Jazz, Perfume & the Incident

On November 12, 1991, the Indonesian military opened fire on protestors in Dili, East Timor. Hundreds were killed and accounts of this massacre sparked international outrage. In Jakarta, a cover-up began immediately and the Indonesian mass media was cautioned to tow the official line. Seno Gumira Ajidarma refused to do so and transformed documentary evidence into semi-fictional form and published it as novel. This novel is a triptych, the first two of which “Jazz” and “Perfume” should be easily recognizable to most readers but “The Incident” is a collage of documents on an event in Indonesian history euphemistically referred to by the same name.