Безмолвные свидетели: роль мангровых лесов как носителей памяти в романе Лейлы С. Чудори «Море говорит его имя»

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Introduction

The relationship between nature and human experience has long been a focus of literary studies. Recent scholarship increasingly examines how ecological elements function as active agents in narrative rather than as passive settings (Buell, 2005; Danielsson, Brandt, 2018).

This perspective is critical in postcolonial literature, as landscapes often preserve cultural memory and resist historical erasure (Nixon, 2011). In Indonesia, mangrove forests have become meaningful symbols, representing environmental survival and shared trauma (Darmawan et al., 2023). Their complex root systems and ability to adapt to changing tides reflect the ongoing processes of remembering and forgetting in communities affected by political violence. Because mangroves thrive in unstable environments, they reflect the fragile nature of memory itself. This makes them a productive subject for examining how nonhuman life forms participate in preserving historical and cultural narratives.

Phytocriticism, an emerging branch of ecocriticism, offers a method for analyzing how plants function as active agents in literature. This approach builds on Marder’s (2013) concept of “plant-thinking”, which challenges human-centered perspectives by attributing agency and meaning-making capacities to flora. Phytocriticism shows how plants shape cultural narratives rather than serve as a passive background. It also aligns with studies of ethnobotanical symbolism, such as the use of Balinese medicinal plants to represent indigenous knowledge systems (Darmawan et al., 2023). Bracke’s (2018) work on memory and landscape complements this perspective by showing how natural environments preserve histories often excluded from official accounts.

Leila S. Chudori’s The Sea Speaks His Name (2017) applies phytocritical principles by portraying Javanese mangroves as living witnesses to Indonesia’s 1998 political violence. The mangroves function as a vegetal archive that records collective trauma through their roots, regrowth, and continued presence. This aligns with Marder’s concept of plant agency and Bracke’s ecocriticism of memory, both of which emphasize the narrative potential of ecological forms – the novel challenges anthropocentric historiography by positioning plants as primary agents of remembrance. In a broader Southeast Asian context, mangroves often occupy liminal zones between land and sea, symbolizing cultural hybridity and ecological resilience (Friess et al., 2019). DeLoughrey (2019) similarly notes that coastal ecosystems in regional literature frequently represent resistance to environmental and historical erasure. Chudori’s depiction draws on this tradition, framing mangrove deforestation not just as ecological destruction but as a metaphor for silencing political memory.

The novel’s phytocritical strength lies in portraying mangroves as nonhuman witnesses to political violence. Unlike human testimony, which can be silenced or distorted, these trees record memory through their biology. Their pneumatophores (roots that surface from tidal mud) symbolize submerged histories that persist despite attempts at erasure. This reflects Marder’s (2013) idea of a “silent ontology”, in which plant life disrupts human-centered timelines and expresses memory through cyclical, non-linear growth.

This study analyzes how mangroves in The Sea Speaks His Name function as mnemonic agents by combining close reading with ethnobotanical contextualization. It examines how literary depictions of mangroves reflect real-world practices, such as the medicinal use of Acanthus ilicifolius in Javanese culture, linking narrative symbolism with indigenous plant knowledge. Grounded in Marder’s theory of plant-thinking and Tsing’s (2015) concept of multispecies storytelling, the analysis shows how human and nonhuman histories intertwine in the novel. This approach highlights mangroves’ ecological, cultural, and memorial roles within both text and context. This reading contributes to Southeast Asian ecocriticism by showing how the novel critiques environmental harm as a form of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) and calls for greater recognition of nonhuman memory (Yusoff, Gabrys, 2011).

This study demonstrates how ecological spaces, specifically mangroves, can function as co-authors of historical memory in postcolonial literature. While previous research has treated plants mainly as symbols (Aveling, 2014) and focused trauma studies on human testimony (McGregor et al., 2018), this analysis shows how flora in The Sea Speaks His Name archives collective trauma through their material and cultural presence. This approach offers a new way to read environmental narratives in Southeast Asia, where ecological degradation and historical erasure often intersect. By placing plants at the center of memory-making, the study highlights the urgent need to recognize nonhuman actors in both environmental and literary discourse.

