'Beauty is a Wound': A portrait of modern Indonesia
Opinion |
Azly Rahman
Published: |
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I took some time from this column to go back to what I have always loved doing most since I was a child: reading.
Of late I have been working on several manuscripts, a collection of 400 poems, a book on educational theory, a book-length analysis of Malaysia’s road to the Islamic state, a collection of cultural-philosophical essays, and memoir of growing up in Johor Bahru in the hippie 1960s, and my favourite, a novel.
So, I have been busy. And I have missed my column and my fellow brilliant commentators who have never given up educating us on the need for Malaysia to be a better society. I’d like to share a book I had just finished reading and analysing, "Beauty is a Wound" (or "Cantik itu luka"), by Eka Kurniawan, a promising and engaging Indonesian author.
Here is my critical reading of that important Indonesian novel, post-Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
I propose chronicling a nation's pattern of mega-change is an aspect of the novel that is worth exploring as an instance wherein the author crafts the philosophical underpinning of the story of the birth and growth of Indonesia, a country sold into prostitution by the forces that march history, and how the worldview of the nation is shaped primarily by the pathological condition metaphored by prostitution.
In the protagonist Dewi Ayu, the portrait of the new nation as a prostitute, and in Comrade Kliwon, the life force that tried to save the nation from being forever being a whore.
I find this notion of ethos and pathos "worldview of the tragic-existentialism" recurring, in a story elegantly weaved with elements of mystical magical Javanese symbolism, well-controlled plot, yet presented in the genre of time-space collapse, inspired by the complexity of the subplots of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the elements of the theatre of the absurd or French surrealistic/ symbolic/ absurdist theatre, some elements of Javanese syncretistic thinking, and most importantly, in the tradition of the spirit of Raden Adjeng Kartini - the legendary feminist-educator-liberator of the mind - the voice given to women, perhaps true to the idea of motherland or ibu pertiwi in which women hold more than half of the earth at every epoch in history.
These are the broad techniques and themes employed in crafting "Beauty is a Wound."
Indeed, I believe, the title signifies the pathos associated with being beautiful, or even exotically and ecstatically and even more so, in this story the exhilaratingly erotically beautiful, as beautiful as the prostitute Dewi Ayu, who, like young and prideful Java and later Indonesia was relegated to become a prostitute to the Dutch, and later to the Japanese, and later to her own "nationalists" and much later by the military-regime-turned civilian-rule of General Suharto.
Thus, the portrait of Indonesia as a prostitute whose saviour is communism, the latter destroyed by the purge which saw the mass graves of hundreds of thousands of communists killed by the US-CIA-backed Suharto. So that colonialism can continue in newer but less visible form. In the novel, pride led to the suicide of the communist leader, Comrade Kliwon.
In my close readings of this seminal chapter on the metaphoring and chronicling of the mega-change of Indonesia, albeit through the prostitutionalising of the nation, I draw instances of Eka Kurniawan’s use of the philosophising-chronolising device, in chracterising Comrade Kliwon, as literary device and subtext.
Portrait of Indonesia as prostitute
Reminiscence of the writing of the once 14-year-imprisoned-50s-writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (“Prem”) in seminal works such as ‘Keluarga Gerilya’, ‘Bumi Manusia’, ‘Cerita dari Blora’ - those that presented the point of view of the revolutionary fighters of Indonesia aka the "communists" - Eka Kurniawan's characterisation of Conrad Kliwon is one of sympathy in tone of the Marxists and the communists, as if continuing the legacy of "Prem" or Pramoedya.
Throughout, the classic arguments of the International Workers of the World and the Marxist-Leninist Third International is revisited, giving today's readers a reminder of what was Indonesian history about and how the struggles between the natives, the nationalists, the communists, and even the Islamists, overseen like a panopticon and synopticon of imperialism (Dutch, Japanese American) continue to define the theme of emerging nation-states such as Indonesia.
And like a cycle of human and social progress, there is the high and low tide of revolutionary waves of change in all its bloody and bloodless consequences. Eka Kurniawan attempted to present a history lesson of the birth of Indonesia, as how Salman Rushdie skilfully did with the birth of India and Pakistan in his novel ‘Midnight's Children’.
