Heterochronicity as écriture féminine: Problematising the Historical Traumas of Taiwan and Indonesia

Entering the exhibition space of ‘Letter - Callus - Post-War’, I was immediately struck by the aura of death that permeates the space. Facing the entrance is Lo Yi-chun’s Deer Rug, ostensibly the skin of a dead anima hung on the wall: an image of death. The soundtrack of Zhang-xu Zhan’s video installation Tale of Animal AT58 features a repetitive and oddly disquieting melody in which instruments of Indonesia Gamelan and Chinese lion dance music - both ritualistic musical forms - intertwine. Behind the screen lies Zhang-xu’s signature paper sculpture, which employs techniques of ‘zhizha’, a traditional Chinese paper art most commonly used as funereal offering.

 

In this site so primed for haunting, repressed spectres are conjured up from a forgotten past. There is Rumphius, the now obscure naturalist employed by the Dutch East Indies Company, whose work had allegedly been stolen after his death by the much more famous Linnaeus (Liu Yu’s Caecus creaturae); Indonesian comfort women as captured by the lens of Meicy Sitorus, some of whom have passed away since their encounters with the artist; the grandfather of Maharani Mancanagara, who left behind a box of diaries and a life story that no family member wanted to recount; and also Rika, the European woman who wrote a letter to a Chinese man in 1969, 27 years after their meeting in Surabaya during World War II (Au Sow-yee & Chen Yow-ruu, If We Do Not Exist, How Could Our Memories Remain and Not Pass Into Silence). According to popular beliefs in Chinese societies, these are spirits stuck between the realms of the living and the dead because they harbour unfulfilled wishes. In Derrida’s terms, the ghost is that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. Generally, we can say that ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present; but in the specific cases mentioned above, the ghosts in fact have no place to dwell in the past for they are residues that have fallen through the fissures in history-writing. 

 

It is precisely these long forgotten vestiges that form the overarching theme of the show, but this is a hauntology that operates on its own particular terms, as it foregrounds the letter and the body as the preferred mediums for channeling the spirits - which explains the ‘letter’ and the ‘callus’ in the title of the show. Familial and private documents such as letters and diaries serve as the starting points of several works, while the body is explored as the site of memory by some of the artists. To speak about unwritten history, effaced memory, and unspeakable trauma is to disrupt time, to stop time in its track, to force it down a convoluted labyrinth where past, present and future are sometimes conflated. In Shen Chi-chung’s psychoanalytic studies of trauma, three temporalities of trauma are identified: first, the actual occurrence of the unanticipated traumatic event; second, the reconstruction and interpretation of the traumatic event through the attribution of symbols; third, repeated discussions and re-interpretations, the need of which was caused by the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event and the ensuing anxiety. That is to say, the traumatic subject no longer experiences time as linear and exclusively forward-moving. Instead, temporal disjunction becomes the imperative condition of being, as the traumatic event becomes a point in time of eternal return. 

 

It is in view of this sense of heterochronicity stipulated by the artistic and curatorial choice to focus on historical trauma that the significance of the letter and the callus becomes apparent. The form of the written letter has beyond doubt become anachronistic, but additionally it has always been a heterochronic thing. The act of writing and sending the letter and the act of receiving and reading it were always separated by a chasm of time. Compared with its electronic cousin, the written letter always contains more than its written contents as it is inevitably marked by its materiality: the ink smudge, the tear stain, the traces of its journey, the fading handwriting, the yellowing and brittling paper… Letters like the ones Lin Yi-chi dug out from her family home are affixed to specific points in time (when they were written), while carrying traces from all the times that they have passed through. Lin’s grandmother was separated from her brother half a century ago, when the latter decided to leave Kinmen in Taiwan for ‘Nanyang’ (the Chinese term for Southeast Asia) in search of better prospect. He finally settled in Bangka Island, Indonesia, and the siblings stayed in touch for years by letters. In her effort to tell the story of a family that came to be separated by geographical distance, national borders and cultural identities, Lin travelled to Bangka with the decades-old family letters as her only pointer. Here what appears to be a spatial movement (from the destination to the origin of the letter) is in fact also a temporal one (from present-day to the time when the letters were written). In the resulting video work Nanyang Express: Trans-drifting and South Sea Crossing, documentary footage of present-day Bangka goes hand-in-hand with an audio track comprising voices reading out the family letters and Lin’s own oral communication with her distant relatives. As in Lo Yi-chun’s Deer Rug, which is in fact sun-dried banana skins (an important export of Taiwan immediately after WWII) stitched together by the artist into a faux deerskin (an important export of Dutch Formosa in the 17th century), different time periods overlap, intertwine and finally collapse onto each other to form a multilayered and malleable temporality.