Materials and methods

This study uses a phytocritical approach to examine how The Sea Speaks His Name represents mangroves as agents of memory. It applies close textual analysis to key scenes where plant imagery, especially roots, sap, pneumatophores, and regrowth, encodes historical trauma and resistance. These metaphors are read in relation to Indonesia’s 1998 political violence, particularly the disappearances linked to the New Order regime. These literary readings are supported by ethnobotanical research, including the cultural use of mangrove species in Javanese medicine. The analysis also draws on Tsing’s (2015) concept of “multispecies storytelling” to explore how the novel weaves human and nonhuman perspectives to shape historical memory.

This study combines phytocriticism with ecocritical trauma theory (Bracke, 2018) and Southeast Asian literary historiography to examine how ecological imagery encodes collective trauma. It focuses on recurring vegetal motifs in The Sea Speaks His Name, such as driftwood as fragmented memory and pneumatophores as submerged truths. These images are read concerning Nixon’s (2011) concept of “slow violence”, where environmental destruction mirrors the suppression of political memory. Scenes of mangrove deforestation, such as “bulldozers roared at dawn,” illustrate how state violence is inscribed into the landscape. These interpretations are situated within post-Reformasi Indonesian literature’s broader concern with silenced histories, drawing comparative insight from Aveling’s (2014) analysis of regional poetry. Through close reading, ethnobotanical reference, and trauma theory, the methodology shows how Chudori’s novel challenges human-centered accounts of history.

Results and Discussion

This analysis argues that Chudori portrays mangroves not as passive scenery but as active agents of memory and resistance in The Sea Speaks His Name. Drawing on Marder’s (2013) theory of plant-thinking and Bracke’s (2018) ecocriticism of memory, the novel presents mangroves as vegetal witnesses whose roots, bark, and growth patterns archive the trauma of Indonesia’s 1998 political violence. These representations challenge anthropocentric narratives by embedding historical memory in ecological forms. The analysis also draws on Nixon’s (2011) concept of “slow violence” to examine how mangrove destruction in the novel reflects state efforts to suppress dissent. By highlighting recurring plant imagery, such as roots, sap, and deforestation, this section shows how Chudori redefines remembrance through a multispecies perspective, positioning flora as co-authors of postcolonial history.

One of the most evocative scenes in The Sea Speaks His Name demonstrates how Chudori uses mangroves to represent ecological forms of memory. Here, mangroves function not merely as symbols but as archivists or nonhuman witnesses that store histories silenced by state violence. This dynamic is captured in the following passage:

The mangroves stood sentinel at the water’s edge, their roots clawing the mud like skeletal hands, gripping secrets the tide could not wash away. At night, their branches creaked like old floorboards in abandoned houses as if whispering to the ghosts of the drowned. Biru often wondered if the trees remembered the names of those swallowed by the sea – the ones whose bodies never surfaced, whose stories dissolved into salt and silt. ‘They are still here,’ her grandmother once said, pressing a gnarled root into her palm. ‘In the bark, in the sap. Even when they burn the forests, the roots stay buried. Memory grows sideways here, child, not up^[1].

This passage demonstrates how Chudori assigns testimonial agency to mangroves, framing them as nonhuman witnesses to state violence. The roots that “claw the mud like skeletal hands” symbolize unresolved trauma, linking natural imagery to the fate of the disappeared or those whose stories remain submerged in political silence. The grandmother’s claim that “memory grows sideways” challenges linear, state-sanctioned historiography and aligns with Tsing’s (2015) notion of rhizomatic memory, where knowledge spreads through horizontal, entangled networks. Through such imagery, Chudori reflects what Marder (2013) calls a “silent ontology,” positioning plants as memory-keepers beyond language. The invocation of “bark” and “sap” as carriers of memory literalize Nixon’s (2011) idea of “slow violence,” showing how environmental degradation and historical erasure are intertwined. These elements illustrate how the novel reimagines ecological forms as sites of postcolonial resistance.

