Eka Kurniawan (born November 28, 1975) is an Indonesian writer and graphic designer. He was born in Tasikmalaya, West Java, and grew up in the small coastal town Pangandaran.
He studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. He writes novels, short stories, movie scripts, and a blog, as well as being an essayist.
His works have been translated into more than 24 languages. His novel, Beauty is a Wound, was included in the list of 100 notable books by The New York Times. The use of Magic realism in the book has led to comparisons to the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.
Kurniawan has insisted that Beauty is a Wound is neither a historical novel nor a book about Indonesian history.
Kurniawan's style of "approaching social concerns at an angle rather than head-on, with hefty doses of surrealism and wry humour" also draws comparisons to Haruki Murakami.
He has been described as "Indonesia’s finest writer since Pramoedya Ananta Toer". In the Book Review referenced below, Jon Fasman makes his own comparison between Pramoedya and Kurniawan:
The region’s nearest Nobel miss was probably Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an Indonesian novelist and essayist who fell afoul of the repressive Suharto regime for his left-wing views. Pramoedya’s best-known works are the four novels collectively known as the Buru Quartet, a sprawling account of a young Indonesian’s political awakening under Dutch colonial rule. Pramoedya wrote these novels while imprisoned on Buru, a remote island in east Indonesia, and the actual writing came quite late. For much of his decade and a half in prison, during the late 1960s and the ’70s, he was denied writing materials, and he narrated the stories in daily installments to his fellow prisoners.
Kurniawan was born on Nov. 28, 1975, when Pramoedya was already 50 years old. (As Anderson notes in his introduction to “Man Tiger,” that was also the day Portuguese Timor declared independence.) Though Kurniawan cites Pramoedya as one of his favorite Indonesian writers, the differences between the two are striking: Pramoedya wrote Tolstoyan political realism, while Kurniawan owes a clear debt to García Márquez, particularly in “Beauty Is a Wound.” Kurniawan does not merely traffic skillfully in magic realism; his Halimunda — like García Márquez’s Macondo and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County — lets him show how the currents of history catch, whirl, carry away and sometimes drown people.
Nevertheless, both he and Pramoedya owe a tremendous debt to Indonesia’s oral traditions: Their stories are digressive yet riveting, and their characters distinct and profound. Compared with many contemporary American novels, the two books of Kurniawan’s reviewed here contain relatively little dialogue. He tells us what the characters do and how they feel, just as a storyteller would. And he knows the importance of a good hook, writing opening sentences that are enviable: “On the evening Margio killed Anwar Sadat, Kyai Jahro was blissfully busy with his fishpond” (“Man Tiger”); “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for 21 years” (“Beauty Is a Wound”). In fact, the first sentence of nearly every chapter in the episodic “Beauty” grabs the reader and yanks him into the action — an essential quality in a book abundant with unexplained jumps in time and characters introduced on the fly.
Kurniawan has insisted that Beauty is a Wound is neither a historical novel nor a book about Indonesian history.
This New York Times Book Review by Jon Fasman was published on-line Sept. 9, 2015.
If Beauty is a Wound is not an historical novel, and it is not, it certainly reflects the modern Indonesian historical condition. Jon Fasman begins his review with this paragraph:
In what is presumably late 1965, as Indonesia is racked by violence in the wake of a failed coup blamed on Communists, a gravedigger named Kamino hits upon a novel method of seduction: He allows himself to be possessed by the spirit of a recently murdered Communist so that the Communist’s daughter can speak with her father one last time. In gratitude, she cooks Kamino dinner. A week later, after Kamino has buried 1,232 Communists in one mass grave, she accepts his marriage proposal. By the time the newlyweds return from their honeymoon, Eka Kurniawan’s fictional Javanese city of Halimunda is “filled with corpses sprawled out in the irrigation channels and on the outskirts of the city, in the foothills and on the riverbanks, in the middle of bridges and under bushes. Most of them had been killed as they tried to escape.”
The tragedy of 1965 echoes in a collective, but buried, undercurrent within Indonesian society, and emerges more powerfully by dint of the suppression of memory and historical fact. And so, it will "bubble up", in art, and literature, because this a safe place, psychologically, to explore the actual in terms of feeling as well as historical fact. The Information Wrap for Maribaya references the purge of the Communists from across Indonesia in 1965 in this article:
Dewi Ayu, the central character of Beauty is a Wound, is a prostitute, the mother of four daughters, including the youngest, called Beauty, but who is repulsively ugly. Quoting again from Jon Fasman's review:
Dewi is part Dutch and part Indonesian, the daughter of a half brother and half sister who fell in love and then fled, and the granddaughter of a Dutch nobleman’s concubine who vanished after leaping off a cliff. The book begins with Dewi’s resurrection and ends with her death.