 

In another bid to engage with the lived realities of grandparents, Maharani Macanagara’s project began when she was given a box of diaries by the grandfather that she never knew. She later found out that her grandfather was actually a victim in Gerakan 30 September, a coup d’etat organised by Suharto and his aides in 1965, which was followed by a mass extermination of everyone suspected to be communist. The incident was the preface to Suharto’s New Order Government, and discourses about it were tightly controlled by the Indonesian state for many years. Memories about it became taboo and trans-generational trauma in many families like Macanagara’s. Interestingly, the artist did not choose to represent the traumatic event or her grandfather’s experience after her archival and field research. Instead, she opted for the form of children’s folktale and created Tale of Wanatentrem Chronicle #2, in which the story of oppression and resistance were told through the imagined animal characters of mouse-deers and frigatebird fighting against pirates. The mouse-deer also appears in Zhang-xu’s Tale of Animal AT58, for which he reimagines Chinese and Indonesian folktales and creates the new cross-breed half-fox and half-mouse-deer figure. This choice of engaging with history through animal characters and children’s folktales is curious in that it signals a kind of regression, which is at once a common response to trauma and a therapeutic strategy for dealing with trauma. 

 

Contrary to the letter, the callus symbolises a completely different form of memory: one that does not register with the conscious mind. A callus is by definition an area of thickened skin that forms in response to repeated friction or pressure, and as such it is an apt analogy for phylogenetic memory, which results from an experience that repeatedly etches a neurological trace from being periodically recalled, until the trace becomes a permanent pathway that can be inherited by offsprings. Analogies aside, the callus is the material manifestation of the body as a site of memory. Meicy Sitorus’s images of comfort women - young girls and women forced into sexual slavery under Japan’s military rule across Asia - in the project Nana Djawa focus in turn on the elderly women’s faces, gaze, hands, feet, hair, and their still or moving bodies while engaging in everyday activities. These coloured photographs are placed opposite to a new series resulting from Sitorus’s residency in Taiwan. For this project, she photographed sites where comfort stations (euphemism for Japanese military brothels) used to sit. The spots have variously become a nursery, a city park, disused plots of land and more. The two photographic series construct a topography of violence and suffering by documenting both bodies and geographical locations, not only as sites of extreme war-time brutality, but also of ongoing afflictions caused by collective silence and amnesia in the name of the forward-looking project of nation-building. 

 

There is a temporal violence to the material and bodily heterochronicity found in the works mentioned above. As it erupts, it implodes normative, linear time and sabotages the perimeters of memory and history imposed by various regimes and their ideologies. In this transmuted temporality, the undead bodies of repressed spectres are finally brought back to the present, where they complicate and problematise the question of historical trauma from the colonial and post-colonial pasts of Taiwan and Indonesia, which can no longer be reduced to a linear and unidirectional causality. Sitorus’s work most palpably evokes Hélène Cixous, who posits that the physicality of the female body is closely connected to female authorship, to the ability of women to write and utter their truths. However, I also consider the general privileging of the heterochronic in the show a form of écriture féminine, for ‘in woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history’, as Cixous remarks in The Laugh of the Medusa while formulating the idea of écriture féminine. In ‘Letter-Callus-Post-War’, the artists alongside curator Chen Hsiang-wen manage to ‘un-think the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes’ by implementing heterochronicity as a tactic for interfering with history writing. The space and temporality that they carve out for heterogeneous remembering and writing will serve as a fertile ground for the mutation of memory and history in times to come.

 

(2019)