Excavation #11

This is my grandfather. He was a misunderstood person. My mother didn’t have a lot of good things to say about him. She said everyone knew that he didn’t earn much money. He wrote pamphlets on “theosophy”. My grandmother was the primary supporter for the family of 7, becoming a seamstress and also dependent on her father’s allowances.  Not surprisingly, my grandmother and my grandfather argued a lot. My mom and at least one of her sisters became resentful of him and his inability to support them more as a family when they were growing up.  This is a family pattern I would learn/inherit/follow, and eventually try to break. As soon as my mom and her sisters moved away from Malang to go to college elsewhere, my grandmother followed suit. She joined with her sister to open a bakery shop in Jakarta.

Meanwhile, my grandfather was left to fend for himself. Eventually, the wife of a friend took care of him, and my mom didn’t know or didn’t want to know if that woman became his lover or even became his wife. She shrugged when I asked her about that aspect. He tried to support his daughters financially as much as he could, even if it was a modest amount.

He died from tuberculosis, and he wasn’t surrounded by his children when he died. My mom regrets not having visited him more often.  He was cremated, and my mom and her siblings took a boat, took his ashes and spread them in the ocean.

This was the story I was told years ago.

In 2017, I took a trip to meet my aunts in Canada. I went through the photos on my flickr page with them and we talked about some of them. My aunt then started telling me stories about my grandfather that I never knew. He was a journalist. He had been jailed a few times. The newspaper approved of his reporting, but the Japanese did not. In World War II, Indonesia was occupied by the Japanese. There was also a blackout curfew, so no lights could be turned on after a certain time. My grandmother had to feed her small children and lit a candle to do so. The glimmer of the candle could be seen through the wooden shuttered window, and the soldiers went into their house, arrested my grandfather for that, and took him away. My aunt did not have any bad feelings towards my grandfather. She said he supported them the best he could.

Since I have a better understanding of what had happened, the circumstances of the situation he was in, I feel more compassionate towards him, so I made this piece about him, since the show was about Hungry Ghost.

In the very front is an image, but I have cut away his figure from the main image. I have placed his image behind a cage. Also behind that cage are: a large print of his last name (that was eventually forbidden to be read, written, learned, used and eventually erased from written history– due to the Indonesian government policy of forced assimilation). Behind his image are some newspaper articles from a more contemporary Indonesian newspaper that was actually about Suharto and his descendants. I cut and weaved together the articles, in the Indonesian traditional way of weaving ketupat.

This piece, and indeed all my  pieces as of late, are supposed to be seen in the dark. They have light components to them because these stories, once hidden and dark, are now seeing the light. But it has taken me a while to articulate it. To be honest, I don’t even know if I’m doing it well right now, but this is the best I can do. And I suppose any effort to articulate it is better than not even trying.

When I first made this in fall 2017, I joked about it because the only place in the gallery that was completely dark was in the bathroom. This was where I took this picture. I joked with my fellow artists that what I have created are merely large, fancy nightlights. But one of them saw how sacred this piece was, called me out on it, and I agree.  My often self-deprecating jokes are just ways for me to avoid the painful truth. I fear the pain. I fear that the audience will not want to hear about it, and will only relate to it if I made it more palatable. I fear other people’s reactions. I fear the reactions of my relatives. I fear my own reactions.  At the same time I felt very compelled to make these pieces, to acknowledge the pain of my ancestors because only then will I start to heal myself.

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