There has been quite a flurry around Indonesian literature
in recent months, in August Words Without Borders http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/myth-and-history-writing-from-indonesia
featured Indonesian writers and pointed out:
“Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world and
Malay, Indonesia’s mother language, is one of the world’s top-ten spoken
languages with a conservative estimate of at least 200 million speakers. (Some
estimates are as high as 500 million.) But how many book-length literary titles
are translated from Indonesian into foreign languages each year? Usually no
more than ten. And how many Indonesian authors could even the most erudite
literary critic in the United States cite by name? I would wager to say one, at
most.”
In October, Indonesia will be the guest of honour at the
Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest annual book publishing event in the world.
Earlier in August I received an advance copy of Eka Kurniawan’s “Beauty Is A
Wound” and then, late in the month, Kurniawan was a guest at the Melbourne
Writer’s Festival in a “conversation” presentation.
Given Indonesia is one of our nearest neighbours (I’m in the
South of Australia), and my exposure to their literature has totalled ZERO, I
think it is probably about time I started to address this imbalance.
Kurniawan’s novel opens with Dewi Ayu coming back from the
dead after being buried for twenty-one years. The first thing she thinks about
is her “baby” Beauty (Dewi Ayu dies twelve days after giving birth). Beauty is
a child she tried to abort a number of times, given she already had three
daughters (all children are to unknown fathers) and she was nearly fifty years
of age, and Beauty is the ugliest baby known, after Dewi Ayu had given birth to
three stunningly beautiful girls:
However it was true that Dewi Ayu
tried to kill the baby back when she realized that, whether or not she had
already lived for a whole half century, she was pregnant once again. Just as
with her other children, she didn’t know who the father was, but unlike the
others she had absolutely no desire for the baby to survive. So she had taken
five extra-strength paracetamol pills that she got from a village doctor and
washed them down with half a liter of soda, which was almost enough to cause
her own death but not quite, as it turned out, enough to kill that baby. She thought
of another way, and called a midwife who was willing to kill the baby and take
it out of her womb by inserting a small wooden stick into her belly. She experienced
heavy bleeding for two days and two nights and the small piece of wood came
back out in splinters, but the baby kept growing. She tried six other ways to
get the better of that baby, but all were in vain, and she finally gave up and
complained:
“This one is a real brawler, and
she’s clearly going to beat her mother in this fight.”
We then travel back in time to Dewi Ayu’s youth, her
marriage to an old mad man, being taken prisoner by the Japanese as part of
their invasion of Indonesia and then being forced into prostitution.
This novel (by having Dewi Ayu coming back from the dead)
managed to cover eighty or so years of Indonesian history. A work that is 470
pages in length (the Australian edition runs to nearly 500 pages) there is a
lot of territory to cover. This is done by running multiple stories, all linked
to Dewi Ayu in some way. We have Maman Gendeng, an indestructible criminal, who
lands in Halimunda (where our story is set) in search of a legendary princess
only to find that the story was 200 years old, as a result he proposes to the
prostitute Dewi Ayu instead. We also have Shodancho a guerrilla revered by the
community, a rival of sorts to Maman Gendeng, who becomes the leader of the
military and is in love with one of Dewi Ayu’s daughters. And we have Comrade
Kliwon, naturally a communist, who is a womaniser but also in love with the same
daughter of Dewi Ayu.
The novel feels as though it is a collection of stand-alone
stories, but the intertwining of characters and the passage of time as well as
Dewi Ayu being the spine of the stories gives the novel multiple linkages.
Drawing on Indonesian folklore there are people who fly,
rebirths, and ghosts a plenty, all of this with the backdrop of extreme
violence, including sexual violence. But
each of the extreme situations are either balanced with humour or with the
level headedness of one of the female characters.
The fact was, most people of Kalamunda
were superstitious. They still believed the demons, spooks, and all kinds of
supernatural beings ran wild in the cemetery, living among the spirits of the
dead. And they also believed that the gravedigger lived in close communion with
all of these supernatural beings. Aware of his difficult situation, Kamino had
never even tried proposing to anyone. His only interactions with other people happened
in the course of his business. He usually just stayed at home, a humid house
made out of moldy old concrete shaded by big banyan trees. The sole
entertainment in his lonely life was playing jailangkun – calling the spirits of the dead using a little effigy
doll – another skill that had been passed down through the generations of his
family, good for invoking the spirits to chat with them about all kinds of
things.
This book is littered with little amusing anecdotes – as an
example the village of Halimunda celebrates Independence Day on a different
date that the rest of Indonesia, this is a result of the news travelling slowly
to the village.
I’ll leave the linear (or more circular) plot quite bare for
you to enjoy the novel yourself, however this work does cover sweeping epic
times in Indonesian history, the invasion by the Japanese, the slaughter of
thousands of communists, living under Suharto’s dictatorship, military rule and
these events are all covered here. With the three husbands of the three
daughters representing military, communism and criminals, the power struggles
are obvious to see, as an aside the police are ineffectual.
A great introduction to Indonesian literature and the
melding of humour, extreme events, folklore and reality is done with a nice
balance.
During Eka Kurniawan’s appearance at the Melbourne Writer’s
Festival he discussed a number of subjects, the ones I thought more relevant I’ll
paraphrase here (he did answer questions in English however at times he did
struggle to find the correct word).
As a university student, studying philosophy, he found he
was spending more time in the library reading English translations of famous
works. Upon reading Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger” he suddenly decided that he wanted
to be a writer. The two major influences of “Beauty Is A Wound” are “dalang”
masters performing “wayang”, Indonesian shadow puppet theatre. Stories
containing heroics, humour and philosophy, as well as commenting on current
affairs. Learning this after reading the novel, was a revelation, a better
understanding of the work instead of the line I’ve seen trotted out a few times
“magic realism” a la Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
The second influence, as revealed by Kurniawan, is
Cervantes, the book’s epigraph from Don Quixote. Kurniawan revealed the idea of
imagination is the guiding influence here.
Besides mentioning Cervantes, he also spoke of Milan Kundera’s
reference to delivering a serious message with a tone of “lightness”, a feature
that is evident throughout the novel. Instead of reeling from every horrific
story you are somehow drawn to reading the next page.
The actual work itself is “three or four” novels mixed and
combined into one to become our final work, and at times, as the stories seem
to exist independently, this is quite obvious. Although the spine of Dewi Ayu
throughout does link them in some way. Interestingly Kurniawan explained that
the character of Dewi Ayu was the last character he formed. The criminal character
of Maman Gendeng is the anti-hero that Kurniawan felt the most sympathy for
when creating him, this, again, I could feel, although a criminal and
indestructible his honesty to his word is refreshing, and even though he
marries a twelve year old his loyalty and honour of this young girl is very
different from the military character of Shodancho a brutal evil man.
I’m glad I delved into the world of Indonesian writing and
there are a few other works now on my radar.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
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