Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J. Epstein
STRANGE HORIZONS
BY: RACHEL HILL
ISSUE: 10 DECEMBER 2018
Three words: Indonesian. Feminist. Horror. Do these words excite you? Because they should.
Here’s why: avenging Javanese Goddesses, revenant dangdut dancers and fleets of rats populate—or rather spill, scratch and crawl from—the pages of Apple and Knife, Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha’s first collection of short stories to be translated into English (by Stephen J Epstein). Sacrifice, fairy tale and orgiastic butchery are the abundant tributaries which converge into the rivers of blood meandering through these stories. Catalogued here are powerful, disobedient women who misbehave, following their own desires over the dictates of society. These are women with swagger, and as such this is a collection for Lilith, not for Eve.
Rather than stories of redemption and restoration, of the goodly justice usually served up in folktales, these are stories of righteous vengeance wrought and lust slaked, of sacrifice given freely and forcefully taken. With sexy monsters and the monstrously sexy, these stories map the ranges of female desire, rage and transformation. So be warned: here be empowered monsters. And they are hungry.
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“Fairy tales give women a place from which to speak, but they sometimes speak of speechlessness as a weapon, a last resort ... beginning with gossip as a woman’s derided instrument of self-assertion, closes with muteness, as another stratagem of influence.” (Marina Warner, The Beast and the Blonde (1994), p. xxi)
These stories reverberate with women's voices, voicelessness, and silence. In the tradition of many fairy-tale collections, the first story, “The Blind Woman Without a Toe,” begins with the enticements of an old crone storyteller, beckoning us to “Come. Come, child. Sit by me. Are you sure you want to hear how I became blind?” (p. 9)
This is a promise of gore to which we giddily squeal “Yes, yes, tell us all! Leave no stone, or indeed toe, unturned ... ”
The crone is one of the Ugly Sisters from the Grimms’ ”Cinderella,” who were allegedly punished for their jealousy by having their eyes gored out by a flock of snarky birds. Here, though, the story of “Sin or ’Sindelarat’” (the Bahasa Indonesia equivalent of “Cinderella”) is recounted from the perspective of one of these nameless sisters, to craft an old story with new claws. This change in speaker flips the script on the original story, revealing the formerly unimpeachable Sindelarat to be in fact an unscrupulous go-getter capable of vast cruelties—someone, this sister claims, who was “no less calculating than we were” (p. 14). Here, storytelling becomes a means for the Ugly Sister to speak back to those that have previously had the power to speak for, and over, her experience. Thus, instead of being traduced within someone else’s narrative and agenda, this sister’s act of articulation shows a woman seizing the power of the voice for herself, enabling her to become the architect of her own stories. This switch in orator, and her direct (re)addressing of fairy-tale tropes around gender construction, does call to mind the microfictions of Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables (1981), in which a “wicked’ women” is:
Generally known as Whore, Bitch, Slut, Sow.... She asked that the labels she bore be changed to some others that would more accurately express her wickedness as a person, rather than, as they did at present, merely as a women. (p. 23)
In “Cinderella” (and as a prevalent trope within fairy tale more broadly), female ugliness is an index for internal moral corruption, whereas physical beauty is an emanation of innate goodness. Paramaditha inverts this equation, making beauty a sanctuary for vice. Rather than originating from pure maliciousness and nefarious glee, the behaviour of the Ugly Sisters is thus instead positioned as a response to societal demands. Where “we were merchandise in the market and Prince Charming was the sole customer” (p. 13), eliminating competition becomes a survival strategy.
The actions of the Ugly Sisters are thus contextualised within a capitalist system which prioritises competition; in which the economy of female flesh is attributed value based on its proximity to an abstract ideal of beauty and compliance. Within this system, the Ugly Sisters’ self-inflicted toe amputations are attempts to sculpt their bodies into the predetermined parameters of a glass slipper, becoming a logical means of meeting the market specifications for female bodies.
In “Scream in a Bottle,” another crone tells her account of capturing, collecting, and guarding women's screams, claiming that this service allows women to remain in society. She also contends that unbottled screams eventually result in the death of the untamed screamer. Making me wonder: what does it mean to scream in these pages? Whence and to where does this sound travel?