People from Bloomington

penguin

classics

PEOPLE FROM BLOOMINGTON

budi darma is one of Indonesia’s most esteemed and influential writers. He was born in Rembang, Central Java, on April 25, 1937. Due to the nature of his father’s work in the postal service, his family lived in several different towns and cities in Java when he was a child, including Bandung, Semarang, Kudus, and Salatiga. After completing his undergraduate degree in English literature at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, he became a lecturer at Airlangga University in Surabaya. In 1970, he was granted a one-year scholarship from the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu to study humanities. In 1974, he received a Fulbright scholarship to pursue his master’s degree in creative writing in the English department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Following this, he received support from the Ford Foundation to complete his doctoral studies at the same institution. He received his PhD in English literature in 1980. Budi Darma won numerous national awards for his writing, including first place in the Jakarta Arts Council Prize for Best Novel Manuscript (1980), the Jakarta Arts Council Prize for Best Novel (1983), the Indonesian Government Arts Award (1993), and the Presidential Medal of Honor (Satya Lencana Kebudayaan) for his literary contributions to the nation. International honors he received include the S.E.A. Write Award (1984) and the Mastera Literary Award (2011). Even after technically retiring, Budi Darma continued to teach at the State University of Surabaya and be active on Indonesia’s literary scene until his death on August 21, 2021, at the age of eighty-four.

tiffany tsao is a translator of Indonesian fiction and poetry. Her translated work was awarded a 2017 PEN Presents prize and a 2018 PEN Translates grant, and was shortlisted for the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize. She is also a writer. Her most recent novel, The Majesties (Atria Books, 2020), was longlisted for the Ned Kelly Award. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

intan paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel, The Wandering, translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded Tempo Magazine’s Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, the English PEN Translates Award, and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. An essay of hers appears in The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright © 2016 by Budi Darma

Translation copyright © 2022 by Tiffany Tsao

Foreword copyright © 2022 by Intan Paramaditha

Introduction copyright © 2022 by Tiffany Tsao

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

First published in Indonesia as Orang-Orang Bloomington by Sinar Harapan in 1980

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Budi Darma, 1937– author. | Paramaditha, Intan, 1979– writer of foreword. | Tsao, Tiffany, writer of introduction, translator.

Title: People from Bloomington / Budi Darma; foreword by Intan Paramaditha; translated with an introduction by Tiffany Tsao.

Other titles: Orang-orang Bloomington. English

Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054132 (print) | LCCN 2021054133 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143136606 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525508106 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Budi Darma, 1937– —Translations into English. | LCGFT: Short stories.

Classification: LCC PL5089.B82 O713 2022 (print) | LCC PL5089.B82 (ebook) | DDC 899/.22132—dc23/eng/20220202

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054132

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054133

Cover illustration: Tom Gauld

pid_prh_6.0_148350565_c0_r0

Bob in Pennsylvania, Ann in Georgia, and Don in Indiana,

People from Bloomington is a "trumpet of a prophecy . . .

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

—(from Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley)[1]

Contents

Foreword by intan paramaditha

Introduction by tiffany tsao

Suggestions for Further Reading

Preface by budi darma

PEOPLE FROM BLOOMINGTON

The Old Man with No Name

Joshua Karabish

The Family M

Orez

Yorrick

Mrs. Elberhart

Charles Lebourne

Acknowledgments

Notes

Foreword

The Absurdist Meets Jane Austen in Bloomington

I first read Budi Darma’s Orang-Orang Bloomington (People from Bloomington) at a very young age and had little understanding of the book other than that it is a collection of stories about the lives of white people in America. My second and more exciting encounter with Budi Darma happened much later, in my early thirties, when I was writing my novel, The Wandering, about a Third World woman who travels the globe with a pair of cursed red shoes. As I engaged with the themes of global mobility and cosmopolitanism in my novel, I researched Indonesian authors who, like myself, had lived abroad and written stories set outside Indonesia. I was in Amsterdam on a fellowship and decided to pick up a copy of People from Bloomington from the KITLV library in Leiden. It was a strange way to reconnect with Budi Darma and realize that he, too, was a writer in transit. He wrote the book in 1979 when he was a PhD student at a university in the United States, just like I was when I was writing my novel, and he produced some of the Bloomington stories in Europe, en route to Indonesia.

