Storytelling, Indonesian Literature and a Lost Soul | Tika Y. Sukarna

“In Indonesia, literary works as they were introduced in our school system is a list that we were never given the time to read but only to know how to answer correctly on multiple choice and fill in the dots exams. Nobody reads them, not even the Bahasa Indonesia teacher whose job was to dictate to us the names of who was forced to marry whom, what eventual disease caused their ultimate doom, in what year it was written, by which class of author and in what era.

A nation originating from a people known for the depth and richness of our art and cultural heritage, I find this systematic pruning of our stories paradoxical. It is as if we had been maliciously robbed, our souls exorcised, we have become just remnants, empty shells of the great people we once were. A people who once braved and navigated the oceans even before Marco Polo or Columbus, who had the tenacity and insight to gather layer upon layer of perfectly chiseled stone slabs that made our Candi Borobudur, who carefully weaved the golden and silvery threads in our Kain Tapis, spun the melody of water and birds into our Kecapi Suling, and infused the souls of the unseen into the majestic chime of our bronze Gamelans.”

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