Martin Aleida’s Monumental Trauma of 1966 in Kata-Kata Membasuh Luka

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-503-4_25How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Diffractive reading; monumental trauma; 1965 Indonesia; Implicated subjectivity

Abstract

This study asks how literature can recompose national memory beyond the author’s biography. Indonesian discourse around the 1965–66 mass violence often reduces testimony to ideology, treating survivor writing as mere reflection rather than as a site where meaning is made. The research addresses this problem by tracing thematic patterns across Aleida’s five-decade practice to clarify how the collection builds what this study terms “monumental trauma”: a durable narrative architecture that exceeds individual recollection and solicits civic recognition. Methodologically, diffraction (after Barad) is operationalized as pattern-tracking across obstacles—censorship, stigma, genre constraint—combining close readings of all stories with mapping of motif, voice, address, and ethical stance. The analysis identifies three interlocking currents: the afterlife of violence in everyday routines; memory and testimony as contested, sabotaged social practices; and moral irony that reframes grief as resilient ethical attention. Across time, Aleida’s writing scales from witness-urgency to broader humanistic problematics, reconfiguring the field in which ideology is sensed rather than asserted. The study contributes to trauma studies, social trauma theory, and performativity by showing how short fiction diffracts harm into shareable forms of care and judgment, advancing beyond reflection models common in criticism of survivor literature. The findings illuminate how Kata-kata Membasuh Luka operates as an aesthetic and civic intervention in post-authoritarian memory politics, offering a method for mapping thematic evolution as public work and shared accountability and a vocabulary for reading survivor fiction without collapsing it into confession or propaganda.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Fitrilya Anjarsari
AU  - Zietha Arlamanda Asri
AU  - Dini Sri Istiningdias
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/19
TI  - Martin Aleida’s Monumental Trauma of 1966 in Kata-Kata Membasuh Luka
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Culture and Sustainable Development (ICOCAS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 201
EP  - 209
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-503-4_25
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-503-4_25
ID  - Anjarsari2025
ER  -