Reading the book as a traveler, I was transported to streets in America’s Midwest, some big and others small, with nice houses and big lawns under a blue sky. Yet, as David Lynch has reminded us, when you see flowers behind white picket fences and Blue Velvet plays in your head, you know that you will find a severed ear. Something is lurking beneath the familiar. I recognized the changing seasons, the apartment buildings, and the trees, but I had a feeling that we were not in Kansas, Bloomington, or an unassuming midwestern city anymore. Budi Darma’s realism is also a strange realm, a universe full of coincidence and cruel fate, where a larger force—deus ex machina?—is laughing at the characters, or at myself, like in the Coen brothers’ films. When I learned that Budi Darma was completing his PhD thesis on Jane Austen when he wrote it, I finally understood his stories, along with his cast of observant but weird characters, in a different light. People from Bloomington is Jane Austen’s world with an absurdist twist. Budi Darma’s new take on the absurd, along with his cosmopolitan sensibility, has added a rich, complex, and vibrant flavor to the history of Indonesian literature.

I use the term absurd in the way that authors and critics have categorized him within the Indonesian literary discourse. An umbrella covering experimental, existentialist, and avant-garde works of authors such as Iwan Simatupang, Danarto, and Putu Wijaya, the absurd has been used to place Budi Darma on the literary map, even though his fiction often escapes stylistic boundaries. In 1974, young Budi Darma was already a prolific author and a literary sensation in Indonesia when Horison, a prestigious literary magazine of the period, issued a special edition on his works. It featured four of his stories, an essay about his works by scholar and translator of Indonesian literature Harry Aveling, and an interview with him by legendary poet Sapardi Djoko Damono. In his essay, Aveling described Budi Darma as a writer with peculiar thoughts, whose stories were populated with unfortunate characters living in a brutal, frightening world in which agency was elusive, as their fate had been decided by circumstances or other characters. Referring to Budi Darma’s earlier essay, Sastra: Merupakan Dunia Jungkir-Balik? (Literature: An Upside-Down World?), Aveling called his absurd fiction a jungkir-balik (upside-down) world where logic fails.

In the same year when the Horison special edition was published, Budi Darma departed to do his postgraduate studies at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. He found Jane Austen’s books after a series of coincidences (serendipity marks not only his stories but also real life). He chose to write a thesis on Jane Austen, going against many people’s advice to focus on another woman writer because too much had been written on Austen. Arguing that he was drawn to Austen for her novels and not her gender, Budi Darma insisted on the topic. Upon completing the thesis, while waiting for feedback from his committee, he embarked on a journey to write about Bloomington city dwellers. In his author’s notes, he claims that the Bloomington stories, unlike his previous absurd fiction, are realist, and resist flying into the other world. This other world, however, remains haunting.

The uncanny in People from Bloomington appears not through fantasy, horror, or magical realism, but in small ruptures within the mundane daily lives, presented to us by narrators with peculiar ways of seeing the world. Poking holes in reality rather than violating it, the book is both subtle and sadistic. While there is no excessive violence in the book, some stories are quite visceral, and they violate our expectations of unremarkable characters and places. Like Austen’s novels, the Bloomington stories allow us to see the world through the eyes of characters who observe and make social commentary on reality. However, if Austen uses characters to convey her views on morality, Budi Darma’s reality is already filtered through polite but morally questionable narrators. Austen’s women characters observe social situations from a limited sphere due to their gender; in contrast, Bloomington’s narrators are characters who transgress borders in disconcerting ways. They are more voyeuristic than curious, more perverse than quirky. They enjoy seeing other people’s misfortunes and even shamelessly benefit from death and calamity.

Social realism has always had an important place in Indonesian literature, perhaps most recognized in the global world through the political novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, but some influential writers, including Budi Darma, occupy a more experimental space, rejecting realism through stories that defy narrative logic and coherence. What complicates the map is that Budi Darma’s strange stories do not always sit comfortably with the absurdist group. People from Bloomington situates him in an in-between space, a realist world portrayed through an absurdist frame, morbid and funny at the same time. This makes the story collection a distinctive contribution to Indonesian literary history.

