Jakarta in the 1990s was bubbling with new ideas of freedom. During the third decade of Suharto’s military dictatorship in Indonesia, punks met on the streets that soldiers patrolled. Cafés and bars pulsed with the energy of youth movements. Quality journalism found ways to wriggle its way around censorship, both official and communal. And when writers couldn’t get past the strict barriers imposed by military rule, they still circulated their critical narratives by donning pen names or disguising fact as fiction.
Ayu Utami was one of the journalists blacklisted from publishing openly in the late 1990s. A member of the group of artists and intellectuals that established Komunitas Utan Kayu, Jakarta’s first space dedicated to art and free expression under military rule, she nevertheless continued to publish her reportage anonymously. Only weeks before participating in the student movement that would pull Suharto from power, she also released her first novel, Saman, which caused massive controversy—in part because of its serendipitous timing, but also because of its uninhibited treatment of taboo topics, both political and sexual.
The novel follows the personal experiences of three young Indonesian women, their relationships to their bodies, as well as the life story of a socially conscious priest violently persecuted during the mass killings of perceived communists in 1965. In a total break from the prose of most of her contemporaries, who either perceived bodily concerns as lesser than politics or who used female sexuality as a narrative tool, Ayu’s fireball novel was not only wildly popular, but also set a precedent for contemporary feminist literature in Indonesia. In 1998, Jakarta exploded—and the shrapnel was Ayu Utami’s books, flying off shelves.
Decades after publishing Saman, Ayu has published over a dozen fictional works, as well as a three-part autobiographical novel, a selection of which was included in Asymptote. Though her days of direct activism have passed, Ayu still supports storytelling that subverts norms through her work as a leader of Salihara, an arts center that grew out of Komunitas Utan Kayu.
There is great value in considering Ayu Utami’s work now, decades after Suharto fell from power. Hindsight gives us the opportunity to appreciate the way Shukantala, one of the protagonists in Saman, interacts across multiple eras with her lover, an ogre, who seems to exist in a colonial past. In a moment of embodied continuity between past and present, they meet:
He looked bewildered. “Where are we?”
I said, “Aren’t we in the 20th century?”
He was still puzzled.
“This is a very strange place. How could I possibly be in two eras at the same time?”
I said, “Time is a curious thing. How can it separate us from the us of the past?”
This blur of categories, escaping from singular, linear narratives, is a lesson in how to (de)construct history in a way that allows Indonesia to imagine new futures. Time is indeed a curious thing: it threatens to repeat itself when we refuse to travel backwards and address the ghosts of the past.
Indeed, it was in a moment of opportune continuity that I met Ayu Utami at Komunitas Utan Kayu, which exists today in the same East Jakarta building that stood for artistic resistance decades ago. It was early October, just weeks after the largest mass demonstrations since the 1998 student movement swept Indonesia. Literally occupying the space of Ayu’s personal history at a moment that echoed her political past, I asked Ayu to walk me through her treatment of some of the major themes that have spanned over two decades of her literary work.
The result: a series of reflections on creation under authoritarianism, feminism in an eastern context, and strategies for navigating traumatic narratives of disputed violence in an uncertain present.
Lara Norgaard (LN): When you published Saman, you talked about politics openly, you talked about sex openly, all under the context of Suharto’s military regime and conservative social norms. Given the political censorship and social pressure of the time, did you ever doubt the subversive path you took as you wrote Saman?
Ayu Utami (AU): I didn’t think about outside pressure when I wrote Saman, actually. At the time, I wasn’t able to publish as a journalist because I had been blacklisted. I had been pushed so low that I didn’t have anything to defend. I had already gotten fired, and many of my friends were in jail. I didn’t even think that publishers would consider my book. So writing Saman was spontaneous, and I didn’t think about the audience.
Saman only became controversial after I submitted the manuscript to a competition. It won with great reviews and everybody wanted to read it. The manuscript wasn’t even finished, but everyone kept coming to me for copies, so I started handing it out on floppy disks. After that, publishers started contacting me. I had good chemistry with one of them, who was just about my age, and so I agreed to publish the book.
