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Southeast Asia Now

A man walking by a large poster in Tràng Tiền Plaza, Hanoi. Photo by Nguyen Quan.

Though diaCRITICS focuses on the stories, art, and voices of the Southeast Asian diaspora, we can’t forget that we (or our parents) left its shores not too long ago.

For many in the Vietnamese diaspora, the great migration came after 1975, when Saigon fell and the war ended. We left on boats, and most of us never looked back. And if we did look back, it was with a mixture of homesickness and gratitude: homesick for a fallen nation, gratitude for not having to live under those “commies.” Yet Vietnam continued without us.

Streets were renamed. Buildings were raised. Economies were built. Children, who didn’t come of age during the War, were born.

Our special issue, Southeast Asia Now, aims to highlight current art and stories from the region. Looking at Vietnam, we have a consideration of the fiction of Lynh Bacardi, whose transgressive work has been targeted for its vulgarity and shocking nature. Still, as Nguyễn Thanh-Tâm argues, there’s more than meets the eye in Barcardi’s art. Speaking of fiction and censorship, we have Hiền Trang’s “This is not romance fiction” (translated by the author), a meta-fictional commentary that is as playful as it is affective. Meanwhile, poet Nhã Thuyên imagines” a roaming street vendor, shouting by night, mimicking the rap song of rat-killer sellers, playing in loops” as she investigates the links between the Vietnamese language and Vietnamese personhood.

Beyond Vietnam, we present a poem by Filipino writer May Morales Dolis (translated by Eric Abalajon), a short story by Indonesian writer AS Laksana (translated by Pamela Allen), and a review of a photography exhibition covering a vast expanse of Southeast Asia.

We hope to give readers a better sense of Southeast Asia literature and art today.


Eric Nguyen is the Editor in Chief of diaCRITICS.

Stranger to the Country

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During the 2000s, state-free online literary magazines prevailed in Vietnam.[i] From tiền vệ to talawas to da màu, these transgressive magazines became inter-relational sites, an anarchistic playground for the Viet diaspora, where literal and figurative immigrants transgressed beyond the physical borders to join in a polyphony of voices. Though never explicitly labeled as “Viet magazines,” it is important to consider this typology of literature in the chronicle of Vietnam’s literature. The writer community that forms the basis of these online magazines has manifested a practice of subversive topics that query the abuse of governmental discretion and interrogate the institutionalized discourses that rule Vietnamese public spheres.

Among unconventional themes, the expression of pain in Lynh Bacardi’s work—the greatest depth of despair in lives of the social margins manifested—sheds light on what otherwise can be invisible to Vietnamese society. I further argue that her depictions of power dynamics, as well as one’s battles against personal struggles illuminated through extremity in content and vulgarity in language, can be considered a refusal to conform with propagandist literature.. In this essay, I analyze “Tre Rừng/Bamboo Forest” (2006), a short story representing Lynh Bacardi’s discernment as Vietnam moves toward industrialization and modernization.

A prominent name in the early 2000s, Lynh Bacardi is a translator and writer who dropped out of school in grade five. She considers free expression in literature a way to connect with reality. For Bacardi, contemporary writers should be among people and nature instead of being isolated from the outside world.[ii] Influenced by her contemporaries, Lynh Bacardi crafts a vocabulary of obscene words. These phrases are part of daily conversation: “cu giả chạy bằng pin”/fake battery-considered taboo in powered cock”[iii] or “thủng lồn/the pussy drilled wide open.”[iv]

Indeed, she was a member of Ngựa Trời/Skyhorse—a group of five female writers targeted by the “cultural police.” The group’s poetry anthology was condemned as “one reek of disgusting words,” and banning their writing was considered “not only the responsibility of relevant ministries but also the shared requirement of our society.”[v] For surveillance practitioners (cultural administrators), any language other than propaganda—the so-called nation-state discourses that have long instructed the public sphere—would be too radical to circulate in the public sphere. For that, many critics saw Lynh Bacardi as “linguistically flawed” for her art’s vulgarity and shocking nature.[vi]

However, vulgar language is crucial to Bacardi’s unmediated investigations of struggles, pain, instability, and alienation—what is inseparable from life. In “Bamboo Forest,” by depicting the life of an orphaned woman trying to make a living in the big city, Bacardi reveals “blind spots” in society as people mass-migrated from rural to urban areas during the economic reformation. Addressing power dynamics between man and woman, the rich and the poor, “Bamboo Forest” introduces an unsettling, turmoiled state of the people, lost in the country’s translation of development.

