“In the Bible, women are treated as pegs and not as the main character even though many of the stories within it would not have gone as they should if these women had not played their part,” she said.

This undervaluation of women in one of the world’s oldest books inspired Avianti to write Perempuan Yang Namanya Dihapus (Women Whose Names Have Been Negated).

The book, which recently won the 2011 Khatulistiwa Literary Award for best poetry book, is a collection of her poems that reinterpret the role of five women whose names have been blurred by history.  
Those Biblical femmes are Lilith, Eve, Tamar, Bathsheba and Jezebel.

“They were present, alive and weaved history. Yet, in the threads of the story, they are always behind a veil,” she writes in her prologue.

According to Avianti, her poems are simply reinterpretations of Old Testament stories.

“I only wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to reinterpret the Bible because it is not an inanimate object that we cannot do anything about,” she told The Jakarta Post.

She added that she considered the Bible a “historical document that would have a different significance if we or another person read it in an alternate way” throughout her five-month poetry writing project.

“I could have learned about religion through it but for this project of mine I assayed it as a work of literature,” she said.

Avianti denied that she has broached a sensitive subject by reinterpreting the role of women as portrayed in the Old Testament, pointing out that it has been done before in Western literature.

“The reinterpretation of holy books is an unceasing literary project,” she said.

Nikos Kazantzakis depicted the struggle of Jesus Christ with fleshly temptations, including depression and lust, in his 1953 novel The Last Temptation of Christ, later adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie in 1988.

Avianti also stressed that her project does not have a feminist agenda, declaring: “I am not a feminist.” She chose women as her subject out of practicality.

“I write about women because I am a woman and so [the subject] is closest to me,” she said. “So it is natural that a woman writes about women because you have to write about what you understand well.”

Avianti has also made women the subject of her many short stories, printed in some of the most prominent newspapers in circulation.

One of her short stories, “Pada Suatu Hari, Ada Ibu dan Radian” (One Day, There Was Mother and Radian), won Kompas Best Short Story in 2009. The story focused on the bleakness engulfing an abused mother and her young son.

In that story, she made references to the Bible as well, as her female character laments the violence her husband has brought upon her with the line “this is my body, this is my blood. Eat it and drink it. I am the sacrificial lamb, for unknown purposes”.

Avianti has also published Land of the Fairies (Negeri Para Peri) and Sleeping Train (Kereta Tidur), both compilations of her short stories.

According to Avianti, who seriously delved into writing in 2008, her stories were born out of the inspiration she found in the myriad of everyday objects her eyes fell upon.

She then takes notes of her daily observations, which she later develops into stories.

“I loved to make small notes but I had never developed them until one day it occurred to me that if I never finished them they would be meaningless. Finally, I put in effort to complete a story,” she said
“That was in 2008. The completion of that project was like the lifting of the floodgates. The other [stories] then started to rush out,” she said, adding that she has always been a lover of books that transport her to “a world of my own”.

“In high school, I wrote a short story that was published in Gadis magazine,” she said. “I started to write again after I started working but the writings were articles discussing architectural projects.”

Avianti has worked as an architect since 1992. She won an Indonesian Architect Association (IAI) award in 2008 for her Kampung House (Rumah Kampung) project.

The writer, who looks up to noted poet Goenawan Mohamad and novelist Ayu Utami, among others, plans to publish Arsitek Yang Lain (The Other Architect) this year.

Avianti, who writes stories during sleepless nights, said the fundamentals of architecture and poetry have become saturated with each other at certain times.

She pointed out that she utilized the principles of poetry in understanding architecture “not in the creative process, but in the process of reflections on architecture”.

Likewise, “writings have linguistic and grammatical techniques, the way architecture has structure”.

Playing the dual roles of an architect and writer, she added, gave her a sense of fulfillment.

“I feel contentment in doing both. If I did one, I would have been bored,” she said, adding that her family “gave her room” to explore both crafts.

And when asked what her greatest achievement so far has been, she replied that it was raising her 10-year-old son.

“But he sees his mother as quite ordinary,” she said with a soft chuckle.

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