LN: How do you personally understand the connection between the personal and the political? What was your own path to becoming so critical about both social and political norms?
AU: The way we control our bodies and the way we control our morality is political. The two cannot be separated.
But I didn’t grow up with feminist theories. For me, it was more organic. I started to question simple words when I was a kid. For example, the word perawan tua, which means ‘old spinster.’ I couldn’t understand what was wrong with that word. It was always used to describe old women, usually overly strict, unmarried teachers. In my own family, my aunties had never gotten married. I loved them, these perawan tua, but at the same time I saw that they were jealous of my mother. That was really confusing, and I didn’t have any theories that could explain why.
Another word I started to question is a term for sex workers. The impolite term in Indonesian is pelacur, which could be translated to ‘hooker’ or ‘prostitute.’ When I was younger, the Indonesian bureaucracy and media created a new euphemism for the word. They started using the acronym WTS, wanita tuna sasila. In English it might literally mean ‘immoral woman,’ but that’s not exactly the right translation. Tuna susila isn’t biting like the word immoral. It’s really quite subtle. We call blind people tuna netra, which literally means ‘no sight.’ And we have the expression tuna rungu, which means ‘no hearing.’ Tuna rungu, tuna netra, and tuna susila are all gentle terms. So I was confused when I tried to understand the meaning behind WTS. Later on I began to realize that someone who says WTS might feel as though they are being polite, but in reality the term has a moral bias. That’s how I began to understand that something was wrong with our social values and the way we use language.
These are examples from my own experience. I didn’t learn about this through theory, but through my own personal pain, through my family, in situations that are not as clear as blatant human rights abuses.
LN: I think that is actually the basis of how a lot of your novels are built. It’s in the subtleties of how characters interact that readers can see larger patriarchal structures. But there are also some explicit discussions of feminist issues. For example, in Saman, a minor character presents at a conference towards the end of the book and says that all of Indonesia’s problems originate in a patriarchal power structure. Meanwhile, the other Indonesian women in the crowd, who are mostly older women, simply can’t understand that concept. The argument between the characters continues and never reaches a resolution. Can you comment specifically on the reception of the notion of feminism in Indonesia?
AU: Mainstream Indonesians still do not welcome feminism as a label. The concept of patriarchy is not really understood because, along with feminism, it comes from the West. More traditional or religious groups take that as a challenge to their values.
Feminism did in fact come from the West, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. However, there is resistance. For certain Islamic, traditional, or nationalist groups, everything that comes from the West will be met with suspicion. I actually don’t like to divide West and East like this, but on a practical level, certain Western ideas do meet resistance here.
At the same time, we also have some Islamic groups who try to find basic arguments for these issues from their own origins and sources, not from the West, which is legitimate.
LN: Interestingly, a lot of your books actually explore the meeting of East and West. You almost always have at least one foreign character in your books. Can you comment on your choice to include that point of view in your fiction?
AU: My characters don’t usually come about very consciously. It’s a subconscious process, but later on, when I analyze myself, I realize that I have my own archetypal characters. There’s always a woman who is mute, or who represents the non-rational world. And there is always a foreigner, especially in my Bilangan Fu (The Number Fu) series. In the first book, Maya, he is an Eastern European Jew who went to the Netherlands and then came to Indonesia, in Manjali and Cakrabirawa he is a Frenchman, and then in Lalita there is a character from India.
Why is that? On one level, it’s because we are actually a mix of east and west. Our knowledge—even our knowledge about Indonesia’s history, our manuscripts, and our temples—came from Western anthropologists during the colonial period. The Javanese themselves forgot about their past. Borobudur, for example, had been forgotten. Many texts had also been forgotten. When Javanese culture turned to Islam, a lot of texts from previous periods were forgotten. Luckily, Bali is a place where texts were, and still are, very alive. Preservation did happen in Bali, but it was still the Europeans who took that history during specific periods.
LN: Sometimes they very literally took it.