Bacardi strikes her readers by opening the story with a sex scene, a taboo in Vietnamese literature. The descriptions begin with a man’s quick, rough search for any possible drops of blood from the orphaned woman, the story’s narrator, but he can’t find any. The man, Quang, wanted to break a girl’s hymen as his wife, a shaman, said it would bless him with an affluent business.

“- Where is the blood, why isn’t there a drop of blood?
-What are you talking about?
-Why are you so dumb, is your mother just as stupid as you? Does she not tell you anything about virginity?”

By employing descriptions of a sex scene, Bacardi questions how, in Vietnamese tradition, virginity symbolizes a woman’s virtue and how, without it, a woman loses her dignity. In the feudal period, a prominent idiom was “Tam tòng tứ đức, thủ tiết thờ chồng,”[vii] meaning a virtuous woman listens to men in the household and remains celibate when her husband dies. To this day, the valorization of virginity as “cái ngàn vàng/the gold-worth belonging” of women is indispensable when speaking of Vietnam’s machinations of power in discourses of sexuality. As such, Quang weaponizes the vagina and exercises power against the narrator. The narrator in the story confronts Quang because she finds whatever blood he is looking for incomprehensible. Unbeknownst to the vortices of such discourses, she regards the assumed knowledge of the body as an uncharted, distant concept,[viii] for the first time, confronting a social construction of hegemonic power maintained by the patriarchy.

At the same time, however, she depends on Quang’s urban background to survive in the city. As she moves from rural to urban, she is hit by the bludgeon of reality. She contemplates:

“I need him [Quang], for having him I would never get enmeshed with the pile of identification paperwork that when applying anywhere would be solicited. I have never seen what identification paper looks like, they said it is a paper with a picture of mine stuck up. They ask for the birth certificate most often, I answer how could I know what to certify. They […] then closed the notebook not writing anything more.”

Caring for her blind brother in the absence of a functional family, the narrator is invisible to society. In an interview,[ix] Bacardi implicitly stated that images of a “fair” modern Vietnam are but imagined, prompting me to think: how can a country assert itself to be on the ladder to development, culturally or economically, while turning a blind eye to the marginalized? Under the discretionary power of the authority, many have been cornered to blind spots of existence, fictionally or not. The narrator in “Bamboo Forest” is vulnerable; she has little to no grasp of society, is an orphan without a birth certificate, and is a non-citizen alien of the country.

Not only that, her poor brother Thành gets into trouble. Having to work night shifts, she has a scrap dealer put her brother to sleep. One night, she figures out the “babysitter” lured him into a gangbang. A teenager going through puberty, the blind Thành may not have an image of the situation he was in, but the sexual excitement is deeply ingrained in his growing body. Immediately, the narrator moves away from the city to somewhere secluded. There, her torn life becomes even more twisted.

Coming home from work early one day, she realizes her lodging is empty, and Thành is nowhere to be found. After hours of searching, she finds Thành on a treetop, picking fruit in an animal-like manner. Another time, Thành chews the rope that ties him to a corner of the bed when his sister leaves for work. Soon, it becomes clear that the sexual intercourse with his so-called babysitter has made him more dysfunctional than ever; he acts frantic at night, and his erection keeps him up. The only way for the narrator to calm her brother down is to pretend she is Thành’s “babysitter” by faking their local accent and satisfying him at night:

“I will look at the moon and describe it to Thành, we then embrace when night falls, when the rows of forest bamboo rise high and the sun will shed itself behind the trees. Their shadows will bring down a net so tender that it feels safe, hence life will no longer be of such wear and tear.”

Each night after sex with her blood brother breathes into their life a sense of calmness, unruptured. Critic Thụy Khuê analyzes this image: “The two orphaned siblings, like the branches of the forest bamboo, grow in whatsoever axis.” The sun, like a scanning, voyeuristic, surveilling device, is halted by the high-rising forest of bamboo trees. The forest bamboo trees transform into a shield for these figurative exiles at the margins, away from the violence of life as they bodily cross the boundaries of the normative and the acceptable. As Thành’s body cannot ease down because of the erection, his sister operates the distorted roles of a sexual object and caretaker. She offers an extension of her seemingly broken body as a way to protect herself and her sibling from a society fraught with the manipulation of the vulnerable. From a sister, she has become a mother, then a sexual caretaker, engaged in triple-punch layers of identity.

