Abstract
This article explores the changes to urban political culture in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1998 to the present. By tracing the contributions of youth activists, and middle-class university students in particular, to the production of the street as a political and public space, the author demonstrates to what extent the democratized post-Suharto era naturalizes the place of youth in nationalist politics. Central to this inquiry of youth identity formation is the elision of class and gender as analytical categories. Student movements in 1998 and after have relied on a specific masculine style that draws on both the authenticity of nationalist historical narratives and the street as the domain of the People, and in the process masks potentially contentious class and gender differences among progressive activists.
Homo Jakartensis
“The present and the possible interlace to form a stylistics of the future.”
1
“That is Homo Jakartensis, a Jakarta human, a character that wanders in search, in a city that has become a market for discourse, with choices that are ever-changing.”
2
Jakarta, the cosmopolitan center of Indonesian politics and culture, has long dominated the nation’s imagination as the place where one goes in order to arrive. In search of recognition, fame, fortune, or merely economic survival, “Homo Jakartensis’s” daily activities form a part of an urban narrative that resonates with extra-local, even national, significance. 3 Does Jakarta deserve its symbolic role as the nation’s cultural and economic center, or do its excesses resemble more closely the megaslums described by Mike Davis as the global future of urbanization? 4 As the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta has the largest urban population in the country (an estimated 18 million) and a disproportionate concentration of the nation’s wealth. It fulfills another trope of the megacity, that of uneven development and ill-conceived urban planning. Rich neighborhoods contain poor ones within, or abut them; office workers live in slum areas; and new skyscrapers continue to be built in overcrowded areas. 5 Migrants escaping rural poverty find themselves in urban poverty, providing cheap labor for an informal economy dominated by “spectral housing.” 6 Given such stark conditions of inequality, the urban landscapes of cities such as Mumbai, Manila, and Jakarta appear as the breeding grounds for conflict and social unrest. Siting political movements within an urban terrain shot through with class and ethnic conflict poses an uneasy dilemma for theorists who seek to recuperate the political potential of the slums and the urban poor as the power of the multitude. 7 How might self-grown political messages or interventions emerge from such localized and denationalized spaces such as the Brazilian favela or a Jakarta shantytown, dominated as they are by cycles of violence and impoverishment? When protests take place in cities where a large percentage of the population live in slums, are these protests an enactment of Davis’s prophecy, alluding to Dylan Thomas’s famous poem, that the urban poor will “rage, rage against the dying of the light?” 8 Street politics provide an entry-point into an investigation of the energies and conflicts that drive contemporary political movements in Indonesia. In the context of Jakarta, and more broadly speaking, in Indonesia as a whole, street politics reveal the contradictory nature of populist reason—that the youth activists who inhabit the realm of popular and democratic discourses in Indonesia are separated in significant and structural ways from the marginalized political subjects they derive inspiration and legitimacy from. This article reframes the urban question that links “street” and “politics” by redirecting our attention to who constitutes the fringes as well as the center of democratic discourse. In so doing, “[t]he centrality of the street to modern life,” 9 and more specifically, the centrality of the street in current Indonesian political life, reveals the fraught intersections between middle-class university student activists and the People they claim to represent.
Where Have All the Rakyat Gone?
The truth of recent popular movements in Indonesia, and the urban politics that most often represent and constitute these movements, is far more heterogeneous than the descriptive term People Power would indicate. To understand why student activists, the “youth” of this article, took center stage as populist figures in the 1998 Reform Movement (Reformasi) that ended Suharto’s military dictatorship, rather than the rakyat (the People) that readings of Revolution would lead us to expect, a brief account of recent Indonesian history and its lack of popular politics is necessary. For the most part, urban politics were kept simple and brutal by Suharto’s New Order regime (1966-1998). A key feature of New Order politics was the transformation of the rakyat, the ordinary People who had formed the nationalist base for Indonesian independence, into the docile and manipulated massa, the masses. 10 The New Order state promoted the instrumentalization of the massa, most notably by incorporating the urban poor as the “floating masses” (massa mengambang) deployed by political parties during rigged election years, distancing them from their political rights as citizens. 11 On the whole, Indonesia’s large-scale development efforts, which led to Suharto’s reputation as the “Father of Development,” reinforced political efforts to depoliticize the citizenry. The military’s presence at all levels of society provided the institutional structure and surveillance to ensure compliance. Opposition politics in the 1980s and 1990s therefore tended to involve dissident political elites and relatively privileged university students who inhabited somewhat freer spaces in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or universities, rather than the disenfranchised masses. The political base during the New Order was decidedly concentrated at the top, rather than at the bottom. Thus, when the Asian economic crisis swept the region in 1997, undoing the economic gains of the dictatorship overnight, it was university students, many of whom belonged to the middle classes and were poised to become the next generation of elite, who rebelled against President Suharto and kicked off Reformasi in 1998. 12
The magnitude of the Asian economic crisis undid the guarantee of elite support for Suharto, and across Indonesia affected everyone from the middle and professional classes to the urban and rural poor severely. Students (mahasiswa) became inextricably linked to popular and nationalist politics as they dared to hold demonstrations denouncing the corrupt and violent New Order state, mobilized supporters, and spoke in the name of the nation and the People. These demonstrations gained ground in the early months of 1998, as university students all over Indonesia formed solidarity networks with other sectors to maximize their mobilization efforts, holding simultaneous mass demonstrations in cities and towns across the country. In the climactic month of May 1998, student activists even managed a high-profile three-day occupation of the parliamentary complex in Jakarta. Bowing to pressure from his former allies, Suharto resigned shortly after on May 21, 1998, and student activists were celebrated for catalyzing the Reform movement that followed. Students were heralded as the new pemuda, the revolutionary youth who were closely identified with the struggle for independence in 1945. The international media branded the student-led demonstrations “People Power,” comparing them to concurrent demonstrations in Malaysia and more historically, the Philippines. For a euphoric time, it looked like a small and inexperienced segment of society had succeeded in rallying the political elite and the rakyat behind them. The pemuda had returned, and following closely on their heels, so had the rakyat. It is tempting to view the development of urban protest culture that began with the Student Movement in 1998 and lingers into the present as an instantiation of a new and urgent populism. As activists consolidated their claim to the political space founded upon the culture of the street and the nationalist tradition of youth (pemuda) politics in Indonesia, the urban nature of political protest reset nationalist history into an urban setting. Reformasi marked a temporal break with the past, but the presence of students, styled as returning pemuda, symbolically sutured some of the breaks and distances between the rakyat and the massa, between poor urban youth and university students, between men and women.