Budi Darma’s in-betweenness can also be seen from how he navigates through different cultures and the idea of being in the world. Unlike today, where travel is a common theme in Indonesian popular novels, often framed as the desire of neoliberal subjects to explore, consume, and seize opportunities, the theme of transnational mobility in Indonesian literature in the 1970s was quite rare and largely depended on privilege received through scholarships or marriage. A few authors who had the opportunity to travel, such as Umar Kayam, Nh. Dini, and Budi Darma, wrote about different cities—New York, Paris, or Bloomington—and engaged with cosmopolitanism in different ways. Cultural clash, disconnection, and the nostalgic longing for home are always haunting the fascination with the West in Umar Kayam’s work. On the other hand, Nh. Dini, whose observation of other cultures was shaped by her experience as a flight attendant and wife of a diplomat, proposed a redefinition of national identity by incorporating the idea of the citizen of the world. Budi Darma’s cosmopolitanism moves away from the questions of national identity; he takes from the West, turns influences into his own, and subverts them.

In February 1950, a group of artists associated with the cultural journal Siasat wrote a manifesto called Surat Kepercayaan Gelanggang that opens with a bold statement with a cosmopolitan spirit, We are the legitimate heirs to world culture, and we are furthering this culture in our own way. People from Bloomington is Budi Darma’s way of asserting his position as the legitimate heir to world culture. He refuses to be marginalized by the Western gaze that situates the Third World as an object of study but not a valid producer of knowledge about its own culture, let alone Western culture. With influences ranging from Kafka to Hawthorne, Budi Darma turns the West into a form that is often unrecognizable or, in his words, upside-down, and conveys this through a language at the margin of the global literary landscape. This explains why some readers, translators, and publishers have been pessimistic about whether People from Bloomington would have a global appeal. While the Western practice of representing cultures in the Third World is, however inaccurate, acceptable and normalized, a distorted reflection of Western society in a mirror held up by a Third World author reveals anxiety about who has the authority to produce knowledge.

Unlike Budi Darma’s male narrators, the protagonist in my novel, The Wandering, is a Third World woman whose decisions are limited by national borders; colonial legacy; and gender, racial, and class boundaries. Yet Budi Darma’s unapologetic cosmopolitanism, in addition to his subtle and sadistic style of storytelling, is a major influence on the book. Budi Darma has indeed inspired generations of writers in Indonesia, from veteran journalist and writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma to younger, bold queer writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu. Ajidarma, for instance, claims that Budi Darma, along with other absurdist writers Putu Wijaya and Danarto, has inspired him to unsettle reality and blur boundaries between fact and fiction in his works on Indonesia’s authoritarian regime (1965–1998) and military violence in Timor-Leste. He praised Budi Darma’s deceptively simple prose in portraying complex characters who are honest about their improper or cruel thoughts.

Through decades, Budi Darma has touched so many writers, artists, filmmakers, and readers in Indonesia, yet his stories also transcend time and place. In 1980, before we were shaken by the black comedy and arbitrariness in Fargo and other midwestern gothic films by the Coen brothers, Budi Darma had painted stoic and darkly funny portraits of the Midwest. Budi Darma’s eccentric portrayal of the society, capturing randomness and monstrosity in a Jane Austen world, will continue to inspire us to reimagine reality and storytelling while pushing the questions around national, cultural, and aesthetic borders.

intan paramaditha

Introduction

All the water coming together, mingling as one, produced a muddy hue, with no hint of clarity at all.

—Orez by Budi Darma

In an essay penned in 1973, Budi Darma—already a writer and literary critic of some repute in Indonesia—made the following observation about Westerners’ attitudes concerning the East:

They see the Eastern world as something exotic, as interesting because of its foreignness. To them, local color is immensely fascinating. Their attitudes toward wayang, batik, Balinese dance, and the like are often shaped by their exoticist values. And the same goes for their attitudes toward the literary works they translate. Reading literature not as literature, but rather as the manifestation of Indonesian writers’ opinions about Indonesia’s problems—this is what happens when such attitudes are held.[1]

A few years later, Budi Darma would go on to write a series of short stories nigh impossible for any Westerner to reduce to exotic content or an opinion on Indonesia-specific affairs. The collection was set entirely in Bloomington, Indiana, where he had been living for the past six years as an Indiana University graduate student doing his MA in creative writing and PhD in English literature. And except for a passing mention late in one of the stories that reveals its narrator is a foreign student, to all intents and purposes, the stories feature an all-American cast.