The grandmother’s placing a mangrove root in Biru’s palm reflects Indigenous ethnobotanical practices, where plants are used for healing and to transmit memory and cultural knowledge across generations. In this moment, the mangrove root becomes a medium of historical inheritance, connecting Biru to the silenced past. Yet rather than offering comfort or closure, the root embodies unresolved trauma because its gnarled form mirrors the fragmented and obscured narratives surrounding the violence of the New Order regime. The line “Even when they burn the forests, the roots stay buried” critiques state-led ecological destruction as a failed attempt to erase collective memory. In the context of the 1998 Reformasi, when decades of authoritarian suppression began to unravel, the buried roots symbolize histories that persist beneath official discourse. This aligns with Glissant’s (1997) poetics of relation, where Caribbean mangroves model anticolonial historiography. Through this ethnobotanical logic, Chudori shows how mangroves serve ecological and mnemonic roles by preserving Indigenous modes of remembrance that resist state erasure:

The elders gathered at dusk, their faces lit by the flicker of kerosene lamps. ‘Cut a mangrove’, Pak Harjo warned, his voice graveled with age, ‘and you sever the past. Its roots hold the names we no longer speak – the ones the sea took, and the earth refuses to claim’. He knelt, pressing his palm to the mud where a young mangrove’s roots trembled in the tide. ‘These trees are our ancestors’ scribes. They write in rings we cannot read, in sap that bleeds when the chainsaws come’. A silence fell, broken only by the hiss of the lantern. ‘They will call this progress’, he spat, ‘but when the roots rot, the shore forgets. And when the shore forgets, we drown’^[2].

This passage presents mangrove deforestation as an environmental loss and an act of genealogical violence. The warning “Cut a mangrove, and you sever the past” asserts that mangroves store cultural memory in their roots, positioning them as vegetal archivists of ancestral knowledge. This challenges the modern, extractive view of nature as a resource, reaffirming Indigenous cosmologies that see flora as kin and memory-bearers. Pak Harjo’s claim that mangroves “write in rings we cannot read” draws on Marder’s (2013) theory of plant temporality which states that plants record time and trauma in forms that resist human interpretation.

This passage advances the novel’s critique of state-led forgetting by framing mangrove deforestation as a direct assault on ancestral memory. Pak Harjo’s warning, (cut a mangrove, and you sever the past) signals that these trees store histories not in archives but in their roots, bark, and sap. The bleeding sap, invoked at the moment of cutting, visualizes what Nixon (2011) calls “slow violence”, a theory that states that a form of harm that is incremental, invisible, and disproportionately affects marginalized communities. By linking ecological loss to cultural amnesia, the novel challenges the New Order regime’s efforts to erase local memory under the guise of national development (McGregor, 2018). The tactile gesture of pressing a hand into the mud echoes Indigenous practices that treat land as kin, not resource (Tsing, 2005). Thus, Chudori reclaims mangroves as living record-keeper or nonhuman bodies that witness what official narratives refuse to remember.

When Biru traces the growth rings of a severed mangrove stump, the tree becomes a site where personal grief and political trauma converge. The distorted rings mark drought, military raids, and her father’s disappearance, suggesting that the tree has recorded what official histories omit. Its wounded surface turns botanical life into an alternative archive, where memory is held not in language but in living matter. The oozing sap likened to blood and the ants’ slow procession toward it evokes ritual and mourning, grounding trauma in ecological detail:

Biru traced the stump’s rings, her fingers pausing at a warped knot. ‘Here – this is when they took Father’, she whispered. The tree had recorded each trauma: narrow rings for drought years, dark streaks for soldiers’ visits, swollen bands where it drank fishermen’s tears. Fresh sap oozed like blood where chainsaws had cut the last living witness^[3].

