Saman
By Ayu Utami

Saman is a story filtered through the lives of its feisty female protagonists and the enigmatic “hero” Saman. It is at once an exposé of the oppression of plantation workers in South Sumatra, a lyrical quest to understand the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary lives, a playful exploration of female sexuality and a story about love in all its guises, while touching on all of Indonesia’s taboos: extramarital sex, political repression and the relationship between Christians and Muslims.

Saman has taken the Indonesian literary world by storm and sold over 100,000 copies in the Indonesian language, and is now available for the first time in English.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ayu Utami was born in Bogor, grew up in Jakarta and obtained her bachelor degree in Literature Studies from University of Indonesia. She worked as a journalist for Matra, Forum Keadilan, and D&R. Not long after the New Order regime closed Tempo, Editor, and Detik, she participated in the founding of Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists to protest the closure of those three weeklys. Currently she is working for the cultural journal Kalam, and at Teater Utan Kayu. Saman was awarded the Prince Claus Award in the year 2000.

Bahasa or English, 'Saman' an addictive, powerful read
By A. Junaidi

Although it has been seven years since its debut publication in Bahasa Indonesia, Ayu Utami's novel Saman -- now available for the first time in English from local boutique publisher Equinox Publishing -- is difficult to put down.

Credit is due Pamela Allen for her successful translation of the novel, retaining the original richness of the author's language -- which has been praised greatly by many literary critics.

Phrases, proverbs and metaphors in Ayu's distinct prose have been interpreted without losing their cultural and political allusions. For example, the local metaphor tanak seperti nasi -- which would be transliterated as "cooked like rice" -- has been elucidated correctly as "bread fresh from the oven".

Cultural and political freedom is the central theme of this work, which won the Jakarta Arts Council award for fiction in 1998, the year it emerged as a breakthrough novel and heralded a new generation of contemporary Indonesian literature.

Saman follows the friendship of four young women -- Laila, a writer, Yasmin, a lawyer, Shakuntala, a dancer, and Cok, a businesswoman -- and its title protagonist Saman, a Catholic priest-turned-human right activist.

Set within the social conditions of the 1990s under the iron-fisted regime of President Soeharto, the story tells of Saman's efforts at helping villagers in their fight against a big plantation company in Prabumulih, South Sumatra.

Backed by the military, the company crushes the villagers and arrests the village leaders and its top activists. With the assistance of the four young women, Saman manages to escape to New York through a long and complicated journey.

The political context of Saman is as relevant today as it was then, although Indonesia held its historic direct presidential election last year in a substantial transition toward democracy; last year's murder of human rights champion Munir has shown that activists still face formidable pressures and challenges.

Thus, the nuances, the political pressure and the villagers' movement, and also the settings of Saman are clearly representative of reality, even if the story, action and people in the novel are fictitious.

For a linear reader, however, the novel might be confusing due to its plot, which jumps from one location to another and from one time to another.

Ayu, a former journalist of Forum Keadilan biweekly magazine and a founding member of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), conducted in-depth research in creating her novel -- something new in Indonesian fiction -- and Saman reads like a narrative article in a news magazine.

Besides revealing the brutality of the regime, Saman provides factual information, such as through Laila's affair with the married Sihar, who works for an oil exploration company. Ayu displays her passion for detail in her description of an oil rig in the Natuna Sea, where the lovers first met.

The novelist also confronts cultural taboos, specifically sexual attitudes and "rules" that relegate women to a position of inequality against men.

Unabashedly and unapologetically, she also discusses sexual intercourse, extramarital relations, orgasms and other topics still considered taboo from a hitherto unexplored and prohibited perspective -- a woman's.

Established, traditionally oriented critics viewed Ayu's work as vulgar due to the use of many "indecent" words, such as penis, vagina and orgasm, and claimed Saman exploited sexuality. However, the exploration and treatment of this subject is one of the novel's strengths amid the patriarchal, Indonesian literary world.

Ayu also raises contemporary feminist issues, for example, why a woman should bear her father's or husband's names: Shakuntala, in changing her single name into Shakun and Tala when applying for a visa to study abroad, essentially maintains her identity.

Other issues include gender equality, justice, and celebration of sexuality -- all unpopular subjects of discourse during the Soeharto era.

And in light of the religious and ethic conflicts that have erupted throughout the nation's history, the novel also urges multiculturalism and tolerance through its characters of Javanese, Minangkabau, Batak and Chinese descent, who develop harmonious relationships among themselves.

