Beauty Is a Wound: A Novel by Eka Kurniawan (review)

—In praise of Beauty Is a Wound; for Ben, too late—

To historians as to fiction writers it is an old and disturbing question: how much imagination is needed to write the past; what does it take to be there? Eka Kurniawan was born in 1975, so he was thirteen when Suharto departed and twenty when Reformasi went stale and failed. Eka could listen to people who remembered the National Revolution of 1945, and also to survivors and perpetrators of the murders of 1965 and 1966. His listening formed limitations and possibilities that determined his own choices. Beneath the listening, of course, there was the assigned reading of the Suharto-era textbooks, mainly lies, but authoritative.

Beauty Is a Wound was conceived when all the stories seemed to come to their end, at the moment when perceived freedom of speech caused a surge that formed a huge and thick heap of noise. Eka’s novel is a courageous and close-to-impossible effort to hear through the heap. Likewise, when we read the book, we get lost in the heap and are rewarded by an echo of our hearing.¹

A reader of a particular age may find much of the novel predictable: predictable molek, beautiful, mooi, mixed-blood, Dutch-native, Indos, preferably women and their equally predictable turn to prostitution or something very much like it. The predictable lust of Indiese letteren, of half-naked and bronze bodies; warm and dark places, preferably at the edge of the jungle. The predictable curse of the West-and-East-not-really-meeting, the curse that lingers, even when the “Whites” are physically missing; gadgets of the Indo curse (call it modernity): gramophone, 78-rpm vinyls, with Schubert’s Unfinished and Beethoven’s Ninth, predictably. It is all there in Eka’s novel, along with the yellowing photographs on the wall of a house long deserted, and some gold and gems hidden in the garden, or so whispers go.

There is, equally predictably, “native tradition,” Indo, too, in fact: princesses, meditation, and wayang, inevitably, Destarata and Kuruserta; at one moment, a young woman runs to the top of a mountain, spreads her wings, and flies. The mountain still carries her name.

Eka, however, takes on the predictable—in the manner of Pramoedya of precious memory, but brutally more so, with a blunt knife. There are some tears, but rather more blood, semen, and some much less mentionable stuff on every page, at every cut. The Dutch, blue-eyed Indies lover (and love he does) trains ajaks, the wild dogs (Eka says), to pit a native against them in a fight to the death. For the first time in my long and eventful career as a historian of modern Indonesia, I had a nightmare about a Dutchman!

There is a predictable attempt by the principal Indo heroine of the novel—who survived the Japanese War and the National Revolution while her relatives vanished—to recover the treasure left in the Dutch house of her childhood. This particular search for the past is one of the most exquisitely written passages of the book. The treasure, gold and gems and whatnot, is supposed to be hidden, of course, in a shithole. The search takes a very long time and nothing is found. As the woman says, calmly, and this is the moment when we begin to love her, “God stole it.”

Even with the treasure lost, however, the Indo line and Indo curse are not cut—not completely cut, that is. The Indo heroine is forced, predictably, into a Japanese brothel during the war, and she stays in an Indonesian brothel after the war and through the revolution. Three daughters are born to her, like chapters in a book on Japanese War, National Revolution, Independent Indonesia. They all come out of rapes. These girls’ eyes are dreamy, as they should be; still Indo, still mixed-blood...