In Eka Kurniawan's work, to be beautiful is to be cursed and raped as to be Indonesia is to be exploited and ravaged and raped as well. To be raped then leads to be giving birth to deformities and monstrosities, as in the march of history and the inevitability of the perpetual birth of civilisational insanity.
"No one knew how Comrade Kliwon ended up becoming a communist youth, because even though he had never been rich, he'd always been a hedonist." (page 161).
Herein lie the thesis of this chapter in Eka Kurniawan's ‘Beauty is a Wound’ that tells the story of Indonesia during the formative years of becoming a republic, of what I call "the portrait of modern Indonesia as prostitute" (with apologies to James Joyce's "portrait of the artist as a young man" and the Filipino playwright Nick Joaquin's "portrait of the artist as Filipino").
He led a gang of marauding neighbourhood kids, stealing whatever they could get their hands on for their own enjoyment: coconuts, logs, or a handful of cacao beans that could be eaten on the spot. One night before Eid, they would steal a chicken and roast it, and then the next day they would find the chicken's owner to ask for forgiveness. (page 161)
There is a sense of foreshadowing of what the nature of transformation the young man, later Comrade Kliwon is to undergo, leading the way to his fascination with Marxism and later to be a member of the Indonesian Communist Party, the seeds of the metamorphosis could be shown in the idea that Kliwon is a thief yet with a conscience, in which perhaps in the idea of the march of socialism towards communism via the global agenda of the Third International, the rationale of stealing from the rich and taking away their property is clear: destroy capitalism and say that it an inevitable historical progress or the march of history in order for the perfect Communist state to emerge as a "kingdom of god", a modern supra-trans-millennialistic movement guided by the Hegelian-philosophy-inverted, served by the philosophy of history conjured by Marx (and Engels) - see historical and dialectical materialism as fundamental twin concepts of Marxism and Praxis.
Here the author, Eka Kurniawan, is giving the readers a history lesson on the influence of communist ideas in Indonesia at the onset of Independence.
A Brief Note on Indonesian Literature
The evolution of Indonesia literature is more exciting than that of the Malaysian, let alone Singaporean from the “thick-descriptive-Geertzian-big emotions-intensity-of-narrative arcs – because ( if we are to contend that good literature needs to show depth-of-despair, dying, and death as catharsis as opiates and dramatic eruptions) of the former’s history of such bloody and profound transformations, beginning with the ancient kingdoms, the Hindu-Buddhist political-philosophical dominance (see the wealth of literature on statecraft in Java, for example), to the war between the maritime powers, the arrival of the Dutch primarily and the establishment of Batavia (Betawi) as a trading post of the Dutch East India Company, to the more than 300-year enslavement of the Javanese and others by the Dutch, to the arrival of the British in the area and the struggle of the colonial powers, to the demise of the kingdoms, and the arrival of the Japanese to the intent to build and Indonesia Raya with the passion and collaboration shown by Achmed Soekarno and Hatta via the Nipponization of Indonesia and of course Soekarno’s campaign of “Ganyang Malaysia “_Crush Malaysia), to the surrender of the Japanese surrender after the loss of the Axis Power of Germany-Italy-Japan, to the complex and bloody struggle for Indonesian independence and next, even bloodier, the CIA-backed Suharto massacre of more than half a million Indonesians in a purge against so-called “Communists” so that General Suharto the “Bapak Judistira”, fashioned after the story of the Five Pandawas, can help the Americans siphon oil money out of Indonesia with the advise of the “Berkeley-Mafia” economists of the Kennedy Era …. the rest is history, right till today, Indonesia is blessed with a Heavy-Metal Metallica-loving president Bapak Jokowi who plays the bass guitar for a Metallica-inspired band …. such exciting history of the Muslim-fundamentalist strong and perhaps South-East-Asia endangering country bent towards ISIS … such fine historical evolution of the dialectics of social change that Indonesia’s literary evolution, from the time of the enculturalization of the Ramayana to the age of the wayang and the “Islamization of the Ramayana” to the emergence of the poets and prose writers of Peojangga Baroe (Pujangga Baru) or the primacy of Takdir Ali Syahbana, Boeya Hamka, and the emergence next of the fiery writers of LEKRA (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat) of Prameodya Ananta Toer, of the 50s (which influenced the birth of Malaya’s ASAS 50 (Kassim Ahmad was one its pioneers), to the literary force provided by Chairil Anwar and next came the 60s Hippie-Days poetry of WS Rendra, prose of Putu Widjaya, the stories of urban life weaved by Muchtar Lubis, Sutarji Calzoum Bachri, and the emergence of the writers of the 80s such as Supardi Djoko Damono and as time and literary periods proceed, responding to the temper of the day we see more and more exciting writers who still, like their forefathers such as the Rimbaud-influenced-existentialist poet Chairil Anwar, these new modern writers, singing the rock songs of Achmed Akbar of the prog-rock band God Bless or the radical tunes of internationally-acclaimed public-rocker-intellectual Iwan Fals, these new and equally fiery writers so to speak, write as if they “write in blood, write naked, and write in exile” … about the things around them. And then we have Eka Kurniawan, an interesting new blood bringing a new perspective of radicalism.