The 1998 Indonesian student movement has become a formative element in the history of the country’s recent democratic transition. 13 In this narrative, student activists claimed their birthright as the nation’s youth, becoming once more the agents of nationalist history. Some of the characteristics they absorbed and embodied, through language, dress, and demonstration tactics, became a distinct style of the student movement that reflected popular culture as much as it did political subcultures. 14 Styling their revolution in easily recognizable ways, student activists simultaneously asserted their class consciousness and their desire to be aligned with, and yet remain distinct from, the masses. 15 More importantly, the politics and strategies of the student movement, what I call “style” in my title, link three developments that are significant to contemporary politics in Indonesia: first, the transformation of the street into a site for oppositional and popular politics; second, the return of youth (pemuda) identities to politics; and third, the receding value of discourses that grant recognition to class and gender difference among activists. This article is devoted to analyzing the implications and limitations of these particular modes of being and action in the Student Movement, based on ethnographic research I conducted from December 2003 to July 2005 in Indonesia. 16 If by asking “Can the Revolution be styled?” I risk trivializing the crucial linkage activists made between political resistance and specific urban experiences and techniques, the ethnography that follows makes clear the import of this question for activists themselves. It is within these urban techniques and stories that the substance of student activism resides; it is also why, despite the authenticating and authorizing public presence of those citizens identified as the rakyat, namely, the urban poor, the student movement continued to dominate the domain of the street while being haunted by the class and gender politics of the New Order.
One of the most intriguing and truly radical aspects of the mobilizations by the 1998 generation of student activists is their wholesale defiance of authority and class hierarchy in their alliance with workers, farmers, and ordinary people. The left-leaning populism of student groups was highly unusual and subversive given the right-wing and anti-communist ideology of the New Order state. Even in 1997, anti-communist propaganda continued to be broadcast annually as part of the state’s ritual to demonize a vanquished communist force that had last existed in 1965. 17 As part of the regime’s efforts to consolidate its development policies, and to remove further sources of political dissent, university campuses underwent extensive depoliticization in 1978 under the NKK/BKK laws, which disbanded student senates, banned political activity on campus, and essentially removed all lawful outlets for students to express and organize themselves. The New Order state had on the whole succeeded in turning the ivory tower into productive diploma mills, as higher education became the key to success and social mobility in the rapidly developing economy of the 1980s. In this depoliticized context, the activism of students, and their adoption of “leftist” styles, cannot be separated from their radical meaning. In the early 1990s, a few leftist and pro-democracy activist groups had already begun organizing on university campuses and off campus with workers, farmers, and communities oppressed by the New Order regime—a regime that endorsed cheap labor, cheap land, and massive development projects, often with military enforcement. Activists worked underground in the early years, trying to expand their political base beyond the campus to include the sections of society that constituted the rakyat, a word that simultaneously contains the meanings of “nation” and the authochtonous “People.” Rakyat implied a mass base, a political body made up of the ordinary and lower class members of the nation. For much of Indonesian colonial and postcolonial history, the rakyat was most often associated with the countryside. At the close of the authoritarian New Order regime, students found a new and authentic reserve of People Power in the urban poor who populated the alleys and slums of the city. By turning the “floating masses” into a politicized sea of demonstrators, student movements in Indonesia transformed city streets into politicized spaces, holding mass demonstrations and free speech rallies in which students, workers, farmers, itinerant vendors, street artists, and ordinary citizens participated as the People of the nation.
The Student Movement (Gerakan Mahasiswa) stood in name for the efforts of a much wider movement encompassing farmers, workers’ unions, lawyers, NGOs, women’s rights activists, artists, (street) musicians, professionals, and pemuda (youth) involved in the pro-democracy movement in Indonesia. Unless specified, most people I spoke to refer to the movement simply as “gerakan” (movement), dropping the possessive noun “mahasiswa” (student). In this article I employ both activist and student interchangeably, because of the conflations that have occurred since 1998, in transposing student identity onto activism. In reality, the activists I discuss belong to a much broader movement that exceeds the narrow field of student politics in terms of the wide range of issues, political affiliations, and networks deployed in their actions. Furthermore, there are important class differences that mark activists who are not students. Yet students regard themselves as an important constituency, if not a leading constituency, within social movements today because of their status as youth (pemuda). The pemuda label allowed a condensation of meanings to accumulate in the person of the student activist. In New Order discourse, students were regarded as pure and moral precisely because of their detachment from politics, which allowed them the privilege to critique the government without serious retaliation. 18 In 1998, the pemuda label underwent a deliberate resignification, harkening back to the glorious past of revolutionary youth who participated in anticolonial struggle, rather than the lower-class “angry young man” or thugs for hire that pemuda had come to mean during the New Order. 19 In reconciling the moral and elite persona of the student with the revolutionary charge of the pemuda, the body of the student activist emerged as a new, and yet familiar, identity. The activist arrived on the political stage in 1998 and stayed on, at times on the fringes of political discourse, and at times, closer to its center. 20
As a name and category, “youth” is always a partial representation. Within the contested figure of the activist himself/herself, there exist the nested relations between pemuda, student, and woman. What is hidden from view when one figure speaks for another? To what extent does the historical legacy of revolutionary youth determine the political identifications made by youth in the post–New Order era? By bringing attention to how “masculinities” reproduce certain gender and class norms within student activism, I point to the ways that historical narratives of pemuda have privileged the memorialization of a male ideal of political heroism, at the expense of more complex understandings of how mass movements and radical politics take place through negotiation. If students (mahasiswa) have assumed the mantle of pemuda status in recent years, the gendered and classed limits of the student movement need also be explored. In the following sections, I show how activists who are not students and who identify as the true rakyat and activists who are women have had to appropriate or be excluded from the quintessential student experience that defined the 1998 generation. How did they experience Jakarta, as the site for their struggle? How does the city as the space of difference interpellate these effects?
