A beautiful young woman with a voluptuous body, long flowing hair, and an Indic costume reminiscent of Hindu-Javanese stone reliefs and Javanese court dancers, rises out of the sea (Image 1).Footnote 1 This is a portrait of Ratu Kidul, queen of an invisible spirit realm under the South Sea, leader of an avenging spirit army, lover of Javanese kings and guarantor of fertility in the realm, protector of fishermen and coastal dwellers, sexual predator, and character in Indonesian erotic-horror films. A potent figure in Javanese mythology, Ratu Kidul also has an active life in Indonesia's modern media and popular culture. In recent decades, she has become a lightning rod in debates about the place of mysticism within Indonesian national modernity.
Darwyn Tse, “The Golden Era Returns.” Digitally enhanced oil painting posted on Darwyn Tse's blog. Copyright 2009, Darwyn Tse. Reprinted with permission.
This portrait was painted by Darwyn Tse, a Ratu Kidul devotee, who posted it on his blog, where I encountered it while surfing the Internet (instead of the Indian Ocean). Despite its ostensible status as a painting, I consider this a photographic portrait. In it, Ratu Kidul appears in close conformity with her iconic image, which circulates widely on the covers of folklore books, in paintings and posters sold in roadside stalls, in crude illustrations on trucks and pedicabs, and on the walls of shops, restaurants, and people's homes, not to mention on the Internet. Although many of these popular images are paintings, they rely on photo reproduction for their production and dissemination. It is, of course, digital photographic technology that allows Darwyn Tse's painting to circulate via the Internet and enables its easy reproduction, dissemination, and appropriation.
Darwyn Tse's painting is also photographic in the sense that it is considered to have indexical properties: it serves as a medium of spiritual contact between the beholder and the spirit queen. The penetration of the painted by the photographic is visibly featured in the Internet-posted painting itself. The painting has been digitally “doctored” to add special photographic effects: the motion blur that leaves only her face and torso in focus, the circular lens flares that appear to radiate out to the viewer, the backlighting that washes her face in an auratic glow. These stylized photographic effects serve as conventional signs of spiritual power.
In this paper, I trace a history of Ratu Kidul's mediation as image in order to ask a set of interrelated questions about the relationships between visibility, modern national public spheres, and photographic technologies. When and why did a figure of the unseen world become visible? Can a spirit queen remain out of sight and maintain her political agency, particularly in an era of transparency devoted to practices of documentary verification and photographic exposure? And if she does disclose herself to the camera lens, on what terms does she do so? How might photographic images conceived as conveyors of supernatural aura illuminate the relationship between political ontologies and semiotic ideologies, and challenge familiar theorizations of photographic indexicality, mechanical and digital reproduction, and the public sphere?
Painting shop with painting of Ratu Kidul modeled on a Basuki Abdullah painting, Yogyakarta, 1997. Photograph by the author.
I will argue that Ratu Kidul's availability as image can be understood as an effect of the emergence of a national political order in which visibility and circulation via the image form a privileged means of recognition for all political agencies and events. In the postcolonial period, photographic mediation nationalized and popularized Ratu Kidul. She became a national public “icon” in the sense invoked by Lucaites and Hariman, who argue that the iconic photograph has been a key technology of liberal-democratic citizenship, providing a resource for identification and embodied, affective engagement that is a necessary complement to the depersonalized, disembodied circulation of texts that characterize the Habermasian public sphere.Footnote 2 They describe icons as “objects of veneration … [that are] reproduced widely and placed prominently in both public and private settings, and … used to orient the individual within a context of collective identity, obligation, and power.”Footnote 3 The icon is sustained by its own accumulated history of circulation and by popular practices of “copying, imitating, satirizing, and other forms of appropriation….”Footnote 4 As Kajri Jain comments, considering images as icons “demand[s] attention to forms of auratic objecthood that do not stem from authorial originality but from performative practices in the realms of circulation and reception.”Footnote 5
The transformation of Ratu Kidul into an image-icon began with her appropriation in the 1950s and 1960s as a subject of modern postcolonial Indonesian painters. Through these paintings, which were widely disseminated via photo-reproduction, she became a figure of authentic Indonesian tradition and feminine beauty. Beginning in the 1970s, Ratu Kidul's reinvention as a character in erotic, supernatural “horror” movies further solidified her place within mass-mediated national iconographies. Film refigured her charismatic, auratic power within the fetishized, commodified, and mass-mediated practices of celebrity and, at the same time, made her a subject of public debates about the status of the supernatural in national culture.
In recent decades, the proliferation of decentralized, consumer technologies of image making and dissemination such as snapshot cameras, cell phones, and personal computers have rendered Ratu Kidul's image increasingly available for personalized, popular appropriations of various kinds. These technologies have enabled her image to travel along more intimate and horizontal routes of circulation than those propelled by mass media circuits, facilitating its incorporation into diverse visual economies and communities of interpretation. Unlike the national public addressed via Ratu Kidul's mass-mediated images, the publics invoked by these images are fractured into narrow niches and often-personalized networks. Nevertheless, Ratu Kidul's history as a mass-mediated national icon adheres to her image and informs its valence within these popular circuits.
As the figure of Ratu Kidul was “remediated” from non-image-based media into paintings, films, television, snapshot cameras, and the Internet, it became subject to each medium's distinctive modes of circulation, practices of reception, and “media ideologies.”Footnote 6 Each of these media, in other words, provided a distinctive “habitat” for Ratu Kidul's image.Footnote 7 Yet each remediation of Ratu Kidul's image did not simply replace previous iterations in a linear progression, but rather added another layer or dimension to her accumulated potentiality as image-icon. It is thus best to think of the image-icon as a dynamic palimpsest bearing within it the accreted history of Ratu Kidul's many mediations.
Despite their specificities, all of the media considered in this paper can be said to operate within an overarching “photographic” visual and circulatory regime tied to Indonesia's modern, mass-mediated, national political order. Ariella Azoulay has argued that the demand that everything be available to be seen is part of a visual and political regime made possible by photography.Footnote 8 What she calls “the civil contract of photography” is the tacit agreement that all are potentially makers, viewers, and subjects of photographs: “everyone and everything is liable to become a photograph.”Footnote 9 For Azoulay, the “citizenry of photography,” the political community formed by the civil contract of photography, is joined by bonds of mutual responsibility and recognition not mediated by a sovereign state. Yet while photography may offer a potential space for the exercise of citizenship outside of state sovereignty, it remains historically the case in Indonesia, as elsewhere in the world, that the civil contract of photography is largely mediated by the institutions, practices, and infrastructures of national public spheres. In practice, photographic technology has been deeply implicated in the formation of mass-mediated national publics, and appeals for recognition via the photograph have most often circulated within national public spheres.
