Seno Gumira Ajidarma

Words Duncan Evans & Retno Darsi Iswandari Photos Jerry Adiguna

“In this world, everybody is busy talking without ever listening to the words of others. People talk without caring if others are listening. People don’t even care about their own words.”

This is a line from the short story “A Slice of Twilight For My Girlfriend”, describing the maelstrom of disconnection that characterizes this world. The story was written by Seno Gumira Ajidarma, one of Indonesia’s foremost writers working today.

The story was one of three read aloud by actors at Galeri Indonesia Kaya in Central Jakarta recently to mark the re-launch of a collection of Seno’s short stories, also titled A Slice of Twilight For My Girlfriend, first published in 2002.

In the collection, he writes about twilight with great intensity. Nearly all the stories involve twilight in one form or another, and it is not just a sun preparing to set, but rather a more remarkable phenomenon that creates powerful and particular feelings in people, for example, the feeling of loss. The twilight becomes a spiritual moment where people can see magical things.

His intensity in describing this phenomenon is connected to his interest in Japanese literature.

According to Seno, classic Japanese writers work intensely to describe a single object, so that a simple thing can be seen from a richer and deeper perspective.

Through cultivating the object of twilight in his book, he writes about many things, such as how “myths that are reproduced and repeated many times can appear more real than the facts themselves,” from “Mercusuar” (The Lighthouse) and how “people who do not follow the customs of society are assumed to be disturbed or crazy people” from “Rumah Panggung di Tepi Pantai” (The Stilt House by the Shore).

He also elevates bitter themes in Indonesian history, such as the murder of ethnic Chinese in the story “Kunang-Kunang Mandarin” (Mandarin Fireflies).

Seno employs a wild imagination in his stories. He mixes things that are touchable and untouchable, sensible and insensible, exemplified by the image of twilight cut up into tangible pieces.

The jumbled imagery generates a magical realist color to his sentences, and speaks to his tendency to drift toward the genre of magical realism sometimes associated with Latin American writers.

However, he says that he does not consider himself a magical realist, and that his style of writing is solely a product of the daily struggles of his own life.

DARK SIDE

Seno has written a good deal about the darker aspects of Indonesian history throughout his career as a writer.

Two of his published works translated into English, Jakarta at a Certain Point in Time, and Jazz, Perfume and the Incident, specifically touch on the bloodier parts of the Indonesian political and social landscape.

When asked to explain the history of his writing process, Seno says that he began writing when he was still in elementary school. He liked to snip out images of characters from umbul, (pages filled with pictures), and then write in words to describe them so that soon enough he had created his own story.

He was often impressed by folklore, such as “Si Kabayan”, and liked to copy stories from folklore onto his school noticeboard.

Seno was also impressed by stories from outside of the country, such as those written by Karl May. His mother read the works of the German writer to him, and he says that the memory of her voice reading the stories still resonates within him today.

He wrote a great deal while working as a journalist for the daily newspapers Merdeka and Zaman. In his work as a journalist, he was occasionally censored and banned by the company for which he worked.

Due to of censorship, he says it is necessary to always search for ways to keep writing about facts and thought. In this vein, he published Saksi Mata (Eyewitness), a collection of short stories, in 1994.

It was followed by a book of essays, Ketika Jurnalisme Dibungkam Sastra Harus Bicara (When Journalism is Silenced, Literature Must Speak), published in 1997. Considered a seminal work of Indonesian literature, it is often quoted in literary discussions. The statement of the book was born at a time when the press in Indonesia was censored and unable to speak openly, and so newspapers functioned primarily to circulate a string of press releases.

The winner of the S.E.A. Write Award, Dinny O’Hearn Prize for Literature and Khatulistiwa Literary Award also argues that the world of letters is not a career in the traditional sense of the term, and writers who feel proud of themselves for making a career out of letters ought to rethink the purpose of literature. Specific careers are a product of particular civilizations. Writing, by contrast, is something deeper than any one civilization. What is most important is that people have ideas that need to be expressed and this innate will and need should not be silenced.

KNOWLEDGE BASED: Teaching a class at Jakarta Arts Institute.
PLAIN SPEAK

Seno wants to dismantle the idea that literature must always use highly cultured language, stating that he employs a form of Indonesian that is used by regular Indonesians in daily life.

He feels that it isn’t necessary to create new words, and rarely uses foreign and regional words in his work. Precisely because of this, the art in writing is in how one supervises the borders of established language.

His personal decision to use Indonesian instead of his mother tongue of Javanese is a reasoned choice. He believes Indonesian is more egalitarian compared to Javanese, which is hierarchical in nature.

“I grew up in Yogyakarta where Javanese was a little difficult for me because of its many levels, and I didn’t like being in the position of a child in that ranking system. Maybe that’s why I mastered Indonesian. Throughout my life I’ve always spoken in orderly Indonesian instead of slang.”

He did not enjoy school as a young boy, though he ended up climbing his way through college until he eventually achieved a doctorate in literature from University of Indonesia.

When asked about his experiences working between the worlds of literature and academia, he notes that there is a significant distance between the two. Literary critics are primarily strong in textual criticism and theory, and do not discuss much about writers, daily literary life or politics in literature.

Nonetheless, he was attracted to the experience of attending literary classes at university and using literary theory as a tool to write literature, not just as a tool to read literature.

Seno argues that Indonesian literature will attract people if it contributes more to scientific knowledge. To achieve this, Indonesian literature ought to be seen from wider perspectives, grounded in the sciences, and not just from a perspective that focuses solely on literary theories centered on aesthetics.

He was particularly impressed, for example, by a critical review that analyzed one of his stories from an architectural perspective.

“In ways like that, Indonesian literature can move beyond the myth that is only busy with aesthetic things, and can make readers experience more of life,” he said as the interview wrapped up, ending as it did as the twilight fell over a small café, secluded from the maelstrom of Jakarta.