Time and Space: 1998 and Beyond
“Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also organise the play of changing relationships between places and spaces.”
21
In 1998, the resignation of President Suharto was a landmark event for the student movement. Their sustained attempts at the mass mobilization of protestors across Indonesia provided the visual proof of a political crisis that was soon formalized by the advent of Reformasi. Dave Mcrae’s description of the 1998 Student Movement conveys the formative impact of these events upon those involved:
Suharto’s resignation left students with an impression that they had been a part of something monumental, not as witnesses, but as agents of history. Some students who had not taken part in earlier demonstrations displayed an obvious elation over their involvement in the final stage of their president’s fall. All negative connotations were lost from the word “activist.” . . . For the time being, the student movement was ascribed the identity of the central actor in the cause of reformasi.
22
The casting of student activists as agents of history gives shape and lends fortitude to the politics of the Student Movement (Gerakan Mahasiswa). Its populist rhetoric fits easily into the nationalist history of Modern Indonesia, a history that has seen several generations of youth (pemuda), mostly young men, rise up at moments of crisis to save the nation. Pemuda history cleaves in two when one considers both the Western-educated indigenous elites who formed the first mass movements and youth organizations of the twentieth century and from whose ranks the first wave of nationalist politicians, such as Soekarno, Hatta, and Sjahrir emerged, and the guerrilla movements and militias that characterized the violent anti-colonial struggle of the Indonesian revolution of 1945-1949. Historian Rudolf Mrazek evocatively names the former the well-dressed “Indonesian dandy” and the latter the “children of the revolution,” naked and armed with a bamboo spear. 23 The 1945 generation of pemuda were not entirely naked; they were for the most part recognizable by their look: long hair, a bandanna with some political insignia, the red and white of the Indonesian flag, a look that contemporary activists draw on. 24 For its anonymity more than its dubious past and criminal links, the 1945 youth generation became the perfect iconic representation for reminding the nation of their past voluntary sacrifices. The rag-tag, “wild,” and unrefined pemuda image has become what Ernesto Laclau calls an “empty signifier” of populism, subduing the differential terrain of politics into a single, unified image. 25
The evolution of the pemuda term, and its inherent emptiness, is most apparent in the way the New Order managed the character of the nation’s youth. In her research on the photography and memory practices of the student movement, anthropologist Karen Strassler notes, “An image of youth as idealistic, ‘pure’ actors had long been fostered in New Order narratives identifying ‘youth struggle’ (perjuangan pemuda) as the motivating force behind Indonesian history.” 26 Even in the depoliticized student era of the 1980s and 1990s, New Order narratives reproduced this refrain faithfully, ensuring that all classes of youth could and would identify with the pemuda legacy. Thus, when the student movement of 1998 caught the public by surprise, its efficacy was soon explained away by the tidy conclusion that youth, and students in particular, were fated to appear on the national political stage when it was required of them. Rather than continuing to naturalize this explanation, I pay attention to acts and stories of distinction that denaturalize and historicize the activist’s role as an agent of history. More specifically, I focus on how the conditions of class and gender difference have motivated and shifted the political identifications of youth. An essay titled “The Student Movement in Social Change” that appeared in a leftist student publication asserts that
Social mobility, responsibility, and resistance (struggle) are factors which have become the reason to involve students who are not in a class formation such as workers or even the bourgeoisie, as they are in the position of being a proto class. So that it is very likely that they will fill one of the classes mentioned above.
27
Unlike “the workers or even the bourgeoisie,” the writer comments, students are unattached to any system of production. This position, of “not yet” having a class position gave students a choice—their transitional status placed them as a bridge between the middle classes they originated from and the rakyat they valorized. Their political position required rejecting the values of an Indonesian middle class better known for its political apathy and consumerist values. In practice, this meant erasing a number of identity markers that would identify them as middle class while cultivating the image that studenthood was a universal (and national) identity, unmarked by class. 28 Activists carried out “class suicide” [sic], leaving the comforts of their middle-class existence behind, becoming close to the rakyat by exploring the rough world of the street. Activist style accentuated the political bearing of the activist. Students affected the style by purposely looking unkempt and growing their hair long, but they also gained familiarity with the life of workers and farmers through extended periods of “live in,” where a student would spend weeks, and sometimes months, living with and organizing communities in urban slums or villages. When activists took to the streets to demonstrate, it was with this added knowledge of the oppressed rakyat.
That the city is full of potential spectators lends a heightened theatricality to their movements. But it is the street itself that allows for the possible creation of political moments, 29 which, in the understanding of the gerakan, is both something extraordinary and something constructed. Adam, a 1998 activist, defined the word for me: “A moment is a personification or opportunity upon which we can act to achieve our goals. A moment is a matter of space [ruang], and time and distance [waktu and jarak].” 30 In this dimensional space, the moment contains the hopeful possibility of expressing, and therefore realizing, the aims of the student movement. The definition given by Adam contains a sense of revolution, an almost apocalyptic rendering of opportunity to do as they wished. Adam’s view of the 1997 economic crisis was that the crisis created the momentum to carry out an activist agenda, but the moment itself was a Trojan horse that could have worked to strengthen Suharto, or smuggled in a hidden agenda where the tragedies of 1998 served as a vehicle for reform. 31 The ambiguity arises in part because of the nature of the street. Because the street is seen as a wild space, control over the street and of the demonstrating masses is always tenuous. 32 Coupled with the unpredictable political outcomes that the economic crisis created, the street itself became contingent. In inhabiting the street, demonstrators opened up other possibilities than those intended by its design. It became, as Adam implied, littered with possibilities. The moments that craft the political intuition of activists (for when does one learn to recognize a moment?) add to the making of the demonstration as a time and space for youth to assemble and walk in unison, to assume their historical agency against the restrictions of the state and formal politics.
