Tag Archives: Indonesian literature

Fünf kurze Kurzgeschichten von Ugo Untoro

Dua lembar baju, celana, 3 celana dalam, dan handuk kecil kumasukkan
dalam tas. Lewat pintu belakang aku keluar, satpamku juga tertidur dekat
dengan kurungan herder. Tetapi terlelap.
Anakku, istriku kalau mau ketemu dengan aku tontonlah sirkus keliling.

Ich legte zwei Hemden, ein Paar Hosen, drei Unterhosen und ein kleines Handtuch in meine Tasche. Ich ging durch die Hintertür hinaus. Mein Wachmann befand sich neben dem Zwinger mit dem Schäferhund. Beide schliefen. Mein Sohn, meine Frau, wenn ihr mich sehen wollt, kommt und schaut euch die Zirkusvorstellung an.

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Dasar aku memang klepto, aku di kamar kecil Kereta Api (Train Urinoir) dan aku mencuri papan yang tertulis “Pergunakanlah hanya waktu kereta jalan.” Tidak berhasil karena pecah, bautnya terlalu kencang, BAJINGAN!!

Ich bin wirklich ein Kleptomane, ich war im Zugurinal und stahl das Schild auf dem steht „Nur benutzen wenn der Zug fährt.“ Es ging schief, denn es zerbrach, der Bolzen saß zu fest. BASTARD!!

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Telpon berdering.
“Halo, siapa?”
“Selli mas!”
“Selli?!”
Bekas pacarku dulu sekali, waktu aku masih ingusan dan pemalu banget.
Pegang jarinya saja sudah gemetar, ngomong juga jarang, jadi surat-suratan
terus.
“Berapa anakmu sekarang Sell?”
“Dua mas, cewek-cowok”
“Suamimu dimana?”
Dia ngomong lagi ngebor minyak di Riau. Kami janjian bertemu, dua hari
lagi. Di tengah hujan lebat, di bawah beringi, kutiduri ia dalam mobilku.
Aku tidak pemalu lagi.

Das Telefon klingelte.
„Hallo, wer ist dran?“
„Hier ist Selli!“
„Selli?!“
Sie war meine Freundin als ich noch ganz jung und schüchtern war.
Zu jener Zeit zitterte ich sogar, wenn ich nur ihre Hand hielt. Wir sprachen kaum jemals miteinander, aber wir schickten uns lange Zeit Briefe.
„Wie viele Kinder hast du jetzt, Sell?“
„Zwei, ein Mädchen und einen Jungen.“
„Wo steckt dein Mann?“
Sie sagte, ihr Mann wäre in Riau beim Ölbohren. Wir verabredeten uns für den übernächsten Tag. Im strömenden Regen, unter einem Banyan-Baum, fickte ich sie in meinem Auto.
Ich war nicht mehr schüchtern.

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Anjing hitam tak tau apa yang harus dia perbuat ketika dilihat tuannya
mencari-cari tali, mengikatnya di kusen pintu dan meletakkan kursi rendah di
bawahnya.

Der schwarze Hund wusste nicht, was er tun sollte als er sah, dass sein Herrchen nach einem Seil suchte, es dann am Türrahmen festband und einen Stuhl darunter stellte.

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Nahkodanya kapal Nuh terlalu banyak minum Rum. Sebuah ombak besar
datang menghantam dan langsung tenggelam. Nabi Nuh tidak bisa berenang
dan semua binatang yang dikumpulkannya mati. Hanya sepasang Gagak
yang sempat menyelamatkan diri.
Mereka terbang dan mencari sarang. Beranak pinak, anak cucunya ada
yang kawin sama ikan, gurita, kerang, ubur-ubur, penyu, dan kitalah
keturunannya.

Der Kapitän von Noahs Arche trank zu viel Rum.  Eine gewaltige Welle krachte ins Schiff und es sank sofort. Noah konnte nicht schwimmen und alle Tiere an Bord der Arche wurden getötet. Nur ein Krähenpaar hatte genug Zeit zu fliehen.
Sie flogen davon und suchten nach einem Nistplatz. Dann brüteten sie; einige ihrer Kinder und Enkel heirateten Fische, Tintenfische, Austern, Quallen, Schildkröten, und wir sind ihre Nachfahren.

