I've come across a book in the bestsellers' stack in a large Gramedia outlet in one of Yogya's many gleaming new shopping malls (my impression is that Jalan Sudirman alone must have about half a dozen of them. The Jakart Post today - Friday - has mentioned shopping malls in Jakarta as a sign of Indonesia's status as an emerging economy. The country does feel like it is on the brink of major social change). The book is called Atlantis, and it is by a Brazilian physicist and geologist, Arysio Nunes dos Santos, who claims that Atlantis was in today's Indonesia. I had never seen the book before. It has of course been translated into Bahasa. From the English, not from Portuguese (I'm not sure the book was published in Brasil).
The idea is simply too appealing in an imaginative way. What a great link between Brasil and Indonesia - nothing short of a famous myth, Atlantis. This beats Prambanan and Borobudur eyes closed. This also links nicely to literary Tamil imaginings of Lemuria in the Indian Ocean. What I also find attractive in this story is the fact that imagined continents in reality seem only one step away from places like Prambanan or Borobudur - or Ratu Boko for that matter. These are concrete places but it turns out they are not entirely unlike products of fantasy for us because we know so little about them that is concrete. Margana told me he likes walking around Ratu Boko and imagining what it might have been like. Locals have imagined a kraton there. In fact, we could perhaps also imagine it was an ancient Atlantis-related site, or a Lemurian colony. As after islamisation it fell into oblivion, and its history has therefore vanished from local memory as well as from the records, it is not terribly unlike a sunken city. Actually, Jawa may have sunken cities - only, they have probably sunk in lava, not in the ocean. They are however as lost to us as cities that might have sunk into the ocean. I find imagining the sunken history of Jawa and the Indian Ocean at large a very appealing exercise. Ratu Boko is in fact more appealing than Borobudur and perhaps also Prambanan - this last is visible from the hilltop of Ratu Boko's ruins - because it is even more obscure and isolated. It is an entirely human creation, yet we can only relate to it mostly through our own imagination as evidence, archaeological or otherwise, is so thin on the ground. Margana mentions however some comparative work done about it in the Netherlands, and including a similar site in Sri Lanka.
In the same bookshop I also find Pawèsti Tanpa Idhèntiti. It is a romané by Suparto Brata. Quite thick too. It is the first time I ever come across a Javanese novel - in Javanese, that is. It has been recently published. I am not sure what the title means. It might mean women without identity. However, I don't really know. I asked about half a dozen people at the Republic Café next to the Inna Garuda hotel and nobody knew the meaning for sure. I wonder whether that means they are all from outside Yogya originally or that the Javanese chosen by the novelist is not really shared by the people who were around me that evening. Yogya is a place full of mysteries.
I see this as a good omen: a Brazilian book and a Javanese novel in the same afternoon. One about an imaginary continent brought to life, the other an imaginative work in a language that is opaque to me (even though it is written in Latin script, as recommended by Dewantara in part so that foreigners might take an interest in it).
Things improve even more later on: I come across Paulo Coelho's Sang Alkemis, translated from the English (I assume). O Alquemista. The Paulo Coelho craze is however more recent in Indonesia than it is in Brasil and elsewhere. I don't like his writing and could never finish reading one of his books (Sang Alkemis included), but it is almost reassuring to see his book all over the world wherever I go. He is often the lone Brazilian author in any book shelf. He has become a member of the prestigious Academia Brasileira de Letras, our most revered literary institution founded just over a hundred years ago in Rio de Janeiro by no one other than Machado de Assis. Machado is considered the greatest writer Brasil has ever had. He has been translated in Egypt into Arabic but I have never seen his works in Indonesian. Just as nobody in Brasil seems to know any Indonesian authors - not even Pram has been translated in Brasil so far - I guess nobody in Indonesia knows any Brazilian authors either, Paulo Coelho excepted. In an earlier era, Jorge Amado used to be the only Brazilian writer people would read all over the world. Gabriela, Clove & Cinammon as well as Captains of Sand were famous titles about life in the cocoa-producing region of southern Bahia in the 1920s and 1930s. However, as he was an openly communist author, I doubt Indonesia ever followed Vietnam's example and translated any of his works. A more obscure author is Gilberto Freyre, whose Casa-Grande & Senzala, though no bestseller, is a revered historiographical-cum-literary work about Brasil's colonial history. It is was first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1933. It is still in print there and still spawns translations in countries as far apart as Japan and Romania. Again, however, Indonesians - not to mention Malaysians - don't know him.
