Baskara T Wardaya - Truth Will Out: Indonesian Accounts of the 1965 Mass Violence

To translate is to bring writing to a new audience. Otherwise, translation would not be needed, obviously. In any work of translation, the translator has to negotiate between the original readership and the new one, but in bringing this book, Truth Will Out, to English language readers, some particularly difficult translation issues emerged.

The original edited volume was written for Indonesians by Indonesians, and consists largely of transcribed oral interviews in Indonesian. Given the nature of the topic and the oral history project that produced the interviews, the specificity of the original intended readership was particularly significant in shaping the book.

As the introduction explains, the volume came about as the result of an oral history project involving students and researchers interacting with former political detainees and their families, together with witnesses and perpetrators of the Indonesian 196566 mass violence. Unlike many other books that have emerged recently with first hand accounts of these events, this particular book was not written or edited by an ex political detainee. The oral history project was conceived and based at an academic institution in Yogyakarta, and involved students and researchers dealing with a subject that had long been taboo.

Anyone born between about 1970 and 1985 in Indonesia went through their entire education during Soehartos New Order, with its thorough and devastatingly effective propaganda about the events of 196566 and its aftermath. (Those born between 19861992 experienced a partial but formative New Order education at primary school). Even at the time of the oral history project that produced this book, namely 200811, just a decade after the fall of Soeharto in 1998, questioning the official version of events was, if not now so risky, still deeply uncomfortable.

A sense of caution and discomfort permeates this book. The language tries to be neutral, gently nudging the (original) readers along to reconsider their received ideas about events, and most particularly, their received ideas about people labelled and stigmatized as communists and communist supporters. One senses the learning process of the researchers themselves as they interviewed people they might otherwise never have met and discussed subjects otherwise never broached.

Readers of the English translation, living as they do outside of Indonesia and not themselves the product of New Order education, might at times find this tedious. Vocabulary, for instance, is often problematic. Throughout the volume, the term 1965 tragedy is used copiously. In the original Indonesian, the word tragedy was capitalized and the year written with an apostrophe, so Tragedi 65. The phrase is a signifier for everything sensitive and formerly taboo. Just mentioning the year 1965 is enough to convey deep, troubling resonance in Indonesian. When linked to the word Tragedi, the phrase attempts to be inclusive and non-accusatory in the book there is little use of words like atrocities, killings, slaughter or massacre. The term mass violence used in this English edition book title (to satisfy English language library search and readership purposes) does not appear in the Indonesian title, which was Suara di Balik Prahara: Berbagi Narasi tentang Tragedi 65, literally Voices behind the tempest: sharing narratives about the 1965 tragedy.