TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Trace of history: Author Iksaka Banu on coming full circle
Moving forward: Author Iksaka Banu tries to move beyond a polarized historical narrative in his works
Change Size
Moving forward: Author Iksaka Banu tries to move beyond a polarized historical narrative in his works. (JP/Sebastian Partogi)
The year 2019 comes to a close on a high note for 55-year-old Indonesian author Iksaka Banu, known for writing historical fiction chronicling the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia.
In mid-October, he won the Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa literary prize’s prose category for his 2019 short story anthology Teh dan Pengkhianat (Tea and the Traitor). This was the second time he won the annual prize after also winning the award’s prose category in 2014 for yet another anthology called Semua Untuk Hindia (All for Hindia).
He also received the Education and Culture Ministry book and language development agency’s literary prize at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali in late October alongside fellow writers Dadang Ari Murtono and Ashadi Siregar.
As he received these awards, he was finalizing a book called Pangeran dari Timur (The Eastern Prince), cowritten with Kurnia Effendi, out via Bentang Pustaka publisher around the end of this year.
The book, a biographical fiction with the two authors working on a dual plot, chronicles the life of Indonesian late painter Raden Saleh (1811-1880), a Javanese-Arab artist who once enjoyed a successful career abroad, including in the Netherlands.
The upcoming book, which was over 20 years in the making, was actually the catalyst that had blown Iksaka’s mind open to stories from the Dutch colonial era.
Born in Yogyakarta on Oct. 7, 1964, Iksaka first published short stories as a child in Kompas newspaper’s children’s section and teen magazine Kawanku between 1974 and 1976.
He also tried his hands at drawing comic strips. Upon graduating from the Design and Visual Arts School of the Bandung Technology Institute (ITB) in West Java, he freelanced as an artistic director for several advertising agencies.
His work led him to abandon literary writing altogether for many years. It was not until he took a hiatus in 2000 that he started to write short stories again, which were published in several publications, like women’s magazine Femina, literary journal Horison and Koran Tempo newspaper.
It was at a secondhand book bazaar in the Utan Kayu Community cultural center in East Jakarta sometime in 1999 that he discovered an old catalog for a Raden Saleh painting exhibition in Jakarta. The catalog displayed the legendary painter’s works along with passages quoted from historical books about the man.
Iksaka said he was captivated not just by the beautiful paintings, but also by stories of the maestro’s life, including the controversies — whether he was a nationalist or a colonialist bootlicker.
This piqued Iksaka’s curiosity to learn more about the dynamics during the colonial period in Indonesia, which ended with World War II.
He started buying several books, including Adolf Heuken’s Tempat-tempat Bersejarah di Jakarta (Historical Sites in Jakarta, Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 2000) and Ide Anak Agung Gde Agung’s Bali pada Abad XIX (19th Century Bali, Gadjah Mada University Press, 1989).
From then on, he continued pursuing the subject, only to discover the “Indonesian victims” vs “Dutch invaders” polarization that had pervaded historical narratives on the colonial period in Indonesia had failed to capture the period’s complexity, such as the presence of Dutch civilians who sympathized with Indonesians and on the other side, Indonesians who sided with the Dutch.
His prose tries to distinguish itself from similar historical fiction pieces chronicling the Dutch colonial period by portraying the complex dynamics of civilian life during that era.
“I don’t always write about the big names — [General Simon] Spoor, [Hendrik Merkus] de Kock or [Herman Willem] Daendels. I also write about the common people trapped at the wrong place in the wrong time, including coffee and shoe merchants,” Iksaka said.
He would take some historical events from the history books he had read and insert fictitious characters to add more flavor to them.
For instance, in one story for Semua untuk Hindia, he writes about a Dutch couple who was stripped nude and whipped at a town hall as punishment for allegedly engaging in morally indecent behavior at a time when Christian Puritanism was at its peak.
Unfortunately, his works have been misinterpreted by many readers who felt that he sympathized too much with the Dutch characters in his stories.
Iksaka said he was trying to jump beyond a polarized historical narrative in order to help Indonesians let go of any historical grudges so that we could move forward.
“We can honor the legacy of the Dutch culture — including a more liberal form of society that we absorbed from the liberal Dutch politicians who ruled in the 20th century — while also honoring our intellectuality as well. Many brilliant and prominent Indonesians lived during the Dutch era, including Raden Saleh and the West Sumatran entrepreneur Agus Muhsin Dasaad,” he said.
Iksana said he has now retired from the advertising world.
“The advertising world required us to work long, stressful hours, drinking many cups of coffee and smoking incessantly; some of my colleagues have suffered from heart attacks,” he said.
He has become a full-time writer, returning to a career he started early in childhood and occasional graphic designer while living with his family in East Jakarta.
That, along with the completion of his Raden Saleh novel, has brought him full circle as a writer. (ste)
