Affective silences: Violence, heteropatriarchy, intergenerationality

“Silence … not the absence of sound, but a point of entry into deep listening.” Personal experiences of violence are often shrouded in silence, which can be perceived both as a form of ongoing violence and as a powerful method of resistance in and of itself (Rich, 1979). Feminist academics, public intellectuals, and activists have continually argued that speech is the foremost means of achieving equality and empowerment (Ahmed, 2017; Lorde, 1984). Feminist scholarship has also been invested in exploring the generative possibilities that silences can engender (Malhotra and Rowe, 2013), and anthropologists have called for an understanding of silence, particularly in the aftermath of violence, as “a descent into the ordinary” that allows for a repair of the self through the quiet inhabitation of an everyday “gesture of mourning” (Das, 2007, 77; Samuels, 2023; Shohet, 2023). Similarly, efforts have been made to think about intergenerational experiences of silence in the aftermath of violence as silent reverberations that manifest as acts of what I have called “haunted speakability” (Dragojlovic, 2021). Such acts are shaped by intergenerational aspirations to visibilize past injustices that are challenged and/or derailed by a subject's embeddedness in long histories of structural violence, which not only inform what can be made visible through speech but often reproduce the structures of the very inequalities they aspire to dismantle (Dragojlovic, 2021). Haunted speakability, then, reflects an urgency to instigate social justice and points to the limitations of speech as a means of achieving equality. Haunted speakability urges further questions about recovery and care, not only for those who themselves directly experienced violence but also for those for whom the affective afterlives of violence might resonate intergenerationally, under ongoing conditions of inequality. This necessitates further exploration of how historical injustices and injuries might emanate as silent reverberations across generations, and in turn requires a deeper engagement with contested issues central to the ethics of intergenerational care. This essay addresses how engagements with past inequalities that are shrouded in regimes of unspeakability might be practiced at the personal and societal levels. Based on long-term intergenerational ethnographic research with people of Indisch (Indo-Dutch) descent born out of interracial intimacies in the colonial Dutch East Indies, I outline an approach within which to consider intergenerational silences beyond the binary logic of liberatory speech and unintelligible muteness. My focus is on young decolonial activists who are the grandchildren of Indisch people who were imprisoned in Japanese incarceration camps during the Second World War and subjected to racialized assimilation policies upon their repatriation to the Netherlands. I chart Indisch activists’ engagements in practices of unlearning, inspired by decolonial scholarship that conceptualizes decoloniality as “the ongoing processes and practices, pedagogies and paths, projects and propositions that build, cultivate, enable, and engender decoloniality” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, 19).1 Indisch activists are motivated by broader global movements and networks that seek to bring justice, healing, and freedom from centuries of structural oppression, such as Black Lives Matter, as well as their own pervasive sense of the affective presence of their families’ pasts, which they describe as an uncanny feeling that frequently escapes articulation but nonetheless persistently demands attention. I approach intergenerational silences as affective spaces that reverberate, as modes of communication that might precede and/or exceed verbal articulation, resonating across time and space, as well as individual and collective experiences of everyday life. Here, affects are understood as plural, with long afterlives that reverberate as forms of communication that are socially, politically, and intersubjectively specific.2 Following the Indisch decolonial activists’ aspirations to unlearn the intergenerational reproduction of gendered, racialized, and classed inequalities embedded in colonial and postcolonial structures of power, I point to the activists’ investments in practices of unlearning, as well as their promises and foreclosures. Inspired by larger global movements that advocate for care of the selves and communities that have been intergenerationally subjected to structural inequalities, the activists urge for an unlearning of the reproduction of inequalities at a personal level, as well as within families, communities, and societies at large. This rests on postcolonial criticisms of colonialism and on the mobilization of the notion of decoloniality as capable of cultivating an ongoing dismantling of the lingering presence of colonial structures and thinking.3 It is also situated as a practice of transversal listening: an attuned, active, and relational mode of being with the affective presence of the past, with all of its contradictions, discomforts, and ambiguities. So situated, the activists engage in decolonial art practices, including community art installations, storytelling, community theater, and robust social media production, all of which are aimed to bring about a healing of intergenerational grief and injury.4 Following the practices of these Indisch decolonial activists, I suggest that attuned listening is an ethnographic decolonial praxis that relies on ethnographers’ intersubjective engagements of being with and paying attention to what resonates through and within silences. I suggest that listening to affective resonance has the potential to