A Serious Joke
Maybe we should start from here: one bright morning, on the banks of the Ganges, an old brahmin coughed after writing the first verse of a kakawin. Or perhaps under a bodhi tree, a Javanese traveler turned over palm leaves, scratching letters with a small knife, trying to create a poem for a princess who never loved him. Who knows for sure when and where Indonesian literature began? Maybe it started from those who wanted to love, or simply wanted to feel nobler, smarter. One thing is for sure: Indonesian literature was born from loneliness that was written, from sentences that tried to fill the empty space in the head and the pounding heart.
Then sailors from the West came, with the intention of looking for spices and God, who could not wait for the wet land of the archipelago to welcome their feet. When they arrived, perhaps they were surprised to find not only pepper and cloves, but also stories that were as convoluted as vines climbing on walls. That is where Indonesian literature meets modernity: when palm-leaf manuscripts began to be tucked away among the cargo of merchant ships, when stories from this country were translated and re-imported with a new, sharper, more exotic flavor. Thus were born “hikayat” and “babad,” containing history that is more fiction than fact.
But perhaps the adage is true, that all great journeys begin with small steps. For some reason, those steps are often accompanied by the question, “Is this really literature?” Those centuries-old texts, lifted up and touted as the beginning, are just words mixed between fact and myth, between history and fiction. And that, perhaps, is the origin of Indonesian literature: a captivating blend of the desire to write and the uncertainty of whether anyone really cares to read. Indonesian literature is a dream that began to be written even before there were readers to dream with.