Creative Process Podcast Interview with Intan Paramaditha
Travel, Literature & Identity with INTAN PARAMADITHA - Author of The Wandering
INTERVIEWED BY MIA FUNK
April 25, 2024
How are writing and travel vehicles for understanding? How can we expand the literary canon to include other voices, other cultures, other experiences of the world?
Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife, the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2024). Her essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.
“I grew up with folktales and fairytales from the Indonesian archipelago, from the Nusantara. And of course I grew up with the stories from the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen and actually I like them better than the Disney version because they're more bloody and gory. I guessed that also shaped my preferences for more dark and gothic stories as I grew up. I did English literature at the University of Indonesia. I wrote a BA thesis on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And my mother was a very imaginative person. She loved making her own stories, so I think I inherit that from her. But she never had the chance to explore her creative side—there were certain expectations for women at that time to get married. She was harsh. But I know why I considered her monstrous when she was younger. She was trying to reject society's expectations in her own way, but we didn't understand her. And so I became really interested in the so-called bad women or monstrous women, in a way that these women allow me to ask questions around the structures that create them. Her whole presence taught me to really appreciate the knowledge that was created by generations of women before me. Part of the work I do now is work with a feminist collective to actually question knowledge production, who is excluded from it, who is being marginalized because of it, and my mother played a great role in steering me in that direction.”
“It’s important to imagine, to keep imagining, a world that is free from colonialism, from oppression, from exploitation, also expropriation of nature. And unfortunately this world is not sustainable—we are not living in that kind of world today. But if we want to see the world for our next generation for the future, we need to pass the torch and ask them to imagine, and then perhaps that way the struggle will continue. ”