Tom Pepinsky

Category: Fiction and Literature

  • Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman

    This is the third in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.

    Previous review:

    1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
    2. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

    Ayu Utami, Saman

    Back in graduate school, I wrote a dissertation about the political economy of regime change in Indonesia and Malaysia. I was in college when the Soeharto regime fell and when Mahathir fought Anwar and the IMF; by the time I had decided that maritime Southeast Asia would be my subject of research, Soeharto was long gone and Mahathir had retired (which was a thing that Mahathir once did). This meant that I learned about the turbulent events of 1997-98 indirectly, by reading about them and asking people about them.

    The mid-2000s, when I was doing the field research that informed my argument, was an interesting time. The crisis was still very memorable—there were still burnt shopfronts in Glodok, and people would still scream at you in the KL exurbs about currency speculation—but things had changed in both countries. One thing that was most notable in 2004 was how much Indonesia’s political opening had led to an explosion of critical discussion of just about anything in the public space. Not just politics, not just history, but things like sex, gender, religion, the media, capitalism, and re(op)pression. Topics that had never been open for public discussion since at least the 1960s, if ever. It was a very open time.*

    That is why I am sorry that I never read Ayu Utami‘s Saman before now. It is a kaleidoscopic novel, discussing female sexuality in raw, provocative, and sometimes amusing ways.

    Four of the central characters are women in their 20s and early 30s, and we meet them in the context of direct conversations about desire, intimacy, and sex itself. One story line follows Laila, a 30 year old virgin, as she pines after a married man named Sihar, whom she plans to meet him for a tryst in New York City. Another follows Yasmin, who encounters the titular character, a man named Saman, after a chance encounter with Sihar and Laila (Yasmin and Saman later do meet in NYC; more about Saman later). Still another story line follows the female character Shakuntala, who is ravenous and unapologetic about her sexual appetite and experiences. There is an air of magical realism in the prose; when Shakuntala describes her youthful sexual encounters with “ogres” and her mother’s warning that she is “made of porcelain,” it seems obvious that this is a metaphor, but the prose is just magical enough to make you wonder.

    Like many younger Westerners in Jakarta in the mid-2000s, I was adjacent to (but not affiliated with, or participating in) the modern art, literature, and music scene. Most commentaries about Saman describe how it influenced the sastra wangi [= “fragrant” literature] movement. I remember this, and I remember events at TIM and so forth. Reading Saman brought me back to discussion groups, coffee- and kretek-fueled conversations about Julia Suryakusuma‘s Sex, Power, and Nation, and the air of possibility and critique, especially among the ritzier segments of Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta. The book is dedicated to Komunitas Utan Kayu, which intersected with Jaringan Islam Liberal [= Liberal Islam Network]. I was close with some of the key players among the latter, and they shaped my thinking about a lot of things.

    But I wasn’t in Indonesia for the release of Saman, which happened to coincide with the crisis of 1997-98. I don’t know Saman was released before or after Soeharto’s fall, but one does note that the exchange rates quoted in the book definitely imply that the book was written before the crash. I suspect that the acclaim that Saman received within Indonesia, becoming a true bestseller, was only possible because it coincided with a period of rapid political change, and an opening of civil society and intellectual space.

    Reading this book a quarter century after it was written, and with my own background in Indonesia as just described, I do notice how powerful the descriptions of sex and sexuality are. These women are not Suryakusuma’s State Ibus. But I equally notice that the title character is Saman, not the four women who dominate the English-language coverage of the book. And I note the themes of capitalist domination and ecological destruction as much as I do themes of sex and intimacy.

    Saman’s character is by far the most fully developed character in the book.** As we learn, he was born Athanasius Wisanggeni to a well-off Javanese Catholic family, and took holy orders to become Romo Wis [= father Wis]. He grew up outside of Prabumulih, in South Sumatra, and after schooling in Java returned home to become the priest in a local community.*** Once there he comes to confront the power of the extractive sector to control the local economy and society, and suffers accordingly. In the end, he leaves the faith. When we first meet him, it is many years later, and he has taken the name Saman.**** He is now an activist, and we meet him because Sihar (remember him?) contacts him after Sihar and Laila, who works as a reporter, witness a crime on a natural gas drilling platform off the Anambas Islands.