Aus dem Indonesischen übersetzt von Thomas Hübner

Give Me a Cross

Ugo Untoro: Give Me a Cross, Ölfarbe und Kohle auf Leinwand, 150x100cm, 2008  (Photo Biasa Art Space)

Ugo Untoro: Cerita Pendek Sekali (Kurze Kurzgeschichten), Museum dan Tanah Liat, Bantul, Yogyakarta 2006

© Ugo Untoro, 2006-2008
© Biasa Art Space, 2008 (Photo) 
© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-6. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Reading/Reviewing Plans

The end of the year is approaching with fast steps. This year I haven’t been so active as a blogger as last year until recently – German Lit Month brought me back to the usual pace – and I have done more blog posts on poetry and translations than the year before; also I did more posts in German and one in Bulgarian too. Book blogging is a dynamic process and the focus of such places will always be subject to small unplanned changes, but I will keep also in the next year my habit to publish reviews of books that were interesting to me.

As you already know when you follow this blog on a regular basis, my taste in books is rather eclectic. I am definitely not a person who is permanently scanning bestseller lists or is jumping in on discussions about books that were – usually for marketing reasons – the “talk of the town”. Therefore I avoided so far reviewing books by Houellebecq or Knausgård; it is difficult to not be influenced by the public discussion that focuses frequently on aspects that have very little to do with the literary quality of the books by such authors but a lot with their public persona and their sometimes very controversial opinions about certain topics. Not that the books by these authors are necessarily bad, but I prefer to read without too much background noise. So I will come also to these authors, but most probably not in the near future.

My blog tries to be diverse, but without quota. But of course my choice is subjective and I am aware of the fact that probably most readers will find many authors/books on this list that are completely unknown to them. If you look for just another blog that is reviewing again and again the same exclusively Anglo-saxon authors, then this might not be the best place for you. If you are eager to discover something new, then you are most welcome. 

There are no ads on this blog and this will also not change in the future. There is zero financial interest from my side to keep this blog alive, I do it just for fun. Please don’t send unsolicitated review copies if you are an author or a publisher. In rare cases I might accept a review copy when contacted first but only when I have already an interest in the book. All blog posts contain of course my own – sometimes idiosyncratic – opinion for what it is worth. In general I tend to write reviews on the positive side. When a book disappoints me, I tend to not write a review unless there is a strong reason to do otherwise.

These are the books presently on my “To-be-read” pile; which means they are the one’s that i will most probably read and review within the coming months. But as always with such lists, they are permanently subject to changes, additions, removals. Therefore I (and also the readers of this blog) will take this list as an orientation and not as a strict task on which I have to work one by one. 

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

Jim al-Khalili: The House of Wisdom

Ryunosunke Akutagawa: Kappa

Rabih Alameddine: The Hakawati

Sinan Antoon: The Corpse Washer

Toufic Youssef Aouad: Le Pain

Abhijit Banerjee / Esther Duflo: Poor Economics

Hoda Barakat: Le Royaume de cette terre

Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel

Max Blecher: Scarred Hearts

Nicolas Born: The Deception

Thomas Brasch: Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne

Joseph Brodsky: On Grief and Reason

Alina Bronsky: Just Call Me Superhero

Alina Bronsky: The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Dino Buzzati: The Tartar Steppe

Leila S. Chudori: Pulang

Beqe Cufaj: projekt@party 

Mahmoud Darwish: Memory of Forgetfulness

Oei Hong Djien: Art & Collecting Art

Dimitre Dinev: Engelszungen (Angel’s Tongues)

Anton Donchev: Time of Parting

Jabbour Douaihy: June Rain

Michael R. Dove: The Banana Tree at the Gate

Jennifer DuBois: A Partial History of Lost Causes

Isabelle Eberhardt: Works

Tristan Egolf: Lord of the Barnyard

Deyan Enev: Circus Bulgaria

Jenny Erpenbeck: The End of Days

Patrick Leigh Fermor: Mani

Milena Michiko Flašar: I called him Necktie

David Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace

Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra

Amitav Ghosh: In an Antique Land

Georg K. Glaser: Geheimnis und Gewalt (Secret and Violence)

Georgi Gospodinov: Natural Novel

Georgi Gospodinov: The Physics of Sorrow

Elizabeth Gowing: Edith and I

David Graeber: The Utopia of Rules

Garth Greenwell: What Belongs to You

Knut Hamsun: Hunger

Ludwig Harig: Die Hortensien der Frau von Roselius

Johann Peter Hebel: Calendar Stories

Christoph Hein: Settlement

Wolfgang Hilbig: The Sleep of the Righteous

Albert Hofmann / Ernst Jünger: LSD

Hans Henny Jahnn: Fluss ohne Ufer (River without Banks) (Part II)