The mangrove stump’s growth rings are a living archive of silenced histories. As Biru traces the warped knot and links it to her father’s disappearance, the tree is revealed as a botanical witness by the description of its narrow rings, dark streaks, and swollen bands that record droughts, military raids, and communal grief. This tactile reading echoes Indigenous epistemologies that treat plants as storied beings, as Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) described, where trees encode memory through form. Chudori uses this vegetal language to confront what Trouillot (1995) calls “silences in the archive”, the selective remembering enforced by state power. The stump’s markings resist the New Order regime’s erasure of dissent, offering what McGregor (2018) identifies as a challenge to biopolitical control. At this moment, ecological life becomes a site of historical testimony, preserving what official records have excluded.

The image of sap “bleeding like blood” extends the critique of state violence into the biological realm. Drawing on Neimanis’s (2017) hydrofeminist framework, the sap’s flow evokes a shared vulnerability between human and nonhuman bodies, resisting the state’s efforts to sanitize grief and history. The ants’ ritualistic procession toward the sap reinforces this reading, transforming the scene into a multispecies act of mourning. This aligns with Haraway’s (2016) concept of symbiosis, or collective survival across species, where trauma reverberates through ecosystems. The severed stump, described as “the last living witness,” also embodies what Yusoff (2018) terms “geologic violence,” linking environmental destruction to the erasure of historical memory. Through these interconnected images, Chudori expands the function of the mangrove from silent witness to active participant in a broader, more-than-human politics of remembrance.

The novel depicts a community-led effort to replant mangroves as an act of resistance against state-backed deforestation. This replanting is ecological restoration and a ritual reclaiming cultural memory silenced by political violence. The seedlings, fragile yet persistent, embody a collective hope, positioning flora as survivors of trauma and agents in recovering historical truth:

The villagers waded into the mud at low tide, each cradling a mangrove sapling like an infant. Their hands pressed the slender roots into the silt, whispering names of the lost as if the trees might carry their stories skyward. Storm clouds gathered on the horizon, but the saplings bent without breaking, their leaves trembling in unison. By dawn, the tide would test their grip, but for now, they stood as slender sentinels between the sea and the scars left by bulldozers^[4].

This replanting scene transforms ecological restoration into an act of mourning and resistance. As villagers press saplings into the mud while whispering the names of the disappeared, reforestation becomes what Nixon (2011) describes as environmental memory work – a practice that counters slow violence through care and repetition. The villagers’ tactile engagement echoes what Tsing (2015) calls “the arts of living on a damaged planet,” where survival depends on multispecies collaboration. The saplings, bending in the wind but refusing to break, reflect Marder’s (2013) view of plant resilience as a form of silent resistance. By positioning mangroves as sentinels between land and sea, Chudori rejects anthropocentric history and asserts that memory also takes root in the natural world.

The villagers naming the lost while planting mangrove saplings reveals how ecological restoration becomes a form of collective mourning and political resistance. This ritual echoes Das’s (2007) argument that grief becomes bearable when embedded in shared practices – here, the planting of trees sutures the wounds left by disappearance and state violence. The looming storm and tidal uncertainty mirror what DeLoughrey (2019) describe as environmental precarity, where ecological fragility reflects the community’s tenuous hold on memory under state suppression. Yet, this act of planting is not resignation but persistence. It embodies what Haraway (2016) calls “staying with the trouble” which explained as a refusal to disengage from damaged ecosystems and entangled histories. Through this phytocritical lens, the mangrove saplings become co-actors in resistance, their roots gripping the mud as firmly as the villagers cling to the stories that power seeks to erase.

The return of the mangroves years after their destruction affirms the novel’s central claim: that memory, once rooted in ecological forms, cannot be permanently erased. The mangroves’ gradual resurgence, by being in the state of scarred but alive, frames regeneration as an act of insurgent memory. Their continued growth despite past violence asserts that suppressed histories endure not only in human testimony but through multispecies persistence:

A decade later, the mangroves had reclaimed the shore. Their roots still bore the jagged scars of chainsaws, their trunks twisted into grotesque shapes by salt and storms. However, saplings now rose from the mud, leaves unfurling toward sunlight. At dusk, fishermen claimed the trees whispered names – not the polished lies etched on official monuments, but the raw, guttural syllables of the lost. The sea still hid bones, but the mangroves clutched them close, their roots knitting a lattice of remembrance beneath the waves^[5].

