YOUTH PLEDGE

Note that the film is intended for projection and exhibition/installation, and that absences of English subtitles are intentional. Closed captions for accessibility needs (in Indonesian/English) can be provided.

On 28 October 1928, seventeen years before the Indonesian Declaration of Independence, a congress of Indonesian youth declared Sumpah Pemuda, or, literally youth pledge. The pledge affirmed a commitment, from the dawning nation’s youth, to the making of and the independence of the nation of Indonesia. The pledge reads:

Kami Putra dan Putri Indonesia, mengaku bertumpah darah yang satu, tanah air Indonesia.

Kami Putra dan Putri Indonesia, mengaku berbangsa yang satu, bangsa Indonesia.

Kami Putra dan Putri Indonesia, menjunjung bahasa persatuan, bahasa Indonesia.

We, the sons and daughters of Indonesia, acknowledge [that we are of] one blood, the motherland of Indonesia.

We, the sons and daughters of Indonesia, acknowledge [that we are of] a united nation, the nation of Indonesia.

We, the sons and daughters of Indonesia, uphold the language of unity, Indonesian.

The text would later be memorialised in a commemorative national day in 1959 as “Hari Sumpah Pemuda." Soeharto, the 30-year military dictator (1966-1998) and successor of Soekarno, Indonesia’s first president (1945-1966), championed its place as national symbol through educational curriculum throughout his 'New Order' (Foulcher). Soeharto was not elected into power, and instead assumed power following a ‘state of national emergency’ declared upon the killing of six military generals in October 1965. The killing was immediately pinned on communists, and resulted in the U.S.-backed 1965-66 extrajudicial massacres, disappearances and imprisonments of all those declared communist and/or sympathiser. The murdered were mostly peasants, accused of communism for being involved in labour organising. To this day, there exists no official death toll.

Communism was outlawed, and anti-Chinese sentiment rose too. The same conflations of the broader ‘red scare’ carried over across oceans. As a result was the inadvertent exile of Indonesian intellectuals, communists abroad, and the displacement of Indonesians, especially Chinese-Indonesians.

Throughout Soeharto’s New Order, expressions of Chinese Indonesian identity were forbidden (Chinese names were to be replaced with ‘Indonesian’ names), and the deemed communists who weren’t massacred were forced to carry identity cards that identified them as such, rendering them exiles within their own country, their own city, their own neighbourhoods. Those who were Soekarno loyalists and invested in his project of anti-imperialism, too, became a target.

The Indonesian diaspora has always existed, but these displacements did not always occur by choice. SUMPAH PEMUDA (YOUTH PLEDGE) was conceived with this history in mind, as an Indonesian who has chosen to move to the United States in pursuit of education, a choice afforded by privilege.

SUMPAH PEMUDA is an experimental documentary exploring self and state-crafted conceptions of Indonesian national identity of young Indonesians in the U.S.. Composed of scans of personal identification documents and participants’ objects of ‘Indonesian-ness’, recitations of the Youth Pledge, digital video of the Indonesian consulate in New York, and 16mm footage of self-identified Indonesians dressed and posed for a U.S. visa-compliant photo, the film is an exploration of what it means to be ‘Indonesian’ beyond national borders, whether here by choice, necessity or otherwise.

What is a ‘unified nation’? What is a ‘language of unity’ (that is Indonesian)? These questions are asked, too, with the acknowledgement of Indonesian as a lingua franca of colonial struggle, then imposed as a mandatory language upon occupied lands like East Timor in the past, and West Papua in the present. What does it mean to pledge ourselves to a nation? A nation that continually fails its people in favour of capital and expansion? What do we owe such a nation? What are we owed?

Beginning with Ana Vaz’s The Camera is the Body, I grounded my film in her reflections on the close-up and the wide shot, with the passport/KTP and personal object scans and the still video of the consulate in mind respectively. She quotes poet Eucanãa Ferraz’s quotation of a Minolta ad that reads “you are the camera and the camera is you,” which, to me, speaks to the defining, fixing and trapping power of an image captured, or rather grasped . On the close-up Vaz wrote,

She could no longer see anything. The machine seemed to have stopped working and was now stuck on an image without focus, contours, face nor figure/background distinction . . . She continued filming not knowing exactly what she was recording, but certain that the creature had a will of its own. A will that would remain unattainable were it not for the full complicity of her breathless body.

The close-up scans seek to evoke both a sense of closeness and intimacy, and a sense of knowing, that then devolves into abstraction. The objects are no longer identifiable, and the passport is illegible as such, turning into arbitrary patterns. With the passport specifically, the goal with the image is to reduce it into nothing. The very notion of identification and travel papers is rooted in a restriction of movement that exists as an imposition of the West upon the world. It is also a rejection of identity being bound to what is legitimised by the state. While the featured passport in the film is my own, the cast of Indonesians are largely ‘not Indonesian’ by nationality, and trans — the passport means little, whilst also bearing real weight on mobility. Markers on state-produced (or rather, state-owned) documents are reduced by the close-up. And the personal objects of the participants are enlarged, and also abstracted, allowing them to meet at the level of the passport (in reduction into ‘mere’ pattern) without making them known. The objects are presented without explanation, and can only be gleaned in relation to the other images presented.

On the wide shot, Vaz wrote of how a landscape devoid of people — in this case: the spaces within the consulate — “becomes figure.” The consulate was a place of interest as it was crafted to communicate Indonesianness. An Indonesian outpost in the West. As a result, it is littered with imagery and grandeur that leans into theatrics. The moulding on the walls, the great hall, it is communicative of a bureaucratic imposition of national identity. In theory, it is a space that is also supposed to be welcoming to other Indonesians, and plenty do come for events and passport renewals, but instead, communicated in the wide shot is a rather sad performance. The consulate building, devoid of people, is a display case that reduces Indonesianness into signifiers.

SUMPAH PEMUDA is a critique of national identity, and any notion of one-ness, despite the insistence of the repeated recitation that demands otherwise. It is a rumination on contradictory existence. The footage of the participants was shot on 16mm in order to displace the viewer in time, and to communicate a materiality in being that isn’t present in digital texture. Maybe these faces are from the 60s, or the 90s. The final sequence of everyone’s faces in quick succession, one after the other, ends the note on the impossibility of one-ness, a visual contrast established just by their being. At the same time, the unified voice at the end speaks to the possibility of a unified voice, a unified people.

The film opens and closes on an image of the Indonesian flag, the first waving outside the consulate, the final image, soiled hidden in the outdoor storage of the consulate. The opening and closing images simplify a duality in how a nation presents itself.

Nitasha Dhillon’s Principles for Decolonial Film served as a guiding tool for a methodology in the filmmaking process in displacements of time and space, its attempts at abstracting representation and representational objects, and in “beginning before cinema.” The film is made with the acknowledgement of an impossibility (and disregard) in making legible to an audience all the national and personal histories that informs the process of making the film, and in that way, the film is the result of a collaborative process between myself and every single one of the participants, all of whom contributed their faces, voices, objects and stories, that ultimately shaped the edit.