In an era in which, as Kracauer memorably put it, “the world itself has taken on a ‘photographic face,’” it is perhaps unsurprising that Ratu Kidul became visible to the camera lens.Footnote 10 One could say that, in becoming an image, Ratu Kidul heeded the modern demand for visual accessibility; she signed on to the civil contract of photography. But one could also argue that she did so, to some extent, on her own terms. It is telling that Azoulay's discussion of the civil contract of photography focuses on journalistic, documentary photographs, which make their claims by way of appeals to transparency, witnessing, and evidence. Images like Darwyn Tse's remind us, however, that although documentary photography may be privileged within modern national public spheres, there are other photographies in circulation.Footnote 11 As I will discuss in what follows, images understood to be spiritually charged, “authentic photographs” (foto asli) of Ratu Kidul body forth an unseen presence whose existence cannot be verified via the evidentiary techniques of documentation and exposure characteristic of the regime of transparency. A “semiotic ideology” at work in portrayals of Ratu Kidul across different media construes photographic images not as inert “traces” but instead as effective emanations of supernatural presence.Footnote 12
By taking seriously what pictures of Ratu Kidul “want,” to borrow W.J.T. Mitchell's phrase, I not only write from the perspective of this semiotic ideology, but also demonstrate how these images operate as social agents that make demands on, provoke, please, and threaten those who encounter them.Footnote 13 Spiritually charged, auratic images of Ratu Kidul are artifacts of a counter-visuality that distinguishes truth from surface appearances, registers the presence and efficacy of unseen forces, and embraces rather than effaces the technics of mediation. They mobilize a semiotic ideology that defies the dominant visual logics of national modernity and corresponds to an alternative ontology that admits the presence of the supernatural in the political field. In their disruptive potential, Ratu Kidul's auratic images thus remind us of the complex, contradictory, and contested nature of national public spheres in which the rational and the secular have never been granted full hegemony.
UNSEEN AGENCIES AND THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF THE OBSCURE
Before turning to the history of Ratu Kidul's postcolonial mediation as image, let me sketch briefly a moment of public debate about the status of the supernatural in Indonesian politics that gives a sense of Ratu Kidul's place within the contested terrain of Indonesia's public sphere. In June 1999, a few weeks before Indonesia's first democratic elections after three decades of autocratic rule, then-candidate for president Gus Dur (Abdurrahman Wahid), a renowned Islamic scholar and democracy opposition leader, generated a heated public controversy when he held a ritual on Java's southern coast seeking Ratu Kidul's blessing for his candidacy.Footnote 14 As a political performance, Gus Dur's ritual invocation of Ratu Kidul demonstrated both his conviction that unseen spiritual forces play a role in the politics of the visible world and his desire to achieve reconciliation between Islam and “indigenous spiritual forces, of whom the most powerful is the Queen of the Southern Ocean, Ratu Kidul.”Footnote 15 Including Ratu Kidul among those whose blessing he sought—he also visited the graves of the wali (Islamic saints) and the late nationalist leader Sukarno—was not only a gesture consistent with his commitment to pluralism, but also a demonstration of power in the “traditional” sense described by Benedict Anderson as the ability “to absorb Power from the outside, and to concentrate within himself apparently antagonistic opposites.”Footnote 16
But for many secularists and some members of his own party (which, despite its Islamic base, adhered to the nationalist vision of a secular state), Gus Dur's mixing of mysticism with politics was an embarrassing act unfitting for a statesman preparing to lead a modern nation. And for orthodox, modernist Islamic groups opposed to him, it was a clear sign of religious impurity that demonstrated what they already suspected: he could not be trusted as a leader of the Indonesian umat. In their opposition to the ritual invocation of a Javanese spirit, secularists and Islamists were united in their defense of a modern rationalism that positions itself firmly against a politics inclusive of the occult. Beliefs in the supernatural, particularly in pre-Islamic spirits, rest uneasily with anxious assertions of Indonesia's modernity by national elites both secular and Islamic.Footnote 17
As leader of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), a Muslim organization with approximately thirty million members, Gus Dur represented a significant strand of “traditional” Javanese Islam based in rural pesantren (Islamic schools) and tolerant of a degree of syncretism and (Sufi) mysticism that was anathema to more orthodox, “modernist” Muslims.Footnote 18 Like other powerful kyai (Islamic teachers), he was revered by some of his followers for his supernatural powers and his ability to mediate between the seen and the unseen world.Footnote 19 Indeed, people I knew in Central Java (of varied religious backgrounds) often attributed Gus Dur's political acumen and survival to his intimacy with the world of the spirits. Gus Dur's near complete blindness, moreover, was taken as evidence of his possession of a different order of vision, an ability to see beyond the surface appearances of the visible world. Gus Dur cultivated this perception of penetrating insight, often alluding in public comments to his knowledge of hidden hands at work behind the tumultuous, intricate, and at times violent politics of the post-Suharto era.
Gus Dur's appeal to Ratu Kidul reminds us that imaginings of occult forces did not absent the political landscape in an era dominated by the reformasi “dream of transparency.”Footnote 20 During the period of transition leading up to and following Suharto's resignation, the photograph emblematized a new era of openness and authenticity based on democratic ideals of transparency and popular political participation. Yet an alternative political ontology and its attendant visuality remained in play. Many participants in and onlookers of Indonesian politics assume—or at least admit the possibility—that unseen supernatural forces participate in the workings of political power. Popular interpretations of Gus Dur's blindness as evidence of his ability to see past obvious appearances point to a visuality that corresponds to this political ontology. Within this visuality, a realm of the unseen that remains inaccessible to transparency's practices of visual documentation and exposure can nevertheless become visible. Whereas the logic of transparency is to disavow the mediations upon which its revelations and exposures depend—an ideology William Mazzarella has called “the politics of immediation”Footnote 21—the political ontology of the obscure embraces mediating figures, forms, and techniques (whether rituals or images) that make it possible to contact and channel unseen forces.
LEGEND OF AN UNSEEN QUEEN
The legend of Ratu Kidul tells of a princess who, either because of a devastating skin disease or because she was sent out of her father's palace after refusing an arranged marriage, ended up wandering in the forests, meditating and acquiring spiritual power. Eventually, she came to the southern coast where, in response to the beckoning of spirits, she threw herself into the turbulent waters of the Indian Ocean and was transformed into the queen of the underworld and all of the spirits therein.Footnote 22
Ratu Kidul is both feared and revered, “associated with demons and death” and yet “seen as responsible for the welfare and protection of Java.”Footnote 23 There are two main strands in the mythology surrounding this figure, one a popular folklore among Javanese coastal dwellers and the other a courtly tradition deeply entwined with Javanese political ontology. Fishermen along the southern shores of the Indian Ocean make offerings to the spirit queen in order to ensure the abundance of their catches and the gentleness of the waves. For inhabitants of this coastal region, Ratu Kidul is a benevolent protector, but one who is easily angered and dangerously seductive. It is common lore that she will carry away anyone so bold as to wear her favorite color, green, sweeping him or her into her underworld kingdom to become one of her pengabdi (servants) or soldiers, and, if her victim is a handsome young man, her lover. To this day, many Javanese will not wear green when visiting the beaches of the southern coast.