highlight the significance of overlapping stories and can offer clues as to how to ethnographically explore topics that relate to the unspeakability of violence. *** I met Zoe in Amsterdam in 2019 at a public lecture on the role of colonialism and capitalism on the present. Zoe completed a university degree in history and postcolonial and gender studies out of her desire to know more about her own family's history. She grew up in the Netherlands as the granddaughter of Indisch (Dutch, Indonesian, German) and Indo-Chinese (Dutch, Indonesian, Chinese) grandparents who, as Dutch citizens, moved to the Netherlands in the 1950s after the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies—present-day Indonesia. In broad brush strokes, Zoe narrated for me how her family's history related to the broader histories of migration and colonialism. Her genealogical narrative stressed both the ambiguity of interracial descent and the certainty derived from the postcolonial scholarship5 about the specificities of Dutch colonialism that encouraged interracial sexuality and concubinage during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dutch men and other European men in service of the Dutch colonial enterprise commonly took local women as domestic help and sexual partners, and/or legal wives, which led to the formation of an interracial society. Zoe speculates that her Chinese descent relates to Chinese men who settled in the Dutch East Indies in large numbers in the 1800s, mostly intermarrying with local women. As self-classified Europeans, her ancestors were incarcerated in the Japanese incarceration camps (1942–1945) and, together with other descendants of Indonesian women who had had children with white men, Zoe's ancestors suffered terrifying brutalities by Indonesian freedom fighters at the beginning of the Indonesian war of independence. Following the Dutch recognition of Indonesian independence (1949), the majority of Zoe's family, together with many other repatriates, moved to the Netherlands, while a minority settled in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Not having any relatives in the Netherlands or a place to stay, Zoe's predecessors were subjected to ruthless assimilation policies that required them to demonstrate that they were not “too oriented towards the East” (Mak, 2000, 250) in order to qualify for public housing. Relating her genealogy to the lecture we attended, where the speakers urged for a decolonization of economy, culture, and society at large, Zoe said, “Do you know Indisch zwijgen [silence, silencing]?” I confirmed my understanding of Indisch zwijgen as a metanarrative about intergenerational silenc(ing), central in Indisch collective and personal discussions of identity, which relates to all that escapes speakability. Indisch zwijgen is connected to long-term historical practices of survival, particularly among women of interracial descent whose sexuality was both celebrated and demonized not only in the colony but well into Dutch postcolonial society (Pattynama, 2007). For many of these women, their selves were “the container[s] of the poisonous knowledge” (Das, 2007, 55) and then came to be experienced by their children and grandchildren as the affective inheritance of loss that manifests as a lingering recursive feeling that something has been evacuated, displaced, occluded, banished, or unknowable, yet is, at the same time, affectively present, demanding attention. It is enough now! This internalized oppression needs to stop. No more silencing. I know it is not easy for the elders. There has been so much loss, so much pain. They were not just victims of course; many also did really bad things—forced daughters to marry white men during colonialism, left those who could not speak Dutch or had dark skin behind [in Indonesia], not to mention all sorts of family coercion after repatriation. But we cannot carry on silencing! It might be too hard for the elders to engage with this, but it is us, the third generation, who need to make a change. We all [Indisch people] know how all-consuming Indisch silences are … they stick to you, take over your entire life, and before you know it, we [the third generation] are behaving like our elders. We are born into the Indisch zwijgen; its atmosphere … you can't just leave it behind. It won't let you go, or you can't let it go. Either way, we need to do something about it. We need to unlearn internalized oppression. We need to heal our past, as Lara Nuberg6 and Simone Berger (2016) are doing. Zoe and others involved in similar projects are advancing demands for not only institutional decolonization in the Netherlands but also an unlearning of internalized oppression of selves, families, and communities. This raises questions about the possibilities of decolonizing the histories of the very imperialism, racism, and heteropatriarchal7 systems of power that gave rise to Indisch people themselves. How can an unlearning of the social reproduction embedded in moral obligations of care and familial affective attachments occur? As Sara Ahmed (2004, 12) has persuasively argued, “emotions can attach us to the very conditions of our subordination,” exercised through intergenerational reproduction of heteropatriarchal normativity. Feminist and queer studies scholars have been instrumental in demonstrating how repetition of social norms attached to the practice of family life and citizenship perpetuate social inequalities across time (Berlant, 1997, 2011; Butler, 1997), suggesting that unlearning can be an arduous undertaking. Zoe's call for intergenerational engagement with Indisch silences resonates deeply with Audre Lorde's (2017, 1) motto, “My silence had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” It also reveals an understanding