Is Dewi, as an Indo, a Eurasian woman, as a prostitute and mother, and with an exotic mix of origins, somehow neither one thing or the other? Or is she a summation of many things that matter in a shared modernity? Is Dewi personifying the merging of all these differing brutal realities, or is she just Dewi? Fasman continues:
In between, Indonesia’s turbulent 20th century marches through Halimunda — independence, Japanese occupation, Suharto’s vicious war against the Communists and the violent stagnation of his long, despotic rule.
Indonesia is a place where multiple contradictions seem ever present, the result of history, no doubt, and a history that needs to be ignored, so life can carry on, but also acknowledged, because, if not, this same history can haunt the present. In the present political climate of a predominantly Muslim country, the long existence of prostitution in Indonesia, has become a focus for a moral backlash. The reality is a bizarre mix of acceptance, tolerance, and everyday realism on the one hand, and zealotry on the other. This modern situation is part and parcel of the ecology of capitalism and the story continues. From Java to Papua, and West Papua, many Indonesians, individuals and communities are struggling to survive . . .
The epic scope of Kurniawan's work is rooted in the contradictions of Indonesia's condition of modernity, which is also universal, and that embraces the existence of the practical realities and compromises of everyday survival. People surviving, women surviving, these survival strategies are pitched against the howls of outrage coming from religious conservatives, determined to halt progressive economic and social change, at any cost. Fasman's review continues:
This risks making Kurniawan’s work sound like a chore, which it is not. García Márquez could fall into sententiousness and grandiosity; Kurniawan, by contrast, has a wry, Javanese sense of humor. When the Communist’s daughter expresses shock that she is speaking with her deceased father — “But you are dead, Daddy!” — he replies, “Well don’t be too jealous of me, you’ll get your turn someday.”
Is it Kurniawan's down to earth connection to the difficult realities of everyday life that allow the author to conjure the bizarre truth of things through an art of sur-reality?
Dewi Ayu’s rise from the grave is not figurative: She was, by all accounts and in the eyes of every character, dead, until she wasn’t. “It must be confusing that I rose again after 21 years,” she tells Beauty. “Even that longhair who died on the cross was only dead for three days before he rose again.” In addition to a delightful irreverence toward religion, Kurniawan has an unsettling way of stirring the supernatural into the quotidian: Gravediggers get possessed by the spirits of the dead, tigers live inside people, pigs turn into human beings, a baby vanishes from a pregnant woman’s stomach in a violent belch.
In a beautiful bit of irony, the only character who comes close to exercising control over any sort of magical events happens to be a devoted Communist and an opponent of superstition with an unsettling gift for effectively cursing people. These supernatural events happen as matter-of-factly as characters eating, copulating or defecating. One of the reasons such elements never seem cloying or overdone is Kurniawan’s grounding focus on the body and its desires, beauty and repulsiveness.
Fasman then compares Beauty with Man Tiger:
In “Man Tiger,” the supernatural is rather more restrained: a few peripheral genies and a single female tiger — “white as a swan, vicious as an ajak,” or wild dog — living inside one young man. Both novels are fundamentally family sagas, though where “Beauty” is discursive and epic, “Man Tiger” is tight, focused and thrilling. Like a good crime novel, “Man Tiger” works best when read in a single sitting, and its propulsive suspense is all the more remarkable because Kurniawan reveals both victim and murderer in the first sentence.
A supernatural tale of murder and desire fascinatingly subverts the crime genre, in a new novel from the rising star of Indonesian fiction
Eka Kurniawan’s first novel Beauty Is a Wound has already been compared to García Márquez and Rushdie – it is long, it recounts the history of an “exotic” country and it is studded with supernatural happenings, so never mind that Kurniawan is bawdy where García Márquez is plangent, or that his occasional direct addresses to the reader owe more to oral storytelling than to postmodernism. Such lofty comparisons might threaten to obscure the writing itself. It is lucky, then, that his books are so distinct and memorable.