The second strand of the Ratu Kidul myth is a supernatural love story that renders her an essential source of power for the rulers of central Java. The affair between Ratu Kidul and the central Javanese kings began when the soon-to-be founder of the Mataram dynasty, Penembahan Senopati, having recently received the wahyu or divine light of kingship, was preparing to do battle with his uncle. Gathering his strength for the coming contest, Senopati meditated by the sea with such power that it caused the waters to boil. Worried about the fate of her underwater kingdom, Ratu Kidul rose up from the depths to see what was causing the waters to churn so violently. When she saw Senopati deep in meditation on the shore, she immediately fell in love. Offering herself to the ascendant ruler, she led him to her underwater palace for three days of lovemaking and political counsel. When he returned to land, she promised to mobilize the spirits under her command to support his rule and to be the consort of his dynasts to come.Footnote 24 Senopati founded the Mataram Kingdom in 1584; in 1755, it split into two sultanates, based in Yogyakarta and Surakarta (Solo), each of which continued to claim a privileged relationship to Ratu Kidul. The Javanese kings’ sexual union with the spirit queen, affirmed regularly through the performance of rituals and sacred dances, assured the continued well-being and fertility of the realm and, hence, sustained their power.Footnote 25
In accounts told by kejawen (Javanese mysticism) practitioners and others steeped in Javanese lore, the presence of Ratu Kidul was conventionally sensed not via visual apparition but by smell or sound: a sudden fragrant wind, or the clamor of pounding hooves—the noise of the spirit horses of her invisible army, the lampor. This sound was often a fearsome one. In Yogyakarta, elderly people recount how the rumbling sound of the lampor echoing through the deep ravine of the riverbed, signaling Ratu Kidul's movement inland from the southern sea or back again, heralded the flooding of the river Code that runs through the city. Some people recalled hearing the lampor on nights that the Indonesian military rounded up alleged Communists during the purges of 1965–1966; one man told me the sound meant that the queen was recruiting these condemned souls to become part of her spirit army.Footnote 26 If Ratu Kidul's presence became sensible through sound and smell, these were, or course, ephemeral traces that left no mark; when Ratu Kidul did leave a lasting trace it was in the form of disaster: a sudden wave that swept someone away, an unaccountably strong wind that battered the shore, a tide that sucked a boat down into the depths, an earthquake or a tsunami.
Ratu Kidul did not readily show herself, and to be able to see her required considerable spiritual strength achieved through ascetic practice. It was said that only her lovers, the Javanese kings, could actually see her, and then only after concentrating their powers through meditation. During the reign of Pakubuwono II (1726–1740), such was the king's exclusive right to see the queen that only he was allowed to watch the sacred ritual dances associated with Ratu Kidul, at which she was said to be present. Other courtiers were forced to turn their backs.Footnote 27
This prohibition on seeing Ratu Kidul appears to have extended to her image as well. In his study of Javanese folk art, Fischer notes, “Few traditional images of the sea queen can be found.”Footnote 28 If she was not a “traditional” subject of image making in Java, what accounts for the proliferation of Ratu Kidul's image in the postcolonial period?Footnote 29 Ratu Kidul's visibility, I suggest, can be understood as an outcome of her nationalization, a process that entailed entry into a modern photographic regime that not only privileges the visual over other sensory modes of apperception, but also demands visual accessibility and circulation as a precondition of political recognition. The dominance of this visual order was consolidated in the postcolonial era as Indonesia's national political culture became increasingly tied to a mass-mediated public sphere.
NATIONAL FORMS OF POLITICAL RECOGNITION
Ratu Kidul's transformation into a visible presence needs to be understood in the context of a shift from divine, autocratic political authority to a modern, secular, national-democratic order. The visuality of today's globalized discourse of transparency has a longer history in colonial and nationalist discourses of modernity as the enlightenment of a world shadowed by ignorance and superstition.Footnote 30 In Indonesia, this visual-political order has roots in the late-colonial period but achieved dominance with the consolidation of a national order after independence. Photography and the nation are intimately related representational technologies, for if the nation depends on a representational logic by which its history, landscapes, institutions, and leaders are taken as standing for and belonging to “the people,” photography has provided a principal technological means by which these forms of political identification and recognition are achieved. Publicly circulating images offer shared visual idioms by which the nation as a geographic, temporal, political, social, and affective location comes to be imagined and national subjects interpellated.Footnote 31
Photography, claims Rosalind Morris, “more than any other technology of representation, has been associated with the transition from absolute monarchies to populist forms of governmentality.”Footnote 32 Whether or not we accept this as a general claim, a similar association between photography, visibility, and new forms of governmentality appears to have occurred in Java. James T. Siegel describes the intense discomfort that arose when Javanese kings first appeared on the pages of that quintessential medium of national imaginings, the newspaper. Hierarchies were visually dismantled and kingly images desacralized by juxtaposed contact with the profane.Footnote 33 Indeed, at the dawn of the national era, Java's kings were faced with an existential choice: to retreat from the gaze of the citizen and render themselves irrelevant to the emerging national political order, or to risk the diminishment of their sacred, charismatic power but gain new potency through participation in national representational practices and circulatory networks. The two major palaces of Yogyakarta and Surakarta took divergent paths in this regard in the period leading up to and in the aftermath of independence from colonial rule.Footnote 34 Beginning in the 1870s, according to John Pemberton, Solo's primary court retreated into a cultivated state of inaccessible eccentricity, generating the mystique of a spiritually charged, authentic Java, “hidden from view” and un-amenable to “replication.”Footnote 35 In Yogyakarta, by contrast, the court embraced the new national political order, along with its demand for visibility and circulation.
Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, who came to power in 1940, chose to hitch his political authority as traditional ruler to the project of the nation. He became a prominent nationalist during the revolution and served in various capacities in both Sukarno and Suharto's administrations after independence. This attempt to merge traditional ruler with modern, national politician was not without cost: while he thus extended his authority to a national stage, he was seen by at least some of his followers to have lost some of the charismatic, spiritual power associated with Javanese kingship.Footnote 36
Whereas the Surakarta court closed in on itself, Yogyakarta's palace literally opened itself to the gaze of citizens. Not only did the sultan actually house the early republican government and found the first national university on the palace grounds during the revolution, but also parts of the palace later became a museum. Today, domestic and international tourists wander through its airy pavilions and on Sundays watch the royal gamelan players and dancers rehearse. A portion of the palace museum is specifically dedicated to Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX. Celebrating his role as nationalist and statesman, the display includes, tellingly, cases filled with his cameras, photography books, and photo albums, emblems of his progressive and cosmopolitan modernity and his own participation in the civil contract of photography.