The return of the mangroves marks not ecological recovery alone but a direct challenge to the state’s attempt to bury history. Their scarred but living bodies enact what Marder (2013) terms “vegetal survivance” which explained as the persistence of damaged life forms that silently testify to past violence. The twisted trunks and scarred roots resist the state’s “polished lies” etched on monuments, offering what DeLoughrey (2019) calls subaqueous memory instead: a form of remembrance embedded in nonhuman bodies and inaccessible to official narrative control. The image of saplings rising from mud while roots clutch submerged bones literalizes Tsing’s (2015) claim that “ruins are the sites of resurgence”. In Chudori’s vision, the mangroves do not simply regenerate but they resist. They reframe history as a multispecies process in which trauma is not erased but woven into the land itself.

The Sea Speaks His Name closes not with a resolution but with a resurgence, where mangrove regeneration becomes a form of historical insistence. Across the novel, Chudori repositions mangroves from passive scenery to active participants in postcolonial memory work. These plants encode trauma, resist erasure, and speak on behalf of the silenced through their roots, sap, scars, and regrowth. From their role as witnesses to disappearances to their function in communal rituals of replanting, the mangroves enact what Nixon (2011) calls slow violence – not as victims but as agents of enduring memory. Their return challenges the notion that ecological or political violence can ever entirely sever the past. Aligning with Indigenous epistemologies (Kimmerer, 2013) and multispecies theories of memory and resistance (Tsing, 2015; Haraway, 2016), the novel reframes post-1998 trauma as a shared struggle between human and nonhuman life.

Conclusion

The Sea Speaks His Name reimagines Indonesia’s mangroves as more than natural scenery – they become agents of memory, resistance, and historical continuity. Their scarred trunks, bleeding sap, and tangled roots register the violence of political erasure while offering a living record of what official narratives refuse to preserve. Across the novel, Chudori constructs an ecological language of mourning and survival, where memory is carried not in archives or monuments but in roots, mud, and regrowth. In this narrative, remembrance occurs not through monuments or documents but through the slow, silent persistence of damaged ecosystems. This study contributes to Southeast Asian ecocriticism by demonstrating how literature can position local ecologies as sites of cultural memory. It highlights how postcolonial trauma, Indigenous knowledge, and environmental vulnerability intersect in coastal landscapes. The mangroves’ return is a sign of ecological recovery and a form of narrative resistance. In spaces marked by disappearance, memory endures by spoken not through human testimony alone but through the rooted presence of the natural world.

 

 

^{1 Chudori, L.S. (2017). The Sea Speaks His Name (pp. 72–73). Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.}

^{2 Chudori, L.S. (2017). The Sea Speaks His Name (pp. 148–149). Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.}

^{3 Chudori, L.S. (2017). The Sea Speaks His Name (p. 195). Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.}

^{4 Chudori, L.S. (2017). The Sea Speaks His Name (p. 234). Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.}

^{5 Chudori, L.S. (2017). The Sea Speaks His Name (p. 302). Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.}

Об авторах

Рули Индра Дармаван

Государственный университет Семаранг

Автор, ответственный за переписку.
Email: rulyindra@mail.unnes.ac.id
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1949-6926

преподаватель факультета языков и искусств

Индонезия, 50229, Семаранг

Кристиаван Индрийанто

Университет Прима Индонезия

Email: kristiawanindriyanto@unprimdn.ac.id
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7827-2506

преподаватель факультета подготовки учителей и образования

Индонезия, 20118, Медан

Мохамад Ихван Росийди

Государственный университет Семаранг

Email: mirosyidi@mail.unnes.ac.id
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9570-4654

преподаватель факультета языков и искусств

Индонезия, 50229, Семаранг

- Тохирия

Государственный университет Семаранг

Email: thohiriyah@mail.unnes.ac.id
ORCID iD: 0009-0009-9764-3857

преподаватель факультета языков и искусств

Индонезия, 50229, Семаранг

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