"Shattered Families": Experimental Form, Transgression, and Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction of Djenar Maesa Ayu

Michael Bodden, University of Victoria, B.C. Canada

Since the publication in September 2002 of her first collection of short stories, Mereka Bilang, Saya Monyet (They Call Me a Monkey!), Djenar Mahesa Ayu has rapidly become a key member of the pantheon of so-called "Sastra Wangi" writers, a group of young women who burst on the literary scene beginning with Ayu Utami's Saman in 1998. Djenar's sensational and often formally experimental fictional accounts of marital infidelity, middle-class hypocrisy, high class prostitution, and molested and damaged teenage girls garnered instant attention and catapulted Mereka Bilang, Saya Monyet! through a very respectable six printings in a little over one and a half years. The first printing of her second collection Jangan Main-Main (dengan kelaminku) (Don't Mess Around (with my sex)-2004) nearly sold out in two days and within four months the book was into its third printing. It appeared that Djenar's cocktail of scandalous themes, the direct language of everyday urban middle-class discourse, and often highly experimental form had captured the imagination of a public eager for works that transgressed the formerly dominant New Order boundaries of propriety, critically showed the seamy side of Indonesian middle-class life, and spoke with a vibrant directness.

In an interview, Djenar has stated that what binds all of the works of the "Sastra Wangi" writers together is their handling of cosmopolitan society, and that if her works are full of sexual themes and taboo topics, that is simply because those are the issues that are close to her in life, issues which she understands well. This talk will examine a number of Djenar's short stories in order to chart the nature of the "cosmopolitanism" represented in her work, and to see how this cosmopolitanism colludes with, collides with, or exposes the hypocrisy of middle class life and normative discourses of social behavior and morality. In so doing, I will investigate the ways in which these stories portray an Indonesian urban middle-class society rife with social crisis, anger at social inequities (for which gender inequities and child abuse become the most frequent and striking tropes in Djenar's work), and an often implicit desire for a new way of living.

Michael Bodden is currently Associate Professor of Indonesian Language and Southeast Asian Literature and Culture in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He has published widely on contemporary Indonesian and Philippine theatre, and Indonesian literature and popular culture. His translated and introduced collection of writings by Seno Gumira Ajidarma, Jakarta at a Certain Point in Time was published in 2002, and his most recent article was a critical analysis of the politics of Indonesian rap music published in Asian Music in the Fall of 2005. He currently is editing or co-editing three books: a collection of Indonesian drama from 1926-1965 to be published by the Lontar Foundation; a collection of essays on contemporary Asian Nationalisms, several of which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal, Pacific Affairs; and a collection of essays on the new wave of writing by women in Indonesia.

Michael Bodden taught at the University of Wisconsin and the Ateneo de Manila before gaining his PhD. form the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin in 1993. He has been teaching at the University of Victoria since 1992, and served as chair of the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies from 2002-05.

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