To shatter discourses, a rejection of any social construction must come into play.[x] Bacardi makes the young woman in “Bamboo Forest” a peculiar subject as she undergoes an entirely definite-structure negation: infinite hymen blood each time she has sex with Thành. This description refutes all the claims and critiques accusing Lynh Bacardi of an overt gloominess in writing. Her uncanny storytelling leaves spaces for a rather optimistic interpretation. While society has gradually lost sympathy for one another and been imprisoned by social codes, the hymen of a woman at the periphery of society remains an infinite reservoir, full of freedom like her bottomless love for her brother.

There is a complex, beautifully poignant manifestation within this relationship that moves beyond incestual sex. These margins have found a way to exist, utterly immune to the normativity disorder and corruptions of our world through taboo love. Critics often call Bacardi’s works pornographic, exploiting sex scenes for attention. But her description of sex transcends such a gaze, informing us of unseen human possibility—Bacardi crafts visions of the marginalized, elucidating a life story so eerie that it seems make-believe. By now, Lynh Bacardi has instructed us an underworld of the marginalized, localizing the very identities caught in the net of invisibility.

Lynh Bacardi and her narrator are symbols of intermittent sounds, full of instability. They may be lost adrift, away from the attention of the public sphere. Still, as they toddle little by little, they are walking on despair that dares to dream and to live, even in the worst times, in an abyss where a flicker of hope is enough to be a religion to move forward, nonchalantly.

peer-reviewed by Nguyễn Quỳnh Chi


Nguyễn Thanh-Tâm (b.2006) works with translations, poetry and performance art. Her poetry has been featured or will be featured on The Offing and The Arkansas International. What she translates can be found at documenta fifteen, Miami Book Fair, Karachi Biennale.

 

 

[i] Hieu, T. The Rise and Fall of Avant-Garde Vietnamese Poetry in Online Literary Magazines during the Early Twenty-First Century.

[ii] Tác Giả và Tác Phẩm Lynh Bacardi. (n.d.).

[iii] Skyhorse (2005). Dự báo phi thời tiết |Weather-Free Forecast.

[iv] Lynh-Bacardi (2006). Tre Rừng | Forest Bamboo. Talawas.

[v] C. (2006, July 2). The abnormative anthology of the collective “Skyhorse”. The Electronic People’s Police Newspaper |Tập thơ quái đản của nhóm “Ngựa trời.” Báo Công an Nhân Dân Điện Tử.

[vi] Lynh-Bacardi. (2006, January). Chúa luôn cứu xét cho kẻ biết sám hối |God always absolves those who repent. Tiền Vệ.

[vii] Tam: three, tòng: deeds/principles, Tam Tòng: three principles a woman must uphold (as a child, she obeys her father; as a wife, she must obey her husband; as a widow, she must remain loyal to the deceased husband by being celibate). Tứ đức denotes the four key attributes of a woman in the Feudal Period: care-taking, beautiful, well-spoken, well-mannered.

[viii] Kristeva, J. (1986, November 19). The Kristeva Reader (T. Moi, Ed.).

[ix] Thụy-Khuê. (2008, November 12). Talking to Lynh Bacardi | Nói Chuyện Với Lynh Bacardi.

[x] Kristeva, J. (1981) “Oscillation between power and denial.”

Đây là một câu hỏi: Tôi viết tiếng Việt (một bài thơ mãi chưa xong)

(Tiếng rao đêm, theo điệu vè của người bán thuốc diệt chuột, lặp vòng.)