Where Beauty Is a Wound is sprawlingly expansive, Man Tiger is slender and taut, with the central supernatural element given relatively little page time and the nation’s history collapsed into oblique glimpses: the rusting samurai swords left behind from the Japanese colonial period and the increase in “private” violence, an apparent symptom of living in “a republic no longer at war”.
Kurniawan himself has described Beauty Is a Wound as three books merged into one: part family saga, part national history, part fantasia. Man Tiger, translated by Labodalih Sembiring, could be called a crime novel, though one in which we know the identity of the perpetrator from the very first sentence. Anwar Sadat, a charming lecher and failed artist, has been murdered by the young Margio, a skilled hunter who is sweet and polite, but has “something inside him”. This being a distinctly Javanese take on the hard-boiled genre, that “something” turns out to be not a buried secret or repressed trauma, but a tigress: white as a swan, a possessing spirit-cum-second-wife, passed down from father to son.
In Beauty Is a Wound, the supernatural exists alongside realist historical accounts and sociopolitical critique, presented as an equally valid representational mode. The white tigress in Man Tiger can more easily and fruitfully be read as symbolic – of Margio’s rage-shot Oedipal desire, having been denied even an imagined outlet in a mother so broken down by her husband’s beatings. Yet at the same time it exists as a living animal, utterly real, accepted by the Javanese as matter-of-fact.
This tangibility is a key feature of the book, whose richly textured descriptions interweave each aspect of the village and its surroundings with the lives of its inhabitants. Imagery, lyrical and arresting, is another great strength: “The night tumbled upon them, buoying the stars and hanging up a severed moon.” Kurniawan’s writing demonstrates an affinity with literary heavyweights such as, yes, García Márquez and Dostoevsky, as well as Indonesia’s own social-realist master Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to whom domestic fans have dubbed him an heir. Most intriguing, though, is the influence of the home-grown pulp fiction that was popular when he was growing up in West Java, visible in the luridly gory descriptions of Man Tiger’s central murder and elevated by a series of arresting similes: the lump of flesh the exact size of a piece of tofu, the blood-streaked floor that resembles the national flag.
There is also the influence of Indonesian storytelling traditions, derived from classical Indian epics such as the Ramayana, and of the Wayang puppet theatre. In Beauty Is a Wound, this results in digressive stories with a large cast of colourful characters. Refreshingly, Kurniawan puts value on literature as entertainment, and his books are certainly that. Man Tiger is particularly effective in deploying some of the classic techniques of the crime genre while subverting others – not only is there no “whodunnit”, the destabilising effect is not caused by the murder itself (violence is very much a part of life), but by the lack of presaging omens.
Indonesia’s recent guest of honour spot at the Frankfurt book fair showcased a dizzying array of literary talent, from Leila Chudori’s love-and-exile epic Home to Intan Paramaditha’s Angela Carter-esque horror. Alongside their melding of local and international contexts, its writers’ penchant for working with multiple forms makes for some thrilling originality. The Indonesian wave is heading in our direction, and I for one will be diving in.
the third of Kurniawan’s novels to be translated, is a world apart in scale, complexity and ambition from Beauty Is a Wound, which entwined Indonesia’s history with the story of a prostitute who returns from the dead.
At just 208 pages, Vengeance Is Mine proffers a sly, sideways glance at Indonesian society and packs an audacious punch all of its own.
Described by its publisher as “gloriously pulpy”, it’s not for the faint-hearted. From its opening sentence – “‘Only guys who can’t get hard fight with no fear of death,’ Iwan Angsa once said of Ajo Kawir” – Kurniawan provokes, titillates and confounds as he examines masculinity in the guise of a man suffering from impotence. Iwan Angsa, the narrator continues, “was one of a small handful of people who knew that Ajo Kawir’s penis couldn’t stand up”.
There is no shortage of seminal fluid, adolescent male angst, masturbation and profanity in the ensuing pages, where we soon meet Ajo Kawir and his friend, Gecko, who is also privy to his friend’s problem.
Narrated in brief, cinematic fragments and laden with florid, coarse dialogue gleaned as much from the comics Ajo Kawir devours as from street slang, the novel shifts rapidly forwards and backwards in time, as we learn of Ajo Kawir’s ability to attract trouble.
Sometimes his fights leave him unconscious in a ditch, at the police station, in the village trustee’s house or in casualty. Consequently, Gecko doesn’t like to leave him without backup, so he often gets wounded, too. The truth is that both enjoy the fights, but Gecko still feels guilty about “the whole business”, even though Ajo Kawir has never blamed him.
