Intan Paramaditha | 'I wanted to explore sexuality in a grotesque way'

The Bookseller

Published March 13, 2019 by Caroline Carpenter

After decades of oppression a wave of feminist literature has swept Indonesia, and Intan Paramaditha is in the vanguard.

Tell us about your book, Apple and Knife.

It’s a collection of short stories about "disobedient women". I re-write well-known fairytales like Cinderella, tales from the Qur’an and Indonesian folklore. These are the tales that we hear often, but they are problematic because usually the women get punished or will be rewarded by getting married... [rewriting] is a way to impose a feminist perspective on the narratives. They are stories about women who resist, but their resistance is situated within specific contexts—they might be housewives without access to power, but within their limited space they fight.

How does your work sit within the context of other feminist writing in Indonesia?

When I first became active in the literary scene, it was a few years after the political reform in Indonesia. It was the end of authoritarianism, so people questioned so many things, including gender constructs, because women had long had to be mothers and wives within a military framework. There were a lot of new women writers at that time who wrote about sex and sexuality, because women’s sexuality had been controlled and repressed. When I started writing, I wanted to do something different: to explore bodies and sexuality in a more grotesque way, looking at the horrific and ugly. So a lot of my stories are quite disconcerting, but I think there are many ways to talk about sexuality within a feminist framework.