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The Name Game – or the years of living with no one to blame, is finally published at Inside Indonesia.

Last night, after the University of Amsterdam and the Australian Defense Force Academy, Canberra, for the third time I gave a lecture-performance of this paper, at Asia Week, University of Melbourne.

Time was very limited, and I wished I could have elaborated my answer more on the last question, do you think the Chinese culture amongst the younger generation of Chinese-Indonesian will gradually diminish. I started off saying that it depends on what we think culture is, and that it is simply ridiculous to say to me, for example, hey, you know what, Soeharto’s gone, now you can eat with chopsticks again, because I do not grow up eating with chopsticks, and I don’t really care whether I am allowed to celebrate the Chinese New Year “again”, because I just simply never celebrated it or even think of celebrating. But I really didn’t get to my real point.

My real point is – following Benedict Anderson’s description of an imagined community that I always thought about when I was writing my paper – the political power in nation-states should be in its highest interest to identify its citizens for the sake of control over mass mobility, and it does so for a long time by assigning labels to its supposedly monoculture members of a nation residing within the geographical boundaries of a state. The one nation, one language idea (real Indonesians speak Indonesian, real Australians speak English with an Ozzie accent whatever that accent might be) has been imposed upon so many people with different personal (I should avoid saying “cultural” for the sake of avoiding the tendency to see culture as frozen as opposed to comprising of free-willing and free-thinking individuals) backgrounds, and it was not until very recently in Indonesia that a different idea, that is of multiculturality, was introduced.

There is a big problem with this superficial multiculturality approach (that I guess resemble integration, which naturally came out of the realisation that assimilation really did not work). Certainly an imagined community is formed when people feel that they are just the same with every single other citizens elsewhere within their nation-states’ boundaries, however multicultural they are. Which is a straightforward paradox. Now. Take the case of the Indonesian exiles, a transnational community. Amongst them they only naturally disagree on trivial things, but at times, and it’s fair to say most times, I can imagine them feeling that strong bond, that togetherness.

It was not the fact that they were exiled from Indonesia (a geographic area within a geopolitical boundary) that formed their strong bond. Neither it was the fact that they all speak Indonesian or look Indonesian (monoculturality, monoethnicity – although I really cannot answer what a real “Indonesian” looks like) that formed that bond. And they certainly don’t live within the same geopolitical boundaries – some never went out of their first exile countries, some hopped out of their first exile to seek refuge in another country, some went to France, some to Germany, some stays in China or Russia, some to the Netherlands, and so on. What I imagine would always bring them together is the fact that they are all exiled from a geopolitical entity called Indonesia because of what happened in 1965.

It is a shared experience, the most personal identifier, much more than the very disputable concept of Indonesian identity – be it monoculturality or multiculturality – that bonds. It is this shared experience that certainly bonded me in mere minutes with Yanto – and perhaps more so, the fact of having a common enemy (this is clearly what Soekarno did with his Ganyang Malaysia movement, and what I imagine has left artists/activists like Apotik Komik or Taring Padi with an empty, now-what feeling after Soeharto stepped down from his throne), that Lord Voldemort character that many Indonesians still refer to You-Know-Who/He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I hope I did make it clear when I illustrate this mostly in the final part of my paper – but perhaps it is impossible to make something like this clear in just a few words in a single paragraph. As unfortunate as it might seem, I think it might be the culture – or rather a shared experience – of fear and trauma, created in 1965 and recreated over and over again during the 33 years that followed, that can really bring Indonesians together, victims and perpetrators alike.

But there’s a long long way towards this togetherness, and still, being a skeptic in this whole nation-states idea, I really don’t know whether bonding, especially of people that are supposed to be the same subject within the confines of a geopolitical boundary, is really that important. I think it is only of utmost importance simply because at the moment we cannot escape from being a subject of any nation-states in this world. Sadly, I really cannot say that it is not important, only because we do not have the freedom to not take part in the game.

Where are you now, he asked. I said here. Here where? he continued to ask. Here here, I said. I’m staying. There there? Yes, here here. Nowhere else, here here, as in here.

That’s amazing, he said. Isn’t this the first time in your life that you’re here, here? Not really, I said, not the first time. Come on, he said. You were always anywhere else but here. You were there here, elsewhere and everywhere else. Well, milord, I said. That is what you think, but I do not think you think right, I said.

I have been in places where I was just there, and I was there. Sure, I have also been in places where I was everywhere else but there, but I was not always there, in those particular places. I have at least once been there, just there, and did not wish to be elsewhere. In fact, it was not at least once. Assigning a number to it just doesn’t make sense, because I have definitely been there at least once, and at least a hundred of times, or even a thousand of times if you would just believe me. I was there, and there alone. And there, I have wished that time stayed frozen. Just there. Freeze. Icicle snowflakes and all, I didn’t mind. Because I had warmth with me. And because when time freezes, movement ceases. There, only there, and really there, forever. With you. Remember?

With me? he asked.

I shrugged. Um. Yeah.

Sort of.

I mean.

I shrugged again.

What time is it there now? he asked. As though it was another fresh beginning of our conversation, a smooth escape from awkwardness. One thirty two, I said. Your tomorrow – I said, trying to impress – is my today. I know that, he said. But you can still try to impress, we said it together out loud, out of habit, and laughed at our togetherness. When our laughs receded, he asked, hey. Can you see the moon? I immediately went to my window and found the moon through my blinds. Found it, I said. That must be the very same moon that you’re looking at now, isn’t it, said I.

Actually, he said. Which planet are you on, again? I – can’t – see any moon from mine.

And so it was. Once upon a time there lived a couple who loved each other so much, so much that they never let their worlds collide. Then at one point, it was not funny anymore.