The Long March
How do activists contribute to the cultural debris of the city? In what ways do they leave behind traces of their politics and their lives through words, text messages, graffiti, slogans, costumes, film, literature, art? 33 In the informal and public space of the street, the city is implicated in the staging of the historical drama of the student activist. The street is a memory space and a cultural zone, compelling activists to remember their part in building a vibrant tradition of expression that was near impossible during the repressive New Order years. To walk in that space after 1998 is to memorialize youth (pemuda) and the gestures of song, dance, yells, slogans, and rhythms that attracted so many demonstrators in 1998.
When activists march together, the demonstration is often organized as a long march, whatever the distance they actually traverse. In answer to my question of when the first long march in Jakarta was, activists pointed to the events of Semanggi I, November 13, 1998, a significant Tragedy in gerakan history. Semanggi I was a three-day journey to the parliament building to protest the extraordinary parliamentary assembly session taking place. They began the march from various starting points, but most groups began with speeches and assemblies at the University of Indonesia Salemba campus, one of the command centers for Jakarta activists. Activists remembered the difficulties of getting to the designated protest site. Jakarta was in a state of emergency, so instead of encountering the usual macet total (total congestion), the streets were empty, with no public transportation available. 34 Army and police troops guarded various government buildings in the city, armed with anti-riot gear, tear gas, and tanks. Parliament itself was guarded by the Pam Swakarsa, civilian paramilitary groups armed with sharpened bamboo stakes. 35 The walk from Salemba to parliament took three long days; at various points students clashed with police, retreating and advancing again. As activists walked through neighborhoods, they passed out leaflets, sang songs, and urged ordinary citizens to join them. By one activist’s account, a demonstration he was leading through a working-class neighborhood grew at a phenomenal rate, so that by the time he merged with another group, they had amassed over 100,000 demonstrators. 36 The journey ended in violence, as troops opened fire at dusk at the Semanggi cloverleaf bridge, killing at least five students and injuring several other protestors. The telling of the event has since fashioned a historical legacy for the student movement, which matches the slow pace of the march (three whole days of battling for the streets) to the commitment of the demonstrators to reach their destination. While the commemoration of Semanggi I remains important to the historical narrative of the student movement, it is the tradition of the long march that represents the “symbolic capturing” of the city. 37
The allusion to Mao Tse Tung’s historic march is deliberate, imparting a sense of achievement and struggle to the student movement. The long march has a physical destination and a symbolic one; it revisits the site of past demonstrations, but its more practical objective is to reach the sites of political power, the presidential palace (istana presiden) or the parliament building (MPR/DPR), for instance. The economic city center, which the demonstration passes through, does not figure as a strategic site for the student movement. However, it is equally important that the march be witnessed by white-collar office workers and the urban poor who populate the sidelines. It is an act of defiance to stop traffic where capital flows, through the streets from which Jakarta derives its reputation as a metropolis. 38 The congregation of demonstrators at the decorative fountain known as the Hotel Indonesia roundabout (Bundaran HI) or on a highway flyover often attempts to cause macet total, or total congestion. An essay by John Berger, titled “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” makes this point vividly:
The demonstration, an irregular event created by the demonstrators, nevertheless takes place near the city centre, intended for very different uses. The demonstrators interrupt the regular life of the streets they march through or of the open spaces they fill. They “cut off” these areas, and, not yet having the power to occupy them permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatize the power they still lack.
39
The interruption of the demonstration has the power to transform the street, albeit temporarily. In the case of Jakarta, the temporal qualities of the demonstration also contain the power of memorialization. The stage is at once a disruption of “regular life” and a reminder that the space of normality is not empty. The route followed reenacts the first remembered long march by the 1998 generation of students. The traces to which contemporary demonstrations allude are that of the namesake event of Semanggi I, the historic three-day long march that culminated in the deaths of five reformasi heroes on November 13, 1998. In these small but remembered ways, the student movement leaves its semi-permanent mark on the temporary “public space” they enact.
“Real” Pemuda Speak Up: Claiming Dominion over the Street
The memory work that activists carry out in the long march has at its core a belief that the street is a danger zone. Over and over, the demonstration ritually resituates activist youth in the place they want to belong to: the street. In her ethnography Young Heroes, Saya Shiraishi describes the street as a dangerous place where “Exposure to the sun’s heat on the street is a sign of impending calamity.” 40 Popular children’s magazines warn about the prevalence of crime and the risks of exposing oneself to a world of strangers. 41 Recognizing the discomfort and displacement people feel by putting their bodies on the street, activists view the level of discomfort tolerated by demonstrators as a sign of their commitment to populist politics. Many continue to feel that demonstrating at a protest is not enough; a statement has to be made through a long (and arduous) march to maintain the gerakan’s self-awareness. It is one small taste of how the poor rakyat survive the harshness of Jakarta.