Việt này
______Việt nọ
Việt đó
______Việt đây
Việt tây
______Việt đông
Việt lông
______Việt lá
Việt cá
______Việt tôm
Việt xồm
______Việt trụi
Việt nổi
______Việt chìm
Việt chim
______Việt bướm
Việt sướng
______Việt đau
Việt giàu
______Việt úi
Việt tủi
______Việt hờn
Việt nhờn
______Việt nhám
Việt ẩm
______Việt ương
Việt mưa tuôn
______Việt nắng hửng
Việt cứng
______Việt mềm
Việt thêm
______Việt bớt
Việt trớt quớt
______Việt nghiêm trang
Việt làng
______Việt nước
Việt được
______Việt thua
Việt rùa
______Việt thỏ
Việt nỏ
______Việt tên
Việt đi đêm
______Việt về sáng
Việt chạng vạng
______Việt hoàng hôn
Việt khôn
______Việt khéo
Việt héo
______Việt tươi
Việt đười ươi
______Việt trăm trứng
Việt đá thúng
______Việt đụng nia
Việt rìa
______Việt lõi
Việt mở mang bờ cõi
______Việt lập hội trồng tre
Việt nguôi ngoai hái chè
______Việt kết bè lau sậy
Việt cậy
______Việt nhờ
Việt sờ
______Việt nắm
Việt đắm
______Việt mê
Việt huề
______Việt lãi
Việt cãi
______Việt im
Việt dìm
______Việt đẩy
Việt rẫy
______Việt ruồng
Việt truồng
______Việt kín
Việt nín
______Việt ồn
Việt dồn
______Việt giãn
Việt mãn nhãn
______Việt hẩm hiu
Việt phiêu
______Việt bạc
Việt ác
______Việt hiền
Việt điên
______Việt tỉnh
Việt nịnh
______Việt trung
Việt ung
______Việt nhọt
Việt vọt
______Việt lùi
Việt bùi ngùi
______Việt hớn hở
Việt lỡ
______Việt lầm
Việt mâm
______Việt đĩa
Việt ông địa
______Việt bà giời
Việt thôi nôi
______Việt miên viễn
Việt hẹn
______Việt thề
Việt quê
______Việt phố
Việt cuồng nộ
______Việt trầm ngâm
Việt mưa dầm
______Việt gió bấc
Việt nhặt
______Việt khoan
Việt ngoan
______Việt dữ
Việt cầm cự
______Việt xung phong
Việt ngồi không
______Việt lập cập
Việt hấp tấp
______Việt lừ đừ
Việt nhừ
______Việt sống
Việt mộng
______Việt mê
Việt dầm dề
______Việt thoăn thoắt
Việt nhát
______Việt lì
Việt bì
______Việt mỡ
Việt nợ
______Việt vay
Việt đầy
______Việt cạn
Việt hạn
______Việt tràn
Việt ngang Việt dọc
______Việt nam bắc đông tây
Việt này
______Việt nọ

________________________________________

Tiếng Việt chấm tôi: mi là người Việt.
Tiếng Việt phẩy tôi: mi là người Việt,
Tiếng Việt chấm phẩy tôi: mi là người Việt;
Tiếng Việt nhắc tôi: mi là người Việt!
Tiếng Việt nẹt tôi: mi chỉ là người Việt.
Tiếng Việt bẻ bai tôi: mi cũng là người Việt?
Tiếng Việt xướng danh tôi: mi không hổ danh người Việt!!!
Tiếng Việt càu nhàu tôi: mi rặt Việt!
Tiếng Việt rì rầm tôi: mi đặc Việt!
Tiếng Việt ai oán tôi: mi loãng Việt.

Tiếng Việt và tôi.
Tiếng Việt nhưng tôi.
Tiếng Việt những tôi.
Tiếng Việt lẻ tôi.

Tiếng Việt bọc tôi, tôi im lìm Việt.
Tiếng Việt bóc tôi, tôi lì lợm Việt.


Không thể thế nào cũng được. Xếp vào hộp Vô Loài.


Theo đường lông ngỗng, lần dấu những xe tải đông lạnh. Ô, hương phở tỏa bốn phương, xa và rộng.