Hamengkubuwono IX, then, embraced a new visuality accompanying secular national modernity that gained dominance after independence. He also signaled the weakening of his relationship to Ratu Kidul by referring to the spirit queen as Eyang, or “Grandmother.”Footnote 37 This assertion of generational distance, one suspects, was an indication of the sultan's ambivalent position as a modern traditional ruler. He would not disavow his intimacy with her entirely, but he placed her as a revered ancestor (a figure of “tradition”) rather than affirming the active, erotically charged bond that had previously secured the Javanese kings’ authority. Like the sultan himself, meanwhile, Ratu Kidul would become increasingly available to the citizen's gaze. In the postcolonial period, “the royal prerogative of meeting with [Ratu Kidul],” in Resink's words, was to become “democratized, making it possible for ordinary people to do so as well.”Footnote 38
BECOMING VISIBLE: THE HOTEL, THE PAINTER, AND RATU KIDUL'S NATIONALIZATION
In February 1966, just one month before General Suharto would officially seize power from President Sukarno, the Samudra Beach Hotel in Pelabuhan Ratu, a town on the southern coast of Java, celebrated its grand opening. The Samudra Beach Hotel was one of four large, international-style hotels built with war reparations from Japan that were meant to provide a showcase for Indonesian modernity, as well as to encourage international tourism. The hotels were one of Sukarno's pet projects; he was personally involved in the selection of their sites and their design. At the ceremony marking the hotel's opening, a remarkable—but not inexplicable—event occurred. A sudden wave wrecked the outdoor dining area. The buffet table was washed away, trees were knocked down, and guests were soaked. One recalled that the roar of the wave sounded “like ten locomotives.”Footnote 39
It was not difficult to discern the event's meaning: Ratu Kidu was angry because she had not been properly propitiated. Hamengkubuwono IX, the sultan of Yogyakarta, who was then serving as minister of development and minister of tourism in the Sukarno administration, attended the opening ceremony. According to some accounts, Hamengkubuwono IX was approached prior to the ceremony by a village elder, who recounted a dream in which a woman in green requested offerings. Despite immediately recognizing this dream as an apparition of Ratu Kidul, the sultan nevertheless declined to make the offerings, stating that he was attending the event in his capacity as a government official and not as Javanese king. Apparently, though, Ratu Kidul did not make a distinction between “Javanese” and “national” politics.
The destruction of the outdoor restaurant made clear the danger of excluding the spirit queen from events taking place essentially on her doorstep. (Pelabuhan Ratu means “queen's port,” and the beach here is considered to be a gateway to Ratu Kidul's undersea realm.) After this inauspicious beginning, the sultan agreed to appease her with offerings. A hotel room was permanently set aside for Ratu Kidul so that she would never feel unwelcome again.Footnote 40 Although room 308 is kept locked, guests of the hotel can, under the guidance of an employee who conducts ritual offerings, visit the room, meditate, and seek her blessing.
With her entry into the hotel, it can be said that Ratu Kidul was brought into the logic of the modern nation. As a social space, the hotel is emblematic of various features of the national community. Icon of the globalized modernity to which postcolonial nation-states like Indonesia aspired, the hotel is, like the nation itself, a modular global form available for replication. The very structure of the hotel, with its long corridors and equivalent, standardized rooms, echoes the serial logic of national citizenship. It is a place of stranger sociality, characterized by mobility and transience, in which all paying customers ideally meet as “equals” (although, as with the status of “citizen” itself, this apparent equality is an ideological construct masking actual hierarchies and differences).
The shift in location of Ratu Kidul to the hotel also offers a fitting metaphor for the reframing of local mythological figures as touristic attractions and of local spaces as nodes in the circuitry of national itineraries and imaginaries. Today, room 308 has become an attraction of the hotel, just as the legend of Ratu Kidul has become part of the promotional materials drawing tourists to this region. Not surprisingly, other hotels along the coast have copied the Samudra Beach Hotel's model of cultural tourism, dedicating rooms to Ratu Kidul and generating their own lore about her mysterious presence. Incorporated into the hotel, Ratu Kidul herself becomes a replicable form that figures “tradition” in a mode amenable to tourism and development.
If room 308 can be interpreted as a modern shrine to Ratu Kidul, signaling her entry into the logic of the nation, the room's décor exemplifies an accompanying shift in Ratu Kidul's mode of appearance. The room is decorated in her favorite color, green, and its walls are adorned with eight paintings of her. Also on the wall are two paintings of Sukarno. The room thus embodies a new modality in which Ratu Kidul's presence is invoked via her image, and linked to Sukarno-nation rather than sultan-Java. Like the hotel in its landscape, the frame of the painting brackets out a larger social world in which she was hitherto embedded, presenting Ratu Kidul in a circumscribed, abstracted form available for reproduction. It is tempting to read the enframing of Ratu Kidul within ornately framed images, inside a locked hotel room, as a domestication of the dangerous, unpredictable powers she was once capable of unleashing, a taming of the unseen within a safely contained visibility. Yet images of the supernatural, as we will see, may also provide a portal by which all that normally lies hidden from view leaks into the visible world.
Several of the images hanging in room 308 are reproductions of paintings by Basuki Abdullah (1915–1993), the modern painter who played the greatest role in establishing Ratu Kidul as a national image-icon.Footnote 41 The European-trained artist was a personal favorite of President Sukarno, who was a major patron and promoter of modern Indonesian art. Sukarno not only collected, but explicitly commissioned painters to paint scenes from history and folklore so that he could teach state visitors about Indonesia as he led them through his personal art collection.Footnote 42 Basuki Abdullah, who specialized in paintings of beautiful women, painted Ratu Kidul in a form that seamlessly blended a culturally valorized figure of tradition with a globalized iconography of modern feminine beauty and sexuality. Art historian Claire Holt aptly describes one Abdullah painting of Ratu Kidul in Sukarno's personal collection, writing, “She emerges from the depths amid dark stormy waves, not unlike a lovely bejeweled society hostess in evening gown, somewhat drenched.”Footnote 43 Like models and movie stars in Indonesia, the face of Ratu Kidul in these paintings is only vaguely “Indonesian” and her pose often more closely resembles female representations in the traditions of European art than any kind of Javanese iconography. Yet her green clothing, her watery surround, and the naga (snakes or water dragons) and horses that often accompany her, clearly allude to the Ratu Kidul myth. It is precisely this blend of “global” legibility with localized references that yields a properly modern, “national” icon.
Basuki Abdullah, “Nyai Roro Kidul,” ca. 1954–1955. Reproduced with permission of the Indonesian Presidential Palace Collection.
