ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the limits of acceptable speech on intimate violence in Soenting Melajoe (1912–1921), one of the first generation of Malay-language women’s newspapers in the Netherlands East Indies. Soenting Melajoe provides a window into women’s concerns, experiences, and emotions in poetry and prose. The chapter examines affective literacies and solidarities by deconstructing linguistic and symbolic schemas in women’s responses to intimate violence. It is structured around three case studies: an account of power and the supernatural in marital conflict (1912–13); a young woman’s plea for public acknowledgement of her friend’s murder (1916); and a call for initiatives to support victims (1918). I trace how norms derived from Minangkabau adat (customary law) and interpretations of Islam were woven into textual acts, particularly witnessing and remembering. Contributors conceptualised their place in families and communities as both powerful and marginal, complicating an enduring colonially constructed discourse on their empowerment in Minangkabau ‘matriarchy’.
