The quotation is from one of the most memorable scenes in James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. We are in Barney Kiernan’s pub in Dublin on June 16, 1904 and “the Citizen”, a grandiloquent, puffed-up, super patriot, is holding court at the bar.

As he lists the glories of Ireland’s past, including the somewhat unlikely Irish heroes of Charlemagne and Christopher Columbus, it is clear that the target of his bombast is Leopold Bloom. Bloom is a Dublin-born Jew, and therefore in the eyes of the Citizen, probably not a real Irishman at all.

The scene is redolent of its time and place, early 20th century Ireland. A society riven by questions of nationalism and ethnicity, that would later explode in a decade of political turbulence and violence, and which led eventually to the creation of an independent Ireland.

So it might seem somewhat incongruous that the above quotation was part of a recitation, performed with a vibrant warmth, in the marble and glass foyer of the World Trade Centre in Central Jakarta on the evening of June 14, by Laksmi DeNeefe Suardana, Indonesian-Australian model, fashion designer, UNICEF activist and 2022 Puteri Indonesia winner.

The occasion was the celebration of Bloomsday, as the anniversary of Bloom’s day-long peregrination around Dublin city center has become known, held by the Embassy of Ireland in Indonesia. Bloomsday is a global celebration of Irish literature, or more specifically Irish literature in the English language.

It is perhaps a sad irony of Irish history that while the Irish language has largely, although by no means entirely, disappeared from day-to-day use and much of its great Gaelic literary works have been lost in time, the Irish have produced a host of superlative novelists, dramatists and poets who fill the pantheon of English literature.

As the Irish Ambassador to Indonesia, Padraig Francis, listed in his introductory remarks, although most assuredly without the braggadocio of the Citizen but certainly with a greater degree of accuracy, these writers include Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, WB Yeats, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, right down to Seamus Heaney, and indeed Sally Rooney, in our own day.

It was therefore appropriate that the readings from Ulysses should have been performed by Laksmi, given her family connections with Indonesia’s literary community and her own role in promoting literacy among young people in under-privileged communities across Indonesia.

Laksmi’s mother Janet, as the founder and director of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, needs little introduction but Laksmi has carved out her own position as a literacy activist.

She launched #LaksmiforLiteracy as part of her advocacy campaign for the Puteri Indonesia title, part of the Miss Universe competition, which she won in Jakarta on May 27, 2022.

Given her background she was imbued from an early age with a love for the written word and she later began teaching English to street kids. She remains to this day a passionate advocate of the importance of teaching literacy in order to allow all the nation’s children, and especially girls, to develop their true potential.

Interestingly, after the recitation Laksmi pointed out that she was also of Irish descent. Her grandparent, a DeNeefe, was born in Dublin, a part of the Belgian expatriate community in that city.

This being the case, she is another of the prominent offshoots of that busy little group, including portraitist, and contemporary of Joyce, Louis le Brocquy and legendary rocker and founder of the Live Aid charity Bob Geldof. Like the fictional Bloom, these immigrants and children of immigrants have added to the mix that still makes Dublin such a diverse and dynamic city today.

The Bloomsday event was co-sponsored by Bookhive and Periplus Bookstore, which provided gift books, including copies of Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners, to all participants.

The evening was, as usual, marked by the generous hospitality of the Irish Embassy in Jakarta, and lubricated by a selection of libations, including a famous dark beer that is as much an integral part of Dublin lore as Leopold Bloom himself. Slainte.

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