The sights and sounds of the gerakan enhance the populist link between student activists and the People. To begin and end a political speech, a speaker yells with his or her fist in the air “Hidup Rakyat! Hidup Mahasiswa!” (Long live the People! Long live the Students!). In the demonstrations, actions, and performances of the student movement that have filled the streets of Jakarta since the late 1990s, songs of “revolution” are sung. A refrain that is often heard goes like this: “Revolusi, revolusi, revolusi sampai mati!” (Revolution, revolution, revolution to the death!). As a sign of how quickly and how far Indonesian public space has changed from its New Order predecessor, leftist publications can now be easily found in major bookstores, and t-shirts emblazoned with changing icons and up-to-date political slogans are being made and sold every day. The much touted Che Guevara has gone a little to seed in these shirts. He now belongs to the urban poor and the fashionable middle classes and does not mark a “student activist” as much as he used to. 42 The lines are increasingly blurred through the dissemination of certain symbols of the gerakan, with Che and Lenin as popular pin-ups on clothing, tattoos, and murals. Recalling the typical activist look of the early 1990s, former students laughingly described the long hair, grungy t-shirt with provocative slogans, torn jeans, and rubber sandals (sandal jepit) that immediately marked them as radikal (a transliteration of the English “radical,” but here signifying “left”) in the formalized white-collar atmosphere of Indonesian campuses. Their cultivated disheveled appearance borrowed the sandal jepit aesthetic of the urban poor everyman, wearing to the campus as it were, their critique of New Order developmentalism that sought to make middle-class office workers of them all. 43 If by wearing a certain street style student activists sought to appropriate the legitimacy of the rakyat, in the post-1998 world, the widening networks of youth organizations in Indonesia have made such tropes familiar to the public. The act of affecting a rugged masculine look as a sign of political sentiment is no longer a domain dominated by students. Increasingly, activists who consider themselves the true pemuda claim the greater authenticity of their political awareness as children of the street (anak jalanan, literally: street children) precisely because the social issues activists protest stem from their urban poor backgrounds.
The exclusionary nature of Jakarta is expressed by the Indonesian saying that “Jakarta is even more cruel than a stepmother” (Jakarta lebih kejam daripada ibu tiri), an opinion offered up by Dani, a young activist from Aceh. 44 I asked him, “What are your impressions (kesan) of Jakarta so far?” He claimed to have none at all, or perhaps, no positive ones to report. It was almost as if Dani had no contact with the “Jakarta” of Indonesia’s imaginary. He lived in a crowded slum area in East Jakarta, in a neighborhood infamous for its crime rates and petty criminals. Dani slipped in and out of informal work. Mostly, he worked as a busker on public buses, singing songs and making political speeches criticizing the government’s policies in exchange for the pocket change given out by passengers who had a destination to go to. Once the speeches were over, Dani would disembark with his fellow buskers and board yet another bus to repeat the performance. Circumnavigating Jakarta on this unintended tour bus, Dani knew Jakarta well, seeing it from the mobile body of his workplace. Yet, he rejected the mark this knowledge might have left on him, because his experience of Jakarta had made no positive impression. Unlike many other newcomers experiencing the cruelty of Jakarta, Dani chose to articulate his position through his political activities, resisting the stereotype of the mindless angry young man “easily provoked into violent actions on the street.” 45 As an activist, through his organizing and speeches, Dani increasingly identified as part of the urban poor of Jakarta, a world far from the insular world of the elite university campus. Thus, when Adi, another activist from his group, claimed that everyone was included in the category pemuda, including students, they clearly defined the parameters of pemuda as that of the politicized rakyat (the people). I asked the question “is there a stereotype that comes to mind when you think of the term ‘activist’?” In answer, the six young men who belonged to the same youth organization looked at each other and replied, “People like us!” In affirming their likeness to the world of activism, the pemuda implicitly rejected the reformasi narrative that only memorialized students as the agents of history. To illustrate this point further, the activists said that they often did not even have the ongkos (fare) to take a bus to demonstrations, or to eat beforehand. They would demonstrate for hours in the hot sun, feeling their hunger. Their stories aimed to differentiate them from students, whom they imagined came from happy middle-class homes, with parents who fed them in the morning. In staking their claim to this difference, the subtext of Dani and Adi’s stories was clear; unlike students, the nation was poor, and only through the bodily knowledge of hunger and poverty could there be an authentic representation of the People. 46
Marking the City: Activist Techniques and Their Traces
“A city is not only landmarks—and that means Jakarta is not just Monas [the National Monument]; to the extent that for me, even though the National Monument is a symbol of the city of Jakarta, it does not represent Jakarta at all. Jakarta is not tall, tough, strong, immovable.”
47
The centralizing bureaucratic and political power of Jakarta can sometimes be erased. Seno Gumira Ajidarma, novelist, journalist, and urban-theorist, writes Jakarta through a series of cancellations. He writes what it is not, erasing the monuments and phallic signs of spatial dominance that adorn postcards and tourist guides to Jakarta. Jakarta is a series of contradictory opposites; it “is not tall, tough, strong, or immovable.” If Jakarta only resembles Jakarta from a distance, that is, from the curious and unknowing gaze of the provinces (daerah), then Seno implodes that view with an alternative representation of the city. Those who do not fall to Jakarta’s cosmopolitan charms practice its defacement. Traces of this rebellion are evident in the visual techniques of the gerakan, which take aim at changing the public façade of the city. Resisting Jakarta’s orderly and hierarchical politics, activists are often arrested for “insulting the symbols of the state,” damaging the sacral images of the president or the Indonesian flag. 48 These flag or puppet burnings are heavily ritualized as a part of happening art, performance pieces derived from the tradition of mime, and mainly practiced by art students and theater groups that were incorporated in the mid-1990s as a standard in student and worker demonstrations. 49 Using the term art expresses the activists’ cultural creativity and artistic license to perform political satire in what otherwise may simply be taken for bad theater. Workers’ groups, the urban poor, slum evictees, and students write their own scripts for happening art to great effect, denuding themselves in public, wearing nothing but body paint, or shrouding and shackling themselves in chains. The scenes of bodily mortification, of being chained and caged, enact a straightforward script of marginalization and exploitation by those in power. An activist I consulted explained that happening art represented a narrativization of ideas that are meant to be easily digested by both the public and the demonstrators, even if visually, the art appeared unappealing. 50 The incongruence of the performance and its visual drama on the streets are as visible as graffiti on a wall, attracting the eye to its stark message.