A Melancholic Note:
I took a deep breath, after finishing my reading of Eka Kurniawan’s mystical-magical-historical-satirical fiction Beauty is a Wound (Cantik Itu Luka). Closed my eyes for a few minutes to first let a cognitive map of the style, form, and craft emerge, and next allow the memory of my childhood growing up in the village in which the Javanese culture (although I am partly Bugis whose ancestry goes back directly-seven-generations to Raja Haji the rebel rouser of Sulawesi) is a dominant feature of the inhabitants of my village in Majidee Johor Bahru.
Although the 470-page novel is a translation, I did not find the story a “lost-in-translation” piece of work. I am all too familiar with the setting and the context of how the characters operate albeit having to work harder in thinking about the culture of the Soekarno era.
Words such as “dukun”, “orkes Melayu”, “preman”, “becak” and a few others used in the translated version brought me back to the enriching and enchanting worldview of the Indonesian-Malays primarily of the Javanese, and more word-associations formed in my mental image vis-a-viz the story, momentarily taking me away from another culture — the American culture — that has become part of me after spending more than half of my life in it. The shifting of worldviews, of one culture to another was smooth and even poignant and nostalgic as I emerge out of the literary world build by the author. Nostalgic in the sense that the elements of Javanese and Malay magic — of divining, spirit possession, spiritual healing with mantras in old Javanese and Arabic combined, and of the rites, rituals, tools of work and play used by the “dukun” (spiritual healer), of the cultural practices of healing (or even voodoo-ing) — these brings back fond memories of those vicarious moments of learning as well as of immersing myself in the hidden and informal out-of-class curriculum of my life-long learning experience. In short, from a very young age, I was immersed, like a little postmodern flanuer, in my fascination with Malay-Javanese mysticism — elements that shape and color Eka Kurniawan’s novel.
In fact, I wanted to have the power of the “dukuns” and become invincible and powerful and cool and feared, as such as Si Buta Dari Gua Hantu, Si Gondrong, Mata Malaikat, and many of the movie characters of the Javanese magical-warrior class/Kshatriya class, imbued with superhuman powers. I wanted to fly invincibly and be shot with a hundred bullets of the Dutch (like my great great grandfather Raja Haji who died as such) and not die not hurt at all. I wanted to go into other people’s body and soul, and see the future, and also cast and break spells. If I were Javanese, I wanted to become the Arjuna-Krishna hybrid of the Nine Javanese saints or the Wali Songo or the Wali Sembilan: pure, pristine, and pirate-of-the-Caribbean-type of gung-ho-Shaolin masters. That type. I wanted to kill my enemies without even touching them. That cool of a warrior.
My dream as child of perhaps thirteen.
The dream of being “a beautiful warrior and wound others”! Ahaaa –beauty is a wound indeed.
Herein lie the aspect of Eka Kurniawan craft I will discuss further: crafting of the mystical into the real and into the story of vengeance whist portraying the actors
A LONGER VERSION HERE:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/24122017-chronicling-mega-changes-in-portrait-of-modern-indonesia-as-prostitute-analysis/
A LONGER VERSION HERE:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/24122017-chronicling-mega-changes-in-portrait-of-modern-indonesia-as-prostitute-analysis/
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