Franz Jung: Der Weg nach unten

Ismail Kadare: Broken April

Ismail Kadare: The Palace of Dreams

Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor (Editors): The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia: 1965-1968

Rosen Karamfilov: Kolene (Knees)

Orhan Kemal: The Prisoners

Irmgard Keun: Nach Mitternacht

Georg Klein: Libidissi

Friedrich August Klingemann: Bonaventura’s Nightwatches

Fatos Kongoli: The Loser

Theodor Kramer: Poems

Friedo Lampe: Septembergewitter (Thunderstorm in September)

Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star

Naguib Mahfouz: The Cairo Trilogy

Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt

Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers

Sandor Marai: Embers

Sean McMeekin: The Berlin-Baghdad Express

Multatuli: Max Havelaar

Alice Munro: Open Secrets

Marie NDiaye: Three Strong Women

Irene Nemirovsky: Suite française 

Ben Okri: The Famished Road

Laksmi Pamuntjak: The Question of Red

Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra

Georges Perec: Life. A User’s Manual

Leo Perutz: By Night Under the Stone Bridge

Boris Pilnyak: Mahogany

Alek Popov: Black Box

Milen Ruskov: Thrown Into Nature

Boris Savinkov: Memoirs of a Terrorist

Eric Schneider: Zurück nach Java

Daniel Paul Schreber: Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Carl Seelig: Wandering with Robert Walser

Victor Serge: The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Anthony Shadid: House of Stones

Varlam Shalamov: Kolyma Tales

Raja Shehadeh: A Rift in Time

Alexander Shpatov: #LiveFromSofia

Werner Sonne: Staatsräson?

Andrzej Stasiuk: On the Way to Babadag

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar: The Time Regulation Institute

Pramoedya Ananta Toer: A Mute’s Soliloquy

Pramoedya Ananta Toer: The Buru Quartet (4 vol.)

Lionel Trilling: The Middle of the Journey

Iliya Trojanov: The Collector of Worlds

Bernward Vesper: Die Reise (The Journey)

Robert Walser: Jakob von Gunten

Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance

Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence

Marguerite Yourcenar: Coup de Grace

Galina Zlatareva: The Medallion

Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grisha

Stay tuned – and feel free to comment any of my blog posts. Your contributions are very much appreciated. You are also invited to subscribe to this blog if you like.

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

From the Tartar Desert

Maybe THE highlight of my visit at the book fair in Frankfurt this year was the Indonesian pavilion; when you entered you literally were in another world. Much has been written about the late start of the Indonesian preparations for the fair, particularly the late kick-off of the translation grant program – but it was all well and who took a little bit time to enter the Indonesian pavilion with its slightly mystic flair could easily forget the frantic atmosphere at the fair. Well done, Indonesia! And it was a pleasure not only to catch a glimpse of the Indonesian book world, but also of the cultural treasures in other areas (Music! Film! Comics! Food!) that the world’s biggest archipelago has to offer. (Not that it was new to me as a former long-term resident of Indonesia…)

We paid of course also a visit to the Indonesian publishers (not ALL Indonesian books are published by the giant Gramedia), and particularly the visit at the Lontar booth with its interesting program of translated titles was a pleasure. Besides, Frankfurt, as is usual during the book fair, paid homage to the Guest of Honor all over the place: there were many readings, gamelan concerts and several art exhibitions at Frankfurter Kunstverein (Eko Nugroho and other artists from Yogyakarta), and at Portikus (Ade Darmawan) to name just a few activities of the program surrounding the book fair.

That Indonesia presented itself in such a splendour at the world’s biggest cultural event is to a considerable part the work of Goenawan Mohamed. Mohamed, the president of the committee that organized and coordinated Indonesia’s participation, is not only the arguably most important Indonesian journalist and since decades the publisher of the famous journal Tempo that played a big role in Indonesia’s reformasi process; he is also an accomplished poet:

 

Dari Gurun Orang Tartar

Dari gurun orang Tartar,
apa yang diharapkannya?
Dari luas yang mengancam,
apa yang dikhayalkannya?

Di Entah itu, Sancho Panza,
kita cuma nunggu.

Jangan, jangan mengeluh.
Berdirilah kau
di dekatku.