During particularly active political moments, actual graffiti did leave its telltale activist mark on the walls, gates, and fences of Jakarta. Sometimes these messages followed in the wake of a demonstration. More commonly, graffiti action took place late at night, safe from the watchful eyes of the police. Jakartans would wake up the next day to see the protest tags to the latest news headlines sprayed across buildings, gates, and floors, on main roads, and in front of university campuses. Graffiti action was an act of defiance that was also a nod to urban gang culture that marked territory by labeling it with their signature graffiti. This anonymous form of protest had an uncertain expiration date. Some graffiti stayed untouched for months, denouncing price hikes, the 2004 national election, slum evictions, while others pertaining to more sensitive subjects were painted over fairly quickly. Graffiti action and happening art both made use of the demo’s borrowed time on the street to create their impact. They broadcast the internal dialogue of the demo, leaving word with the other inhabitants and potential spectators of the city. Even though the changes wrought by activists upon the visual culture of the city were impermanent, this sometimes worked to their advantage.
I return to Dani, the young activist from Aceh. Dani was arrested and charged with “assaulting the state” (pasal makar) for a graffiti action that happened quite spontaneously. He had had no intention of writing what he did, that is, the politically sensitive “Cancel the Military Emergency in Aceh” (Cabut Darurat Militer di Aceh), but when his group got to the Bundaran HI (Hotel Indonesia roundabout), the clean, white walls of a construction site beckoned. 51 Compelled by this empty space, he set to fill it with many slogans, but the original slogan that inspired him to write was the one that earned him attention. Kebetulan, coincidentally, they had brought heavy felt-tip markers along, and with this simple tool he scrawled his message in plain sight for everyone to see. Soon afterwards, a guard at the adjacent high-end shopping center Plaza Indonesia (owned by one of Suharto’s sons) hailed him and asked him to stop. “Don’t do that here, kid!” Dani assumed that he was reported to the police by this same security guard who had witnessed and tried to stop his graffiti action. He was interrogated for hours by police, who tried to force him to admit to his outsider status, and especially to his potentially subversive Acehnese identity. He lied of course, claiming to be from another ethnic group from the North Sumatran city of Medan. His Acehnese identity could not be proven, even though the police were certain of it, because he didn’t possess an identity card. They took him for a ride at two in the morning, accompanied by his lawyer, to the site of his crime. Alhamdulillah! Dani exclaimed. Praise god, the writing was gone. Someone had erased it, probably the security or the lurah (neighborhood watch) there. “I was so relieved,” Dani said, “to see that clean wall, because now there was no evidence of my action. The police who brought me there were silent.” He was released the following day.
Dani was released because there were no traces of his actions or certainty over his identity. Even when his authorship was verified by the security guard who worked at the prestigious shopping mall, the actual graffiti that had threatened his freedom had been erased by the caretakers tasked with guarding their urban territory. The walls were empty once more, the activist’s political message erased. To have no identity in this city, like Dani, was to live in a state of invisibility and potential liberation, where one’s words were subject to erasure. As one of the “wild” young men of the street, Dani was free to coast through Jakarta, hopping off and on a bus, exchanging songs and slogans for his fare. The invisible pemuda of the city were the natural link between the predominantly middle-class students and their desire for the politics and images of the street, but “real” pemuda also troubled the movement by remaining outside the intellectual structures that spawned student activism. Their lack of social standing, indeed the threat that pemuda assume for the middle and upper classes, ensured that in times of peace, their claim to the public space of the street remains ephemeral and fleeting.
Mahasiswa/Mahasiswi: Challenging Masculinities in the Student Movement
My argument so far has focused on demonstrating the resuscitation of historical bonds between youth and nation in the creation of new public and political spaces in Jakarta, but the ideational form upon which that formulation rests—the masculine, militant, and violent pemuda figure—demands a more nuanced intervention as well. The celebratory mood that accompanies activist performativity often forgets an obvious but integral part of activism: How is the street gendered? As I turn from a discussion of how an authentic marginality is performed and perceived by activists to an analysis of how the politics of the street are gendered, I am now refocusing my attention onto the mainstream student movement. Here, the trope of masculinity acts as an inclusive and hegemonic ideal, informing activist definitions of political success and behavior. Gender becomes strangely displaced as a lower class condition, or in some cases misplaced, lost altogether as a mode of inquiry that would situate the political experiences of men and women in relation to one another.
After Semanggi I (November 13, 1998), discussion groups, which had been the mainstay of the student movement in the 1980s and in the underground days of the early 1990s, were no longer in vogue. 52 From 1998 onwards, the dominant model of organizing took the form of the aksi model, which featured large demonstrations with crowds reaching tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets. Activism itself came to be defined by the popular elements of this “radical” model, edging closer to the street in search of the authentic rakyat. 53 The unspoken need by students to demonstrate masculine power of the wild, urban, pemuda type on the streets was taken as an index of their political commitment, a commitment that demanded mass demonstrations and violent encounters with the police. Students who participated to a greater degree in campus activism rather than “national”-level politics epitomized by street demonstrations found themselves feminized and mocked by the gerakan. Activists at the time were held to a standard of aggressiveness generally found lacking in women; one was judged either radical or not, militant or not. Women were considered incapable of being brave and committed (in Indonesian militan, from the English “militant”) enough to be trusted to be on the frontlines, even though this bias did not in fact bear out—a number of well-known women activists had emerged from the student movement of the 1990s, and several prominent student organizations self-identified as radikal boasted at least a few women members. 54 For the aforementioned reasons, groups comprised exclusively of women were derided by male activists as failures, or as separate and not-yet equal parts of the main movements controlled by men. Rather than addressing how the membership and experiences of pro-democracy and populist groups were themselves structured and affected by gender relations, the general lack of strong female activist role models for both men and women activists, and the disparity in numbers between young men and women in the gerakan, were characterized as the inevitable consequence of personal failings. Given such a widespread notion of gendered behavior within student organizations, one that contradicted the egalitarian charters of most of these groups, it is important to look at how the language of post-reform politics and the development of “social movement” rhetoric eclipses some basic problems faced by women in Indonesian politics.
