For many Indonesians, events surrounding the ‘30th September Movement’ of 1965 remain mysterious and contested. This was an attempted military coup on the Sukarno government, the blame for which was placed on the Indonesian Communist Party. The subsequent counter-coup resulted in General Suharto’s inauguration and it was under Suharto that Indonesians were force-fed an ‘official’ government narrative which condemned the communist left (Zurbuchen 2002). Public antipathy was harnessed, leading to the mass extermination of communist sympathisers across the country. Questions thereafter were discouraged by the Suharto regime, denying for many, closure on the most tragic moment in Indonesia’s history (ibid). Suharto’s resignation in 1998 created space to re-examine this traumatic (and highly dubious) chapter, and Indonesia has witnessed a flurry of nostalgia for 1965, and the experiences of its victims (ibid). But what does 1965 mean to a country almost 50 years on, and how do these diabolical events still affect, and effect, Indonesian memory, as Santikarma suggests? As a geographer, my research focuses on communist literature – ‘buku kiri’ – which until Suharto’s resignation was banned in Indonesia but since 1998 has been hit by overwhelming demand. In particular, my interest surrounds Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a communist prisoner under Suharto, yet widely held as Indonesia’s most prized author. For Caruth (1995), literature offers an important insight into traumatic experience, and the emergence of Pramoedya’s texts signifies the resurrection of Indonesian memory. Pramoedya is part of Indonesia’s genealogy, and examining his work through a psychoanalytical lens may help seal the rupture between past and present.

This essay is about Indonesian migrant workers, their writing, and the possibility to consider that as their own archives. Writing is a tool for archiving, and writing enables the migrant workers to document their own lives. The narratives of the migrant workers do not always make it into the narratives of the archival systems of the state. In contrast, the migrant workers' writing emerged as their own archives. Writing can also be used as a mechanism to endure the unjust working and living condition. Migrant workers are the active ingredients of the archives: being a migrant worker is an embodied experience, which remains an important source for writing stories. In the case of migrant workers, writing means to establish an alternative system of recording and archiving. I argue that the migrant workers' written texts are a performance of self-care and a form of embodied archiving.