Urban palimpsests of 1965–66: decolonial memory in Indonesian short stories

This article reads three of Triyanto Triwikromo’s Semarang-set short stories—’Zikir Walik Jagipeken [Jagipeken Back Dhikr]’ (2013), ‘Penguburan Kembali Sitaresmi [The Reburial of Sitaresmi]’ (2015), and ‘Bunga Busuk [The Rotten Flower]’ (2012)—as decolonial urban palimpsests negotiating the afterlives of colonialism and the 1965–66 mass killings. Our objectives are to show how the stories re-map Semarang’s sites as layered archives of violence and resistance, to identify narrative strategies (haunting, fragmentation, temporal and spatial dislocation) through which counter-memories emerge, and to refine the ‘decolonial urban palimpsest’ as a lens for literary responses to state violence. Guided by Quijano’s coloniality of power, we combine close reading of voice, spectrality, temporality, spatialisation, and toponyms with grounded contextualisation. We demonstrate how the texts enact a counter-cartography that unsettles official narratives of modernisation and closure, while exposing racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies that persist in post-independence memory regimes. The article contributes empirically by situating Semarang’s contested memoryscape within colonial and Cold War genealogies; methodologically by operationalising decolonial reading through site-attentive textual analysis; and conceptually by proposing a portable framework for reading urban traces as counter-archives. Future research could extend this approach to other Indonesian cities and media, and examine how genres negotiate censorship and regimes of remembrance.