Women’s participation in formal and street politics has become an increasingly accepted idea in Indonesia, a worthwhile challenge posed by the demands of democratization. 55 The term gender has come to be understood in lay terms as promoting women’s participation in politics and society, rather than a deep exploration of the unequal and constitutive relations between men and women. Linking sexual politics to nationalism, Saskia Wieringa shows how the New Order state based its policies for women upon the kodrat wanita, the restrictive Javanese moral code that dictated a woman’s behavior:
The kodrat of Indonesian women prescribed that they should be meek, passive, obedient to the male members of the family, sexually shy and modest, self-sacrificing and nurturing. To this end, their main vocation was wifehood and motherhood.
56
The underlying right-wing and conservative ideology that upheld the kodrat wanita also ensured the acceptance of its aggressively virile and masculine counterpart: the militarized society of the New Order years. 57 Such strict social control over femininity meant that deviation from these roles was difficult, especially in the political arena. Students who were radicalized through exposure to leftist and feminist ideas deplored this traditional and limiting New Order definition of a woman’s place in society. The modern Indonesian woman had to be free of such limits and brought to (class) consciousness. Yet it is a leap to think that the anti–New Order rhetoric prevalent in the gerakan brought a new consciousness to bear upon the practices of the movement. Gender became a separate women’s issue much the same way that workers’ rights were championed as a labor issue. The inequalities of capitalism and Suharto-style development were judged to have victimized women, especially poor and rural women who were unaware that they themselves had the keys to valuable and empowering local knowledge. In response, many organizations in the student movement and other pemuda organizations established a women’s wing to discuss and act upon the problems of their poor, rural counterparts, relegating the female members to their own, ostensibly autonomous, sphere. The joke was often made within leftist organizations that their women’s groups were Gerwani, the name for the leftist women’s organization linked to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in the 1960s. The allusion was telling, evoking as it does the particular fear and fascination that Gerwani had in the national mythos, as hypersexualized and politically treacherous women. 58 Yet in this case, leftist activists proudly made the reference to point to women activists’ bravery and resistance. Even so, Ikra, a former University of Indonesia activist, critiqued his fellow activists in the student movement for essentially replicating New Order politics, which made women the wives of civil servants, soldiers, teachers, and now activists, rather than allowing them to share within the same political space as the normative male organization. 59 In a few cases, a number of the women’s wings folded within a short period of time. The short lives of these groups were usually blamed on the inherent pettiness of women’s “lipstick” issues and the volatility of letting women organize themselves. 60 For example, the radical student-based organization Forum Kota (Forkot, or City Forum), which had a coalition of almost forty campuses at its inception in 1998, formed a women’s wing to accommodate the sizeable number of women activists who joined their alliance. One of the leading Forkot activists explained that the women’s wing was shut down by the main body for the “usual” reasons. Pressed to elaborate, he explained that the women were either jealous of each other in contests over their popularity and looks or fought for dominance because of the perceived power their boyfriends held in the main organizational body. That the largest and most significant student group in 1998 attributed the failure of its women’s organization to catfights reveals the extent to which women’s sexuality prevailed as the explanation for conflicts that personalized and sabotaged gerakan politics. Women, it appeared, could not rise above personal conflicts and were therefore incapable of maintaining powerful political bonds without the intervention of men. The oft-used slogan of “solidarity” (solidaritas) in the gerakan could bridge different marginalized groups and social classes but could not effectively ally women activists in inspiring or lasting ways.
Rather than gendering the tightly knit issues of poverty and social justice in the student movement, feminist discourse became merely one of a series of analytical tools that allowed activists to jump theoretical hurdles. Because students already occupied such an exalted moral position in society, it was easy for many to assume that “gender” was mainly a class problem, overcome by education and social mobility. In a gathering of young Muslim women activists, a young woman from the State Islamic University in Ciputat sympathized with the efforts of poor rural women in East Java who were seeking leadership positions in their village community. Yet in the same breath, she claimed to have never experienced gender discrimination of the sort experienced by women in the daerah (rural provinces), because she was middle class and a university student. Never? Never, she reiterated. Because she was sadar (conscious, enlightened), and educated, and because she participated in activist circles, these facts insulated her from the social issues she had come to discuss. Implicitly setting up an urban/rural divide, as well as a distinct class divide, the activist in question considered it anachronistic to have experienced “gender” given her position. 61 This is a crude example, but it does illustrate a point that many young women in the gerakan felt: that gender issues were theoretically interesting but were removed from their personal lives. “Gender” was not a concern or a struggle in (their) real life, because they adhered to activist norms: they were intelligent, educated, organized, militan, sadar, and so on. They could perform in their own right the pidato politik (political speeches), orasi (the performative act of oratory), and other organizational talents their role as activists required. That the activist model was a masculine one was simply taken for granted.
