Unpacking Waris

Passing down inheritance, and becoming an heir, are political matters. 

Inheritance determines who is the master, who is the shadow, and who is removed from the line of succession.

Inheriting something means having control over deciding the importance of the inherited object.

"Hana nguni hana mangke, tan hana nguni tan hana mangke" – Sunda Buhun

There was the past, there is the present. If there had been no past, there would be no present.

We are children of wounds that have not yet healed. For us, being heirs means delving into the trauma of our ancestors that continues to flow in our blood, wounded by powers that have ravaged our bodies and our land.

My heritage is a history covered in the red blood of conflict. 

Conflict within the family at home, conflict within the extended family, the indigenous community, and the ongoing conflict in the Land of Papua.

"Tefa leu be, ta'o be nasihat."

What was passed down was not only land, but also direction.

But from Rote, a dry land far from the center, that direction always came late or 

it never arrived. We were born on the margins, growing up without a voice, 

taught to be patient, not to ask questions.

We:

Consisting of many selves

spread in all directions

at home and on foreign shores

wage workers caring for their masters' inheritance 

while what is left our own inheritance is either neglected or out of reach

***

The state has inherited a development perspective rooted in colonialism and capitalism: the accumulation of wealth through the exploitation of people and nature, severing bonds and relationships of mutual respect. 

Waris: the apparatus of power—a tool for the seizure of resources, the theft of natural and labor value, locked in a consensus of property, in pockets of exclusion of those who are entitled and those who are not, and also the patriarchal intuition of ownership claims—disguised as hereditary love of kinship and family.

Inheritance is often associated with capital for the heirs. Anything considered unproductive will not be inherited, but rather set aside until it becomes rotten or obsolete.

We are heirs to a history of wounds, lies, trauma, poverty, and a devastated 

Mother Earth.

In 1950, shortly after Indonesia gained independence, a number of avant garde male artists wrote a manifesto: “We are the legitimate heirs of world culture.” Legitimate, acknowledged, not bastards. But if what is considered valuable in world culture is decided by a handful of elites in countries that profit from the exploitation of resources in the Global South, by free market interests that rely on global inequality, by colonial structures that perpetuate genocide, then perhaps we would be better off as bastards.

We are all heirs to colonial lies, especially regarding the hierarchy of certain bodies over other bodies—colonial ableism. We therefore need a personal and collective manifesto that day by day rejects these hierarchies, that glorifies love for oneself and one's community despite living with all the violence of the capitalist world.

Protest from the Islands

It is not easy for women to interpret the word waris. In our custom, we are merely women who are born and then referred to as “the others,” certainly different from our brothers, who by the socio-cultural system have been entrusted with inheriting power, territory, and knowledge.

We have inherited myths of the glory of sailors. The history of Wakatobi was written from the decks of ships by men, spread in narratives of development that displaced our relationship with nature, that worshipped concrete and reclamation, culinarization that silences the earth and food as knowledge and livelihood, and that turned living spaces into mere spectacles for tourism. The education system distanced us from our own land. Our history has been silenced and our bodies tamed in the name of progress.

On our islands, inheritance is prioritized for men, while women's bodies become bastions of tradition, weaving beauty that we never defined, mandated to give birth to successors, without ever being asked, “Are you okay with all this?”

Our ancestors have left us because our living space and altar stones have been destroyed. Faced with the state, the church, and patriarchy, we are fed up with it all. With all this anger and wounds, we wish to heal.

We reject the inheritance given from our fathers, grandfathers, and uncles alone. We want to preserve the legacy of our grandmothers, mothers, aunts, relatives, and their comrades who are not bound by lineage. We also refuse to be dazzled by the glory of kings and queens. We want to amplify the voices of the “machine proletariat,” the “land proletariat” (as Tan Malaka would say), the home proletariat, and weave together a fair and sensitive historical narrative that transcends imposed boundaries.

Protest from the Body

Transgender women are often removed from inheritance lists because they are considered to violate normative nature. When they leave home and no longer use their birth names, they are removed from the family register. 

Transgender women's inheritance rights are also often entrusted to the closest relatives, even though it is not certain that these rights will be fulfilled by the relatives who receive the inheritance mandate. In fact, these rights are often secretly transferred to their own children without the knowledge of the transgender person concerned.

When trans women raise children, they are not considered legitimate heirs because they do not meet the legal requirements according to the hierarchy of applicable laws and regulations.

The legacy of trans women is the result of collective work, culture, and civilization that can be preserved by future generations.

We reject inheritance when it is nothing more than an extension of power that loots bodies and sexuality: the reproductive and cis-heteronormative logic that we have struggled to erase from our memories. The trauma remains alive. For us (queers), this inheritance is palpable. Feelings of inferiority, of being unseen, unheard, unacknowledged, unloved— loud and overwhelming.

This identity was born from genetic engineering that positions the body as both a laboratory and a digital space, a body that is open to modification through syringes, synthetic hormones, pills, and other cyborg equipment.

We are considered glitches—errors in the system.

This identity is not a biological error but rather the result of medical interventions that transcend gender: political, pharmacological, and radical.

Inheriting a history that villainizes the women's movement alienates us from many things. For most of us, movement has always been confined to the dichotomy of domestic versus public. In fact, everything radical is reproduced in domestic spaces. The suppression of the labor movement has also led us to a capitalist society that increasingly individualizes and kills collectivity. Freedom only comes to those who have power, whether it be capital or knowledge.