How we are meant to read the stories of People from Bloomington is no mystery at all. The author himself provides clear instruction in his preface to the collection’s first edition. Far from being mere exercises in reverse exoticization—of the West by an Easterner—or local-color portraiture specific to Bloomington and its inhabitants, the stories, we are told, actually concern themselves with humanity in general, as observed by the author where he just happened to find himself at the time:

Obviously, the narrator is never myself, the writer of these stories, but rather an abstraction of certain types of people I have come across in many different places. These stories just happen to be set in Bloomington. If I had been living in Surabaya or Paris or Dublin at the time, I would likely have ended up writing People from Surabaya, People from Paris, or People from Dublin.[2]

Since Budi Darma quotes Faulkner elsewhere in the preface, it’s not wholly surprising that this remark resonates with Faulkner’s insistence that his work was not just about the American South, but a universal human condition: The same hopes, aspirations, tragedies are universal everywhere, no matter what color nor what race. The writer is regional only in the sense that he is using something that he is familiar with to save himself the time of research.[3]

Indeed, when I asked Budi Darma to write a paragraph or two to include in a submission proposal for publishers, it was this universality that he sought once again to emphasize, thirty-nine years after the collection was first published:

Various poems by Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino—these works bring into relief a sharply dichotomous East and West. Yet in essence, both Easterners and Westerners are but creatures who operate according to archetype, and therefore, in character, are more or less the same. They feel similarly buffeted by loneliness and suffering, and blessed by happiness and joy; they are dragged hither and thither by crises in identity and other experiences that are universal in nature.

While I was living in Bloomington, Indiana, I interacted with many old-timers, American university students from various other states, as well as foreign students from different countries. When Thanksgiving and Christmas came, not to mention New Year’s, I went traveling with American friends to different places, staying over at their homes, and spending time with their families. It was this universality that I felt.[4]

It is my strong hope, as not only the translator of this English-language edition of the collection, but a reader who admires it very much indeed, that its new audience will be able to appreciate Budi Darma’s work on these terms—as a work that seeks to provide insight into humanity and human relationships at large, inspired by lived experience at a local level, and as a literary work as universally relevant and resonant as the texts by Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Austen, and other Western writers to which the stories themselves allude. Certainly, no one is a stranger to the claim that such-and-such literary work is universal. But for my part, it is particularly exciting to see this term, usually reserved for Western canonical texts or centuries-old world classics, emphasized in conjunction with a modern Indonesian text.

It is also my hope that this English-language translation will prove useful in ongoing debates concerning the ethicality of writers making use of subject matter and experiences that are not theirs. Those who defend the right of a writer’s imagination to roam unfettered, unbounded by race, citizenship, class, and sexual orientation, tend to argue that such imaginative work is the very heart of all fiction writing, and that a certain shared humanity is what enables a writer to cross cultures, classes, and identities and render experiences radically different from theirs with faithfulness and sensitivity.

Those more suspicious of people asserting their right to write anything from anywhere point out that the literary mining of others’ experiences tends to be unidirectional, with people equipped with more economic, political, and social capital writing about those who have less—and thanks to the phenomenon of European colonization, with Westerners writing about other people and countries rather than the reverse. (I confess that I tend to fall into this latter, suspicious camp. Technically speaking, the imagination may be free to soar; in reality, it tends to trundle along roads paved by power.)

In such a global literary landscape, Budi Darma’s collection, with its portrayals of white American characters in an American setting, is a divergence from expectations, even though it is not singular among Indonesian literary works in this respect. (Not only did Budi Darma, during the same period, write a novel also set in Bloomington with American characters—Olenka [1983]; in terms of all-American subject matter, he was preceded by his Indonesian contemporary Umar Kayam, whose 1972 work, A Thousand Fireflies in Manhattan [Seribu Kunang-Kunang di Manhattan], was set in New York and included three stories entirely about native New Yorkers.) It will be telling to see how a work like People from Bloomington is received among an English-speaking Western audience. If arguments defending the writer’s right and ability to cross cultures are to maintain any currency, then the Western literary community must show themselves able to appreciate literary works that do exactly this, but in a direction opposite to what they are accustomed to.

Interestingly enough, the back cover of the collection’s first edition featured praise from Ikranagara, a prominent figure on the Indonesian theater