Sebab para ksatria hanya tanda:
angan-angan dan epilepsi
yang tak ingin selesai.

2008

 

From The Tartar Desert

From the Tartar desert,
what does he expect?
From the threatening width,
what is he imagining?

In that Anywhere, Sancho Panza,
we just wait.

Do not, do not complain.
Stand
beside me.

Because the knight is just a presage:
thoughts and convulsions
that do not want to end.

2008

Goenawan
Goenawan Mohamed: Don Quixote, PT Tempo Inti Media, Jakarta 2013
Translation from Bahasa Indonesia by Thomas Hübner 

 

P.S. – While I am writing these lines, I receive rather disturbing news from Indonesia: the most renowned literary event of the country, the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, organized since 12 years by Janet DeNeefe, has become the target of some officials who threaten to shut it down. The reason: the festival is – like such events should be – a place for open discussion and exchange, also about topics that are still painful for some people in the Indonesian authorities. If the Festival doesn’t cancel its panel discussions about the mass killings of 1965, one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, and is screening Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Look of Silence, it will be shut down according to local police, military and government officials.

Maybe these “officials” should have a look at the Indonesian Constitution before they make a mistake – it guarantees freedom of expression and free speech and renders these violent acts of censorship and intimidation completely illegal.

I hope the organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair issue a swift statement against this incredible scandal. Indonesia was chosen as a Guest of Honor, as a democratic country that respects human rights and democratic values. Those who terrorize the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival destroy the positive image Indonesia just built up – I hope they will not succeed to suppress freedom of expression and free speech. Otherwise it would have been better to not invite Indonesia as a Guest of Honor to Frankfurt.

© Goenawan Mohamed and PT Tempo Inti Media, 2013
© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Drought

Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is the Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2015. This is a reason to use the opportunity to read some Indonesian literature – but it is not the only one. Indonesia is also a country with an immensely rich culture, and it is also the country with the world’s biggest Muslim community – and Indonesian Islam is very different from Islam in the Arab world. It has also achieved a quite successful transition from a corrupt authoritarian regime to a quite vibrant democracy that despite some problems is without doubt a success story. (Ok, since I lived in Indonesia, I feel a great nostalghia and am very fond of this country and its people – one reason more for me to read books from Indonesia.)

The dominating Javanese and Balinese cultures have traditionally a strong focus on performative art: wayang theater, dance and ballet, poetry performances, gamelan music. Poetry readings are very popular, and the same goes for theater performances in general; but Indonesians usually don’t read much and buy even less books. The national literature is not a subject in school, and even world class authors like Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the grandmaster of Indonesian literature and Nobel Prize candidate, are unknown to many Indonesians. Only very recently things seem to change a bit: there is a quite generous grant program for translations of Indonesian literature (in English and German), several established literature festivals in Bali, Jakarta, and Makassar are becoming more and more popular, some younger authors, predominantly female, have bestsellers that are really widely read among younger Indonesians – in one word: many Indonesians discover the book and literature in general.

A pioneer in bringing Indonesian literature to foreign readers is the Lontar Foundation, which has published over the years a growing number of Indonesian “classics”. One of these I am reviewing here, Iwan Simatupang’s novel Drought, first published 1972, two years after the early death of its author.

The unnamed hero of the novel, an ex-student, ex-soldier/independence war hero, and ex-bandit decides to participate in the big Indonesian experiment of transmigrasi (transmigration) and to start a new life as a farmer on one of the outer islands of Indonesia.

Transmigration was a huge program of the government of dictator Suharto that aimed officially at a better balance of population on the different islands of Indonesia. The government promised land and all kind of other incentives to mainly poor farmers from the overpopulated island of Java that had been willing to resettle on the other (usually not so fertile) islands. As a result, millions and millions of mainly Javanese people migrated within Indonesia, and it is easy to fathom that this was not only a gigantic transfer of population, it resulted also in many internal problems, starting from hunger and epidemics to which the transmigrants were frequently exposed, to environmental problems as a result of deforestation of huge areas, to ethnic and religious clashes between the frequently Christian autochthon population and the predominantly Muslim Javanese migrants. As a byproduct, almost all islands have now an ethnic majority of Javanese that are and were viewed as being more loyal to the Javanese-dominated central government in Jakarta than the local populations. Judging from today’s standpoint, the whole transmigration project can be considered as a huge failure that instead of improving the life of farmers turned out to be a scheme that was spreading poverty all over the archipelago.