of Indisch zwijgen as a deep, embodied silence that affectively resides in the practice of everyday life. Her stress that elders “might not be able to speak” but that everyone knows how silences feel shows a deep empathy with the many forms of silence that emanate from long histories of gendered, racialized, and classed inequalities. In this way, predecessors’ silences might be a quiet shelter from exclusion that does not dare speak its pain, wherein normative marginality evacuates a person's capacity to comprehend what might be beyond the horizon—or indeed, that the horizon even exists. Similar to other decolonial activists—mostly the grandchildren of those who experienced cataclysmic violence directly—Zoe is dedicated to protecting certain silences within Indisch families and communities. Yet, as an ardent believer in decoloniality, she allocates a duty of care and an obligation for change to her own generation, who she says should be attentive to what their ancestors’ silence is conveying while also being invested in becoming otherwise. Becoming otherwise becomes a decolonial practice of unlearning in and of itself. *** Based on conversations with Zoe and other self-identified third-generation decolonial activists, I want to suggest an ethnographic decolonial praxis with and through which to engage with the silent reverberations of intergenerational violence and decolonial politics of visibility beyond the binary model of liberatory speech and passive silence. The best way to outline this might be to frame the activists’ approach as deep, transversal listening that is attuned to the haunting presence of historical regimes of unspeakability that affectively reverberates across generations, bringing a necessity to unlearn and break away from the perpetual reproduction of social inequalities. Taking seriously the activists’ analytical thought and practice, this essay invites ethnographic engagement in deep, transversal listening that will serve not only to acknowledge local specificities and descriptors of the social dynamics of silences but also to mobilize an eloquent critique of the structural inequalities in which silent dynamics are embedded. The deep transversal listening in which Indisch activists engage highlights the historical regimes of unspeakability that might have evolved as forms of care for those who inhabited non-normative ways of being or were otherwise marginalized and as such particularly vulnerable under heteropatriarchal regimes of inequalities. Silence, as the most common response to everyday experiences of gendered violence, has been noted across various cultural and socioeconomic contexts (see, for example, Gammeltoft, 2016), often instigating regimes of unspeakability and the production of gendered inequalities. Yet, what seems unspeakable nevertheless signals itself, allowing the enunciation of the unspeakable in a way that is affectively capable of communicating across generations amid various moral constraints and contradictions. The intergenerational transmission through which conformity to regimes of unspeakability emanates indicates attention to multiple vulnerabilities and mobilizes silences as a way of protecting the self from exclusion and marginalization not only from society at large but also within the marginalized group itself. Thus, a fragility of belonging not only to the nation-state but also to the very families into which one was born is produced wherein normative kinship practices employ regimes of unspeakability as a way of protecting those who are marginalized and excluded by those same practices (Samuels, 2023; Shohet, 2023). The process of unlearning the perpetual reproduction of social inequalities through everyday engagements in decoloniality for which Zoe and other decolonial activists are advocating charts new possibilities for empathy with ancestral hardships and inherent vulnerabilities, resonant with Pérez's (2013, 200) attention to silence as “a point of entry into deep listening.” In this way, the silences themselves might become openings into the unlearning of internalized oppression, as a practice that can lead to personal and political change (Cassaniti, 2023). In this essay, I have drawn attention to the ways in which the silent reverberations of past violence shape subjective becomings across generations and subjective senses of being and belonging in society amid ongoing conditions of inequality. The Indisch decolonial activists’ approach to the silences that surround their families’ long histories of multilayered forms of violence urge an ethnographic approach of “response-ability” (Haraway 2015, 231) that neither overtly celebrates the capacity for silence to create resilience in the aftermath of cataclysmic violence nor neglects to account for the ongoing structural inequalities within which lifeworlds unfold. Inspired by decolonial activists, I suggest an ethnographic decolonial praxis that is attentive to a deep transversal listening that neither celebrates the silent agency that resides in radical alterity nor imposes the idea of speech as the only pathway for achieving equality and empowerment. It also shows how decolonial activists’ aspirations alert us against the production of sharp distinctions between the production of academic knowledge and their practices of everyday life. I am grateful to Annemarie Samuels, Julia Cassaniti, Merav Shohet, anonymous reviewers and AA editors for their feedback on the earlier version of this piece. Research for this essay was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Open access publishing facilitated by The University of Melbourne, as part of the Wiley - The University of Melbourne agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.

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