By the time the novel tilts into “the whole business”, we have also learned that “it” happened when the boys were 12 or 13, long before Ajo Kawir went to Jakarta, became a truck driver and met a woman named Jelita. Indeed, Jelita is a mysterious figure who hovers over the novel, generating suspense, until she appears briefly in its latter stages, and even then remains a mythical figure who manifests and vanishes as if by divine design.
Kurniawan has described himself as an adventurer on the page, borrowing variously from myth, comics and all literary traditions, and habitually drives his narratives between the extreme poles of the crass and the sublime, the tragic and the comedic, the surreal and the real.
In their home village, the teenage boys have been spying on the local headman and his wife as they make love. This was before Ajo Kawir became impotent and he would later do the tahajjud prayer for his sins, even arguing with Gecko whether they had, in fact, sinned anyway.
Gecko would daydream about the size of the wife’s breasts but, during one of his late-night spying adventures, he comes across something far more interesting than the couple’s lovemaking, and decides to share this secret with his friend. The intrigue leads the boys to the house of a mad woman the locals call Scarlet Blush, and they witness her brutal rape by two uniformed policemen.
For Ajo Kawir, who is caught by the policemen and forced at gunpoint to take part in the rape, the traumatic legacy is his impotence. For Scarlet Blush, whose tragic history unfolds during the rape, and seems to reference the post-war era of Indonesian leader Sukarno, it is far worse. She dies soon after the rape, her body found lying in her backyard next to the unmarked grave of her murdered husband.
In the ensuing years Ajo Kawir tries everything, from bee stings to chilli pepper, to stir his sleeping member. Even the prostitute that Gecko’s father takes him to fails to wake it.
As the years pass, violence becomes Ajo Kawir’s way of life – until, at the age of 19, his fearsome reputation is such that he is hired to kill an elusive gang leader named The Tiger. Instead, however, he encounters Iteung, the female bodyguard of a businessman belonging to a mafia-like organisation called The Empty Hand, and falls in love. The pair eventually marry, despite his impotence.
Unknown to Ajo Kawir, Iteung too bears the scars of childhood trauma and it is only later in the novel that we discover her secret.
The novel suddenly hurtles forward to Jakarta, 11 years later, where Ajo Kawir drives a truck bearing as a motto the words that form the book’s title. His experiences in the interim are revealed only in brief flashbacks and dream sequences; following the pattern of Kurniawan’s previous works, one scene is even narrated by a lizard.
Ajo Kawir stands out among Java’s truckers, where a kind of supercharged machismo rules. He cares for his estranged wife’s child, studiously avoids violence and engages in long, philosophic dialogues about the value of solitude and silence.
Rape again enters the narrative, along with a truck chase and a host of new characters as Kurniawan takes us deeper into his exploration of masculinity, and on into the novel’s surprising and disturbing denouement.
It’s impossible to escape the sense that with this novel, Kurniawan is attempting to give added agency to the belief that the world is “dick driven”. As Ajo Kawir tell his young co-driver: “All of human existence is nothing but a dream our genitals are dreaming. We’re just here to act it out.”
The elements of Kurniawan's narrative can be found in the news, local news, national news and international reporting. For example, this tragic story covered in the Guardian newspaper:
The grisly truth behind a baby’s death has caused an outcry in a country where abortion laws take scant heed of circumstance
Kate Lamb in Jambi Thu 16 Aug 2018
Fika* gave birth alone in her room at night. The baby came out alive.
According to her testimony, the 15-year-old from Sumatra cut the umbilical cord with a razor and then the baby went limp and died. She held it up, but it didn’t cry. After that she wrapped the tiny body in a tablecloth and hid it under her bed, she told her lawyer. At dawn she buried it in a shallow grave next to a palm tree by her house.
The discovery of the dead child, who was found by a farmer in late May, prompted the arrest of Fika and has become something of a village horror story. But even worse were the details that followed. In the same wooden house in the village of Pulau, an isolated community in the Indonesian province of Jambi, Fika’s grandmother wails.
“I want to kill him. I want to kill him,” is all she can say, over and over, as she pounds the floor crying.
When the dead baby was found hidden in the foliage, the neighbours suspected it might be Fika’s, but no one guessed she had become pregnant after being repeatedly raped by her brother. The grisly details of the case have shocked Indonesia, which came to light in July after Fika was jailed for six months for having an illegal abortion.
