1965

February 13, 2017

A TED talk about forgetting 1965, just when we need to remember it

Two years ago, I gave this short TED Talk about imaginary husbands, telling lies, and the mass killings that slashed across Indonesia in 1965. I know many people will hate it, and will disagree most violently when I say that the long silence that followed the killings was probably a good thing. But we mustn’t forget for ever. I post the unedited version of the 5 minute talk now, to remind us all what can happen in Indonesia (what HAS…

January 19, 2014

Why won’t my Indonesian friends watch The Act of Killing?

It’s easy to be snobby about the Oscars, but just sometimes, they put a spotlight on a film that deserves, indeed demands, to be more widely watched. The Act of Killing, for example, which has just been nominated for Best Documentary. If you are interested in how societies process their own history of mass murder, Josh Oppenheimer’s extraordinary film is a must-see. For more than a year, I have been carrying a copy of the film around on a USB…

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July 17, 2012

Reflections on Indonesia’s collective amnesia

Last month, at the Makassar Writers’ Festival, I had the great privilege of meeting one of the giants of modern Indonesian literature, Ahmad Tohari. His triolgy Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk, was for years censored by its Indonesian publishers Gramedia: they removed a large chunk of writing about the killings of suspected Communist sympathisers by government troups in the mid-1960s. It was only after the book was translated in full as The Dancer by the fabulous Lontar Foundation that Gramedia dared to…