Unfortunately, the English version does not really show the beautiful and touching relationship that is formed between the Catholic Saman and Islamic villagers.

Religious intolerance is still a current concern of many people here, and Saman provides a possible response to a certain institution which, until recently, forbade pluralism, liberalism and inter-faiths praying.

The novel also reminds us of the nation's unfinished political and cultural problems that need addressing.

Perhaps the very real issues broached in the novel will never be settled completely, but through reading this "real" and "true" fiction, people might be better able to understand these problems and try to seek solutions -- a possible impact that illustrates the value of Saman.

As a note to the translator and publisher, after reading Saman, loyal readers of Ayu Utami will await, impatiently, the English version of its sequel, Larung.

Taken from The Jakarta Post

SAMAN
By Sadanand Dhume

IF GEN. SUHARTO'S resignation was Indonesia's pre-eminent political event of 1998, then the publication of Ayu Utami's debut novel Saman was its literary equivalent. It quickly sold 100,000 copies-in a country where a mere 5,000 can propel a book on to the bestseller list-and set off a firestorm of debate, discussion and sniping. How could an unknown girl from Bogor create a work so self-assured?

Today Ms. Utami is widely acknowledged as the most accomplished of a generation of young women writers who are grouped together under the umbrella term sastra wangi, or fragrant letters. Saman, now available for the first time in English, consists of two interlocking tales of Laila Gagarina, a 30-year-old half-Sundanese, half-Minang photographer who falls in love with a married man, and of Saman, a Javanese Catholic priest with a social conscience.

It's easy to see why Saman struck a chord with the first generation of Indonesians weaned off Sukarno-era political theatrics and fattened on the market economy. The book is unabashedly worldly, casually sprinkled with references to the Russian Tea Room, G-strings, the paintings of Georges Seurat, Kermit the Frog, the comedian Rosie O'Donnell and studded condoms.

The action flits from Central Park to an oil rig in the South China Sea to a palm-oil plantation in Sumatra. Yet, to Ms. Utami's credit, none of this feels contrived. Her characters are remarkably authentic, their lives rooted in the real: the sense of sin for a young girl touched for the first time, recurring anxiety about the loss of virginity, the pain and promise of an adulterous affair in the big city. Much of Saman's appeal lies in its matter-of-fact treatment of sexuality: masturbation (male and female), a woman's lust for a man's sweaty body, a love bite on (curiously) a forehead.

As with many first novels, Saman's seams tend to show. There are relentless flash forwards and clumsy shifts in point of view. Major characters disappear without an explanation and the book loses energy about three-quarters of the way through. But imperfect technique is more than made up for by the freshness of the characters and by flashes of vivid imagery. An oil rig looks like a silver box in a sea of lapis lazuli. Emotions are as pure as milk being poured into a pot. Faces crumple like freshly washed satin touched by a hot iron.

In its own way Saman captures aspects of the New Order as sharply as In the Time of Madness. There's the corruption. A multinational oil company pays for the American education of a big-shot in the ministry of mines and energy. Settlers from Java-part of an eerily named government program called transmigration-eke out a living in a newly cleared Sumatran forest, only to face eviction by a corrupt Chinese tycoon in cahoots with a Javanese and a Batak.

When Saman, the Catholic priest, tries to aid the settlers he comes up against the dark side of government power. Then there's the New Order paranoia about communism that outlasts the fall of the Berlin wall. It is mirrored by the tendency of the government's opponents to blame everything on a mysterious hidden hand, as when Saman believes intelligence agencies are behind the murder of a businessman by a mob in Medan.

Unfortunately for Indonesia, seven years on it's hard to see the old man's hand in everything that goes wrong. The country has traded the blunt instrument of military rule for the scalpel of democracy, but whether this can solve its myriad problems remains debatable. The meltdown of the Asian financial crisis followed by the inept rule of Gen. Suharto's successors has ruined Indonesia's hard-won reputation as, if not a full grown Asian tiger, at least as a promising cub. Elected as Indonesia's answer to Vladimir Putin or Thaksin Shinawatra, the strong man who sets an unruly house in order, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono inherits a next to impossible task: resurrecting a country now mentioned in the same breath as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Mr. Dhume was a Jakarta-based correspondent of the REVIEW between 2000-03. He is currently writing a book on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia.

Taken from Far Eastern Economic Review