If painters such as Basuki Abdullah created a national icon for cosmopolitan cultural elites and the foreigners to whose gaze they were oriented, photographic mediation effected Ratu Kidul's emergence as a popular national icon. Most of the widely circulating images of Ratu Kidul are reproductions of Abdullah's paintings or hand-painted images based on these reproductions. As her image circulates, her status as a public icon itself becomes a source of value, supplementary to her status as queen of the unseen world, which further propels the proliferation of her image.Footnote 44 This merging of spiritual potency with the allure of celebrity, which began with her transformation into a reproducible painted image, was taken a step further as Ratu Kidul entered the world of film and became a star.
RATU KIDUL AS FILMIC ICON AND NATIONAL TROPE
Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the present (with a heyday in the 1980s), Ratu Kidul became the subject of numerous films characteristic of an Indonesian film genre dealing with the supernatural, known as “horor” films.Footnote 45 As with her relocation within the frame of the painting, the films, Wessing observes, “dislodged” her from specific locations, narratives, and practices.Footnote 46 Filmic mediation thus made it ever more possible for viewers to meet Ratu Kidul, to borrow Benjamin's phrase, “in their own situation.”Footnote 47 Not only did she appear in contemporary Indonesian settings in many of these films, but people now encountered her in their local cinema and later, with television, at home. Bringing Ratu Kidul intimately nearer in this way, film also rendered her a discursive figure in public debates about the place of mysticism in the nation.
Movie Poster featuring Suzzanna as Ratu Kidul in Bangunnya Nyi Roro Kidul, Soraya Intercine Films, 1985. VCD cover courtesy of Robert Wessing.
Modern Indonesian painters portrayed Ratu Kidul according to a formula blending local specificity with global legibility. So, too, a Eurasian actress named Suzzanna frequently played the Ratu Kidul (or related) character. Suzzanna was such a commanding presence within this film genre that she became known as the “Queen of Horror.” The identification of this “queen” of animated shadows with Java's legendary spirit queen thus established a conflation of celebrity—what Benjamin called the “phony spell” of the film star-as-commodity—with spiritual charisma.Footnote 48
For Benjamin, celebrity opposed and supplanted the aura of charismatic original presence.Footnote 49 The history of Ratu Kidul's mediation as an image suggests, however, that within mass-mediated, national political orders auratic power is not opposed to celebrity but rather is achieved through and dependent upon celebrity's mechanisms of photographic mediation, commodification, and publicity. Felicia Freeland-Hughes describes the intensive mediation of the accession ceremony of Hamengkubuwono X (Hamengkubuwono IX's son) in 1989: it was reported in the local and national news media, recorded in a souvenir film, heralded in posters hung on the roadsides, and celebrated in photo-souvenirs of the sultan and his family sold near the palace. These mediations helped produce the new sultan's “traditional” charismatic authority in a form commensurate with modern publicity; charisma, she writes, “was processed through the celebrity machine.”Footnote 50 So, too, the filmic rendering of Ratu Kidul extended her auratic “cult value” by reformulating spiritual charisma via the commodified and mass-mediated mechanisms of celebrity. The circulation of mass-mediated images renders kings, film stars, politicians, and spirit queens alike “‘intimate strangers’ (Schickel 1986) who combine social distance and affective proximity through the agencies of the media.”Footnote 51
Although some Ratu Kidul films take place in a timeless, legendary “past,”Footnote 52 most are set in contemporary time with plots that revolve around the shattering of the moral order of a village community by villains who engage in rape and adultery and use black magic, corruption, and violence to achieve their nefarious goals. Teachings of the Queen of the South Sea (1991), for example, tells of a young woman whose position as village head is usurped by a rapacious villain and his cruel henchman.Footnote 53 With the help of Ratu Kidul (and some supernatural snakes), the heroine eventually triumphs. Ratu Kidul appears in such films as a beneficent advisor and a force of righteous vengeance, dispensing gory justice against those who violate the harmony of the community and the decency of its citizens. In such films it is the villains who provide the steamy content; but in others, Ratu Kidul, someone closely related to her (often her daughter), or a character endowed with Ratu Kidul's power, is herself a vengeful seductress.Footnote 54
Many of the films, which were initially distributed to theaters that catered to a lower-class and mostly rural clientele, would, in the 1990s, be shown on privatized Indonesian television. Others were made specifically for television. Whereas sexual content, gore, and mysticism tended to be tolerated when it came to cinemas perceived as catering to the lower classes, the televisual broadcasting of mystical films and serials generated significant unease among national elites. In Indonesia as in many parts of the global south, television, more so than film, has been explicitly framed as a pedagogical medium for achieving state-driven goals of development and for promoting middle-class lifestyles.Footnote 55 Van Heeren argues that the controversy surrounding horor films has often hinged on the question of whether the supernatural forms an acceptable part of modern Indonesian society.Footnote 56 The horor film genre is identified—whether in celebration or chagrin—as a distinctively Indonesian genre, reflecting an apparent cultural predilection for mysticism.Footnote 57 At the same time, in public debates, government officials and Islamic leaders described horor films as contrary to the goals of development and religious piety: they feared “mystical films would lead Indonesian people astray from reality and modern times … that these series showed a realm outside reality, were far from rational, and did not have any educational value.”Footnote 58 Registering the threat that photographic images of supernatural figures pose to the dominant visuality of the modern national order, a prominent government official quoted by Van Heeren admonishes, “Do not teach the people to see something that does not exist.”Footnote 59
THE AURA OF POWER: FOTO ASLI AND THE IMAGE AS SPIRIT MEDIUM
Yet the camera has always led a double life in its deployment as a quintessential technology of modern rationalism and its simultaneous affinity with the supernatural.Footnote 60 A persistent thread in the reception of popular images of Ratu Kidul suggests that her transformation into an image has, in many instances, served to disseminate, rather than evacuate, her spiritual power. This efficacy is nowhere more in evidence than in lore about the dangers of coming into contact with Ratu Kidul's image. An article in the national newspaper Kompas about a 2010 exhibition of paintings of Ratu Kidul in the city of Solo notes that painters of images of Ratu Kidul often appear to have been cursed and to suffer tragic fates.Footnote 61 Basuki Abdullah had recently paid her a visit when he was viciously murdered in his home in Jakarta in 1993.Footnote 62 Several models who posed for his paintings of Ratu Kidul also met early ends.Footnote 63
“Mystical Picture of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul,” 2000. This image of Ratu Kidul is said to have been generated from a photographic negative. Original artist unknown. From the collection and reproduced with permission of Darwyn Tse.
