Options, The Edge: Intan Paramaditha explores displacement, feminism and the road not taken
'The Wandering' tackles politics and privileges of travel and desire, and the freedoms and limitations of the choices we make.
By Tan Gim Ean
12 May 2020 - 9:23am
The Wandering was translated by Stephen J Epstein from the Indonesian edition titled Gentayangan: Pilih Sendiri Petualangan Sepatu Merahmu (All Photos: Intan Paramaditha)
In The Wandering, a young woman bored with teaching English in Jakarta, a city “full of thwarted suicidal urges”, makes a pact with her Demon Lover. He gives her a pair of red shoes that will take her wherever she wants to go — but the present comes with a curse.
Intan Paramaditha’s debut novel was translated by Stephen J Epstein from the Indonesian edition titled Gentayangan: Pilih Sendiri Petualangan Sepatu Merahmu (2017) after it won two grants from international writers’ association PEN. It centres on borderlands and global nomadism, desire, mobility and displacement, the politics and privileges of travel, and how freedom and limitations tip the choices we make.
Its protagonist remembers her mother’s warning — “bad girls go wandering” — but like the disobedient woman who gives in to an addiction, she grabs her options on a wing and a prayer as her red shoes click-clack across land and sea, from Indonesia to the US and Mexico, through dirt-filled streets, hotels, graveyards, nightspots, markets and mosques. En route, fellow travellers share gory, sorry stories.
Intan did her PhD in cinema studies at New York University and now teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has two short story collections, Sihir Perempuan(2005) and Kumpulan Budak Setan (2010, with Eka Kurniawan and Ugoran Prasad), from which the stories in her first collection in English, Apple and Knife (Harvill Secker, 2018), are drawn.
Her fiction, which won the Kompas Best Short Story Award and Tempo Best Literary Fiction of the Year in her homeland, does not fight shy of gender, gore and sexuality as she pushes boundaries both real and imagined, particularly those rooted in culture and politics.
Options talks to the author in an email interview.
Are you a disobedient woman?
Yes, of course. In order to make changes, you need to ask questions and disobey. Disobedience is needed to move things forward.
What shaped your feminist perspective? Was it the result of things that happened in your country or increasing awareness after you moved to the West?
I became interested in the feminist perspective when I was an undergraduate at the University of Indonesia. At that time, my questions started with my family: Why didn’t my mother behave like a ‘good’ mother? I was studying feminism and realised that instead of asking why someone wasn’t a ‘good’ woman, I should have asked what made someone a ‘bad’ woman and what constructed good or bad. Starting with my mother, I became interested in disobedient women — women who resist the structures that confine them — and the stories behind them.
Did your mother ever tell you that bad girls go wandering?
Not exactly. My mother didn’t have the opportunity to travel or to wander the way she pleased because she had no economic privileges to do so. But she taught me how to fight.
When I was a child, I was very shy and quiet and I had problems with bossy kids. Some of them were real bullies. My mother told me I should always stand up for myself and that’s what I will always remember from her.
She wasn’t a writer, but she taught me how to read and write. She was the model of disobedient women in my stories. Her traces are everywhere in my writing.
The protagonist in The Wandering talks about being displaced. Do you feel that way now that you live abroad?
Yes, but displacement is more complex than something that happened in the past, for instance, something you felt when you first went abroad and now you don’t feel anymore. For many people living in between worlds, the sense of displacement is ongoing. It might come and go, not something you get over with. You can feel displaced in your home country, too. You think your home will remain the same, but each time you go back, there are always new things you don’t recognise.