FROM HISTORICAL WOUND TO MORAL REALIGNMENT: ECOTHEOLOGICAL RECOVERY IN AHMAD TOHARI’S JANTERA BIANGLALA

Abstract

Political violence is often read as a human tragedy alone. That frame is too narrow for Ahmad Tohari’s Jantera Bianglala. The novel links wounded bodies, damaged habitats, and a returning sense of the Divine. This study examines how the novel organizes that relation and what conceptual contribution follows from it. The primary corpus is the full 182-page novel. It was processed into 48,434 running words, 187 paragraph units, and 4,808 sentence units. Lexical screening flagged 182 paragraph units with ecological markers, 172 with violence markers, 110 with spiritual-ethical markers, and 129 with care-restoration markers. A denser core of 76 four-way-overlap paragraphs was then read closely with support from a chapter-page matrix, motif counts, and a relational co-occurrence table. The findings reveal five linked movements. First, the novel stages historical violence as ecological rupture. Second, natural matter functions as a witness that stores fear, endurance, and memory. Third, fragile repair grows through relational shelter, especially around Srintil, Goder, Rasus, and the damaged village environment. Fourth, the text turns ecological signs into moral and theological correction through the teak forest, the swing, the sea, and the final rainbow image. Fifth, Rasus’s movement from soldier to shepherd-like caretaker gives narrative form to restorative agency. These findings support the concept of an Ecotheological Recovery Spiral. Recovery is not linear in this model. It is recursive, fragile, place-based, and ethically demanding. The novelty of the study lies in showing that nature in the novel is not background. It is a witness, a refuge, a moral mediator, and an active force in post-violence realignment.