Page 173 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Epilogue: One Slip of the Pen . . .

All the above begs the question of how to write and what to write about
violence—perhaps especially violence elsewhere—and whether to write about
violence at all. This includes, of course, my own writing of this modest piece.
An Indonesian colleague and fellow Maluku watcher insists that in writing
about such situations, whether we are partisan or neutral, the language itself
limits our descriptions and forms of argumentation. If one writes, say, about
the ill-fated and now infamous pro-peace Public Service Announcement “Speak-
ing from the Heart: Acang and Obet” aired some months after the war in Ambon
began and re¤gured subsequently as a source of important emblems of enmity
on both sides—the names of its sentimentalized child protagonists, Acang and
Obet, becoming those for both the Christian and Muslim enemy—this writing
itself, or so the argument goes, reproduces the war’s bitter, bloody divide. “Am-
bon is itself bloody,” my colleague commented, “you mention Ambon and you
mention blood—one slip of the pen and . . . ” Since people’s desires, fears, and
imagination are even more sharply tuned in extraordinary situations than other-
wise, a slip of the pen is often not needed to turn a writer or ¤lmmaker’s inten-
tions considerably awry. Yet even the kind of not-writing advocated by the
Manado Pos journalists can, I argue, conceal its own phantom dangers which,
in certain circumstances, may contribute to producing more violence. In the end
I believe it is often best to write. In this age of publicity, airing and exposing
con®ict has undoubtedly its own obvious as well as unforeseen dangers, but
media exposure, as in the case of former East Timor, can also, eventually, con-
tribute to peace. If writing is a kind of violence, not writing and varieties of
not-writing occasionally risk being so, too.

Notes

This essay is based on three months of ¤eldwork in Manado, Yogyakarta, and Jakarta,
Indonesia, in 2000 and 2001. It was carried out in the context of a four-year interdisci-
plinary research project on “Indonesian Mediations,” which in turn is one of four sub-
projects within a larger “Indonesia in Transition” Program funded by the Royal Nether-
lands Academy of Sciences. My own research concerns the dynamics of mass and small
media in the imagination and production of violence and peace in the Moluccas. I would
like to thank the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences for its support of this research
and the Research Centre Religion and Society at the University of Amsterdam for its
support of a preliminary ¤eld trip to Indonesia in May 2000. Versions of this essay have
been presented as papers at conferences at Leiden University, University College London,
University of Amsterdam, Harvard University, and at the Association for Asian Studies
meetings in April 2002. I would like to thank the audiences of these different venues for
their comments. Special thanks go to Webb Keane, P. M. Laksono, Birgit Meyer, Annelies
Moors, Rafael Sánchez, and Henk Schulte Nordholt for their helpful suggestions. I also

162 Patricia Spyer