Chữ đượm mùi ngây, đến nỗi tôi tuyệt vọng muốn trữ nó, cho một triển lãm trong bảo tàng mùa đông, sắp sửa,

 

 

Note: This poem is also presented on a digital display panel on the balcony above the main entrance of Bürgeramt Rathaus Tiergarten Berlin, as a part of Displayed Words project, curated by Fabian Schöneich, Nan Xi and Lou Ferrand, CCA Berlin and Mathias Zeiske, DAAD. On view from December 2023 until 30 April 2024. https://displayedwords.org/

[read English translation]


Nhã Thuyên secludedly anchors herself to Hà Nội, Việt Nam and stays within borders of languages, translations and poetic exchanges. Her most recent books are bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt with its English edition: un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry (Roofbook, USA, 2019) and moon fevers (Tilted Axis Press, UK, 2019). She’s been talking to walls and soliloquies some nonsense when having no other emergencies of life to deal with. Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) has been waiting to see the moon. She is unearthing her notebooks and rubbing her words in Berlin as a 2023 DAAD artist-in-Berlin fellow.

This is a question: I write in Vietnamese (a not-yet-done poem)

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(A roaming street vendor, shouting by night, mimicking the rap song of rat-killer sellers, playing in loops.)

Viet this
____________Viet that
Viet fast
____________Viet slow
Viet no
____________Viet yes
Viet wet
____________Viet dry
Viet anti
____________Viet support
Viet sword
____________Viet shield
Viet healed
____________Viet hurt
Viet alert
____________Viet drowsy
Viet mighty
____________Viet helpless
Viet gorgeous
____________Viet loathsome
Viet drum
____________Viet stick
Viet mix
____________Viet purify
Viet sigh
____________Viet laugh
Viet half
____________Viet full
Viet bull
____________Viet ox
Viet inbox
____________Viet spam
Viet instagram
____________Viet facebook
Viet cook
____________Viet chew
Viet bamboo
____________Viet lotus
Viet ambitious
____________Viet easy
Viet monkey
____________Viet one-hundred-eggs
Viet legs
____________Viet hands
Viet dance
____________Viet kick
Viet homesick
____________Viet wandering
Viet bridge-burning
____________Viet building reed-boats
Viet untying the ropes
____________Viet expanding the land
Viet and
____________Viet but
Viet hut
____________Viet mansion
Viet even
____________Viet rough
Viet love
____________Viet care
Viet share
____________Viet take
Viet chưng cake
____________Viet bánh mì
Viet sushi
____________Viet fish sauce
Viet loss
____________Viet win
Viet spleen
____________Viet bliss
Viet abyss
____________Viet mountain
Viet dragon
____________Viet phoenix
Viet width
____________Viet length
Viet strength
____________Viet weakness
Viet virus
____________Viet penicillin
Viet villain
____________Viet goddess
Viet heartless
____________Viet gentle
Viet trouble
____________Viet comfort
Viet black tooth
____________Viet long hair
Viet where
____________Viet what
Viet gut
____________Viet skin
Viet thin
____________Viet thick
Viet realistic
____________Viet fictional
Viet typical
____________Viet unorthodox
Viet cock
____________Viet hen
Viet then
____________Viet past
Viet breakfast
____________Viet dinner
Viet rigour
____________Viet happiness
Viet genius
____________Viet dummy
Viet mercy
____________Viet attack
Viet get back
____________Viet go away
Viet they
____________Viet us
Viet minus
____________Viet extra
Viet umbrella
____________Viet paddy hat
Viet combat
____________Viet make peace
Viet please
____________Viet curse
Viet earth
____________Viet sea
Viet key
____________Viet lock
Viet sidewalk
____________Viet middle
Viet swindle
____________Viet honest
Viet split
____________Viet gather
Viet forever
____________Viet one minute
Viet west
____________Viet east
Viet at least
____________Viet wholly
Viet omnipresent here and there
____________Viet of yore Viet of now Viet whatever not yet
Viet this
____________Viet that

The Vietnamese language punctuates me: you are a Viet person.
The Vietnamese language commas me: you are a Viet person,
The Vietnamese language semicolons me: you are a Viet person;
The Vietnamese language proclaims me: you are a Viet person!
The Vietnamese language frightens me: you are only a Viet person.
The Vietnamese language ridicules me: you are also a Viet person?
The Vietnamese language champions me: no wonder you are a Viet person!!!
The Vietnamese language goes on at me: you are wholly Viet!
The Vietnamese language grumbles at me: you are solidly Viet!
The Vietnamese language feels bitter about me: You are liquefying Viet.

The Vietnamese language and me.
The Vietnamese language but me.
The Vietnamese language plural-me.
The Vietnamese language singular-me.