Our hero is willing to fight the drought that the village where he re-settled has to face; while the whole village leaves because of the unbearable drought, he is struggling alone left to his own devices. However, he has not only to fight nature, but also later a number of equally unnamed agents of society and the government: a doctor who seeks to cure his “madness”, or an official of the transmigrasi office that wants to send him back to the same village that is suffering from the terrible drought again after he is released from hospital. But he meets also people who treat him as friend – a smuggler (“the little fat man”), his concubine (“VIP”), and a former guerilla fighter turned bandit (“Beard”).

Simatupang’s characters are all without names – they are not only to be considered as individuals but as symptoms of Indonesian society in the 1960s. The smuggler, the bandit, the concubine, and the hero of the novel are failures in the eye of the society, but they show much more humanity and good-naturedness as the representatives of the system for which transmigration stands for. Simatupang is frequently using humor and irony in the novel to expose the pomposity, arrogance and hypocrisy of “official” Indonesia. According to the translator Simatupang

“delights in exaggerating scenes to incredible lengths, and in the to-and-fro of outraged logic.”

That is particularly true for the scene in which the author describes how a committee of university officials is holding a meeting in which they discuss if and how the university can get rid of this student that is questioning the rules and the authorities so much that it is simply unbearable for some of the professors; just when the heated discussion comes to a stalemate and several participants are on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a message of the hero comes in that he resigns from attending the university on his own will – and with a twist, the author adds that the hero liked the lessons of that professor most who was the most persistent advocate to get him removed from the campus – very embarrassing for those professor who looks now in the eyes of his colleagues (and the readers) like a complete ass. These kind of ironic twists are quite frequent in Simatupang’s novel and make it an entertaining read.

Despite this rather critical approach of the author and his hero towards Indonesian society, the novel ends on a rather optimistic note. The hero, having been going through a long and sometimes painful educative process, realizes that only in living in the company of his fellow-men he can turn his back to failure. If he will finally succeed with his undertaking does not matter so much – at least he will have tried.

“Where to? He didn’t know. Nor did he care. – A new passion seized him. He rolled up his sleeves. He stretched out his hands to the men standing stiffly on the truck. – “Let’s go!””

Drought is an interesting novel, and not only because of its somewhat exotic setting; it is making the reader curious to get to know more about Indonesian literature. The big number of newly translated titles this year is an excellent opportunity to discover this archipelago also via its literature. Make your choice!

Drought

Iwan Simatupang: Drought, Lontar, transl. Harry Aveling, Jakarta 2012

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Food for thought

“…without a love of literature, you’ll remain just a lot of clever animals.”

—Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind)

Bumi

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Republic of Fun

republic-of-fun

Today is election day in Indonesia. The voters in one of the biggest democracies of the world (and also the country with the biggest Muslim population) elect a new parliament. It will be noted in the Western media if the political parties close to SBY or Jokowi (Indonesians love to call their politicians by short nicknames) have won and if the election process went on without major problems and irregularities.

But beside from that there is usually not much in our media about the biggest archipelago in the world, a country that resembles more a continent in terms of its variety of cultures, religions, languages, or (endangered) biodiversity. We hear from this country normally only after another big natural disaster (tsunami, earthquake, volcano eruption) has struck it or when holiday time is approaching and we are presented another report about the “exotic” island of Bali, also an endangered paradise. Only recently two new topics have popped up that made it to our news: the Indonesian childhood of the present US President and the ruthless activities of the palmoil and extraction industry that is destroying the livelihood of millions and the natural habitat of many endangered species like the Orang-Utan.

I admit it: when it comes to Indonesia I am a bit emotional. After I arrived in 2009 for the first time in the country, I almost immediately fell in love with this tropical country and its warm and genuinely friendly people. And after two very happy years in Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese culture, it was clear to me that I will come back to this place as frequently as possible.

Of course it is impossible to describe the fascination of Indonesia in a short blog like this. Nor is it possible to give an impression of the life of contemporary Indonesians here in general. But considering the fact that Indonesia is somehow a success story in recent years: a 250-million people of incredible variety got rid of a corrupt authoritarian regime in a comparatively peaceful way and without military intervention from abroad, established a quite robust democratic system with citizens that are no longer afraid to voice their opinions, with millions of Indonesians nowadays moving slowly up the social ladder into an emerging middle class, with arts, literature and any other form of human expression and creativity booming, and with media that don’t shy away from touching topics that were taboo for a long time, such as the excellent “Tempo”, or with documentaries such as “The Act of Killing”, touching on the genocide following the putsch against Sukarno in the mid 1960s which killed a probably 7-digit-number of people, most of them completely innocent of communist sympathies or with the intention to plot against Suharto’s government. Even regarding the colorful personality of Tan Malaka, a more differentiated public discussion is possible nowadays. Considering all this and also the general very fast shifting of economic and political power to South-east Asia, I think it is worth it to start reading a bit about this country.

