“Why aren’t Indonesians writing more novels about their fascinating country?” Patrick Sweeting wonders. “There is a tremendous lack of good creative writing in Indonesia, so it is like repaying a debt.” He is referring to his first novel, Jaipong Dancer, which has recently been published in Indonesia. “I have had a great time in Indonesia - so many interesting experiences.”

He pointed to the two names on the front of his recently published novel, Zubaidah and Yahyu. “They are both dead now.” Sweeting said. They are people he lived with, in two separate remote villages in South Sumatra, while doing research for his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from 1978 to 1981.

Sweeting later married an Indonesian woman from Lembata Island, near Flores, and two of his three daughters were born in Indonesia. He has worked in Indonesia for a long time.

To go back to the beginning, Sweeting was born in Somerset, United Kingdom. History was his favorite subject due to an inspirational teacher. After leaving school, this born adventurer took a job with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, now known as the HSBC. It was a great life for several years, and Hong Kong was still under British administration.

He soon realized that he needed to “get back to reality”, and so picked up his studies again. This led him to a PhD in social anthropology, which fitted in well with his interest in faraway places.

At first, Sweeting wanted to go to Burma (now called Myanmar) for his PhD research, but it proved difficult to get a visa. His next choice was an area that he had read about in another scholar’s paper — Southwest Sumatra.

So he travelled to Sumatra and did his research in a remote region of Bengkulu, fulfilling an ambition to experience rural life in Southeast Asia. He studied indigenous methods of conflict resolution between the Rejang people, who he thinks number only about 250,000 now. He says that they have a complex way of life, and their conflicts and methods of resolution are just as complex.

Living among the Rejang people and experiencing their way of life was a life-changing experience for him.

“I had to go through a major character change to be able to adapt to living in such a remote location, especially after what I had been used to. For the first six months I hated it, especially the lack of privacy.”

He eventually came to appreciate the new way of life, and not long after completing his PhD in social anthropology, he took a position managing a sugar plantation in the same region.

In his book there is a character called Jim Robinson, an Englishman who manages a tea plantation. In chapter three, Sweeting switches to writing in the first person, so I asked him how much of that character was based on him.

He answered, “Not much at all. Only the circumstances, and some other things relating to people I met during those times.”

The book is about a beautiful young woman called Yahyu, whose beauty and dancing ability has been both a blessing and a curse. At the age of 17, she feels she has no choice but to run away from her life with her transmigrant Javanese family, to avoid a marriage she cannot face.

Alone, with no money and wandering in the wild, she enjoys both good and bad encounters, and she is eventually led down dark paths. As she endures great hardship, she becomes stronger and wiser, and also discovers a murky side of her own nature that she hadn’t realized was within her. Human beings are complex creatures, and Yahyu’s complexities don’t quite fit with the strictness of 1950’s Indonesian social attitudes.

Her personal trials are taking place against the backdrop of political and social unrest in that part of Sumatra during those years. The forests and mountains are also hiding places for opposing groups of guerilla fighters.

In 1983, Sweeting “landed a plum job” as field director for Oxfam in Indonesia, and was based in Semarang for the next five years.

“These were five of the most wonderful years of my life, when I married, and two of our three daughters were born there. I did a lot of work, traveled a lot to some remote and wonderful places, and it was bloody marvelous. In those days there was no email, so I could work independently. Now with email, everything can be controlled from a faraway central office, which is not always the best thing.”

When his contract with Oxfam ended, he found himself in Kupang, West Timor, for several years, engaged in work relating to dry land agriculture. Then he wandered Asia working as a consultant.

Sweeting then joined the United Nations as their chief field advisor, and worked in Nepal, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. He was in Afghanistan when 9/11 occurred.

He then found himself back in Indonesia, and was involved in setting up the Crisis Prevention and Recovery Unit for the United Nations Development Program (for disturbances in Maluku, Poso and Aceh). He and a colleague also flew into Banda Aceh two days after the earthquake and tsunami catastrophe in 2004, aboard an air-force plane.

“I had never seen anything like it in my life. Everything was under 10 feet of mud, full of chunks of debris, and corpses.”

Sweeting is now based in Jakarta, and is working on his second novel, which will be a sequel to Jaipong Dancer, and from the sneak preview I was lucky enough to get, it sounds like a very intereting read.

Sweeting finds time for a lot of hobbies, and is loving life in Jakarta, which he finds is “a city full of life”. He is an extremely fit 62-year-old who still runs half marathons and likes to climb volcanoes. He loves watching movies on the big screen, or DVDs at home, and loves opera. “My book was written to a constant background of music
by Puccini.”

“There is a tremendous lack of good, creative writing by Indonesians about Indonesia, so my book is like a repayment of a debt I owe to Indonesia for so many interesting experiences.”

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