The Vietnamese language enshrouds me, I am soundlessly Viet.
The Vietnamese language ploughs me, I am tenaciously Viet.


This can not be what-ever. Classifying it into the Without-Species box.


I am following your goose-feather route, tracing the refrigerated lorries. Oh, the fragrance of phở noodle keeps spreading all over, far and wide.

The word smells so innocent that I desperately want to archive it for a museum winter exhibition, forthcoming,

 

Note: This poem is also presented on a digital display panel on the balcony above the main entrance of Bürgeramt Rathaus Tiergarten Berlin, as a part of Displayed Words project, curated by Fabian Schöneich, Nan Xi and Lou Ferrand, CCA Berlin and Mathias Zeiske, DAAD. On view from December 2023 until 30 April 2024. https://displayedwords.org/

[đọc tiếng việt]


Nhã Thuyên secludedly anchors herself to Hà Nội, Việt Nam and stays within borders of languages, translations and poetic exchanges. Her most recent books are bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt with its English edition: un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry (Roofbook, USA, 2019) and moon fevers (Tilted Axis Press, UK, 2019). She’s been talking to walls and soliloquies some nonsense when having no other emergencies of life to deal with. Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) has been waiting to see the moon. She is unearthing her notebooks and rubbing her words in Berlin as a 2023 DAAD artist-in-Berlin fellow.

Bulldozer

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Excavators at mining area in South Kalimantan, Indonesia. Photo by Dominik Vanyi.

I felt as if my father had woken me that night and started talking to me. It was just a feeling, nothing more, that he was there in front of me again, peeling sunflower seeds with his teeth, with the occasional sharp intake of breath because of the saltiness that makes your lips and tongue swell up a bit.

We often used to sit together like that. On the table there’d always be a big pot of tea that would get topped up with hot water again and again. I ate my sunflower seeds the same way he did, with the same occasional intake of breath.

My father was a lovely man.

“How did you go in your test this afternoon, Alit?” he’d ask.

“Ninety.”

“Wow, you could be a doctor.”

“Should have been a hundred, dad, it’s a shame I didn’t do so well on question five.”

“Be more focused next time.”

“Yeah, next time I’ll pay more attention.”

“Ninety’s good though, Alit. With a score of ninety, the world’s your oyster.”

His ambition for me was that I be a successful person who earned plenty of money. He’d ask me the same question over and again: “What do you want to be, Alit?” And I’d answer, robotically, “A doctor, dad!”

I don’t know how long I kept up that automatic response. But when I was approaching my thirteenth birthday we got evicted from our house. I was in second year of junior high school. The eviction meant that my schooling was seriously disrupted. I rarely attended school and I had a hard time keeping up with the lessons. For a while we were living in a tent, which really did make me lose all interest in school. And of course, my grades were terrible.

Our neighbours suffered the same fate; they raged like wounded animals. The men clenched their jaws ‘til they resembled wooden statues, and their eyeballs were like balls of fire. The women took off their clothes and stood naked in front of the bulldozers that were going to destroy their homes. But the bulldozers weren’t about to desist just because the men had turned into wooden statues and the women had shed their clothes. We still had to leave our village.

My father seemed more sombre than usual but he never became angry. He didn’t fly into a rage like the others in the neighbourhood; he was like the calm surface of a lake, and I could never fathom what turmoil might be going on inside him. He warned my mum not to go taking her clothes off.

“So what’s better, dad, this land or the land we’ve been promised as compensation?”

“Do you know why those women were prepared to take their clothes off?” he asked me in return.

“Because they don’t want to move,” I replied. “None of us wants to move. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, because they don’t want to move.”

“Is it because the compensatory land is no good?”

He just grunted. I pretended to know what he meant.

“So why won’t you let mum get naked?” I pressed him.

“Because it’s too much for these poor eyes, Alit! It’s not right for a woman to take her clothes off in public.”

“But shouln’t we be resisting the eviction dad? They can’t just arbitrarily demolish our home.”

“You’re right that the eviction must be resisted. But do you really believe you can block the path of a bulldozer?”

