“I can still hear them weeping”: 20th Century Fiction as a Source for Indonesian Conceptualizations of the 1965-66 Mass Killings

Changes in Indonesia following the downfall of Suharto’s New Order era have resulted in in-creased openness about the mass killings of avowed and alleged Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members during the years 1965-66. Yet our knowledge of this topic remains limited. As such, fictional accounts of the violence are valuable sources for increased understanding of these events. An early way Indonesians were conceptualizing the killings in writing and literary works bespeak attempts to interpret the violence and lay culpability for its occurrence in light of the involvement of wider factors. In voicing negotiations of identity and of personal and psy-chological struggle, Indonesian fiction dealing with 1965-66 enables us to move beyond the polarized notion of binaries created in theorizations of this historical moment. An analysis of six Indonesian works of fiction written between 1966 and 1985 will show how literature, drawn together with existing analytical and theoretical frameworks, acts to enhance our understand-ing of the 1965-66 violence. Introduction1 With increasing frequency, accounts of the deten-tions, torture, and mass killings of communists an