catatan pinggir:
coba perhatikan baik-baik bahasa yang dipakai dalam artikel di bawah,
terutama yang oleh Ayu Utami, Philip Yampolsky orang Ford Foundation
itu dan John McGlynn. kedua laki-laki asing berkebangsaan Amerika
Serikat ini sangat dekat dengan TUK, si John itu sendiri aktif
terlibat dalam Lontar TUK. kok gak ada suara "lain", dari luar TUK,
dikutip dalam artikel ini! bukankah seperti menurut Goenawan Mohamad
sendiri dalam Kasus Chavchay, sebuah "laporan jurnalistik" harus
punya "dua sisi" ("cover both sides", istilah dia) baru bisa diterima
sebagai "benar"!!!
dan perhatikan jugak bagaimana "tubuh" Ayu Utami digambarkan buat
para pembaca yang jelas pasti kebanyakan laki-laki asing jugak!
nah!
-Saut Situmorang
=========================
A Young Novelist Challenges Indonesia's Taboos
JAKARTA: For Indonesia, 1998 was a time of two revolutions, political
and cultural. Suharto's downfall and the subsequent election of
President Abdurrahman Wahid received worldwide attention, but no one
outside noticed the appearance of "Saman," a novella by an unknown 27-
year-old named Ayu Utami.
The book quickly became a phenomenon, reigniting the kind of public
debate that had atrophied under Suharto's regime. It touched on
virtually all of Indonesia's taboos: extra-marital sex, political
repression, the relationship between Christians and Muslims, hatred
of the Chinese.
"That book was like a whirlwind," says Philip Yampolsky of the Ford
Foundation here. "No one had talked about politics like that before,
or, for that matter, about sex like that before."
Two years later, Indonesians await the long-delayed second book,
tentatively entitled "Laila Never Called in New York," which Ayu
considers the completed version of "Saman." In the meantime she has
become a quasi-celebrity, unusual in a country where writers live on
the fringes.
"The audience for literature in Indonesia is so small, and easily
challenged," says John McGlynn, editor in chief of Jakarta's Lontar
Foundation. "Short stories have much more of a tradition than novels."
"Saman" shows signs of being a draft scenes undeveloped, sketchy
characters but is still an impressive work, written in fresh,
lively prose shifting among different times and locations. At its
core is the story of the Catholic priest Wis and his transformation
from political passivity to dissidence. Surrounding him are four
women, originally his students Yasmin, Laila, Shakuntala and Cok
whose voices, woven together in Faulknerian fashion, form the novel.
The book is set in the 1990s but its key events take place in the
early '80s, when Indonesia's economic "miracle" demanded a brutal
price for "development." Wis, who teaches at a Catholic school, takes
the side of villagers dispossessed by the government. He organizes
protests, escapes a crackdown and moves overseas, reborn as the
activist Saman.
But "Saman" is less about politics than love and personal awakening,
as if Costa-Gavras were directing "Magnolia." Wis's political
awakening is paralleled by a sexual one, as he breaks his vows to
have a passionate affair with Yasmin.
Part of what makes "Saman" so extraordinary is its undermining of
expectations. Its sexuality is never the comfortable kind: While
Laila has an adulterous affair, Yasmin's love for Wis culminates in
explicitly erotic letters evoking Genesis and the Song of Songs. Its
treatment of ethnicity and religion is subversive: Wis, the Catholic
priest, is Javanese (most Javanese are Muslim) and works in Muslim
South Sumatra rather than the Christian North; Muslim Laila's married
lover is a Christian; anti-Chinese hostility a meeting of rubber
tappers ends in condemnation of "Chinese colonialism" is balanced
by sympathetic Chinese characters.
The clampdown scenes broke the silence of self-censorship. "You get a
very vivid picture of what happened when the government started
putting the screws on these small rural communities," Yampolsky says.
So did the graphic sex. "Don't underestimate how daring she was,"
Yampolsky adds. "There's a disconnect in this country between what's
represented as the norm and how people actually behave."
Ayu has her own explanation. "I read Tintin when I was a kid," she
says, laughing, in the café of the arts center Tuk, where she works,
organizing film series, lectures and performances. "That was my
original inspiration."
Ayu's beauty her luminous eyes and sensuously noble features have
worked more against than for her, inspiring bizarre accusations that
she not only had an affair with her mentor Goenewan Mohammed, but
that Goenewan was the true author of "Saman."
This misogynist conspiracy theory used as "proof" the unlikelihood
that a young woman, never before published, could create such a self-
assured work, without answering why Goenewan, a famous editor and
essayist, would give it away. And as Yampolsky puts it, "why would a
Muslim, even an open-minded one, write a novel so saturated in
Christianity?"
Ayu's Catholicism is central to her vision. "I grew up with the
Bible," she says, "and if you read it carefully there are all these
contradictions, just like real life. It was written over a long
period of time by different authors, and that inspired me to think of
a novel as polyphonic."
Ayu, 30, grew up in Bogor, near Jakarta, feeling isolated as a
Javanese among West Java's Sundanese and as a Catholic nearly all
Sundanese and Javanese are Muslim. "I wrote my first novel in high
school," she says. "About adventurous teenagers. Everyone rejected
it." She started university but dropped out at age 20 to join the
magazine Matra and start a career as a journalist.
In 1994, she and some colleagues founded the Association of
Independent Journalists, an act of courage that cost her her job and
landed others in jail. "It was a very special time in my life," she
says. "Most of us were young and still idealistic. It gives you hope,
when you see very different kinds of people come together because
they believe in something."
The odd contradictions of Suharto's New Order lightened the
gloominess a little. "Maybe your friends were in prison," she
says. "But at least you could bribe your way in and throw a party in
jail."
The work at Tuk and residencies in the Netherlands and Japan have
kept her busy: "I'm not one of those disciplined people who can write
a paragraph a day. I need to feel inspired." She says the new book
expands the role of several previously minor characters, and in
particular delves into the 1965 anti-Communist, anti-Chinese
massacres in Bali.
"The culture here was stunted by an apathy created by self-
censorship," McGlynn says. "When 'Saman' came out, it signified the
end of that."
For her part, however, Ayu shows no sense of triumph. "We still
haven't won," she says. "It's not politics now, it's the society. The
intolerance."
-
Jonathan Napack is a journalist who travels frequently in Asia.
