An introduction
When faced with my own subalternity, and thinking about the ideas presented about world-history and post-colonial literature in Ranajit Guha’s History at the Limit of World History, I immediately gravitated towards trying to thinking of the concept as quotidian and ordinary, one that is digestible and relevant as possible to my own experiences and personhood. I have found upon self-reflection that the experience of trying to tease out the subalternity within myself to be an extremely challenging and personal task, which is why I have decided to work in a writing style that speaks best to the emotional work this entailed, and a style that I know and practice often – that of poetry.
I began this project by reflecting on about how I have begun to shape an idea of “what really happened” in my head from childhood in regards to my family’s history. I want to explore how the idea of my family’s history comes from what has been relayed to me coupled with my own imagination. As much as I have attempted to tease out, much to my family’s irritation, all the stories that comprise of my lineage remains shrouded in layers of silence. More specifically, what I found myself thinking about most were trying to grasp at the vignettes and side comments of what little was told about two women from my father’s side of the family, namely his grandmother (who I call Apak) and his mother (who I call A-ma) whose lives I know little to nothing about, yet feel a strangely strong connection to, but only relative to the stories my father had told me of them.
I believe that family narrative and history, is informed just as richly by political, cultural, and historical forces as national and world history. If we are to think of a “family” as a “world,” many stories are still pushed to the margin still. Growing up in a patriarchal society and family informed by cultural values of hard work, this means that subalternity comes from being male, and largely non-working. Many of the theoretical and political concepts that the I have explored in close reading of Guha’s texts are concepts translate beautifully, in its own mangled way, into that of my own history—per Indonesian tradition, I attempt to retell stories as old as time, to speak into existence, and history, the lives of two women I had never learned quite enough about.
I was inspired by the excerpt of Assia Djebar’s Fantasia and the usage of imagination as a political tool. Where Djebar uses imagination to shape from minimal record the story of an Algerian cave of women and children smoked out by the colonial French army, those whose lives were only made meaningful in the caves of their misery, and in the event of their untimely deaths are given new meaning.
I hope that this final paper/project begins to unpack and unravel the subaltern in life, in death, in memory, and in memoriam.
She, they all say, was a hundred years old
On mourning the limits of history
How do I tell them that where I am from is the ocean?
No land, no nation-state, no label of identity,
just water,
its ever-changing tide
with lines of demarcation, that don’t even stay constant.
How funny it is that countries fight over the oceans—
how do you fight over something that mixes the bones of everyone that has ever died at sea, in an ever-so-crowded soup of souls that
ebb and flow like strange and unpredictable tide?
I love the ocean because the ocean looks the same to everyone, no matter where you see it from, as long as you’re in the middle of it —
it’ll always look the same,
I can open my eyes and imagine, that:
this is what the ocean looked like when Dutch tradesman
carried batik to the Eastern coasts of Africa
this is what the ocean looked like when the Japanese infantrymen
checked on their cargo of rifle and woman below deck,
this is what the ocean looked like to Apak, whom still lives in my memory
as a woman without a real name, just of a title
the blue and boundless sea – where she stares out, and looks at her small
and dry hands, or maybe they were laden with sweat,
On wooden vessel headed for spice islands,
I imagine that she thinks that
Maybe one day I’ll be able to eat sugar again,
She asks her young husband, where are we going?
I imagine, more-or-less, what that sounds like in Toishanese
as she did, as she does, as how she is remembered
is in a tongue I do not live in, like histories,
neatly folded away in boxes, like all her possessions the night after she died
her stories, her feelings, swept like dust in her small Surabaya bedroom
from her brittle young bones,
I was told that my Apak in her last days, would often cry for her mother,
who she last saw when she was sixteen, or eighteen? in a time of the past that blends
together with what little memory she had of Southern China—
Apak, who lives in the edge of my family history, weeps for
someone I barely even thought of could exist,
(are the ghosts of my ancestors, subaltern too?)