Like the models for paintings, those who impersonated Ratu Kidul in films were exposed to the potential dangers of mimetic contact.Footnote 64 Suzzanna was said to practice mysticism daily in order to protect her from the dangers of impersonating Ratu Kidul.Footnote 65 The threat of mimetic contact was also thematized within Ratu Kidul films. In The Curse of Nyai Roro Kidul (1979), for example, a painter (wearing a green T-shirt) poses his girlfriend as the spirit queen.Footnote 66 As punishment, Ratu Kidul's servants draw him down into the depths, and his portrait sheds tears of blood before transforming into a laughing Ratu Kidul herself. The rest of the film's plot revolves around the curse suffered by the model-girlfriend. Meanwhile, in Revenge of the Queen of the South Sea (1988), power emanates like electricity from a Basuki Abdullah painting of Ratu Kidul to the main, evil character (an American anthropologist!).Footnote 67 Recognizing film as an auratic conduit for her presence, some Ratu Kidul film viewers, Wessing reports, avoided wearing green to the movie theater.Footnote 68
To understand the semiotic ideology at work in such modes of reception, let us return to the alliance between the photographic and the supernatural manifested in the painting of Ratu Kidul by Darwyn Tse with which I began. In this painting, as noted earlier, photographic effects have been mobilized as conventional signs of spiritual potency.Footnote 69 As Henk de Vries observes, there is a strong affinity between the religious “miracle” and the technological “special effect,” in that miraculous revelation has always depended on a certain “technicity.”Footnote 70 A narrative of photographic origins and special effects accompanying another of Darwyn Tse's Ratu Kidul portraits likewise enhances the image's “mysterious power.” In a 2008 entry written in English and titled, “My Newest Painting of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul,” he describes how a friend found “a negative from nowhere” that, “when he developed it, turned out to be a foto of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul.” Darwyn Tse was “inspired” to do a painting based on the “foto:”
So on the eve of “Jumat” or Friday Kliwon (believed to be a sacred night in the Javanese Calendar) I started the ritual of painting.… I made a “sesajen” or offering of black un-sugared coffee and seven incense sticks to all ancestors and “Penguasa Gaib” [mystic powers] facing south and ask for the blessing from Ibu Ratu Kidul so the process will be a smooth and successful one.… Three days later I completed the painting. It's what you see here, it depicts Ibu Ratu standing gracefully in the midst of the sea with a Naga behind her, notice the “sari” from the waist down, is the color of Indonesian Flag, Red and White.…
Hope you enjoy it!
Try and feel the energy from the painting; it's ecstatic!Footnote 71
In a subsequent blog post, titled “Mystical Picture of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul,” Darwyn Tse displays the “original photograph” that inspired his painting. He describes how, while his friend was meditating, a negative of President Sukarno “appeared out of nowhere.” When he developed it, “the negative became the photo of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul you see here. Magic??? You decide….”Footnote 72 As with the paintings in Room 308, the linking of Ratu Kidul and Sukarno transposes her relationship with Javanese kings, which buttressed worldly rule with spiritual power, onto a national stage. At the same time, the positive-negative union of Sukarno and Ratu Kidul figures them as conjoined, unseen forces at work within national politics, a common theme in strands of messianic nationalism in Indonesia.Footnote 73
With his Chinese name, his facility with blogging and writing in English, and his mode of address that assumes an audience unfamiliar with Javanese mystical practices, Darwyn Tse is clearly not your stereotypical practitioner of Javanese mysticism. In 2010, his blog page described him as a thirty-three-year-old physical trainer living in Jakarta who had studied art in Australia.Footnote 74 His use of English for his posts, despite their strongly national frame of reference, positions him as a cosmopolitan.Footnote 75 The public for Tse's blog likewise appears to have been predominantly elite, urban Indonesians; most of those who commented on his site wrote in Indonesian with an occasional sprinkling of English to index their own cosmopolitanism.
Darwyn Tse's account of the origins of his fascination with Ratu Kidul points to the primacy of images, among those of his generation and class, in engagements with the spirit queen:
I still vividly remember like it was yesterday, when I first came across a picture of a beautiful painting by this Artist named Basuki Abdullah. The painting depicts a beautiful woman, dressed in a traditional Javanese garment the color of green worn only by someone of high aristocrasy [sic]. On her head sits a beautiful crown in gold, her hair is long and blown by the wind. She emerges, and kind of just floats on the sea. I was so mesmerized, that I dreamt about it. The next day I asked my “mbok” or servant who is this charismatic woman in the painting. Without any hasitation [sic], she told me that it is Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, Ruler of Segara Kidul (south sea of Java)….Footnote 76
“Foto asli” (authentic photograph) of Ratu Kidul, Yogyakarta. The image, said to be an actual photograph of the spirit queen, was given to the author in 1999, original date and author unknown. Collection of the author.
Struck by a reproduction of a modern Indonesian painting of Ratu Kidul, he turns to an elderly Javanese servant in his home, a conventionally authentic vehicle of Javanese “tradition.” Visual image now precedes oral legend.
Tse's narration of his engagement with Ratu Kidul is ultimately fixated on his personal spiritual journey. Yet though he addresses himself to an elite Indonesian public interested in mysticism as a path to self-fulfillment, Darwyn Tse's blog has much in common with practices and stories that surround popular images of Ratu Kidul that I encountered during fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Java, mostly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In their elicitation through meditation and offerings, their various references to photography, their allusions to nationalism, and their capacity to radiate “energy” or power, Darwyn's images echo spiritually powerful images of Ratu Kidul that circulate informally in Central Java.
