Fugitive memory

GEOLOGICS MARIAN PASTOR ROCES

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On Aug. 17, in Indonesia, the government of President Prabowo Subianto postponed the release of a 10-volume "official history." A good number of historians and activists pushed back against this history-writing project which they think will gloss over the memory of atrocities and further historical amnesia.

To several generations of activists, Indonesia has not acknowledged the 1965 murder of an estimated million-plus alleged Leftists when General Suharto took over from President Sukarno. Yet the numbers are staggering: some estimates go as high 3 million killed in cold blood. The anti-communist purge was widely known to have been supported by the United States and the United Kingdom, and halted Indonesia's momentum towards non-aligned status during the Cold War.

Historical amnesia - a collective forgetting by deliberate means or simple human neurological inclination is the shadow side of identity. But it's complicated.

MEDIATED REALITY

In the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the French New Wave director Alain Resnais worked with a script by the esteemed Margueritte Duras about a 24-hour love affair. The story is told in flashbacks, as though those sudden recollections fired up during intense experiences.

The woman, an unnamed French actress, recalls the immediate aftermath of the hydrogen bomb detonation over Hiroshima. The man, a Japanese architect, actually lost family during that doomsday. But, fighting with the Japanese Army, he was not witness to the horror.

He tells the woman she knows nothing of the day. Her flashbacks are from film footage, newsreels stories, and broadsheets. She was in Hiroshima to film an aftermath documentary.

He, too, knows nothing of the bomb blast. His flashbacks also draw from mediated reality, fixating as he does on the name of woman’s birthplace, Nevers. He knows nothing of Nevers except for the alluring name. She does not wish to ever go back there.