It’s true, you can’t block the path of a bulldozer. My father said it’s because a bulldozer doesn’t have feelings. He was of the view that we all hold our own fate in our hands. That’s why he wasn’t too distressed. He never got caught up in the drawn-out rage and grief that accompanied whatever disaster had befallen us. What was there to complain about when everything is written on the lines of every individual’s hands? Prolonged grief, in his view, was tantamount to challenging God’s will.

“Does God not like being challenged?” I asked.

“Not even the village chief likes being challenged,” he replied.

Eventually our village disintegrated. People who’d previously been neighbours now occupied compensatory plots of land far removed from each other. Having at one point been a site of frenzy, tension and angry outbursts, our village now lay completely empty.

My father constantly reminded me never to curse or rue my fate, however bad it might be.

After we’d been living in a tent for several weeks, he moved us to my grandfather’s house. The day we began packing up our belongings did not go without incident. My youngest sister was sick, and the second youngest lost her favourite cat. She was refusing to go anywhere without that cat.

“We’ll get another cat when we get to your grandfather’s place,” my father cajoled her.

My sister was hard to convince. She sulked all night until she eventually succumbed to sleep, outside the tent. My father picked her up and took her into the tent, away from the steamy night air.

“You’ll really like it at your grandfather’s place, Alit,” he said to me.

“Maybe. As long as grandma doesn’t talk too much.”

“I’m going to build us a house on the adjacent vacant block. And then behind the house we’ll build a chicken coop. Just you wait, Alit! We’ll never be abandoned on God’s earth. So quit your grumbling. Just be grateful for both sadness and happiness. We call it grace.”

At that time I didn’t know whether or not he still harboured ambitions for me to be a doctor. He’d stopped asking me. Maybe it was a question he’d buried deep in his heart.

Grandpa’s house was a long way from my school, so I moved schools to a closer one. But the problem was that I thought my new school was far inferior to my previous one. I told my father that my old school was nicer, everyone was friendly and the teachers were all great. But despite my many complaints about my new school I still managed to pass.

After graduating from junior high school, I moved up to senior high and made every effort to get good grades again. I studied really hard. But the bulldozers were like devils that had been released from hell. They pursued us constantly and once again evicted us when I was preparing for my final exams. The yard of grandpa’s house, where we’d been living, was acquired for road-widening. So we all crowded into the one house with grandpa and grandma.

I really hated living with grandma. During the day she just talked non-stop and at night her constant hacking cough pierced my eardrums. It was like sleeping in the jungle and hearing the howling of a wolf which, if I let my guard down, I was afraid would claw at my throat.

And my father remained placid, like the tranquil surface of a lake.

“God is prosperous, Alit,” he would say. He spoke very slowly but I could hear a whirlpool-like roar below the surface. It was as if he was talking to himself. As if he was trying to convince himself.

After that I’d occasionally catch him looking despondent. He’d still remind us not to blame God for the fate we had to endure, but I really think he was reminding himself not to curse the bad luck that was pursuing him. Contrary to everything he was always saying, he transformed into a very dejected man. And his sadness was like a swamp that slowly sucked the life force out of him. I could see his body getting swallowed up, his hands waving as if he was hoping to be rescued. He died before I was strong to pull him out of that pool of sadness.

I really didn’t want to recall all that dreadful sorrow. But there it was, my father had suddenly appeared. My bedside clock told me it was 2 am. I really did feel that he had woken me up, wanting to talk. I told myself that maybe it was actually my wife, accidentally nudging me. I tried to close my eyes again, only to realise that she wasn’t there beside me.

She appeared a few moments later carrying a big glass of water. It was stiflingly hot that night; rain was surely on its way.

“I felt as if your father woke me up just now,” she blurted out before I’d had a chance to open my mouth. “He wanted to talk. And it was weird, Alit, it was as if we were old friends. Even though, as you know, I never met him. He died long before we were married.”

“What did he say?”

“Let me see …” She thought for a moment but gave up. “I can’t remember exactly but his voice was so clear. What was that all about do you think?”

“You can’t remember anything at all?”

“This often happens to me. Alit. I have trouble remembering what I’ve just been dreaming about.”

I wanted to tell her that I too felt as if I’d just been woken up by my father, but I changed my mind. If I told her, we wouldn’t get back to sleep till dawn, because she’d want to keep chatting. She’d like nothing better than turning our coincidental experiences that night into a mystical conversation. Why had we both felt we’d been woken up by him at the same time? I knew that the answer to that question would involve hours of discussion.