So what do we make of the disappearance of gendered experiences in gerakan narratives in favor of a dominant masculinity that defined political activism? Should women’s voices appear as compendium volumes to men’s normative experiences of radical politics? The notion that women should or could be given voice to “as woman” would be reductive to say the least. It would mean hearing only one voice instead of listening for richly complex experiences. Anna Tsing’s research on the marginal Meratus communities who live at the edge of the Indonesian nation-state explores some of the possible ways of thinking about difference without resorting to the universalized figure of the disadvantaged woman. 62 Tsing’s introduction sets up the theoretical tensions between postcolonial readings of difference and globalizing tendencies that see gender as a separate and universal construction alongside race and nation. As an intervention, Tsing proposes an exploration of the analytic space in between to see how marginality as a space and category of difference is itself gendered. It is this suggestion that informs my argument for gendering gerakan narratives, to intervene where class consciousness about the place of the rakyat and pemuda in popular politics overrides other forms of critical consciousness as proof of the transformative power of the student movement. My attempt to treat analytically the boundaries that sustain and contain a “woman activist” in the mainstream student movement without essentializing sexual difference, or lumping women into class categories, has not been without difficulties.
It is particularly difficult to “delexicalize” women in the way that pemuda are free to be heroes of the revolution, or similarly, how students have been transformed into reformasi heroes. There is no female counterpart to the pemuda (revolutionary women, anyone?) in the history of Indonesia’s anticolonial struggle; even though pemudi, the feminine version of the word exists, it is rarely in circulation. Women are mothers or wives of politics, characterized by loss and victimhood. 63 Indeed, one of the most prominent groups to emerge from reformist politics are the ibu korban, the mothers of victims, whose children were among those shot or burned in the riots and demonstrations of 1998. I therefore do not make the claim that women are invisible, nor that they are absent. No, women are there. At demonstrations, on campuses, mahasiswi (female students) mingle with mahasiswa (male students). Yet, their presence is not an equal presence, in numbers or in meaning. 64 Women are not invisible, precisely because they are given roles to play. Their presence represents a gendered continuum of politics that makes jokes of overly zealous feminists, paragons of ethnic dress and western theory, and women’s groups that smack of domestic concerns. Such stereotypes of women activists float unchecked through the gerakan. 65 To achieve a measure of fame, women are evaluated by the same standards that give male activists their reputations. In other words, women must be as militant, as radical, as potentially violent, and as wild as men. Such exacting standards, especially regarding the aptitude for fearlessness and violence, ensure that women’s failings in the gerakan can be laid at their feet.
While the figure of the activist remains linked to that of the revolutionary pemuda, in practice there are increasingly positive outcomes from the politicization of young women, albeit mainly from the urban middle classes. As more and more women graduate from student movement activism to the formalized workforce of corporations, law firms, NGOs, journalism, and the academy, they bring with them the various agendas and skills for organizing and networking that have emerged out of the experiences of the 1998 generation. If pemuda today are already reclaiming their stake in Indonesia’s history, perhaps the next wave of youth involvement in local or international politics will give due credit to the young men and women who participate, rather than forcing them into the mold of masculine heroics that has defined earlier generations of Indonesian youth.
A Brief Conclusion
This article has explored some of the discursive limits placed upon reformasi narratives by investigating how class and gender structure the political identifications of Indonesian youth. On the one hand, there is the orthodox and empowering image of political masculinity embodied by the nation’s youth, handed down through the dominant narrative of nationalist history that takes the revolution of 1945 as its inspiration. The politics of the 1998 Student Movement were therefore, quite naturally, shaped and styled bearing the historical legacy of revolutionary pemuda. On the other hand, the term pemuda today also refers to the urban poor, the underclasses who are left out of this narrative, and who reject the idea that students know the real Indonesia. For them, poverty is a bodily knowledge that can only be represented by those like themselves who make their living on the street. If students and other activists have to descend to the streets (turun ke jalan) to protest, pemuda are already in close proximity to the dangers of the street. They therefore feminize and infantilize the “student” stereotype, whose exclusive purchase to the rights of nationalist history delegitimates the pemuda experience of the lower classes. Pemuda groups also insist that the term pemuda continues to be the overarching model for revolutionary youth, encompassing students. But does this act of encompassing include the gendering of student identity? The rejection of the reformasi narrative and its image of pure, moral students by groups belonging to the urban poor is fundamentally a class critique of the discursive displacement enacted by a selective history that has since become dominant. Yet, given the hypermasculine iteration of radical political activism and nationalist feeling, the multiplicity of a cross-class, territorially broad definition of pemuda still does not reflect all those who are interpellated by the politics of the street.
With one identity delimited, there remains another open and empty one: that of the People. The pemuda identity and its youth politics have made a meaningful urban politics possible; instead of the revolutionary past that equated youth and nationalism, present-day activists are regarded as bearers of nationalism and democracy, and perhaps in the immediate future, a nationalism inflected with globalism. The return of the past need not be a haunting. The very first line of this article began with a quote from Sarah Nuttall, who writes about the changes to youth culture and their effects on racialized and classed spaces in post-apartheid South Africa. Nuttall suggests one possibility for recognizing the conditions for change, not as an overlaying of the present over the past, but a more complex interlacing of “the present and the possible to form a stylistics of the future.” Styling the revolution contains the seeds of a future style of politics; its practices are open, creative, and material, its actions taken by all those who are invested in the political and public space of the street. With the appearance of the pemuda came the rakyat, and with the student activist mass movements, came once more the proper reflection of the People. In this regard, Reformasi and its student movements do not lack fervor for being so outwardly dependent on performativity; the masses that were drawn to the Student Movement, and who continue to populate the streets of Indonesia’s towns and cities today, learned from their techniques that indeed, they need not go quietly into this dark night.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my first readers, Tyrell Haberkorn and Andrew Willford; my former colleagues and students at the Department of Political Science at Amherst College; and David Goldfield and the anonymous reviewer at the Journal of Urban History for their contributions to this article. Without their comments and constructive criticism, this piece would have remained unfinished.
The author declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article:
The field research for this article was funded by the Fulbright-Hays. Early versions were presented at the University of Indonesia anthropology conference and the ARI symposium at the National University of Singapore. A generous Loewenstein fellowship and a pleasurable working life at Amherst College allowed me to put the finishing touches on this article.