Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. xii, 199 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7826-9.
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an earthquake—the third strongest in recorded seismological history—tore open a gash the length of California (800 miles) under the Indian Ocean, off the northwesternmost part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra in Aceh. Unbeknownst to many of the people in Aceh, the earthquake generated massive tsunami waves, flattening and upending most everything in its path. With more than 160,000 dead in Aceh alone, the tsunamigenic earthquake brought unprecedented death and destruction. Still, hundreds of thousands survived, many were wounded, and many more lost all their possessions. Unprecedented disaster also brought with it unprecedented humanitarian attention and aid. Moreover, when the tsunami struck, an ongoing secessionist struggle between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government had closed Aceh off to foreigners, but in the aftermath, a peace agreement was signed and the government opened up the province to foreign aid to begin the difficult process of reconstruction.
In After the Tsunami: Disaster Narratives and the Remaking of Everyday Life in Aceh, Annemarie Samuels reminds us that pre- and post-disaster lives do not form two neat bookends. Her ethnographic work focuses on the long aftermath: that is, after the aid projects are finished, when homes have been built, new roads paved, and memorials constructed, how is life and how is the everyday remade? Putting to use ethnography’s strength in drawing out intimate details and compelling narratives, Samuels reveals Acehnese survivors’ resilience, creativity, faith—indeed, their individual subjectivities in remaking life. Subjectivities for Samuels are not “to reduce human experience to third-person abstractions, such as subject positions or discourse,” (8) but rather a deep study of the complexities of an individual and their inner lives. This is a provocative assessment and I think it would have been more so with a longer discussion situating it within the body of work she cites—such as the edited volume on subjectivity by Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, University of California Press, 2007)—or even other rich philosophical or anthropological debates on subjectivity. Such a discussion would add to Samuels’ claim that post-disaster recovery is “not only a social and cultural process, but also a fundamentally subjective one” (7).
In line with Mary Steedly (Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland, Princeton University Press, 1993), Samuels privileges the “narrative experiences” of tsunami survivors, illustrating that narratives are not just discursive, but also embodied and enacted. As such, the book weaves together an array of experiences, stories, and narratives in an effort to nuance various facets of disaster and disaster recovery in Aceh: humanitarianism, religion and grief, memory, and reconstruction. For example, a focus on conversations and sentiments in Aceh reveals that the tsunami-affected are not voiceless beneficiaries, but rather quite aware of their positionality within global hierarchies of humanitarian practice. Collective gratitude towards humanitarian efforts functioned as an agentive mode of critique against the failures of the Indonesian national government. A similar juxtaposition is observed in the memorialization of the tsunami: state-endorsed and subsidized tsunami memorial sites signalled a narrative of national triumphalism and governmental authority—an overall sense of closure. While these official monuments do have emotional purchase amongst tsunami-affected Acehnese, Samuels finds her interlocutors’ memories live on in other quotidian spaces: passing by homes where neighbours died; the presence of newly built homes; the absence of old shops and the scent of trees.
In chapters 3 and 5, Samuels highlights the centrality of Islam in processes of grieving and efforts to make sense of the tsunami devastation, respectively. Faith and devotion heeded the tsunami as fate and divine wisdom, providing an opportunity, however short-lived, for positive change, both individually and collectively. Again, narratives and intimate conversations allow Samuels to understand that grieving was both an ethical process of acceptance and of self-cultivation for those who lost so much in the tsunami. Samuels is also careful to note that silence, especially by men, may also be a narrative form of sadness that is not public-facing. Indeed, language can sometimes have its limits, as discussed in chapter 2, in which readers are presented with what she terms “embodied narratives” of those who experienced the rupture and disorder engendered by the disaster. She writes, “tsunami narratives are embodied and about bodies” (60), providing visceral retellings of how survivors used their own bodies to escape or bore scars from the tsunami, or how devastated Acehnese recounted their extraordinary embodied experiences, in which they did not feel hunger or thirst, or fear and anxiety in their encounters with myriad dead bodies.
Overall, Samuels conveys that remaking everyday life after disaster is neither straightforward nor linear, nor is it a complete process. Her goal in putting these chapters together is to illustrate the paradoxes of creating a new normal that is at once “like it used to be and never the same” (4). Her focus on subjective narratives allows her to cover a range of topics that constitute life in Aceh, post-tsunami. Reading the book, I did wonder what life as “it used to be” was like. The tsunami washed away so much but, of course, did not erase history. In particular—and perhaps selfishly given my own interests on the intersections of civil war and tsunami in Sri Lanka—how did life lived under decades of conflict shape the remaking of life? There are moments where conflict-related violence is mentioned briefly and how, for example, in memorialization the Indonesian state tends to marginalize conflict narratives, yet, it is difficult to get a sense of these significant broader political and historical conditions. Given that the conflict ended after the tsunami struck, ostensibly people were remaking life after the tsunami and also after the conflict.
This book is very accessible and would be appropriate for both graduate and undergraduate audiences. For researchers working on disasters, and for those who simply are curious as to how life can persist amidst such devastation, Samuels’ methodological focus on narratives offers poignant and honest details of the remaking of everyday life in Aceh.
Vivian Y. Choi
St. Olaf College, Northfield