“You can’t remember a thing?” I asked again, trying to sound casual.

“Hmm … only a bit and it’s very hazy. If I’m not mistaken he asked us to go to Bagas and Yuni’s place. We haven’t been there for ages.”

How could it be? He had asked me the same thing. But I restrained myself; I didn’t say anything to my wife.

The next day I called in to see Bagas and Yuni on my way home from work. I thought it was important to see them as soon as I could, given our father’s request to both me and my wife. Both my younger siblings were still living in my grandfather’s house. He’d died a year after our father. So now, with grandma, there were just the three of them there. Grandma was still coughing all night long. Hers was an incurable illness it seemed.

“They’re going to demolish dad’s grave because of the arterial road project,” said Bagas when I got there. “I got the notification letter yesterday. He’ll have to be moved somewhere else. And if we don’t move him ourselves, well, the grave will just be gone.”

It was as if a low-flying vulture had begun tearing at my heart and my liver. I could almost hear the grousers of the bulldozer as it thumped out from its hellhole in pursuit of my father. As he used to say, we all hold our own fate in our hands. And my father? He was still being pursued by bulldozers. Even when the time came for him to rest, those creatures were still chasing him.

I reached for the notification letter that Bagas was holding out to me. I screwed it up and threw it into the gutter. The gutter is the only place for bad news.


AS Laksana was born in 1968 in Semarang, Indonesia. He is a graduate of the Department of Communication, Gadjah Mada University. He was founder and editor of DeTIK until the tabloid was banned in 1994. His first book, Podium DeTIK, is a collection of weekly columns he wrote for DeTIK. His fiction works include the short story anthologies Bidadari yang Mengembara (2004), Murjangkung, Cinta yang Dungu dan Hantu-Hantu (2013), and Si Janggut Mengencingi Herucakra (2015). The first two books were selected by Tempo magazine as the best literary books in their respective years of publication. The last book earned him a literary award from Badan Bahasa. He has also written two novels, Medan Perang and Ular di Tapak Tangan, each serialized in Koran Tempo (Jakarta) and Suara Merdeka. From 2009 to 2018, he wrote a weekly column titled “Ruang Putih” for the daily newspaper Jawa Pos.

Pamela Allen is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She publishes in Indonesian and English and is a widely published literary translator. She began her work as a literary translator when she was an undergraduate student, first tackling a novel by the respected author Achdiat K. Mihardja. She has been translating for Lontar since 1992. In 1995, she was awarded her first translation grant, from the Australia Indonesia Institute, for the translating of an anthology of short stories by Indonesian women, published by Longman as Women’s Voices. She is the translator of the highly acclaimed novel Saman by Ayu Utami. Since 2008 she has been a translator for the annual Ubud Writers Festival anthology, celebrating the work of emerging Indonesian writers. She has been a mentor for emerging Indonesian translators. In 2019, she was the winner of the AALITRA (Australian Association for Literary Translation) Translation Award. In 2023 she won third prize in the AAPW (Australasian Association of Writing Programs) translation competition.

Curse

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Balintawak Market, Philippines. Photo by Jonal Dela Cruz.

A curse crashed into the town’s shores.
Light collided with the huge rocks;
It came from the mountains and forest,
Exploded in the surface of the sea,
Dived into the bed of cold and darkness.
Festering on the side of the lagidlid,
Eventually their fins were cut off.
Until final bubbles came out from their mouths.
The manitis are staring at each other,
Their alertness completely gone.
They can no longer return.
The ayungin were spared from the curse.
Stopped swimming once caught in the net;
Then, cooked in a clay pot with vinegar.
When served the entire family was poisoned.

 

Note: Names of local fishes are retained; lagidlid (Caranx oblongus), manitis (Parupeneus multifasciatus), ayungin (Leiopotherapon plumbeus)


May Morales Dolis grew up in Marinduque and now resides in Bacoor, Cavite. She is the author of the chapbook Ayon Kay Kid Talaba (2023). Translations of her poems have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation.

 

 

Eric Abalajon is currently a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Visayas, Iloilo. His translations have appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Four Way Review, Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, and Tripwire: a journal of poetics. His debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Flowesong Press. He lives near Iloilo City, Philippines.