Does she have a birth certificate? I ask my father, who answers that:
he knows that her birthdate is merely an estimate
She is a family legend that dies at one hundred and a half years old, in the year 2011, in her sleep, around no one, with her last breath thinking about how she didn’t know when her mother passed,
six months before her death, we celebrated her hundredth year of life with her
and all her children, and children of and children of—
where we think she has lived a hundred years
where as a matter of fact, she has lived thousands of lives,
Apak, you passed away when I was thirteen, and I feel bad for always being a little bit scared by how spidery your veins looked, and how soft and thin the skin of your hands were, and how tightly you would grip my palms and how hard you would stare when you spoke to me, while I could only smile and nod.
(I probably looked so stupid)
How I never really understood what you said, but all I remember is dad telling me that you were wishing me luck and prosperity, in a mangled hybrid of languages that predates our family name
as if you knew that Akong’s first-born would also sail many seas on an adventure of their own, like you,
staring out into the boundless Pacific out of plane windows, thinking about all the people who have perished in the seas below.
To be sub-altern is to be a subject at the limits of imagination
My great-grandmother lived at the limits of my imagination.
In my family history, she, the matriarch who outlives her husband,
who outlives two children, whose fragile and bony wrists used
to scare me, but I now carry with pride, the jade,
(that, legend has it)
that absorbed all her bad luck, and now mine,
when it bangs against dinner table when she fights with
her daughter who insisted she return to Hong Kong
and try to reclaim a home she never actually knew.
when it bangs against the stove tops in which she used to
boil taro and vegetables for wu gok and ham sui gok
which my father speaks so fondly of, he says to me,
I was her favorite grandson,
and turns to me, sadly, that I too, will never understand
the kind of love that sounds like Toishanese farmland.
I quietly carry it, I quietly carry her, I quietly carry it all with me.
We have never met, but sometimes I think I know her
Sometimes I am told that I am her
On uncovering the history of that who I have never known
He is fifteen when she passes away, and all I know of her are vignettes of my father’s
memory in which,
he is slowly losing, to time, her image frozen in a strange stasis,
a history that constantly changes because it exists only in words,
the strange tall clock in my grandfather’s living room that doesn’t even work anymore
(or never was repaired)
My grandmother had dark, black, thick hair, and it makes my father sad
when I bleach mine and strip it of some unspoken quality
what a pity that you bleach your nice dark thick hair and strip its thickness with chemicals, and dye, and cover it, constantly,
he pauses:
you are the only person alive who looks like her.
The first time I see a picture of A-ma it is in a Facebook post my aunt posts, wishing her late mother a happy birthday
I don’t even know her name, but it makes me cry, like my fifteen year old father, who was visited by her in a dream the night before she died, telling him that she was going to go soon, that after they visited her he began crying four hours early
(or was it two?)
before the hospital calls and tells them that she has passed painlessly.
She loved history, and politics, and the news, and reading, and knowing
and she loved to hear my grandfather sing;
I love to read and I love to sing and I wonder what of my favourite songs
she would end up enjoying, I wonder which one of the songs my grandfather sang for her, that she loved most, or maybe she even loved to sing too, and danced along, her hair twirling as she would sweep the floors of their one bedroom house that housed seven mouths to feed;
maybe she would’ve actually liked that I dyed my hair, amused at her grandchild, all blonde, like the boys in the books, like the boys in the comics Akong used to collect,
like the images of a world that seemed to be what the world was,
like the faraway images of boys that were friends with the Japanese
(who she does not want to remember)
she is so much like you, he always says—
a woman unreadable behind a static photographed smile, dresses in a blouse
that looks…white?
(or was it cream? or pink? or baby blue)
Brows bushy and thick like mine; like mine but real, not drawn on hair by hair religiously every morning with tinted pomade,
(my father, who is Catholic, shakes in head in shame and amusement at this habit, because the pomade fades after hours anyway, to reveal my bald and paltry eyebrows, and still asks me to go to church with him when I am home)
Faded, like colour washes out throughout the day, and through the years,
the cruel curse of time;
a living history of half-baked memory, but only so much feels real—
like subaltern story, lives on by strange abstractions that seem to replicate the
grief and the happiness and the love,
just as rich and vivid as a life once lived, but through me,
my father sees the unrecorded history of his late mother, who is feisty,
and young, but more patient and soft-spoken than I.
