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Jakarta Post

‘Rasa’ Stop whining and start living

Out now: Nuril Basri’s latest novel Rasa (Feelings) was published simultaneously in Indonesia and Malaysia this year

Sebastian Partogi (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Mon, August 19, 2019

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‘Rasa’ Stop whining and start living

Out now: Nuril Basri’s latest novel Rasa (Feelings) was published simultaneously in Indonesia and Malaysia this year.

Nuril Basri’s latest novel Rasa (Feelings) can be read as a satire that makes fun of the naïveté of middle-class Jakartans.

Despite the relatively comfortable lives they enjoy, young middle-class corporate workers in Jakarta can be the greatest whiners in the world.

Instead of counting their blessings, the fact that they can still pay their rent and bring food to their table through their office jobs — taking into account that many people in Jakarta are unemployed and still live in poverty — the privileged lives they lead, which open their access to various resources, have inflated their expectations unrealistically.

Their educational background and professional skills instead have turned these people into entitled brats, they feel they deserve a more exciting life owing to their privileged context.

Just look at Maya, the 29-year-old female character in Indonesian writer Nuril Basri’s latest novel Rasa (Feelings) published simultaneously this year in Indonesia and Malaysia. She is a fictitious character, but she reminds us of our fellow urbanites.

Maya already works as an account manager in a corporation, a job that pays her bills. Her life comforts, apparently, are not enough for her. Maya complains she is “feeling old”, that she is “lost in confusion”. She senses she deserves a more exciting fate in her life than “merely” taking care of her company’s sales matters.

Growing up in a very conservative and pious family, with overbearing parents, Maya has never had sex by the age of 29, apparently deemed by the author as an anomaly in Jakarta, a city where casual sex thrives alongside religious fundamentalism.

She feels imprisoned by her dull day-to-day activities: no sex, no romance and no adventures. So, she quits her office job and applies for a position as a waitress on an international cruise ship. She flies to Estonia to travel with the ship around the world, meeting people from all corners of the globe with all sorts of peculiar behaviors on the cruise.

As becomes apparent Maya’s idea that escaping her boring office job to travel around the world on a cruise ship will grant her the grander life she desires is merely an illusion. Life is no easier on the cruise: there she meets an overcritical boss, several girls who backstab her in the end and “princely” good-looking men who are nothing like what they seem.

True to Maya’s trait as a “natural born whiner”, she has a hard time making lemonade out of the lemons she is habitually dealt while working on the cruise. Her overcritical boss makes her feel unworthy; the girls who backstab her make her timid and anxious.

Oh, what a poor girl. As if Maya had no backbone. She is so fragile and has no resilience at all. Her vapidity will make tough, no-nonsense readers grind their teeth in frustration.

Nuril Basri
Nuril Basri

Even when she travels to the faraway countries that her ship docks in, she cannot enjoy her solo odysseys; she longs to be accompanied by lover man. Seriously, Maya, you read way too many Cinderella stories. Independent and tough-minded readers will surely scoff at her unbelievable fragility.

Perhaps Maya’s so fragile because her overbearing parents protect her too much? Maybe. Her overprotective parents may share the blame for Maya’s dormant sexuality. In this cruise, however, away from her conservative family, Maya’s suppressed sexuality claws itself out randomly.

She starts indulging herself watching men as they walk by the ship. Perhaps this is the first time in her life she objectifies the male body. Still, Maya is so dyslexic she misspells “objectification” (obyektifikasi in Indonesian) as objectivity (obyektifitas). She also meets a mature and confident woman from a neighboring country who teaches her how to be a badass.

Maya’s misadventures look like she is spending some harmless fun; she even gives us the impression she is wasting her time during the cruise. Until something unexpected happens, of course, which initiates Maya into her rite of passage (Nuril is well known for writing novels in the bildungsroman genre).

While reading the novel I could not help gritting my teeth and feeling frustrated by Maya’s endless whining and fragility. No backstory adequately explains her melancholic disposition either.

Perhaps, this is also the writer’s intention: Nuril wants to satirize the naïveté and silliness of middle-class urbanites. The novel, however, lacks the literary flavor that is present in Nuril’s previous works, especially Not a Virgin. This one reads like a pop novel, but it is okay.

Maya reminds me of an annoying friend, who works in a multinational corporation, a job which pays her bills and allows her to enjoy traveling here and there, but still constantly complains about what she perceives to be lacking in her life: no boyfriend, no “meaningful job” and so on and so forth.

Maya actually also reminds me of my younger self whom I hate. Yes, once I was like Maya, an ungrateful brat who kept complaining about his own life, despite all the comforts he enjoyed thanks to his privileged job — until a number of shocks slapped me back to life. And like Maya, I also had to learn to incorporate gratitude into my own life. (ste)

— Photos courtesy of Nuril Basri

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Rasa (Feelings)

by Nuril Basri

Published by Gagas Media, 2019

364 pages

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