Seno Gumira Ajidarma

75/2021. Jazz, Perfume & the Incident, by Seno Gumira Ajidarma, is a novel about jazz, perfume, and an incident of violent government repression in occupied territory, except the parts about the incident are actually factual reports of the November 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, aka the Dili Massacre, when the Indonesian military murdered 250 or so human rights protestors at a funeral in East Timor / Timor Leste. The author Seno Gumira Ajidarma was a journalist subject to government censorship of news media who lost his job in January 1992 as a result of publishing articles about the Santa Cruz massacre, but he wasn't detained. He published further material under the guise of literary fiction in 1996. The incident had previously become internationally notorious due to coverage by foreign journalists Max Stahl, Amy Goodman, and Allan Nairn, who managed to outwit the Indonesian and Australian authorities to get the news out, but their work was censored within Indonesia and could only be smuggled in covertly. The most conservative estimate of East Timorese deaths directly attributable to the Indonesian occupation is upwards of 100,000 people but many scholarly researchers consider this an underestimate and some have alleged that over 40% of the population died.

The plot of the novel is that the protagonist, who remembers women by their choice of perfume, is reading reports of the Santa Cruz massacre and listening to jazz, which just happens to be associated with both musical freedom and civil rights.

The report chapters are verbatim eyewitness reports of the Santa Cruz massacre and subsequent "disappearances" collected by Indonesian magazine Jakarta Jakarta (where the author worked before being sacked for doing journalism in public) within the framing story of the protagonist reading them. Simple but effective. Apparently censors don't read literary fiction, or they think nobody else reads it, so printing these stories in this form evaded censure.

The jazz chapters are a long meditation on the use of art to communicate meaning, through music or through words: "jazz frees me to imagine, to wander as far as my thoughts can take me. If the music empowers just one listener to do something, isn't that already more than enough?" (...) "I want to know how history can be recorded in a voice. How blood and tears can be heard forever in sounds that occupy so limited a time."

The perfume chapters are more complex. Are the perfumes really attached to privileged women or are these the perfumed women from advertisements by brands which won't buy space in a magazine that's perceived as too political, a magazine that might be censored or banned from the shelves? Which stories should our protagonist pay attention to: the self-possessed ones already on every billboard, the stories that pay the bills; or the dispossessed ones desperate to be heard, the stories that could get him sacked or detained or tortured or dead? "'I have a story,' she says. // 'What is it?' // But my pager goes off. // 'Someone called. Said don't print the piece on the people who got shot.' // 'Sorry, where were we?'"

Then about two thirds of the way through, while the protagonist is still in 1993, the author is in 1996 and decides he might as well push ALL the way, so there's suddenly a chapter on journalism, and then a chapter about lesbians, and then one about gay men, but the author is smart and subtle about this. So his character talks about learning journalistic skills and gives a list of mostly innocuous potential questions ending with 'What's your opinion of the "July 27 Incident?"?' Which is acceptable because in 1993 there hadn't been a July 27 Incident. The July 27 Incident occurred in 1996 just before the novel was published. So the question remains unanswered because it's supposed to make the reader think, and this device works extremely well. And then further down the same page the protagonist (and presumably also the author) mock's himself: '"What's your opinion about the current political situation in Indonesia?" // "Journalists today are cheeky with their questions! But they don't have the nerve to print the answers!"' Then there's a rant rejecting ideology so green-red eco-left ideas can be introduced into the text, and the chapter concludes with quotes from another journalist's interview with a surprisingly philosophical snail.

The chapter on lesbians deliberately normalises a variety of lesbian and bisexual relationships between women from a variety of social backgrounds: 'I already mentioned that I'm aware of this sort of thing but to see it firsthand, in one's face, is different.' The following chapter mentions rape (no description or graphic detail) as a form of torture and political/social repression so there is an immediate contrast between the sexual choices of women free to choose and coercive sexual control by society. The next chapter on gay men emphasises unthreatening sexuality, with a story of gentle lovers told in an interview and contrasted against the interviewer's prejudices, then the interviewer dreams of male sex-workers (lol, no comment).

In the next chapter the journalist protagonist's office is raided by "intelligence agents" who confiscate information: '"We're looking for the evidence." // "We're good people here, sir." // "It's exactly because you're good people that you can be subversive." // Crap. I can't say "Well, in that case we're evil," can I?'

Before I read this I thought it was going to be worthy and of historical interest and with an interesting structure, which it is, but it's also full of mischief and joie de vivre. I loved it!… (more)

I have to say that this book is not really "my kind of thing" but I am enthralled by the immensely clever way it was designed.

The author, journalist Seno Gumira Ajidarma, wanted to write about the "Dili Incident" in what was then a city in Indonesia and is now the capital of East Timor, when paramilitary opened fire with machine guns on a massive crowd of peaceful protesters. The official death toll was 19; the real body count was probably in the hundreds. The government, a dictatorship, claimed the soldiers were defending themselves against a bunch of violent guerrillas, and anyone who said otherwise was arrested or had to go into hiding. Ajidarma wanted to reveal the truth about what happened, but feared reprisal.

And so he published it in a literary press (the censors didn't pay much attention to literary books) as Jazz, Perfume and the Incident. Disguised as a novel, only one-third of the chapters are about the Incident. The other chapters are loosely connected short stories/vignettes themed around jazz and perfume. This is to disguise the book from casual browsers. Only if you really start reading it do you get to the heart of it, where Ajidarma presents eyewitness accounts, Amnesty International reports about torture, etc.

Since the English-language reader is not going to have a clue about this, it was all explained in the introduction.

That is so incredibly awesome. I have to applaud Ajidarma's cleverness here. And it worked: although he lost his job over his coverage of the Incident, he was not arrested, and a few years later the dictatorship was overthrown.… (more)