This poem by Dadolin Murak was published in May 2019 to mark the anniversary of “Mei Berdarah,” or Bloody May of 1998, when Indonesians of Chinese descent faced mass killings and rape and the Indonesian government washed its hands of mass violence. Dadolin Murak’s poem, published in Indonesian as part of the proliferating “Facebook literature” of poetic expression, is presented here in English translation.” It sings of memories of violence and and a contested memory of the May 1998 killings in which ruling elites still impose silences. Brutal rapes of Chinese-Indonesian women were hidden. As the poem recounts, their rapists took them to secret, empty places – dark corners, the insides of taxis with blacked-out windows, the vacant silences beneath Jakarta’s bridges. (Images come courtesy of Canadians Concerned About Ethnic Violence in Indonesia files.)
A bloody May
Dadolin Murak
Fire consumed
The houses
Of the children of China
All their possessions
Looted
Jakarta weeps
In the corners of bedrooms
Inside taxis, and
In the spaces under bridges
They wept … they cried out
Without shedding tears
They screamed
Yet their cries were silenced
Their throats choked
Bloody vaginas and grave wounds
They were raped one by one
Their violators unsated.
Next, stabbed
With beams of wood
Still unsated. Next
Their necks slit
Without quarter
All the generals
Pretended to know nothing
“This is beyond our control”
The authorities excused themselves
“This is mob violence”
Thousands of excuses
Smoothly flowed forth
From the mouths of the powerful
Decades later
The cries and screams
Still echo forth
From the spaces under bridges
From inside taxis
From hospitals, and
In every corner
Of the Capital of the Republic
Still the ears and hearts of the powerful
Still deaf, still closed.
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