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Putu Oka Sukanta brings historical memory to wider audience
Courtesy of the Lontar Foundation
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Courtesy of the Lontar Foundation.
The story starts in present-day Jakarta, on the morning of a human rights conference. An older narrator wakes up and argues with his wife as married couples do. He chats with the taxi driver on the way to the meeting hall before taking the stage.
The narrator, it becomes clear, is a former political prisoner from Soeharto’s New Order regime. As he speaks to the crowd, memories flood in. Traumatic images pull readers away from a conference room into a distant but heavy past.
“The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I heard the voices of a crowd walking along beside a number of men with their hands tied behind their backs. With them was a man brandishing a machete. Once I realized I was still on my feet, I started reading again from my notes.”
The book detailed above is Putu Oka Sukanta’s Celah, to be released in English as Spaces: Reflections on a Journey. It was translated by Keith Foulcher and published by Lontar.
The launch will take place on Oct. 30 from 12 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Goethe-Institut, Jakarta, with programming and book releases to honor the Balinese writer’s long-term dedication to human rights and literature on the year of his 80th birthday.
Spaces — a novel that transforms historical memory into fiction — is an ideal showcase for the commemorative event.
The novel’s narrator is a fictionalized version of Putu Oka himself, who was imprisoned without trial from 1966 to 1976, withstanding torture and human rights abuses and then decades of social stigma and legal probation.
Spaces is the third in a series of semi-fictional novels grounded in these memories, following Merajut Harkat (The Threads of Dignity) and Istana Jiwa (Palace of the Souls), and the first in English translation.
Spaces is a unique addition to Indonesian literature available in English. According to translator Keith Foulcher, the unconventional combination of lived experience and fiction sets this book apart.
“Even though Celah is described in Indonesian as ‘a novel’, it didn’t seem to me to be the right designation for the English version,” Foulcher explains through email. “I preferred to give the translation the subtitle ‘Reflections on a Journey’, leaving open the question of genre.”
The literal journey Spaces traces is that of the author’s current work as a writer, acupuncturist and HIV/AIDS
activist.
Merajut Harkat and Istana Jiwa, novels that focus directly on witness testimony of political violence and its implications on family life, may seem more urgent than Spaces. But it is this final novel that exposes the lasting legacy of political violence through the writer’s memories.
“I don’t believe inspiration has no connection to life, to reality,” Putu Oka says. “Real life is the mother of art. And the father is the esthetic. So if an artist is able to combine mother and father, they will create good writing, or good drama, or good film.”
Whether as a search for long-forgotten 1960s poetry, correspondence with journalists about finding witnesses to 1965 violence in Aceh or an encounter with an old friend forced into exile, real accounts from Indonesian history constantly arise in Spaces.
Yet Putu Oka’s literature is more than a collection of personal stories. His books assert a historical counter-narrative that makes new perspectives available to Indonesian and foreign audiences alike.
“History under democracy is not just one color. People try to make history like a ruler. Straight. I don’t agree with that, because the source of history should come from different sides, different opinions and different interests,” he says.
“If there is only one color, other people will be marginalized. The historical viewpoint of the most people, or of the strongest group, will suppress that of minorities.”
For Putu Oka, the experience of a working Indonesian woman should carry as much value as that of historical figures like Kartini.
“We have to represent all kinds of perspectives. That way, our democracy as well as our history will have many colors.”
With disputed and traumatic narratives, translation becomes especially challenging.
In Spaces, Foulcher had to find words that would communicate the author’s experience, which sometimes required him to look beyond the literal meaning of words in Bahasa Indonesia.
“Where it becomes ‘hard’ of course is being careful not to sensationalize, to think carefully about what the author is saying, and make a judgment about how confrontational the text should be in English,” Foulcher says.
History and politics in Putu Oka’s recent work as well as questions of translation will be the focus of panels accompanying the launch of Spaces at the Goethe-Institut.
Listening to Putu Oka’s stories and discussing their implications is itself an effort to democratize history. It is also an assertion that someone who suffered decades of gross abuse has a voice with value.
“So who am I? Before October 1965 I was a secondary school teacher, a poet and a journalist. Now? A victim? A scapegoat? A survivor?,” the narrator of Spaces asks the audience during the speech that opens the novel.
“What’s clear is that I’m a human being, just like all of you in this hall.” (ste)
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Spaces: Reflections on a Journey will be available online at lontar.org beginning on Oct. 10.
