence, is--by any measure--an extraordinary accomplishment. An ethnographic history of the Indonesian independence movement from the standpoint of people from the Karo highlands of North Sumatra, the book contributes powerfully to the long ongoing project of decentring dominant narratives of Indonesian nationalism, placing context-driven practices of storytelling, imagination and audiencing at the core of our understanding of anticolonial transformations. Complicating the heroic and homogenous tropes that have organized the ex post facto memorialization of the Indonesian independence struggle, Steedly's interlocutors detail the winding and often ambiguous routes by which Karo women and men, living on the "outskirts" (p. 1) of an emergent nation, came to understand their place in an envisioned post-colonial polity. They also make clear the localizing practices that they used to encompass "Indonesia" within intimate spheres of home, kin, community and moral self-making.
Drawing upon a diverse range of materials, including oral histories, documents, testimonials, memoirs, photographs and songs (including the song that gives the book its title), Steedly weaves a rich and compelling history that extends our understanding of this crucial time in Indonesia. In the process, she upends many of the conventions of Indonesian historiography. This is not just a story of the past, but of the storying practices that give history its force and meaning. Deeply attentive to the circumstances of telling, retelling and in some cases, silencing in which tales of war and nation and the subjectivities of their narrators emerge, Steedly's volume offers incisive theoretical contributions to studies of narrativity, memory and the violence that haunts nationalist imaginaries. The book also offers a lyrical and profound meditation on the doing of ethnography itself. A sharply reflexive sensibility, honed by long-term field engagements with Karo communities, provides Steedly with insight into what she calls the pleasures of ethnography, including its production of granular detail and plausibility. It also attunes her to its risks, including the danger of being seduced into a foreclosed facticity that fails to account for multiple storylines, some of which fail to circulate socially. Steedly leaves the fragments of Karo visions and memories visible in her text, arguing for the need to "retain a sense of puzzlement, to use it as a guide in tracking both the unaccounted-for events of the independence struggle and the memories and stories that have been produced around them" (p. 25).
While there is much to be said about Steedly's many and diverse theoretical contributions, here I am most interested in one trajectory that Steedly maps through the narrative thickets of Indonesian nationalism--that of gender. Over the past decade, driven by multiple imperatives--including a need to consider new civilian-targeting patterns in war and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, the landmark call for the integration of women's participation into all aspects of conflict and post-conflict programming--gender has become an increasingly central focus of scholarship and practice in conflict and post-conflict settings. Empirical evidence of the effects of conflict on women's bodies and lives has resoundingly challenged assumptions that war is the natural province of male combatants, or that conflicts and their transformation take place in a public political sphere inhabited primarily by men. Analytic approaches that link militarization to gendered inequalities, cultural narratives of gendered personhood, and the struggles of women and men in their everyday social worlds have only reinforced that challenge. With conflict viewed through a gendered lens, a recognition of women's important roles in articulating strategies for cultural transformation and in remaking social and material worlds during and after war has undermined stereotypes of passive, feminine victims of violence. From an acknowledgment of the particular harms done to women to a recognition of women's agency in the work of social repair and reimagining, gendered perspectives have enriched our understanding of the complex contours of violent conflict and post-conflict social life.
Much of this work has emerged at the intersection of theory and practice, a circumstance injecting it with the energy of what Pierre Bourdieu called "a scholarship with commitment" (2000). It has provided an essential corrective to post-conflict projects that exclude women from negotiations, narrowly define war crimes and the bases for criminal justice and reparations, or assume that "reconstruction" means restoring the status quo antebellum rather than questioning how gendered matrices of injustice give form and force to conflict. At the same time, much of the analysis that has been offered in support of such commitments has been additive, focused on expanding our breadth of focus to include women, rather than asking how a gendered perspective might transform the basic assumptions that undergird interventions into conflict. This focus on the inclusion of women, rather than on the transformation of our understandings of conflict, has narrowed opportunities for leveraging the critical potential of women's voices when, for example, they question the liberatory promise of truth-telling mechanisms, ask whose definitions of "culture" prevail in programming designed to be "culturally sensitive", seek justice in the reordering of community relationships rather than through formal judicial means, or draw links between resurgent violent conflict and unaddressed structural violence and socio-economic inequality. Translated into practice, this limited focus on inclusion has often meant recruiting women for participation in programmes that, while overtly eschewing a generic male subject, nevertheless fail seriously to consider how reconciliation, community repair or reparations for past harms might look substantially different, were they designed in deeper dialogue with the complex realities of local women's lives.