Every night is hellish, dark and threatening, but like them we want to reclaim the inheritance that has been stolen from our ideological mothers, that mutilated knowledge, chopped up until it lost its shape, burned, buried deep into the center of the earth. But the earth is sick and vomits, spewing forth the collective anger of the departed women. There is no inheritance today—go find your own food!

Reclaim

We want to inherit everything that is considered shameful in the rulers' version of history and has never been properly resolved.

We want to assert our rights as heirs to what has not been bequeathed to us.

In the future, we want to bequeath it without exception.

We demand more than just material inheritance—we claim the right to redefine, the right to change, the right to breathe freely. Because nurturing does not mean submission.

Various collective initiatives, from women, indigenous peoples, workers, and diverse gender and sexual identities, pass on knowledge that is intimately connected to one another. Mamas in Papua are fighting to protect the forest because for them the forest is an inseparable part of life— this is an awareness that must be passed on to their children and grandchildren. Labor groups pass on the spirit of resistance from generation to generation. Meanwhile, queer friends strive to preserve safe spaces, practices of care, and acceptance for all to the younger generation.

We are the heirs of the forbidden culture carved by Murniasih, one leg severed, who did not want to resemble anyone but ourselves, full of wounds, wild and fierce, a culture forged by pestles pounding relentlessly to drive away the seven demons of the village, woven together by the hands of those who did not succumb to the threat of hell.

I am the heir to women with bloodless wounds who fought against those who took away their freedom, those oppressors hidden behind culture. Their history and wounds became my greatest strength in the struggle against injustice against women.

Am I dead? No! They said as they continued to lead the resistance from the grave. 

***

Passing on feminist knowledge is a space for the horizontal and rhizomatic inheritance of knowledge, which spreads, giving recognition to the thoughts and experiences of bodies across classes, islands, and generations. Passionate bodies interpret knowledge in a space and time that is constantly in flux.

That is why we made a pilgrimage to the grave of Kartini's Spirit, I Fanned the Flames Peeling Away the Dark Walls and found them abandoned, 

their names blurred.

We want to inherit and reinterpret the narratives of monuments and artifacts that were removed, sold, or destroyed during the war.

we:

grow unconfined by the walls of schools, libraries, archives, and museums

we:

wander through demolished graves, musty moldy warehouses,

abandoned studios, and flea markets

Together, we reject the absence and limitations of learning spaces. We want collaboration between different backgrounds/specializations in the work of preserving and restoring narratives of the past. We contribute to reimagining this practice with a spirit of decolonization that is relevant to the southern hemisphere.

we:

trace the buried, abandoned - rotting, decaying

reimagining - hacking 

technologies to read

to care for, to live with the decaying and vanishing

Legacy for the Future

As part of the global community, we want to inherit the memories, knowledge, and resistance from women of the islands. We do not want to be the generation that breaks the ecological and collective legacy. We write as an intervention against masculine knowledge that fosters new colonialism, tourism capitalism, and a state that obeys statistics.

With a feminist legacy, we strive for radical ways of giving: care, solidarity, knowledge, and trans-social and transnational autonomy of livelihood. Feminist ways of giving does not perpetuate names or genealogies, but thickens networks of life across classes, species, technologies, and nations—sabotaging the algorithms of inheritance that govern the annihilation of nations, workers' livelihoods, and natural resources of today.

Because inheritance is not a curse, but a fire that we rekindle to burn away all

injustice and light the way home to the door of equality.

Disability justice is anti-capitalist, anti-genocidal justice that requires leadership by those most affected. All lies about deaf and/or disabled women must be exposed, lies that we are powerless, that we have no opinions, that others speak on our behalf.

I am a child of that land.

I inherited my mama's strong hands,

but also a silent legacy that has hardened within me.

“Ana moli leu ma lelu.”

Children who know how to receive, know how to sort things out.

Legacy is not always about what we leave behind after we are gone, but what we nurture while we are alive. And as a transgender woman, I try to sow seeds of hope about courage, care, love, and nurturing that are beginning to grow in places we cannot yet see, but will blossom in a regime that embraces all desires.

Today I am sorting things out.

I refuse to be the successor of wounds that are silenced and forgotten. I choose a path that is no longer silent.

We want to offer love and happiness from a world that continues to practice mass extinction through colonization. We are here not as a sign of apocalypse, but as a possibility: that empathy is a form of resistance, and queer happiness is the most radical counter-power to the machine that is destroying humanity.

We refuse to be afraid.

We will never die.

We accept what we have inherited, learning from the wise as well as the wicked. We will follow and cultivate the wise, sending them to the furthest future we can reach. We do not fear or avoid the wicked, but rather confront and examine them so that they are not repeated in the future. This is our promise to our ancestors and emerging generations.

__________________

* = ‘waris’ is a word used in - among others - the Indonesian, Malay, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Persian languages, which refer to inheritance. The word is an adaptation of the Arabic word ‘warith’ which means ‘heir’ or ‘inheritor’.

Note on the plurality of subjects in the Manifesto:

This Manifesto was composed by different subjects, each representing personal as well as collective expressions. As a result, sometimes parts of the text use ‘I’ while  other parts use ‘we’ as the enunciating subject. During the collective writing process as well as the editing, the polyphonic nature of the text is maintained, as it best represents the way the Manifesto was created by The School of Women’s Thought.