Finally I come across quite a gem: nothing other than the ten Mafalda volumes of cartoons by Quino. I used to read them in Brasília back in 1974 when I first visited my father and his second wife in their new apartment in SQS 303 (that is a residential address, by the way). Back then Mafalda had never been translated and I therefore had to read it in Spanish. Of course, Quino, being Argentinean (from Mendoza province right next to the Andes and the Chilean border), wrote only in Argentinean, a language many consider to have deviated so much from standard Spanish as to make it into a separate, distinct language. I tried very hard to read the cartoon strips with a dictionary my father had but did not always succeed. The dictionary of course only had standard Spanish vocabulary in it. In fact, I was so attracted to Mafalda that Quino's creation is almost single-handedly responsible for my having learned Spanish well, something that was not very common in Brasil in those days. After Mafalda I started reading Argentinean authors such as Borges and Cortázar, and then all the other Spanish-language Latin American authors of renown and also quite a few not so famous ones. In fact, Spanish soon became my second language. I ended up teaching it for a while to other Brazilians at a fascist creation from the time of General Franco, namely, the local branch of Instituto de Cultura Hispánica (now transmogrified in the democratic era into Instituto Cervantes).
Quino has a mordant humour. Mafalda, though a child, also has a very sharp critical consciousness that was quite appealing to my fourteen-year old self bored with my family's bourgeois life in the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship (Quino started publishing right before the 1976 military coup in Argentina that brought down Isabelita Perón's shaky government. By then Brasil had had a military dictatorship for over a decade and Uruguay for about three years). Also, Buenos Aires in the 1970s - the setting of Quino's Mafalda stories - was a very attractive place for a Brazilian teenager. It was sufficiently similar for me to identify with it thoroughly, and exotic enough to seem appealing. Quino depicted children trapped in the bourgeois life of urban families not unlike my own. But of course Quino's children were often in fact very unchild-like little monsters with their sharp tongues and opinionatedness. Their aspirations however were quite genuine and quite recognizable: more cosmopolitanism, a better life, better governance, less imperialism. A life without inflation and economic instability was also part of the picture.
Now Mafalda has arrived in Indonesia. The publisher, Gramedia, is very coy as to whether the strips have been translated from the Argentinean original. I doubt very much that has been the case. The language however seems very colloquial all the same, and therefore I have a hard time reading it as I am not used to colloquial urban Indonesian. In a way, my difficulty is similar to that I experienced back in the mid-1970s when I could not read Mafalda easily because of the colloquial Argentinean in which it was written. One interesting detail: Mafalda is still read in both Argentina and Brasil, not to mention dozens of other countries around the world, and in all kinds of languages too besides Bahasa. However, it has arrived in Indonesia only last year. I find this exceedingly interesting. Have Mafalda and Quino become through the years even more famous and therefore his renown has finally reached this country? Or has Mafalda finally been translated here because Indonesia is increasingly opening itself up to the world, and becoming ever wealthier? Mafalda is certainly a major South American cultural product of the past decades, particularly popular with certain sectors of the urban middle-classes (and a certain age group too), and it is therefore perhaps no wonder to learn that it has finally arrived in Indonesia.
Another possibility is that it has arrived here because it resonates with local reality: indeed, my impression of the little I have seen of Indonesia (in fact, only Yogya and Solo so far, though Surabaya should come next) is that it is not wholly unlike Brasil and Argentina a couple of decades ago. Namely, it is a country with a recent, long and deep dictatorial past, a fledgling democracy, and full of cosmopolitan aspirations that remain unfulfilled because of economic oppression, bad government, and provincialism. Even imperialism is still here as the US courts the country openly in its somewhat vain fight against growing Chinese influence in the world. It is also a country that remains anti-communist to some degree. Besides, it is a country full of social criticism. Tan Malakka's work - Madilog, in three volumes - is in all bookshops. It was banned for many decades. I know his work because I could read it online in Brasil (I have even quoted from it - and translated the quote into Brazilian Portuguese for a book chapter I wrote. It is an excerpt where Malakka muses about the pre-colonial history of both Sumatra and Jawa). He was of course a noted communist. He got killed during the independence war, not far from where I am now (from what I remember, though I may be wrong). Indonesians have made an opera about him. It was recently on stage in Jakarta. It was however banned in another town in East Jawa, again not far from here. We have already made peace with our communists long ago and even occasionally elected them to office, especially as mayors and town councillors. Besides, this month the second president from the Workers' Party has been inaugurated (the party has now been in power for over two administrations in a row). Indonesia, just like Malaysia, is still grappling with its communist heritage.The Malaysian security apparatus, in fact, according to a colleague, still seems to think Communism may be a danger. In Brasil, the days when passports where issued with a warning saying they could not be used to enter Cuba are long past (in fact, Brazilians often love Cuba; the culture is very close to ours in many ways and the people are great. I have never been there).
Mafalda and I therefore have something in common. We are both new arrivals from our part of the world, though we already have quite a long history behind us. Unfortunately I have aged whereas Mafalda has obviously not. Also, she seems to be quite fluent in colloquial Indonesian, whereas I grope for words almost every time I open my mouth.
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