Many contemporary Indonesian authors are fascinated by and even draw on Latin American literature. And the big question is, can they influence their Latin American counterparts in the same way?

Mexico was a country Dea Anugrah only knew from books. The Indonesian author explored Mexico City’s gritty streets through Roberto Bolaño’s cutting prose, which also introduced him to more than a few Mexican drug lords alongside Juan Pablo Villalobos’s character Tochtli.

However, it was in August 2017, with a grant from the National Book Committee and a few Alejandro Zambra novels tucked in his bag, that he first set foot in Latin America.

“It felt like going home,” Dea said on a hot, dusty afternoon in Kemang, South Jakarta, when asked what it felt like to travel to such a culturally and linguistically different country.

He clarified his response by describing one of Bolaño’s short stories, Death of Ulises. Arturo Belano, the story’s main character and an alter ego of the author himself, finally returns home to Mexico City before attending a Book Fair in Guadalajara. The narrative begins with the words, “Belano, our dear Belano, returns to Mexico City”.

“When I got to the Mexico City airport for the first time, that thought just came to me,” Dea said.

If nothing else, the playful way in which Dea takes on the attitude of Bolaño’s fictional author in the telling of his own journey as a writer belies the intimacy of his relationship to Latin American fiction.

Dea is not alone in his fascination with the region’s literature. Indonesia, too, will follow in Bolaño’s footsteps when the National Book Committee, Gramedia and the Lontar Foundation attend the Guadalajara Book Fair this December.

The participation of three mainstream Indonesian institutions in the prominent book festival is a key moment in Indonesia’s literary relationship with Latin America. Over the past three years, Gramedia has released books by famous writers from Latin America’s “boom” generation, like Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez.

Marjin Kiri, an independent Jakarta publisher, preceded Gramedia in this focus and indeed has added more depth to the collection. Its catalog of translated literature curates cutting-edge voices from Latin America, such as Ana María Shua and Luís Sepúlveda.

Marjin Kiri editor Ronny Agustinus notes that many of Indonesia’s contemporary authors draw on the region’s literature. 

“The influence is very strongly felt if we read Eka Kurniawan’s earlier works. Beauty is a Wound is clearly an Indonesian version of Macondo,” Ronny says, citing the village setting of García Márquez’s famous 100 Years of Solitude.

“In later works, this influence appears with more subtlety. Man Tiger feels like Chronicle of a Death Foretold.”

Dea, meanwhile, is part of a small but vocal group of young urban writers for which Márquez serves as a door opening to the larger world of Latin American fiction.

Sabda Armandio, too, finds the hard-boiled urban detective stories of writers like Paco Ignacio Taibu more compelling than the rural narratives of magical realism.

Interest in Latin America is not a new phenomenon. Established poet Nirwan Dewanto has read the region’s literature for decades and suggests Indonesia has a long history of intellectual exchange with various Latin American nations.

“Our first president, Sukarno, was very close with Mexico,” Nirwan says.

Then, during the New Order, foundational Latin American thought found its way into Indonesia. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, essays on Liberation Theology and progressive political figures — including Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Salvador Allende — were widely discussed in Indonesia’s intellectual circles under the authoritarian regime.

“Borges’s influence here is also very big,” Nirwan continues. “For example, his notion that tradition is something universal, that it doesn’t have to do with geography, that it’s not bound to politics. Also, his statement that you have to create your own precursors. He says it’s not precursors that create you, but instead, you have to create them.”

There are shared histories between Indonesia and Latin America, which form as the basis for some attention toward this geographically distant tradition.

Ronny points out that many Latin American countries experienced United States-backed, anticommunist dictatorships, as Indonesia did. The creative ways of expressing historical trauma drive his interest in the region’s literature.

But Nirwan, whose taste in poetry lies in antilyrical verse from various cultural contexts, emphasizes that Latin American authors write in Spanish and Portuguese, the imperial tongues of their colonizers. Indonesia, in stark contrast, defined its own independent and, consequently, peripheral literary tradition.

“Latin America doesn’t have the same problems as we do in developing modernism from the periphery,” Nirwan says. “In my mind, by writing in Spanish and Portuguese, they are already at the pulse. They are already in Europe.”

Nirwan’s argument grows in importance as Indonesian representatives’ travel to Guadalajara this December.

If Indonesia simply absorbs Latin American influences without projecting its own voices in return, the structures of power that exist in Indonesia’s publishing relationship with Europe and the US might be reproduced across the southern hemisphere. The literature of colonizing languages enter Indonesia, but Indonesian literature itself does not find reciprocal attention abroad.

Eka is one of a few contemporary Indonesian writers whose works have been translated into Spanish. That new exposure is an opportunity for Latin America to consider Indonesian literary traditions.

“García Márquez’s generation was influenced by North American writers like Faulkner,” Ronny Agustinus says. “And then Latin America influenced the United States back. I’m curious about whether Eka can influence the younger generation of Latin American writers.” (ste)

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