Garin Nugroho : didong, cinema and the embodiment of politics in cultural form

. . . chopped up at the blink of an eye, whether relatives or friends, cleared out completely . . . (Bowen 207) These lines, quoted from a performance staged in 1978 to applaud the achievements of the Suharto regime, celebrate the massacre of between 500,000 and 2 million people that clinched the victory of Suharto's forces in purging Indonesia of communists in 1965. Under Suharto's program of the civic function of the army, strategies of control and intimidation infiltrated onto the micro-level of daily life and cultural activity. The recruitment of the popular form of didong, the sung poetic duels renowned among the Gayo people of central Aceh, as a tool of the New Order, exemplifies this pervasive influence. John Bowen, the scholar of Sumatran poetics and politics who quotes these lines, has documented how, as the army spread its tentacles in the 1960s and 1970s down into the grassroots of local cultures, local government recognised that a popular art form such as didong could become a dangerous tool of dissent. Didong had evolved through the middle of the 20th century from a folk form into a tool for engaging the modern world in a popular idiom, a form characterised by humour and word-play which used the veiled language of metaphor as a vehicle for incisive political criticism. Bowen traces the attempts by the central government under Suharto to counter this potential threat by enlisting didong in its service. Despite the "distaste" that, according to Bowen, many Gayo felt on hearing these lines, their framing within the poetic form of a didong performance provided a potent mnemonic device to keep an awareness of the price of dissent vividly in the popular imagination.