Nikkei Asia: Indonesian travel novel a tribute to open borders
Indonesian travel novel a tribute to open borders
'The Wandering' attacks male privilege, but extols a bygone era of nomadic freedom
JOHN KRICH, Contributing writer
July 31, 2020 04:00 JST
BANGKOK -- More than nine years ago the Indonesian feminist writer Intan Paramaditha began working on her first novel, a structurally ambitious pop fable that aimed primarily at liberating women from traditional roles to take to the roads of the world.
"Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go wandering" was the tagline when the book was published in her homeland in 2017 under the title "Gentayangan," a name that the author says is often used to "describe ghosts who are not in the world of the living but have not crossed over to the other world. ... That state of being neither here nor there."
This is a state that Paramaditha experienced during a decade of academic studies in the U.S. and three other countries. Yet, she tells the Nikkei Asian Review, "It felt like a really nasty joke to me" when the launch of "The Wandering," the book's English edition, was obscured by the pandemic lockdown.
"'The Wandering," she states, "is a novel about people who transcend borders and keep encountering walls and barriers in their journeys. It was crushed by a virus that certainly doesn't respect borders."
The novel is similarly daring in its escape from the normal conventions of storytelling. In a post-COVID-19 world, though, it may stand less as a declaration of feminist freedom than as a final tribute to an age of unlimited global nomadism in which travel was a presumed right -- although Paramaditha points out that this mobility "was shaped by certain economic privileges."
In the novel, however, all that is needed to get from Jakarta to New York or Berlin is a pair of magical red shoes, bestowed by a horny devil-figure after some feverish sexual encounters. As such, Paramaditha's tale is a self-conscious, self-reflexive affair, combining a modern-day "Faust" (the mythic German figure who gains worldly knowledge by selling his soul) with "The Wizard of Oz" -- the Hollywood film where a dazed Kansan girl travels through imaginary worlds thanks to similarly empowered footwear.
At the same time, she has drawn on an interactive structure that allows readers to jump at will between chapters to experience 15 different itineraries, a play on both the Argentine surrealist Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch" -- a pioneering novel that invited readers to skip playfully around the narrative -- and her love of "choose your own adventure" children's stories. In print, it is child's play to follow the author's instructions about which pages to flip back toward, if not to keep track of all the storylines, but the electronic Kindle version sometimes does not cooperate in traveling backward or forward.
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