In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023
Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.
Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.
The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:
Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.
Nastiti, like her mother Arini and her grandmother Rukmini in subsequent chapters, is a complex woman with a troubled past. Her apparent promiscuity excites and also repels the narrator, who is relegated to being her emotional appendage—someone to whom she can occasionally reveal shards of her inner turmoil, but seen mostly as “a hero who [arrives] too late; not helpful and not needed.” The narrator accepts this role passively, for he lacks the acumen to read Nastiti:
I was the person on whom Nastiti liked to dump any toxic waste that burdened her mind, but I never had the power to determine how much she would give me.
In the young man’s eyes, Nastiti represents the feminine counterpart to Melville’s white whale, at once blown up and reduced to fragments via modern technology and social media. Just as Moby Dick is Ahab’s obsession, feminine beauty—as embodied by Nastiti and other women in Birth Canal—is coveted by men in power (or any man wielding a camera) while generating violent misconceptions in its alienating, all-encompassing “femaleness.” Even if Nastiti is not a transcendent white whale but simply an ordinary Jakartan woman who commutes to some “boring office job” in her “ugly rubber flip-flops,” her refusal to become “readable,” like her willed disappearance from her friend’s life, sets the tone for the novel’s subsequent chapters.
None of Wuri’s heroines are exempt from the oppressive forces of history, but they—exemplified most notably by Dara (whose name means “virgin,” in the sense of integrity and selfhood)—remain resistant to both the literal and symbolic violations perpetrated by men. The women depicted in the novel may be exploited or abused, but still manage to profess their agency by engaging in both hidden and visible acts: abortion, disappearance, pre-marital sex, adultery, suicide, listening, remembering, and perseverance.
Birth Canal’s next chapter takes the reader to World War II Semarang, with the focal character being Rukmini; eventually, she will become Nastiti’s maternal grandmother, but in the days of conflict, she is an Indo-Dutch teenager, captured by the occupying Japanese army and forced to become a comfort woman. This chapter also introduces Arini, Rukmini’s daughter and Nastiti’s mother, an airline stewardess who travels to the Netherlands in present day to share Rukmini’s harrowing story with a feminist researcher.
If language, or our linguistic concepts of love, family stability, and motherhood, can harbor hidden biases reflective of an existing power structure, then a character’s alienation from language and social norms can challenge what has long considered to be natural. Birth Canal fittingly quotes the lines in Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem,” about how the cracks are what allow the light to get in. Specifically, Rukmini, forever shell-shocked by her sexual conscription during World War II, becomes emotionally disengaged from the life she subsequently leads with a loving, supportive husband and her daughter Arini. Even so, she manages to expose the cracks in her cultural milieu by implicitly questioning the social expectations imposed on women, with regard to their presumed roles as dutiful wife and mother. Rukmini’s depression thus allows the gendered relations within the family to shift; her husband eventually takes on the caretaker role, becoming both father and mother to their daughter.
The notion of men being hit-or-miss emotional caretakers in Rukmini’s case, as well as in Nastiti’s and Dara’s in the novel’s last chapter, seems both revolutionary and realistic as depicted by Wuri. These men, by not having any pre-established criteria to help them read their troubled women, are not saviors but well-meaning, yet hapless, partners. They misread clues and make mistakes, further exposing the unstable social construct of biological destiny and gender roles.
In Birth Canal, there is no correlation between fertility and motherhood, since a woman can give birth and be an unfit mother or vice-versa; she may have the potential of being a wonderful mother but cannot bear children. The concept of the birth canal, as depicted in the novel, is rivetingly unsentimental—or perhaps “natural” in its most fundamental sense; it conjures a passage full of mystery and perils, all of which does not lead necessarily to birth. Since this idea of birth canal is not linear or predictable but evocative of a two-way thoroughfare between life and death, self-knowledge can traverse from the hidden to the visible, or equally from wholeness to failure.