A small book called “Republic of Fun” (and it is really fun to read it) is now on my table that gives an excellent insight in the daily life of contemporary middle-class Indonesians. It is a collection of pieces that was written by Butet Kartaredjasa for the Sunday edition of a newspaper in Semarang, Central Java. Butet is in Indonesia a very well-known actor, not only on stage but also in countless movies and TV productions. He is also a director, a painter (his father Bagong Kussudiardja was a famous dancer and painter), a successful businessman (he founded several advertisement companies) and a journalist and writer as well. “Republic of Fun” and its predecessor “President of Ridicule” introduce to us the Blurt family (obviously shaped on the basis of the author’s own family): Mr. and Mrs. Blurt and their three children “Brother Chubby”, “Miss Tomboy”, and the youngest, 12-year old “Miss Trendy”. Problems within the family, education issues, health problems, but of course also politics and everyday occurrences form the backdrop of the short pieces that have titles such as “Stopping Violence”, “Scary Statues” (on the fake policemen statues that remind drivers to stick to the traffic rules), “Free University”, “Indonesian Obama”, “Steel Chastity Belt” (on the new Anti-Pornography Bill), “The Koi Tragedy”, and others. Once the cast is introduced, the reader likes to come back because he feels already connected and kind of part of the Blurt family. How is the friendly quarreling between Mr. and Mrs. Blurt going on, which of the children will create a problem this time, and what foolishness or corruption of the country’s political elite he will expose this time? Of course it is not the soap opera quality of these pieces and the admittedly very relaxed attitude of this family man (the people from Yogyakarta, Butet’s hometown seem to me to be the most laid-back people on this planet) alone that make these pieces such a nice and entertaining read. It is the ability of the author to catch a problem precisely and to put it in the form of a witty dialogue or funny little story.

But there is also something very serious behind these pieces. “Steel Chastity Belt” for example starts with a dialogue between the usually ironic Mr. Blurt and his more positively-minded wife. But just this once, Mr. Blurt seems to be satisfied with his politicians.

‘Wow, my representatives in parliament are really something. Top class’, Mr Blurt said, putting on a serious expression. So – what’s going on then, that suddenly he’s so positive? It seems he’s been shaken by the ‘achievements’ of the Members of Parliament who have just finished drawing up the new Anti-Pornography bill that will be ratified soon. And if those MPs are spending time managing things that need no managing, then doesn’t that mean that real problems have all been solved? And doesn’t it also mean that more important, pressing matters have been wiped from the face of Indonesia? Crucial issues to do with the people and the State – like the rise in numbers of the poor, rampant corruption, the collapse of the legal system, the totally chaotic public services, the injustice of mining contracts, the collapsed health system – all these have to been solved.’

In the second half of the piece Butet comes to the really shocking content of this new bill that seems so extremely important that for many months it made the headlines in Indonesia: the first clause of the bill says that

‘anything that is categorized as inciting lust has to be wiped out…It’s not clear just how the bill measures someone’s ‘lust’. And who or which institution will do the measuring, and using what scale.’

Tight women’s clothes, even the use of lipstick or a smile, not to speak about any work of art that deals with the human body, can fall under this incredible law.

‘So, in readiness for this disgusting bill, Mr Blurt is preparing two things. Number one, he wants to order a steel chastity belt for himself to protect his sacred ‘family jewels’ from displaying any untoward aggressive excitement. Number two, Mr Blurt just wants to pray. ‘Please let those who drafted this bill based on such disgusting thinking, which insults all women, be cursed by their own mothers for what they have done.’

“Reading Republic of Fun makes me hear again the voice of Indonesia I remember from my childhood”, claims a certain O. Bama, and an obscure S.B. Why has “Three thumbs up”.

“Life is just dropping by for a laugh.”

Butet Kartaredjasa: Republic of Fun, translated by Jennifer Lindsay, Red and White Publishing, Jakarta 2011

 

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