Haunted Environments: Political Violence and Ecologies of Memory in Ayu Utami’s Larung and Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s Kalatidha

Political violence damages bodies, historical records, and environments mediating the past. This article examines Ayu Utami’s Larung and Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s Kalatidha through comparative close reading informed by haunting studies, material ecocriticism, and environmental approaches to cultural memory. Interconnected episodes involve family remembrance, cave hydrology, bamboo vegetation, psychiatric confinement, documentary fragments, and commercial redevelopment. Three mechanisms emerge: environmental dispersal of victims’ traces, restricted remembrance and credibility, and destruction of settings sustaining sensory attachment to the past. Larung links embodied intergenerational transmission, hydrological disposal narratives, and activists’ renewed political vulnerability. Kalatidha juxtaposes spectral persistence with institutional abuse and the loss of bamboo and fog beneath a shopping mall. Haunting reveals unresolved violence without guaranteeing reliable testimony, protection, or repair. The proposed ecology of memory is a vulnerable relation among material carriers, situated perceivers, and conditions of recognition, advancing comparative understanding of political and environmental harm in Indonesian fiction.