Her 17-year-old brother was sentenced to two years in prison for sexually assaulting a minor. Their mother, a single parent and rubber farmer, is being detained on suspicion of assisting her daughter with the abortion.
Abortion is illegal in Indonesia except in exceptional circumstances, such as when a woman is raped, and only then if it is carried out within the first 40 days. Forensic testing revealed Fika was seven months pregnant when she gave birth.
In a rare move, the court suspended Fika’s prison sentence earlier this month in response to the outcry, and she has been moved from prison into the care of a child protection agency as the Jambi high court hears her appeal.
Her lawyer, Damai Idianto, expects the court to make a decision later this month. Idianto says he hopes the teenager will soon be released. As more details are revealed, the case has exposed some uncomfortable truths and shone a light on the systemic prejudice against rape victims in Indonesia – from the level of the village to the judiciary. ‘If she didn’t report it she must not be a victim’ In the village the case was initially perceived as “incest” and some residents argued the siblings should be banned from returning based on adat, or customary law. Even after her brother told police he had raped his sister nine times since last September, and that he would beat her until she complied, the police failed to see the girl as a victim.
Instead, prosecutors focused their efforts on building a case against her for having an illegal abortion. “They think, ‘if she didn’t report it then she must not be a victim’,” says Helvi Rachmawati, from the consortium of women’s NGOs in Jambi. Some in the village are willing to go further, suggesting Fika was not raped.
“Maybe in the beginning she was forced into it,” says Fika’s ethics teacher, who preferred not to give her name. “But maybe she felt pleasure from it afterwards.”
If she didn’t enjoy it, the teacher asked, why didn’t she say anything?
Mirna Novita Amir, a women’s activist and lawyer in Jambi, said a local judge – one not sitting on this case – voiced the same opinion in a private conversation. Women’s activists in Jambi say the reactions and handling of the case reveal a disturbing lack of awareness about rape victims.
‘We prefer not to talk about this anymore’ Fika’s family home, a wooden house on stilts, is a three-hour drive from the city down a long bumpy road, past ambling goats, oil palm and rubber plantations, and then a 10-minute boat ride across a mud-coloured river to the village of Pulau. Its population: 1,800. In Pulau the news has become a source of intense shame and guilt.
“We have to make sure this does not happen again, to watch our children,” says district chief Asri Yonalsah, who was visiting the village for a measles vaccination drive.
However, it appears Fika’s case might not be an isolated incident. According to women’s activists in Jambi there have been five cases of “incest” reported in the province this year. Some have also pointed a finger at shortfalls in the education system. Sex education is not a mandatory part of the Indonesia’s national school curriculum and while about 40% of schools in Jambi city have some form of sex education, elsewhere in the province it is virtually non-existent.
It was at his Islamic boarding school that Fika’s brother would watch pornographic videos with his friends on their mobile phones. He later told police the videos had prompted him to rape his sister. “They can watch this stuff freely but then they don’t have any education about it,” says Ida Zubaidah, from the NGO Beranda Perempuan.
When Zubaidah met the 17-year-old in prison in July, he claimed he had not fully understood the repercussions of his actions. “He was crying and he said he didn’t know that he could get his sister pregnant. He told me he thought that could only happen if he had sex with a girlfriend,” said Zubaidah. Back at the school, Fika’s teacher says they had no idea she was pregnant. Fika wore a long headscarf that covered her torso and they thought she was just putting on weight. A quiet and introverted student, Fika did not appear unhappy, they say. At the end of term event in May she had been dancing.
After the news of the case reached the school, teachers conducted raids, confiscating mobile phones and erasing pornographic videos they discovered. Smartphones have now been banned in class. Teachers say the case has been devastating but they have no plans to introduce sex education. They prefer to refer to Islam, the dominant religion in the country, for guidance. “For us who live in the village,” says Fika’s teacher, “it’s still hard for us to talk about.”
*The name of the girl involved in this story has been changed to protect her identity
One of the NGO's mentioned in the Guardian story, Beranda Perempuan has a webpage showing the photo above, with the caption "Realize Women's Liberation". There are many activists working across Indonesia to address the contemporary manifestations of patriarchy found in social attitudes, behaviour, power, politics and the law.
A. Yes. Masculine identity in Indonesia (as elsewhere) is shaped by patriarchy, and underwritten and guaranteed by existing political and religious powers! So what would you expect the answer to be?
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