Steedly's book, while not explicitly directed towards addressing these contemporary policy issues, nevertheless poses important challenges to prevalent assumptions about gender and conflict. While Rifle Reports adds substantially to our knowledge of the experiences of women during the Indonesian independence struggle--and in so doing highlights the hegemonic qualities of Indonesian nationalist discourses that sideline women's narratives--it goes far beyond any simple accounting of gendered difference or women's marginalization during wartime. To be sure, Karo women and men often saw themselves taking on distinct roles in the nationalist movement, with women frequently tasked with supporting male frontline fighters as cooks, nurses and caretakers of home and fields. However, Karo women did not express such experiences to Steedly as reflective of either discrimination or "tradition". Rather, as Steedly points out, during the era of "Independence",
Karo did not associate women with traditional values in need
of protection from the influences of a foreign modernity, for
the simple reason that in the 1940s they did not see tradition
and modernity as antithetical conditions. Nor did they associate
traditional values with the domestic sphere. Upholding customary
lifeways and preserving an essential Karo identity were not
thought of as responsibilities for women. These were understood
to be located in the wide network of kin relations constructed
and performed through public rituals, customary negotiations,
and formal oratory--in other words, in the male-identified
world of kinship and politics. Nor was the gender of the agents
of national modernity clearly marked. If women were naturally
atavistic and socially conservative--or soft and inexperienced
--then special efforts of education and indoctrination were
needed in order to bring them, too, into the state of national
modernity, (pp. 175-76)
For many Karo women, wartime was also a moment when they began to taste new and "delicious" freedoms like travel and education, and to feel themselves called to join a broad struggle that extended the boundaries of the known and silhouetted everyday routines in the light of the extraordinary. Young women who joined the elite Srikandi Corps were trained in military and political skills, ranging from first aid to cleaning and shooting guns to fluency in the novel, exciting language of nationalist propaganda. They, along with other nationalist women, travelled throughout North Sumatra and beyond, sharing their fresh knowledge and engaging in political speech-making. Yet the story that Steedly tells is not a simple, easily recognizable one of women's participation and agency. Gender was also central to the way in which Karo highlanders narrated the nation into compelling form, and later, to their enjoyment in detailing this past. While romantic genres of nationalist heroism and progress--genres that placed individual male revolutionaries at the centre of the action--dominated public discourse, many Karo women, as well as men, saw in women's diligent labours on behalf of an emergent Indonesia another persuasive narrative. Women's experiences, Steedly suggests, underwrote a "counterhistory that shifts the moral balance toward a sacrificial model of citizenship and sociality grounded in domestic values" (p. 51)--an alternate vision that later could be mined for a critique of the failures of Soeharto's corrupt New Order regime to live up to the promise of revolution.
These kinds of moral tales became crucial to gendered processes of shaping nationalist subjectivities. In distinction to the narratives told by men, the stories told by Karo women did not hinge on a trajectory of personal and national development and agency. They drew instead on "parables of community" (p. 167) and idioms of women's shared diligence, responsibility and even exhaustion on behalf of the emergent nation. As Steedly acknowledges, for a reader attuned to listening for signs of women's resistance and empowerment, these Karo women's narratives may read as "flat", but for their narrators themselves they were anything but. Many Karo women's memories were saturated with a feeling of having been meliar--an "eagerness" that Steedly describes as evoking an "edgy adolescent sensibility" (p. 167). At the same time, these memories inflected nationalism itself with moral valence and embedded it in a gendered valuation of home and generosity. Here Steedly complicates the very idea of nation-making, by highlighting the gendered discourses through which Karo came to view themselves part of an "imagined community" (Anderson 1991) of Indonesia. She notes, "most often it is assumed that an educated (and mostly male) elite has already done the initial work of imagining for the community as a whole" (p. 117). Steedly identifies a very different kind of imaginative process, "a historical process of subject formation through specific, repeated, sometimes contested, and always mutable patterns of gendered action" (p. 173), in which Karo women and men folded the nation back into everyday practices of ethical self-and community-making.
By refusing to write history as a foreclosed linear movement from colonialism to independence, tradition to modernity or oppression to liberation, Steedly offers a text that also provokes curiosity about the ongoing circulation of these stories. What happened to the "eager girls" (Chapter Four) of independence who invested the new idea of a nation with familiar moral narratives of sacrifice and diligence while dreaming it out to encompass both kin and strangers? Over the long years between independence and the time of Steedly's fieldwork, how and where did their memories move? What did the daughters and sons and grandchildren of this first generation of "Indonesian women" make of these tales? Neither Steedly's interlocutors nor Steedly herself craft classic fables of "women's empowerment" in which the "capacity" of naive young women develops into an ability to act decisively for their own benefit. Indeed, Steedly challenges the applicability of such common tropes to Karo women, who eschewed precisely this kind of self-authoring storyline. But did these women's experiences during wartime alter the gendered dynamics of their lives and communities over the years that followed? As Steedly notes, Soeharto's New Order regime worked an extraordinary sleight of hand in recoding Indonesian women as "traditional", subjecting them to a coercive regime of gendered constraint. The images that Steedly's interlocutors offer--of young women draped in the camouflage of passion fruit vines, crawling through the underbrush on skinned hands and knees, clad only in their sarongs; of a young wife burying guns in her rice field when her husband did not know how to swing a hoe; of a mother's lament for the child that she lost to the demands of the struggle--stand in stark contrast to the romantic portrayals of male heroism and female domesticity sunk deep into Indonesian public culture. These gendered disruptions, and the pleasures of questioning that they provoke, are yet another gift that Steedly offers to her readers.