On Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan, if you know where to look and
you’re the kind of person who does look—really look, the way children do
before the world teaches them to stop—there stands a woman made of bronze. She’s
been there since 1981, and she’ll be there long after you’re gone, long after
the road beneath her crumbles and the city forgets its own name.
Her name was Tuti Amir Kartabrata, and she is pointing a
rifle at the sky.
She is not pointing it at heaven by accident.
---
The thing you have to understand about October of 1945 is
that Bandung was a city that had already learned how to be afraid. Fear has a
smell—most people don’t know that, or they know it and don’t like to admit
it—and Bandung smelled of it the way old cellars smell of wet stone and slow
rot. The Dutch were coming. They were piggybacking on the Allies, those
liberators, those saviors, wearing their borrowed moral authority like a
clean suit thrown over something deeply, fundamentally dirty.
They had been gone, and now they were back. And everyone in
Bandung understood, in the wordless animal part of themselves that civilized
people try so hard to bury, what that meant.
The city was going to burn. Not metaphorically. Not as some
grand rhetorical flourish. Burn. Orange and red and screaming hot in the
tropical night, the kind of burning that gets into your lungs and never quite
comes out, the kind that leaves children with no eyebrows and a thousand-yard
stare they carry into old age.
Tuti knew all of this. She was eighteen years old, or close
enough to it, and she knew.
---
Her father, Husein, was a military instructor for the
TKR—the People’s Security Army, though people was doing some heavy
lifting there, because the people in question were largely terrified and
under-equipped and facing one of the most experienced colonial military
machines on the face of the earth. He had seen the battlefield up close. He had
smelled what Tuti had only read about.
“No,” he said. The word was a door slamming shut.
But Tuti had grown up in that house. She knew every hinge,
every gap in the frame, every way to wedge it back open.
She came back the next day. And the day after. Her friend
Nani Sumarni came with her, because misery loves company and so does righteous,
burning determination. They wore Husein down the way water wears down stone—not
all at once, not dramatically, but steadily, patiently, with the terrible
patience of the young who don’t yet believe anything can truly stop them.
Then came the morning he pushed back too hard.
Tuti reached into her pocket.
“If you don’t let me go,” she said, and her voice was very
calm, the voice of someone who has already made their decision and is simply
informing you of it, “I will detonate the grenade in my pocket right here.
Right now. In this room.”
Husein went very still. The way you go still when a spider
drops from the ceiling and lands on the back of your hand. That primitive,
full-body stillness.
He looked at his daughter’s pocket. He looked at her eyes.
He made his calculation.
He said yes.
It was only later—much later, after the smoke had
cleared and the city had stopped burning and the dead had been counted and some
of them had been buried—that the truth came out. The truth, which Tuti had
apparently found hilarious in the way that only the genuinely brave can find
hilarious.
The grenade was a mango.
A mango, ladies and gentlemen. She had bluffed her way onto
the front lines of a revolution with a piece of fruit and a face like stone.
She would have made one hell of a poker player.
---
They called themselves Laswi. Laskar Wanita Indonesia. The
Indonesian Women’s Army. They set up their headquarters at Gedung Mardi Harja
on the very same day the Allies rolled into Bandung, which tells you something
about who these women were. They did not wait to see how things shook out. They
did not sit by the radio wringing their hands. They organized.
More than a hundred of them came. They were high school
girls, mostly. Vocational students. A handful of housewives. Widows—and here’s
where it gets dark—widows whose husbands had already been eaten by this war and
who had decided, each in her own private way, that grief was not sufficient.
That grief, in fact, was just anger waiting for a direction.
The locals called them Maung Bikang.
The Female Tigers.
The PETA officers who trained them—former soldiers of the
Japanese-sponsored Defense Corps, men who knew how to make people ready for the
worst—did not soften the curriculum on their behalf. They marched. They drilled
until their feet bled and then they drilled some more. They learned to assemble
a rifle in the dark, by touch alone, with their eyes closed and sweat dripping
into their mouths. They learned first aid, which is really just learning to
look at the worst thing that has happened to a human body and keep your hands
steady anyway. They learned field-kitchen logistics and tactical combat and how
to move through space like you belonged there, like you owned it, like
the world owed you passage.
“The Laswi members were incredibly sharp at assembling and
operating firearms,” Sugiarta Sriwibawa would write forty years later, in the
slightly clinical tone of historians who are trying to describe something that
still, even at that distance, makes them feel a particular kind of awe. “After
all, many of them were educated high schoolers.”
