Goenawan Mohamad

ONE thousand faces of the past have never remained, one page of old photos in an album. What do we remember of Indonesia pre-1998? If there is an "ethics of memory", then this is when we admit that "remembering" is merely casting a glance at complex experience of the past.

But over and again, people in Indonesia totally wipe the slate of memory—annihilating that diversity called "the past". It is as though people have to