I often wonder if she would she love me like a daughter, or a friend,
even though she was so young and only had a formal education up to middle school,
she was very smart, and very accepting, my father says,
she is so much like you, he always says—
my father’s grief tints A-ma rose and sepia toned
where the times she scolds him, and makes him go to bed without dinner
become bleached over, like the bones of
the one million dead in ’65.
Subaltern life only captured by a handful of torn photograph scans,
how will I reckon with knowing that I never will know her?
Would she look at me with her dark eyes
with compassion and love? and touch my ever-changing hair and smile at the comfort of knowing that someone else will continue carry her
years after she dies.
What is it like to know that your life is the unwritten history of the subaltern?
My father tells me that she died because she didn’t want to go to the hospital because the family was too poor to spend money on frivolous medical expenses,
her headaches turn to a brain tumor diagnosed too late, she carries the silent burden of her pain so her children can go to school, and to know more than she ever did; even though my father says she never complained I imagine that she would massage her head in pain, and curse at the sky, and curse at her life, at her parents, whoever they are, wherever they came from, for the earthly pain.
How strange it is to bear the face of the subaltern,
and for her beloved and oldest son to see so much of her in me,
she is so much like you, he always says,
she would’ve loved you so very much.
Seperti naga (like dragons)
The strange thing about trying to catch smoke is that it makes your
eyes burn, but your fingers feel fine,
even though the root of all smoke is fire, painful to the touch.
What comes from fire are tendrils that look like ghosts—
the women of my family are the smokey ghosts, who only appear and materialize when the fires of memory are fanned,
like in 1998, when Matahari burns to the ground,
like in 1998, when hundreds of Chinese women are raped in the burning capital,
who still keep their mouths
shut
like the babies, who are dead, or alive, or do not know that they come from violence,
as hundreds of stories quickly turn from subject to object to smoke,
live on the edges of a national history that refuses to look 20 years back
and mourn, maybe even
just a little.
I am subaltern in that I cannot say where I am from without telling the story of the sea, or the story of the soundless songs my grandmother danced and sang to, and of the fires of 1998,
when in a world that transcends “ethnicity” and “nation” and “time”
we attempt to vacuum and package all that is so rich about us and
packaged into markers of traits, and violence, and status, I am nobody.
I am subaltern in that I cannot say what home is,
but I can tell you what home smells like, and sounds like, and feels like,
of hot and heavy air,
and honking cars and motorcycles,
and Djakarta’s dust in between sweaty toes at Mangga Dua parking lot
and roosters cawing, and the call to prayer,
and the spires and scrapers and electric towers
that populate a growing skyline,
of learning how to say the lord’s prayer in Indonesian with my sticky knees pressed against maroon cushion of Kathedral, whose walls mostly had the looming dusty portraits of Dutch priests,
and of chicken fat and oil, and the bitterness of spinach
with the bite of scallions and tough egg noodles,
and with an unplacable heaviness in my tongue and in my head which is probably the ghosts of all the murders that stained these car polluted streets red.
I am subaltern in that I cannot say where I am from.
Like ashes, and smoke, and my A-ma buried in Surabaya, and Apak scattered in the sea
all I can do is grab at memories that materialize in thin air, and for a very quick
second, attempt to build a history that speaks to the richness of
what my father, a man of few words, attempted to build for me.
Sometimes I wonder if it’ll be this way when I die.
Every cultural tradition in the world speaks of dragons in their folklore, of large creatures of fire and power, that breathe smoke and fire,
yet people still claim that dragons never existed, even though they are
real, everywhere, and just like
world-building is a process of imagination,
and that history is a process of imagination—
I may have not been there to experience the breadth and depths of these women’s lives,
but the most powerful tool I have against the curse of time and forgetting
may just be the fact that I have actually tried to remember anyway.