Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • 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.

  • Decolonization, Government Criticism, and Indonesia’s Criminal Code

    Indonesia’s House of Representatives has passed a major revision to the country’s criminal code that creates new penalties for, among other things, having sex outside of marriage, criticizing the government, and insulting or discriminating based on race, ethnicity, religion, belief, skin color, sex, or mental disability. As is often the case, the main focus among the English-language international media is the new criminal penalties for extramarital sex.* And unfortunately, the focus on sex and protest might obscure other important parts of this new legal framework (PDF here) that might be of interest, such as new criminal penalties for racial, religious, and other forms of discrimination.**

    Nevertheless, the real news is about government criticism. I’ve been following Indonesia’s legal framework for regulating things like protest, criticism, nudity, homosexual intercourse, and so forth for years now, dating back to the “UU Anti-Porno” and the associated debates and demonstrations dating from 2006. What I notice about the contemporary official coverage of today’s new law, however, is invocation of colonial legacies in the Indonesian penal code as the motivation for revising it. Here is a quote from Law Minister Yasonna Laoly.

    It is time for us to make a historical decision on the penal code amendment and to leave the colonial criminal code we inherited behind

    This is an interesting and revealing turn of phrase. Elsewhere, in Indonesian, he is recorded as saying

    Produk Belanda tidak relevan lagi dengan Indonesia. Sementara RUU KUHP sudah sangat reformatif, progresif, juga responsif dengan situasi di Indonesia

    Dutch products are not relevant anymore for Indonesia. The draft amendments to the penal code are very reformist, progressive, and responsive to the situation in Indonesia.

    Yasonna is observing here, correctly, that much of Indonesia’s penal code was inherited from the Dutch colonial code after independence. This is common around Southeast Asia and around the world: it is often the case that former colonies continue to follow civil and criminal codes first implemented under colonial rule, which at the moment of decolonization is often a pragmatic and practical response to a challenging new political environment. Yasonna is arguing that the fact of the criminal code being a product of Dutch colonial rule is sufficient to justify amending and fully reconceptualizing it.

    I don’t think that anyone could seriously argue that Dutch colonial regulations are suitable for contemporary Indonesia. They were written almost entirely without the input of the colonial subjects of the time, so they were inherently unrepresentative, undemocratic, and illegitimate. And although they have been updated periodically through processes analogous to the present one, these legacies are plain to see. So, should we follow Yasonna, and understand these criminal penalties for criticizing the government, protesting or demonstrating without permission, or having sex outside of a state-recognized marriage as a kind of decolonization?

    In my view, it is better to understand these new developments as a consequence of Indonesia’s deteriorating democracy, which is both a cause and a consequence of the erosion of civil liberties under the Jokowi administration. This is not the first time that Jokowi has taken steps to restrict government criticism and dissent, and revisions to the penal code that simultaneously defend group-based rights (ethnic groups, races, religions, etc.) while restricting individuals’ ability to express dissent are aptly described by Aspinall and Mietzner as “nondemocratic pluralism.” The rights of groups remain sacrosanct***; individual freedom of conscience, expression, criticism, and mobilization are continually under threat.

    The invocation of a decolonial narrative in defense of these new laws nevertheless warrants wider attention for scholars of Indonesia, and of the post-colonial world more generally. Decolonization is a common trope in academic scholarship about the postcolonial world, but it is commonly treated as an essentially progressive endeavor, and also as an inherently legitimate and defensible postcolonial response to an illegitimate and morally abhorrent situation: colonialism. Indonesians and others should ask themselves if “decolonizing Indonesia’s penal code” is what is happening here.

    NOTES

    * Westerners who cover Indonesia are particularly concerned with laws about alcohol and sex. In my opinion, all laws that regulate these and other vice issues are generally stupid, no matter where or by whom they are enacted. It is stupid that I can’t buy beer in a Circle K in Jakarta anymore, and it was also stupid when I couldn’t buy beer in a Circle K in Pennsylvania (which was true until very recently). Laws that regulate sex are about as effective at controlling sex as would be laws regulating the moon and the stars at controlling the nighttime sky.

    ** Among others, there are now new criminal penalties for misrepresenting one’s academic or professional qualifications. No more fake PhDs, in case you were wondering.

    ** I should note that “the rights of groups” are only sacrosanct for those groups whose social status is recognized as legitimate. So Protestants and women, yes; Ahmadiyah and the trans community, no. See also Jeremy Menchik’s Tolerance without Liberalism.