These typically snapshot size images of Ratu Kidul, sold in roadside stalls and passed from hand to hand, appear to me to be poor-quality photo-reproductions of paintings, but they are offered as foto asli, or “authentic photographs.” Usually foto asli are said to have been taken by someone with the spiritual power necessary to both elicit and withstand her visual appearance. They are potent, efficacious objects, capable of transmitting Ratu Kidul's power. Such power-imbued images resonate with more longstanding Javanese understandings that certain material objects may store and convey spiritual (and political) power.Footnote 77 At the same time, foto asli exploit the material properties of photography as a technological process to enhance claims of spiritual contact.Footnote 78
The line between the indexical (photographic) and non-indexical (painted) image has been rigidly etched within Euro-American philosophies of photography that treat indexicality as the mark of its distinction as a representational technology. But this line becomes blurry in such images.Footnote 79 As we have seen, paintings believed to be imbued with supernatural power make indexical claims of contact with their subject. Basuki Abdullah asserted that Ratu Kidul appeared to him directly, thus allowing him to make paintings motivated by her apparition.Footnote 80 The painter here becomes a kind of camera, a sensitive medium of reception.Footnote 81 His paintings are, in this sense, photographs.Footnote 82
If the opposition between the indexical and the non-indexical breaks down in images of Ratu Kidul, this is in part because a different semiotic ideology of indexicality is at work here than that which, in Euro-American writings, aligns photography with indexical traces such as death masks or fingerprints. Spiritually charged painted or photographic images of Ratu Kidul are not conceived as traces or residues; rather, they are indexical in the sense that they establish contact between the spirit queen and the beholder of the image.Footnote 83
Even canonical Euro-American writings on photography admit such a way of conceiving the indexicality of the photograph. Although much of Barthes’ account of photography, for example, is consistent with an evidentiary paradigm that posits the photograph as a “certificate of presence” and a guarantee that “what I see has existed,” Barthes and others also insist on the photograph's “magic.”Footnote 84 For Barthes, the photograph's uncanny power derives from the impossible way that the photograph carnally conjoins, as if by an “umbilical cord,” a body located in the past to a body situated in the present: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.”Footnote 85 The magic of bodily contact across time and the rupture of death gives the photograph its supernatural power as a kind of “resurrection.”Footnote 86 In what I call the auratic indexicality at work in images of Ratu Kidul, the photograph is not conceived as a trace of a past but now absent presence, but rather as a medium for transmitting an ongoing but otherwise invisible presence. It is an ontological rather than a temporal gap that the image bridges, acting as a conduit across the line of the unseen and the seen, the supernatural and the worldly, the spiritual and the material.Footnote 87
Tom Gunning has argued against understanding the photograph's compelling ability to conjure presence as an effect of indexicality. The photograph, he argues, is experienced phenomenologically, not semiotically, that is, not as “a sign for something but as the presence of something, or perhaps we should say a means for putting us into the presence of something.”Footnote 88 Gunning proposes thinking about the photograph in relation to the tradition of optical devices that produce pleasurably uncanny visual illusions through “visual acuity and excess.”Footnote 89 But if iconicity demonstrably plays a role in the photograph's presence-conjuring powers, this is not a reason to dismiss indexicality.Footnote 90 My argument here is that indexicality is itself subject to cultural mediation, such that within the semiotic ideology of auratic indexicality the photographic image is precisely a medium of contact or “a means of putting us into the presence of something.”Footnote 91
This logic of indexicality also helps explain why, far from withering, the “aura” may be extended and enhanced in the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction. In their work on images of an Islamic saint among a Sufi sect in Senegal, Allen and Mary Roberts offer a reading of aura that traces back to its Greek meaning as “breath.” Following David Freedberg, they describe aura as “the inherence or presence of power and presence within a work of art.”Footnote 92 For Benjamin, the aura resulted from an object's unique existence in time and place, such that a photograph could only ever be a copy, severed from its original, and thus stripped of aura. Although photography reinvigorated the mimetic faculty, enhancing the capacity “to get hold of the object at very close range by way of its likeness,” the aura of the unique original was lost in the process.Footnote 93 Yet one could argue by contrast that it is the very proliferation of images of Ratu Kidul that produces the sense of her immanent but invisible presence. Though unseen, Ratu Kidul is everywhere, her presence seeping into the material world via her images as if they were portals to her unseen realm. The logic of auratic indexicality treats the photograph not as a copy but as a conduit, allowing spiritual power to be conveyed across multiple mediations. For a blogger who posts a poster of a Basuki Abdullah painting on his blog, for example, reproduction does not diminish its spiritual potency. The image “possesses a strong magic power within it”; he urges his readers to gaze at it until they experience an “eerie feeling.”Footnote 94
An auratic image is, then, one in which “representation is subsumed by presence.”Footnote 95 Auratic popular images of Ratu Kidul accede to the modern demand for visibility without conforming to its dominant visuality, and thereby carve a space for an alternative political ontology within Indonesia's contemporary public culture. She achieves visibility without transparency.
THE BANALITY OF RATU KIDUL
Foto asli of Ratu Kidul sold by street-side vendors and passed hand to hand move within local and sometimes personalized circuits, often associated with the subcultures of messianic nationalism, whereas the images posted on Tse's blog address a cosmopolitan urban public interested in Javanese mysticism. Despite their differences, both renderings of Ratu Kidul reframe and repurpose iconic mass-media images, are disseminated via decentralized media, and follow informal, horizontal routes of circulation. Both are primarily conceived as objects that bestow personal rather than political power. Such auratic images allow people to feel touched by Ratu Kidul's power in ways they describe as transformative and spiritually meaningful.
But although auratic indexicality is spoken about as a property of the image itself, it depends upon practices of reception that sustain this sense of spiritual contact and contagion. If painting, film, and television made her a national icon, consumer technologies for image making and reproduction have rendered Ratu Kidul increasingly available for a wide range of popular appropriations. As mass-mediated iconic images are remediated via popular photography, painting, scanners, and the Internet, they are taken up within different interpretive communities, and assigned different kinds of properties, value, and efficacy. In the hands of those not invested in the semiotic ideology of auratic indexicality, her image may also become banal, a desacralized citation of spiritual power rather than its actual, effective presence.
I encountered a striking example of such banalization in 1997, when I visited Parangtritis, a dramatic stretch of beach just south of Yogyakarta. The scenic beach is a popular weekend destination for Yogyakartan families and young couples. A group of itinerant photographers carrying Polaroid cameras zigzagged across the hot sand, offering to take people's photographs as souvenirs. The photographers carried albums of sample photographs, which they eagerly thrust into the hands of their prospective customers. Most were snapshots of couples or small groups posed, smiling, against the backdrop of the sea—typical souvenir photographs for those who lacked cameras of their own.
But the spiritual resonance of the beach was not entirely absent. Several photographers showed sample photos of a woman kneeling at the edge of the sea, her back to the camera, in a position of devotional prayer. More surprising to me were photographs in which young women in conventionally seductive poses—reminiscent of 1950s pin-up models—appeared superimposed over the cresting waves of the ocean. The resulting photographs resembled the iconic image of Ratu Kidul rising out of the waves.
Given the lore about the dangers of mimetic contact with Ratu Kidul, the casual irreverence of these photos was striking. Such souvenirs suggest that for some, the beach conjures an image of Ratu Kidul that is nevertheless devoid of power. Several of the photographers I spoke with told me that young couples often commissioned these photographs as souvenirs. I suspect that these were mostly self-consciously modern, middle-class urban youth—those who would be most likely to mediate their romance photographically in the first place.
In these images, Ratu Kidul makes her appearance as an icon of exotic female sexuality available for playful impersonation. The souvenir photos allow young women to insert themselves into a collective image-repertoire, which, I suspect, they regard with ironic distance as déclassé and quaintly not-quite-modern. The artifice of the photographs’ “special effects” is part of their campy appeal (just as some fans delight in horor films’ cheesy, over-the-top special effects). Such girl-as-Ratu Kidul-as-sex-kitten images would hardly have been possible if Ratu Kidul had not already been mediatized as an Indonesian film star. Indeed, one might ask whether the young women were impersonating Ratu Kidul, or, more likely, picturing themselves as a beautiful actress playing Ratu Kidul in a film.