He said it like it was a mild surprise. It was not a mild
surprise. It was exactly what you’d expect from a hundred young women who had
decided that dying on their feet was preferable to living on their knees.
---
Now we come to the part of the story that I would have
leaned into. That I would have circled back to. That I would have lit from a
strange angle and let you sit with for a long, uncomfortable moment.
Her name was Soesilowati, and she arrived on horseback.
---
Picture the office on Jalan Kepatihan. It’s 1946. Abdul
Haris Nasution—who would one day become a general, who would one day survive an
assassination attempt that killed his daughter instead, who had already learned
that history is mostly a series of things you didn’t see coming—is sitting at
his desk doing the administrative work of revolution, which is less glamorous
than the songs suggest.
He hears a commotion outside.
The kind of commotion that makes the guards’ voices go up a
register.
Then the door opens.
She doesn’t knock. She doesn’t announce herself. She walks
in the way people walk into rooms they have already decided belong to them, and
she drops something heavy onto Nasution’s desk with a sound like a melon
hitting a floor.
He opens the package.
Inside is the severed head of a Gurkha soldier. The rank
insignia is still on it. She has been careful about that—careful that he would
be able to tell exactly what it was she had done, and to whom, and at what
level of the enemy’s hierarchy.
Soesilowati looks at the general across his desk, across
this extraordinary thing she has placed between them, and she explains calmly—calmly,
in the voice of someone discussing the weather or the price of rice—that she
took it herself.
Nasution, to his considerable credit, did not faint.
He hired her. He made her his personal bodyguard for field
operations. And what stayed with him—what lodged itself in his memory like a
splinter that the years never quite worked loose—was the image of her on guard
duty. Sitting bolt upright on the hood of the car.
Not in the car. On the hood.
Watching. Always watching.
---
And then there was Willy Soekirman.
Kambela Dewi, they called her. The way she fought defies the
comfortable clinical language we use to put distance between ourselves and the
thing we’re describing. Her comrades said she went into a trance. That
when the blood was up and the fighting was close and the world had narrowed to
the terrible bright present-tense of pure survival, something happened to Willy
Soekirman that they could only describe in terms that sounded more like
possession than combat.
She carried a short sword. Not a rifle—not the long-barreled
certainty of distance that could kill a man before he ever saw your face—but a
short sword, which meant she had to be close. The Gurkhas she faced
carried kukris. If you don’t know what a kukri is, imagine a knife designed by
someone who thought regular knives were being too subtle. Curved, heavy,
designed for exactly the kind of work Willy was doing, and the Gurkhas who
carried them were very, very good at their work.
Willy was better.
“I was on total autopilot,” she would say later, in the
careful past tense of someone describing a person they used to be and are not
entirely sure how to account for. “Suddenly, I’d just notice my hands were
covered in fresh blood, and my comrades would be wildly cheering me on.”
Her most legendary duel happened near the Viaduct. A group
of Laswi fighters had been cornered—the Gurkhas pressing in, the exits
narrowing, the geometry of the situation becoming very bad very fast. And Willy
Soekirman looked at this situation and made a decision that most people,
confronted with the same geometry, would not have made.
She drew her sword.
She had been insulted. A Gurkha soldier had said something
to her—something demeaning, something that reached down past the patriotism and
the ideology and the politics and touched something older and rawer and more
fundamental. Something about being a woman in a place men had decided women did
not belong.
She won.
She won in front of everyone. In front of the Laswi fighters
who had been certain they were about to die, and in front of the Gurkhas who
had been equally certain of the same thing from the opposite direction.
Later, in 1995, she put it simply in an anthology, in a line
that has the quality of something carved rather than written:
On the front lines, a short samurai sword is always
drawn.
---
The bronze woman on Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan is still
pointing her rifle at the sky.
She was restored in 2021. Someone decided she was worth
preserving—that the story she represents was worth the trouble of maintenance,
of care, of the ongoing effort of remembrance.
They were right.
Her name was Tuti Amir Kartabrata, and she had a mango in
her pocket, and she was not afraid. Or—and this is the more interesting
version, the truer version, the version I would want you to sit with—she was
afraid, the way anyone sane is afraid when the city is burning and the enemy is
coming, and she went anyway.
That’s the thing about the female tigers. That’s what the
bronze can’t quite capture, what the history books flatten into names and dates
and tactical footnotes.
They knew exactly what they were walking into.
They walked in anyway.
And the city—this hot, complicated, burning, surviving
city—remembered them.
Even if the city sometimes has to be reminded.
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