IMOW - Excerpt from Saman

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Excerpt from Saman
Ayu Utami

Indonesia

GALLERY

CONVERSATION

“Madam, you’re Christian aren’t you? I’m not, but I learned at Catholic school that Jesus didn’t have a father.”

Something can suddenly evaporate from our memory, like a ghost, like a dream. We can feel the trace of it, somewhere within ourselves, without being able to reconstruct it anymore. We are left with hatred, anger, fear, love. But we don’t know why.

After my meeting with that ogre at that particular point, I did not only fall in love. Since that day I was full of dreams about their country. I wanted to see the land of the giants, to see the land of the giants, to see their grand houses, their roads, their mice and their cats. Especially so I could get away from my father and sister, whom I had never respected, and they neither liked nor respected me. I didn’t like them either.

So I didn’t go ahead with the visa application. Why should my father continue to own a part of me? But nowadays the Javanese have started to imitate the Dutch customs. A married couple gives the father’s name to the baby, assuming that the child is glad or lucky to have been born. How misguided. How naïve.

In the past we were allowed to choose our own names. Grandmother called my father Timin. Just before he took up his lecturing job he began calling himself Mintoraharjo. My mother never changed her name because she liked the one she had been given. She was descended from Javanese nobility and from the nymphs who sing. But nowadays the court records your name at birth on an official document and you are cursed with it for life.
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