AU: For me, if we have the choice that something will either disappear or be taken by others, I’d rather it be taken. At least in the future we can take it back.
LN: Manjali and Cakrabirawa is actually very literally about archeology. The characters search for forgotten Javanese temples. But, in the process, they also dig up stories of more recent violence, like the mass killings of 1965. Your characters try to approach this traumatic past, but there remains a certain emotional distance. What are storytelling strategies for closing the emotional gap between present-day Indonesia and these unrecognized narratives of violence?
AU: The histories that we cannot talk about openly always relate to present sensitivities. Why can’t we talk openly about the 1965 communist purge? Because existing organizations are implicated in that massacre. It’s not easy to get rid of present interests and sensitivities, but we can try.
We need to understand why people cannot accept different versions of history. I think it relates to the way history is taught at schools and in everyday life. One main problem is that our historiography is very political and dogmatic. What do I mean when I say dogmatic, or nationalistic, or full of ideology? Indonesians today are trapped in a specific way of perceiving all history as the story of Indonesian independence. We cannot see outside of that structure. The problem is that we always need a bad guy. During the colonial period, the bad guys were the Europeans, the Dutch. But the structure stayed, and even when the Dutch were cast out, we still needed a bad guy and a good guy. When events started happening in a more complex way, people could not process it, and when communism started to grow, people still treated the situation as very black and white, because of how our history is structured. Now, every time we see a different version of history, we are unable to process it. And if we cannot process a narrative, it is seen as dangerous, leading us to then close ourselves off from that version of events.
The way to start changing this is to change the way history is taught, which is something that I want to do this year. In my method, students begin with their personal histories or stories. First, a kid is asked to tell their own family’s history. Describe your grandmother, the history of your grandmother or grandfather. Write it down. With kids it doesn’t have to be very accurate. Just tell your story, the legends and the myths of your family. And then, after that, the kids are given a timeline of, say, national history, or the mainstream history that we already know, the history of Indonesian independence. They are asked to connect it to their own story. So what students see is how a historical event influenced their grandfather, or how it is connected with their lineage. They might see that their family stories are missing from the timeline.
By relating these two narratives, students would be able to understand from an early age that history is not a solid thing. It’s full of empty spaces to fill. And then, when they share their stories with their friends, they know that there will be differences. Some students will probably experience conflicting versions of history. But because those conflicting versions are explored within the classroom, and because no one kills each other in class, it’s not so frightening. Having a different version of history is not so dangerous. If we change how we teach histories in this way, it might help our younger generations feel more at ease with uncertainty.
Actually, in the 2019 Literature and Ideas Festival “My Story, Shared History,” Salihara invited six artists from Indonesia and six artists from the Netherlands who have an Indies background to collaborate on telling these personal histories. They’re already adults, ranging maybe from their late twenties to their late thirties, but the method still works and it’s actually new for them. We want to develop this method, learn from it, and then apply it to younger generations.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Ayu Utami was born in Bogor in the Indonesian province of West Java in 1968. A journalist during the Suharto regime, she was also active in campaigning for freedom of the press. Her first novel, Saman, was published in 1998 (the same year that Suharto was forced to step down from power) and was considered groundbreaking for its frank portrayals of female sexuality and implicit critique of the political repression ongoing at the time of its writing. She was awarded the Jakarta Arts Council Prize for Saman in 1998, and named a Prince Claus Laureate in 2000. She has published over fifteen works, including Saman’s sequel Larung, and a trilogy of nonfiction books.
Lara Norgaard is an editor, journalist, and translator. A graduate of Princeton University (B.A. Comparative Literature), she founded and directed Artememoria, a free-access, English-language arts magazine focused on the memory of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship and served as Editor-at-Large in Brazil for Asymptote from 2017–2019. Her nonfiction reporting has been published in publications such as Agência Pública and The Princeton Echo, her literary criticism in The Jakarta Post and Peixe-elétrico, and her translations of fiction and non-fiction in Asymptote Journal. Currently, she is a Luce Scholar collaborating with the Lontar Foundation in Jakarta, Indonesia and a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
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