    These kinds of intersections among various story lines are what make Saman such an interesting read. In reading together with the student, we came to the view that Saman represents a vision of the ideal man: he is pure, he is pious, he is noble in thought and in deed, unlike all of the other women in the book. It led us to think about assumptions about gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia: in Western academia, there is a view the traditionally, women were relatively more powerful and autonomous in Southeast Asia than they are in other parts of the world. In fact, this led us to pick off my shelf an old book that I bought for my first undergraduate class in the anthropology of Southeast Asia, Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz‘s Bewitching Women, Pious Men, which is where I first encountered this view. From page 1 of the volume:

    Dominant scholarly conceptions of gender in Southeast Asia focus on egalitarianism, complementarity, and the relative autonomy of women in relation to men—and are framed largely in local terms.

    My student quipped: “This should be the title of the book! Not Saman.” Good one!

    I’m conscious as well of just how cosmopolitan everyone in this book is. Much of the dramatic action takes place in New York City, which was all but unimaginable in the 1990s for anyone but Indonesia’s globe-trotting elites. And many passages in the book take the form of email exchanges, taking place—on the book’s own timeline—in 1994. I paused to think about this, because I did not receive send or receive an email until the summer of 1996, and the idea that two people could carry on trans-Pacific a romantic dialogue via email in 1994 is pretty interesting.***** I note that one minor background figure in the book, someone named Sidney with a New York apartment, is definitely someone I know.

    In all, these thoughts help me to place this thoroughly enjoyable book in its historical context. And, also, to think about the random series of fortuitous connections that link me indirectly to the times and places here.

    Notes

    * This is one reason why I firmly believe that democracy really does matter. Just the possibility of freedom of conscience in public spaces is irreplaceable, and this is truly impossible without the minimal protections on individual expression afforded by a minimal democracy.

    ** In my understanding of literary criticism, which dates from my high school English classes, Saman is a round character, and the others are flat.

    *** I took particular note in this part of the book that Utami describes how Prabumulih had changed in the intervening years:

    The name of the street had changed, from Kerinci to Sudirman, from the name of a mountain in Sumatra to that of a Javanese general.

    Seems like an important detail.

    **** Saman doesn’t mean anything in Indonesian. There is a part of the book where a character speculates about Saman’s name as having been chosen because it sounds leftist (e.g. like Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Aidit). I think it sounds like semen and that that’s the point.

    ***** It reminded me of Jim Siegel‘s essay on the student protests of May 1998; specifically, a comment about a young women who remarked that her Softlens prevented the tear gas from affecting her.

  • Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

    This is the second in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.

    Previous review:

    1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation

    Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

    This is one of those books that you read about before you read. Gina Apostol is a giant of modern Philippine literature, and Insurrecto is a heck of a book.

    The early chapters, much like the reviews, hinted at just how many layers of meaning would be revealed throughout the course of the book, but upon encountering this passage I knew that Apostol was going to be throwing heaters with every pitch:

    This is wickedly funny stuff. There are levels.

    Rather than try to summarize Insurrecto‘s plot, or to explain what the book is about, let me instead just describe some of what’s “in” it. (It will be for you, the reader, to read and organize all of this for yourself.) At one level, it is the story of two contemporary women, one American and the other Filipino, who are writing—and not exactly collaboratively—a screenplay about a massacre of Philippine villagers by American occupying soldiers in 1901. They have different interpretations, different points of emphasis. The American, Chiara, is writing a screenplay based on a movie her father, Ludo Brasi, had made about the same massacre, in the 1970s. The Filipino, Magsalin, lives in New York but is enlisted by Chiara to help with her script. They travel to Samar, the location of the massacre, Ludo’s film, and Magsalin’s home region. This happens in the contemporary period, under the brutal Duterte administration.

    Questions of authenticity abound, and also questions of perspective, all intertwined. We read various scripts not as scripts, but as descriptions of the events, which are themselves invoking the broader questions of authenticity and perspective, as in a passage where an American photographer in 1901 describes the veracity of the images his camera takes to a Filipino counterpart who describes his own eyes as perfectly capable of capturing what the camera captures. Or discussions of a beach town as a trompe-l’œil, like a film set to conjure what a beach town is supposed to feel like, but nevertheless with real people, real flowers, real guns.

