Apple and Knife: A Riot of Unruly Women

Emily Bitto, The Monthly, May 4, 2018.

A collection of playful and provocative short stories by Intan Paramaditha 

In her author acknowledgments, Intan Paramaditha thanks “the first disobedient woman” – her mother – who “inspired many of [her] early stories”. Apple and Knife is a riot of disobedient women, including vengeful, neglected wives, prostitutes and saucy dancers, a village abortionist shunned as a witch, and a host of more supernatural, randy and ravenous devil-women.

Apple and Knife is the Indonesian author’s first short story collection to be translated into English, and its mode, in both form and content, is a kind of Frankensteinian, gruesome and unruly hybridity. The first story, “The Blind Woman Without a Toe”, establishes the terrain: it is a re-telling of the Cinderella story, transposed onto an Indonesian setting (Cinderella is now Sindelarat), and told from the perspective of one of the “evil stepsisters”, now a blind, vagrant old woman. In this version Sindelarat is no innocent, and gains her advantage over her sisters through a pact with dark forces and the exploitation of her superior beauty. “When in competition,” the narrator tells us, “women need to eliminate rivals and be unsparing in their hatred.” In the end, of course, no one wins, and Sindelarat spends the remainder of her short life pregnant, trying to produce a male heir to the throne.

The revisionist project of “feminist fairy tales” is certainly not a new one, and has been taken up with varying degrees of subtlety or didacticism since at least 1979, when Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was first published in the UK. Fortunately, this cultural heritage is handled lightly, and mostly in a peripheral fashion, across the rest of Apple and Knife, allowing space for the more compelling components of traditional Indonesian mythology, B-grade horror, contemporary Indonesian politics and international pop culture that makes this collection both original and highly entertaining. These motley elements are roughly shaken and viewed through the lens of Paramaditha’s playful but provocative kaleidoscopic vision. The outcome is a camp, schlocky supernatural romp with a darker political heart.