Such souvenir images presumably circulated within an intimate sphere in which viewers shared the same semiotic ideology and ontology, one in which images are not conveyors of spiritual power and Ratu Kidul is not (or is no longer) an active force in the world. By contrast, digital images posted on public Internet sites become accessible to a wide range of people who may have differing views on the matter of spirit and image. Echoing the Parangtritis beach photographs, several tourist snapshots of a young woman vampishly posed in Room 308 of the Samudra Beach Hotel were posted on Flickr by a young woman named “Kerry.” Like the Parangtritis images, these snapshots allude playfully to the queen's iconic sexuality; “Kerry” wears short shorts and poses seductively on Ratu Kidul's bed, in front of her portrait, and in the room's doorway.Footnote 96
Yet the irreverence of this mimicry rankled at least one viewer (who appears from his own Flickr photo stream to be a young Indonesian male). In a comment on one of the snapshots he warned of the potential dangers of impersonating Ratu Kidul: “Don't ever imagine that u will be like her. bad luck will happen to u bcos u dun have any respect 4 her room.”Footnote 97 In response to a photo showing “Kerry” posed coquettishly in front of a reproduction of a Basuki Abdullah painting, he criticized her improper dress and admonished, “Plz do respect the queen as eu can see that u are in her room and she is watching u.”Footnote 98 As if acknowledging that his response to the photos aligned him with a more “traditional” interpretive community rather than his own peers, he signed both comments “-on behalf of her generation.”
As should be clear by now, the history of Ratu Kidul's mediation as image conforms to neither a narrative of modern disenchantment nor one of technological re-enchantment. Rather, as Ratu Kidul's image circulates within Indonesia's heterogeneous and complexly mediated contemporary public sphere, it elicits both banal and spiritually efficacious engagements that coexist and at times jostle uneasily against each other.
SEDIMENTED HISTORIES OF MEDIATION
Read linearly, the history traced in this essay might be sketched as follows: Ratu Kidul's emergence into visibility, first via painting and then film and television, was linked to a shift from a Javanese order of absolute, sacred monarchy to a national, secular, democratic order in which recognition depends upon availability to the eyes of the citizenry via circulation within a mass-mediated public sphere. Whereas Ratu Kidul's power traditionally enhanced the well being of the Javanese kingdom, as she entered the national public her powers became hitched to Indonesian nationalism. In recent decades, a new media ecology in which mass media share space with a plethora of decentralized, consumer media has attenuated Ratu Kidul's public and political valence as she has become an intimately accessible resource in personalized projects both spiritual and banal. Ratu Kidul retains some political resonance in her association, in foto asli and other auratic images, with a messianic nationalism that surrounds the figure of Sukarno. Yet popular images of Ratu Kidul circulate primarily as commodities and gifts that promise to enhance the personal power of their possessors rather than serving some larger collectivity or political project. The circulation of images of Ratu Kidul through decentralized, consumer media and their mobilization for highly personalized purposes neatly echoes the logics of privatization and self-realization characteristic of neoliberalism.
Yet the linear logic implied in this narrative obscures the way that image icons become repositories of their own histories. Each new mode of appearance does not cancel out an earlier form but builds upon it or takes its place alongside it. Ratu Kidul's history of mediation clings to her, rendering her a palimpsest of her many modes of appearance, all of which remain available as resources or potentials to be mobilized as her image enters new forms of mediation and moves along new paths. Indeed, it may be the very density of this palimpsest that sustains Ratu Kidul's continued potency within Indonesia's contemporary political culture today.
An invocation of Ratu Kidul—again by Gus Dur, whose controversial ritual appeal to the spirit queen was described earlier in this essay—registers this sedimented quality, in which “older” forms of sensing Ratu Kidul's presence coexist alongside “newer” ones and current invocations draw upon the preserved possibilities of previous appearances. On 27 May 2006, a devastating, 6.2 magnitude earthquake hit just south of Yogyakarta, in the area of Bantul, the flat plain that stretches between Yogyakarta and the South Sea. The earthquake left six thousand dead and displaced hundreds of thousands more, and caused widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure. Significantly, while much of Yogyakarta proper was not affected, parts of the sultan's palace were damaged.
Many Javanese living in the immediate vicinity interpreted the earthquake as a sign of Ratu Kidul's anger with Sultan Hamengkubuwono X for promoting a materialistic and environmentally destructive capitalist modernity and for failing to uphold Javanese traditions.Footnote 99 Such interpretations linking disaster to the ruler's perceived failings were not surprising given the political interpretation of natural events in Javanese political ontologies. Some people, though, cast the disaster in national terms: linking the earthquake to the 2004 tsunami that devastated Aceh, they viewed it as a sign of disorder in the Indonesian, and not just Javanese, political realm.Footnote 100
When asked to interpret the meaning of the earthquake, now former-president Gus Dur offered his own, characteristically provocative commentary that likewise placed Ratu Kidul in the frame of national politics. Ratu Kidul was angry, he stated, because she had been forced to wear an Islamic headscarf by Habib Rizieq, head of the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam), a radical Islamic group.Footnote 101 Gus Dur's comment referred to then-current debates about a proposed pornography law that sought to outlaw forms of dress and behavior deemed erotic and hence inappropriate in (an Islamic) public. In the debates over the pornography law, which eventually passed in 2008, cultural “traditionalists” aligned with secularists to oppose what they argued was an alien, imported form of Islam promoted by Islamic hardliners.
Gus Dur's rhetorical image of Ratu Kidul in a veil signals, once again, her appearance as a potent figure in national political discourses. In contrast to the actual powers attributed to (an unseen) Ratu Kidul by villagers affected by the earthquake, Gus Dur's remarks seem at first glance to treat Ratu Kidul as mere trope, a symbol in a war of symbols being waged in the national press. Yet Gus Dur's comments depend for their efficacy on widespread familiarity with both her iconography and her controversial place within debates about erotic and supernatural media images and Indonesian modernity. Given that long flowing hair, tight and revealing “traditional” dress, a powerful sexual appetite, and seductive prowess are all attributes of Ratu Kidul—not to mention her status as a spirit queen associated with pre-Islamic beliefs and syncretic devotional practices—Gus Dur astutely recognized her potential as a condensed symbol of all that radical Islamists sought to eradicate from the Indonesian cultural and political landscape. The debate about pornography was, after all, simultaneously about defining a national image through regulating the public appearance of women and containing the unbridled circulation of images made possible by the Internet, VCDs, and other new, decentralized, consumer media technologies. More profoundly, in “veiling” Ratu Kidul, Gus Dur's comment suggests, the Islamists were seeking to subjugate the political ontology of the obscure (and its attendant visuality) within contemporary Indonesian politics. The incisiveness of his commentary—and with it his recuperation of the political currency of Ratu Kidul—depended upon her accreted history as a popular Indonesian image-icon.