    So, as you can see, levels. Instead of reading my opinions you should just wade right in, splash around, and enjoy the whole thing. There will be bits that you get, and there will be bits that you miss (like me), and there will be bits that make you think differently, and then you’ll immediately second-guess those—and then, you’ll wonder whether or not you actually do get those bits that you thought you got. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in his back-cover endorsement, the book is “meta-fictional, meta-cinematic, even meta-meta.”

    One thing I found especially enjoyable about the book was the writing, how Apostol uses language and dialogue to conjure a sense of whimsy and humor in the context of a lot of heavy themes. Take this exchange:

    “the plate like petals, a corolla of carbs” is just excellent—the book is full of such expressions. But the dialogue here makes the whole thing even better. You can pay attention to no other part of the book and still really enjoy all the exchanges like this. You can even enjoy Apostol’s witty dialogue at otherwise difficult passages:

    Here again are those themes of authenticity and perspective. What’s real? Who decides? But also, LOL, “that’s the wrong texture. Meth is fine and bright.”*

    It’s not all heavy. You can also enjoy the parts that discuss how the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi speak Tagalog. You can enjoy knowing that Chiara is obviously Sophia Coppola, and Ludo is Francis Ford Coppola, and that Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines: a story about Vietnam that’s a retelling of a story about Africa was filmed in the Philippines.** You can even enjoy the parts that describe young American soldiers who are as naive as can be—sometimes attempting to be principled, oftentimes not, but never heroes. That said, there are no heroes in Insurrecto. No character is entirely sympathetic, no character is pure. Casiana Nacionales, the insurrectionist after whom the book is titled, is the only exception.***

    I take two things away from Insurrecto. Not themes exactly, but rather impressions.

    One is interconnectedness. No specific passage in the book does this, but I am left with the impression that we are to understand the massacre of 1901, the history of the Philippines, and our efforts describe it and narrate it to others, as being connected far beyond the islands themselves. There is no way to describe the Philippines on its own, from an aperspectival perspective. References to Magellan, to the similarities between lechon and porchetta, to American soldiers communicating with the village chief in a basic Spanish learned in Cuba… and of course, the fact of travel, of living abroad, of working across distance, both real and virtual, which is a constant theme for every character. Even the proliferation of terms and phrases in Tagalog and Waray, this reminds the reader that there is always translation of some form, and that we make our way through our connected worlds with, at most, an imperfect and incomplete view of those connections and how they made the world we inhabit.

    The other is honesty, about perspective, about history, about our ability to comprehend. The camera never captures reality, the script never records it, but our eyes don’t either. I truly appreciate how thoroughly Apostol establishes this point: we are never “inside” the history, we are always outside it. We have roles in history****, not places in it. Magsalin tells Chiara, who cries out for justice for two victims of Duterte’s drug war,

    do you think you will exact it in the middle of the road in a town where no one knows you, a woman in short shorts and bloody platform sandals, with even your continuity in question, do you think that is your role right now, to be the avenger in a time that does not give a fuck?

    Magsalin is speaking to us, yes, but I believe that she is also speaking to herself. Look how she breaks that fourth wall, right there without even making a big deal about it. Roles, not places.

    NOTES

    * One example of where I’m not sure if I get it, or if the levels are too subtle for me, is Chiara’s description of crack as meth. Crack is a cocaine product; meth is called crank. Is that another level? I am pleased to learn, however, that shabu means the same thing in Tagalog as it does in Indonesian. (For the of completeness, let me also note that shabu-shabu is something else entirely.)

    ** And if you click here and fast-forward to 2:45, you can hear 5-year old Sofia Coppola sing the Philippine national anthem. Hand to God.

    *** Read Apostol herself on this point, she might not agree with my view. I do agree that she is the character that we need to “side with,” because—indeed—“atrocity happens, this war happened.” That, if nothing else, pins the novel down as being more than just a literary exercise.

    **** Obligatory reference to how history comes from the same root as story goes here.