Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.23
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8850-4067In Fitri’s Paya Nie, the swamp becomes the site through which the Aceh conflict is remembered, through its muddy terrain, waterways, everyday activities, and stories passed down by local communities. These details bring into view experiences of violence and loss that official histories often overlook. We used close reading and motif mapping. They are used to examine how the swamp serves as a counter-archive of the Aceh conflict. The analysis brings postcolonial theory into conversation with internal colonialism, collective memory, and the relationship between landscape and historical representation. This study pays attention to bureaucratic and military control and extractive development with the same stress on the marginalisation of women’s voices and the difficulties of remembering violence after the conflict. The findings reveal that unequal power relations between the Indonesian state and Aceh have continued since independence. However, they cannot be equated with European colonial rule. By portraying the swamp as a place where memories of violence remain part of everyday life, Paya Nie shows that official histories do not fully capture the experiences of local communities. The novel also suggests that ending armed conflict does not necessarily end suffering or resolve the lasting effects of violence.
Ritonga, Mhd. Rasid, et al. “The Swamp as Counter-Archive: Internal Colonialism, Subaltern Memory, and Postcolonial Ecology in Fitri’s Paya Nie.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 411-33, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.23.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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