Unlocking Indonesia Through An Exploration of Its Literature | C.W. Watson

Visitors attending the Indonesia Book Fair 2011 in Senayan, South Jakarta. With
so much Indonesian literature being translated, it has become increasingly easy for
expatriates to learn more about their adopted country. (JG Photo/Yudhi Sukma Wijaya)

“Reading novels is an excellent way of getting to know something about a country when one is newly arrived, doesn’t know much about it, and is going to be spending some time there. Certainly this was my experience coming to Indonesia for the first time some decades ago.

Only at that time I was hampered by the fact that there were few novels — only ones by Mochtar Lubis as far as I’m aware — that had been translated into English or any other foreign language which I could read.

I had to learn Indonesian first before I could start reading the literature and it took me a year of hard work before I could comfortably read fiction.

But the hard work paid off, and I plunged into all the novels and short stories that I could lay my hands on (not always easy to obtain at that time) and found myself entering a new world, one which bore an ambivalent relationship to the one that I had learned about over a year of personal experience, bemused observation and animated conversation with friends and mentors about recent history and the place of religion and culture in Indonesian society.

One of the reasons for the ambivalence was that in fact there had been very few novels published between 1962 and 1972, so there was nothing describing contemporary events. What I was reading then, constituted the reflections, mediated through the fiction of writers from the period before 1962, a historical period of about 50 years, since it was only around 1910 that novels and fiction began to circulate widely in densely populated areas in the archipelago.

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