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Author delivers strong message about art, bigotry
Author Laksmi Pamuntjak has just finished her Australian book tour.
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A voice within: Author Laksmi Pamuntjak published her latest novel "Fall Baby" last month. The sequel to "Amba" (The Question of Red) is one of very few novels written in English by an Indonesian author. It was published by Penguin Random House.
(Courtesy of Laksmi Pamuntjak/-)
P
rominent Indonesian author Laksmi Pamuntjak showed slides of the work of I GAK Murniasih, the late Balinese contemporary artist. They contained pastel-colored paintings of men and women's genitals as symbols of women’s erotic experiences.
“[Murniasih’s works] are extraordinarily bold, irreverent and confident. They make a case for art that dares to challenge, subvert and also say it the way it is,” explained Laksmi, who took the artist as her inspiration for Srikandi, or Siri, the protagonist of her latest novel Fall Baby.
Laksmi prepared the slides to accompany her keynote address titled "Claiming Ownership of One’s Freed Selves: Freedom, Art and Morality in Indonesia" on Nov. 20 for the Indonesia Council Open Conference at the Australian National University in Canberra, a part of her Australian book tour.
In her speech, Laksmi used art as the entry point to talk about grim issues in Indonesia: bigotry and censorship.
“The first part of the title comes from a line in Toni Morrison’s 1993 novel Beloved that says ‘Freeing oneself is one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self is another’. Not only it is a phrase very close to my heart, it is also the perfect grist for what I wanted to say about art and how it can give us hope in a time when bigotry is on the rise and civil liberties are increasingly in peril,” she said in an email interview with The Jakarta Post.
“I say this because despite some of the necessary and welcome changes [President Joko Widodo] has made to his new cabinet, I see our country backsliding on the very issues we elected him for in the first place — human rights, religious tolerance, a quality of democracy, and a tougher stance toward hard-line Islamic groups — issues we had given him much leeway on to tackle only in his second term.”
“His continued support for the regressive amendments to the Criminal Code and the founding statute of Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) encapsulates this problem.”
