Speaker : Dr. Taomo Zhou (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
by SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies
*25 November 2022 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm Waktu London
Abstract
This presentation traces an Indonesian woman activist’s life trajectory through different parts of the decolonizing world as a diplomat, a political exile and an asylum seeker. Francisca Fanggidaej (1925–2013) [pictured] was a left-wing intellectual and a member of the Indonesian Parliament. She was an activist in the Afro-Asian movements and a mother of seven children. She became a communist exile in China after the mass violence and regime change in Indonesia in 1965–1966 and endured a two-decade separation from her family. Based on a close reading of Fanggidaej’s dairy entries across four decades and more than 180 personal letters, this talk interweaves the public and private lives of Fanggidaej, thereby connecting the history of Third World internationalism to a global history of motherhood. It shows that the decline of Third World internationalism signalled not only a missed opportunity to reframe global geopolitics but also a lost moment to reimagine motherhood and restructure women’s relations with family and work.
Between 1967 and 1975, Francisca Fanggidaej, a Dutch-educated, left-wing Indonesian women’s rights activist, stayed eight long years in the VIP wing of a hospital in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, a microcosm of several other Indonesian exile patients and their Chinese medical staff. To fight off “anxiety, boredom, restlessness and despair,” Fanggidaej turned to Mao’s teachings to energize the monotonous day-to-day life, to alleviate the stress caused by the dense human relationships under confinement, and to suppress her worries and longings for the husband and seven children she left behind in Indonesia.8 In 1967, Christmas greetings from a Dutch radio broadcast brought back memories of her family and Fanggidaej could not hold back her tears. In her diary, she soon criticized herself for being carried away by “petty bourgeois feelings” and tried to normalize her personal sufferings as part of the national tragedy in Indonesia in 1965–1966, which prepared the nation for a Mao-style proletarian revolution. The Indonesian Communists, learning from their past mistake of following the revisionist, peaceful, parliamentary road, would “bury the corpses of their fallen comrades, clean the blood from their bodies, and lift the weapons they left behind.” “Rebel is justified!” Writing from her hospital bed in Guangzhou, Francisca imagined in her diaries the surviving PKI members lighting “sparks of revolution” in the forests and valleys of Indonesia and starting “a prairie fire” for the entire world.9 On each of her seven children’s birthdays, she wrote them stories about Maoist revolutionary youths—a girl guerilla fighter in South Vietnam, a brave Soviet student who challenged his teacher about “bourgeois humanist” Russian literature, and Hong Kong teenagers who rioted against the British in 1966—as birthday gifts. Her children would never receive these gifts due to the complete severing of communications between China and Indonesia following the freezing of bilateral diplomatic ties.
simak pula
Pergerakan Politik dan Pemikiran Francisca Fanggidaej oleh Ita Fatia Nadia. *Dari Diskusi Melampaui Sekat, Mewariskan Keberanian : Solidaritas dan Pemikiran Perempuan di Masa Lalu
Francisca C. Fanggidaej, Perempuan Revolusioner [1925-2013] #Eksil1965
Kisah Eksil Francisca Fanggidaej dan ketujuh anaknya yang ‘terpisah’ 38 tahun sejak 1965 – Liputan BBC Indonesia
simak pustaka eksil selengkapnya
Klayaban di Negeri Asing – Kompilasi Kisah-kisah Para Eksil 1965
simak 1600 ‘entry’ lainnya pada link berikut
Daftar Isi Perpustakaan Genosida 1965-1966
Road to Justice : State Crimes after Oct 1st 1965 (Jakartanicus)
Definisi yang diusulkan D. Nersessian (2010) untuk amandemen/ optional protocol Konvensi Anti-Genosida (1948) dan Statuta Roma (2000) mengenai Pengadilan Kejahatan Internasional. (disalin dari Harry Wibowo)
Perpustakaan Online Genosida 1965-1966 