Interview with Restless Magazine

Restless Magazine, February 2020

Tell us about what you do... 

I explore two major themes in my writing: travel and the idea of disobedient women. I am interested in travel not as a lifestyle but as a set of questions around mobility in the global world – why people move, who can move, who can cross borders, and what kind of conditions allow this movement. How do categories such as travellers, tourists, expats, migrants, or refugees shape your experience? These are the questions I ask in my new novel, The Wandering. 

The idea of disobedient women recurs in my work, probably most prominent in my story collection Apple and Knife. I grew up in a culturally-diverse country with the world’s largest Muslim population. Patriarchy is wedded to religion, capitalism, cultural tradition, and women resist in different ways, because the oppression they face is not singular. I think it’s important to keep telling and listening to stories of women’s resistance. 


Can you give us an insight into your industry?

Perhaps I can talk about readership and what it means to my work as a writer. The academia is of course another planet where we have a tiny group of experts reading our work, and we always have a complicated relationship with the so-called ‘public engagement.’ In the fiction world I have more readers. I write fiction in the Indonesian language, and readers in the Anglophone world access my work through translation. The number of translated literature is only three per cent of all books published – it has increased according to the recent reports, but it still very small. The number of books by women writers in translation is even smaller. Also, translated literature is dominated by works originally written in European languages. So that means I am a woman writer writing in a language that’s quite marginal in the global literary market. I am more privileged than most Indonesian authors who have never had the chance to find readers beyond Indonesia, but this situation tells a lot about the need to decolonize global literature.

When do you feel at your most powerful?

It’s hard to feel powerful when you are conscious of the webs of power that determine what you can and cannot do. But over the years I have gained some power – not much, but it’s enough to protest or to influence decisions in certain areas. I feel happy if that power allows me to make small contributions, such as helping to disseminate issues that matter to me or opening more doors for others.
 

Read the full interview here