Such a bilateral view of the birth canal would reject a happy ending in “Hana,” the novel’s third chapter, which depicts desolate, squalid Yokohama in the aftermath of World War II and the Allied occupation of Japan. In this chapter, an American war photographer, like a modern day Pygmalion, becomes obsessed with Hanako, a Japanese housewife, after capturing her images on his camera—echoing Nastiti’s story. He returns to the U.S. in 1946, and finally develops—or “gives birth” to—Hanako’s images in 1953. In bringing her images to life, the man seeks atonement by conjuring a glowing Hollywood coda:
I’m sorry, I say, and she will forgive me. She has forgiven the world . . . the world war, and she forgives the men who caused her so much suffering. As she lay in a patient bed . . . she would give birth to a baby boy or girl, and she would stop struggling against the destruction that had already occurred. She looked forward and saw hope. They all stood up to greet the beginning of a new dawn.
But this happy ending starkly exposes the imbalance of power between the photographer and his subject. By unilaterally erasing the trauma that he inflicts on Hanako and presupposing her forgiveness, the photographer amplifies his act of aggression. His wish for a whitewashed Hollywood ending can be compared to the male gaze in pornography that presumes a surfeit of access, leading us to Birth Canal’s last chapter, set in 21st-century Osaka. There, Dara, an Indonesian expat in a loveless marriage, is beset by grief due to her inability to conceive, and decides to distract herself by stalking Ayaka, a Japanese porn star originally from Yokohama—who may be biologically related to Hanako.
Pornography, in the novel’s context, can be defined as a utilitarian, propagandist narrative form that offers a predictable outcome; the nude female body, or the literary text, is made into a transparent vessel, devoid of any history or hidden meaning except to offer a preset ideology. To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion: to bear witness, to preserve their unique stories from the relentless, intrusive probe of the dominant narrative structure. Accordingly, throughout the novel, Wuri consistently cautions us against language written from the perspective of male violence. In passages describing rape, she employs stark, clinical prose to both highlight the victim’s abject conditions and expose the perpetrator’s solipsism, who conflates aggression with gestures performed “as if full of love.”
In many ways, a birth canal, unlike linear, male-centric, or propagandist narrative, represents a latent site of conflicts and thwarted possibilities. To use psychoanalyst Dori Laub’s definition of trauma as open-ended and timeless:
Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.
This sense of trauma as generational embraces a complex storytelling that resists facile articulations and pat resolutions. According to Laub, if there exists no other reliable witness besides the victim when the event first occurs, trauma can only be acknowledged through the subsequent act of listening: Arini gains an understanding of her mother’s past by hearing her story, thus bearing witness to this past and in turn, transmitting it by her own agency. This act of listening, of being immersed in the murky depths of Rukmini’s suffering, affirms the existence of the unspeakable.
Prior to Birth Canal, the concept of recurring trauma has surfaced in a science fiction story of Wuri’s called “Dioscuri,” where a clone subject questions his existence by asserting that he has been cloned not to have an independent trajectory, but simply to replicate his dead brother’s health issues and suicidal tendencies. Failed conception—rendered variously as stillbirth, miscarriage, filicide, abortion, and suicide—represents an affirmative acknowledgment of psychic damage as well as a form of political protest in Wuri’s fiction. Her resistance against “comfortable” storytelling may be compared to the way her character Dara keeps peeling the bloody scabs on her cracked lips, refusing to mask them with a dark lipstick shade to lessen a bystander’s disgust.
In focusing on recurrent and trenchant topics that impact modern Indonesian women, Wuri continues the feminist lineage led by Ayu Utami, who emerged in 1998, during the waning days of Suharto’s repressive New Order, to pioneer a resolutely “shameless” literary tradition that illuminates the female body and raises visibility to gender issues, from sexuality to reproductive choice and domestic violence. Wuri’s literary approach also reflects Indonesia’s culturally diverse heritage by embracing the “butterfly effect,” or connective tissues that bind people intangibly impacted by the country’s complex colonial legacy. Makramé, her 2017 collection of short stories, meditates on the concept of jalin—interwoven knots or threads that connect all beings. One can see the cosmic connection from jalin in Makramé to jalan in Birth Canal, the author’s text engendering a dynamic topography of infinite possibilities.
Thuy Dinh is coeditor of Da Màu and editor-at-large at Asymptote Journal. Her works have appeared in Asymptote, NPR Books, NBCThink, Prairie Schooner, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and Manoa, among others. She tweets @ThuyTBDinh.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: