Tom Pepinsky

Category: Teaching

  • 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 (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation

    I have the great fortune to lead a course in modern Southeast Asian Fiction in English this semester. This means that I get to read and critically evaluate a baker’s dozen of recent Southeast Asia-themed books, and also some classics. It’s a motley bunch, but it’s tremendous fun and I have learned a lot already.

    What’s more, this is a special opportunity to think about the intersection of political science, Southeast Asian studies, and literary fiction. I’ll use this space to write short reviews of these books from the perspective of an eager reader, someone who is not a literary critic but who wants to think expansively about new fiction in its historical, political, and transnational contexts.* There will be spoilers. Read on if you’re curious.

    Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation: Singaporean State-Building, Personified

    Rachel Heng‘s The Great Reclamation is a very enjoyable read. It is an engaging love story set in a time of great political and social change in Singapore. The book is well-crafted and easily digestible, written with a welcoming and engaging prose that can lead you to miss just how smart and evocative it is. Anyone who cares about Singapore, or who wants to read some historical fiction on decolonizing Asia, will enjoy this book.

    Spoilers from here on out. The Great Reclamation tells the story of a small fishing village in Singapore’s East Coast, located several kilometers from the urbanized center of late colonial Singapore. The central characters are fishermen and their families, Hokkien speakers who live a traditional lifestyle in their kampong (the Malay word for village**). The protagonist is Ah Boon: we meet him at the beginning of the book as a shy and nervous young boy whose father fishes for a living and whose older brother is set to follow in his footsteps. Ah Boon is fearful, not cut out for a hard life on the water, but early on—after being compelled to join a fishing trip with his father and brother—he discovers that he has an uncanny ability to detect islands off the coast that are invisible to others. These islands are not just magical, appearing and disappearing depending on who is looking, they are full of fish, which provide a rich bounty for Ah Boon and later for other villagers. Ah Boon’s discoveries make a hard life into a prosperous one, allowing his family and the villagers to fill their bellies, send their children to school to learn to write in Chinese, to purchase medicine to treat their basic ailments, and to live in some comfort as the world changes around them.

    Those changes around them are substantial. First comes the Japanese occupation during WWII, which brings tragedy and trauma to the family. Then comes the return of the British, then impending independence first with and then without Malaysia. Amidst all this, we watch Ah Boon grow up together with his friend Siok Mei, a fiercely independent young orphan whose parents had joined the nationalist revolution in China and perished. They are fast friends; Ah Boon pines over her, but his love is unrequited, as Siok Mei becomes increasingly engaged with the Singaporean labor movement that was aligned with socialist and communist forces around Asia. In the end Siok Mei marries someone else, and Ah Boon discovers Natalie, who works for the new independent government (who are called, in Hokkien, the Gah Men) in a field that might best be called “community development”. Under Natalie’s tutelage, Ah Boon becomes a government employee too, learning the educated version of Singaporean English, wearing a crisp white shirt in the cool air conditioning, and convincing his villagers to use a new community center and eventually to move into new government-constructed apartments (Singapore’s famous HDB flats). The former fishing village is demolished, to become East Coast Park.

    There’s a lot more to the story: the environment and the effects of development on the village community, the communist movement and the crackdown against it***, the legacies of wartime trauma for Ah Boon’s family, the twists and turns of Ah Boon and Siok Mei’s relationships with each other and with others. There is also a lot to say about the prose, the ways in which Heng evokes the sensory experience of things like food and sun and salt, the feel of slurping up steamed fish and greens and the sound of chopsticks clinking on ceramic bowls. But I’d like to pull on one specific thread, which is the larger meaning behind Ah Boon’s character in the context of a book about Singapore’s modernization.

    My question is, does Ah Boon represent Singapore itself? I think he does. Ah Boon is Singapore.

    Ah Boon is something of a magical character, someone who transforms traditionally minded people into modern citizens. It is he who discovered the hidden islands that made his village prosperous under the British. And it is he who could convince those villagers to embrace modernity after decolonization, to move into the HDB flats and to embrace the cement walls of the new community center. It is he who could teach those villagers to wipe their feet when coming inside to watch the TV, who would clean up after them to keep the public space presentable, and who could patiently listen to their anxieties over living on the fifth floor of a building. Ah Boon has some essence within himself that allows him to make progress against all odds. The through-line from shy boy to Gah Men is that Ah Boon is a low-key hero.

    In this, Ah Boon also represents Singapore’s best perception of itself, as a self-made society. He is not the wealthy kid; rather, he is a poor Hokkien boy who made his own way, from the bottom of the class hierarchy to a cozy place within the postcolonial administration. He works hard, and his life gets better as a result, as do the lives of those around him. He knows that some people don’t like how the government makes hard choices for the common good, but he believes that these things must be done and he does not spend too much time looking backwards. The last words of the book are absolutely on point:

    Ah Boon made it, and we root for him along the way. In true Singapore style, there are always costs to development and change, but as Ah Boon says, progress over stagnation. So, about the past: Bury it. Make it new again. He is cringe, but he is free.

    NOTES

    * What you read here are not just my own thoughts, but rather my thoughts in conversation with the student taking the course. That student will remain anonymous for now, unless they ask me to reveal their identity.

    * And, incidentally, the origin of the English word compound, in the sense of a fortified camp.

    ** Almost certainly this was a reference to Operation Coldstore.