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Eka Kurniawan

Man Tiger

Introduction by Benedict Anderson

The most exhilarating part of literature’s history is that it has no teleology and is not driven by the chariot of Progress. The most original writers seem like unexpected meteorites. Who could predict the arrival of Sophocles, Virgil, Lady Murasaki, Cervantes, Melville, Lu Hsün, Shakespeare, Proust, Gogol, Ibsen, Márquez, or Joyce? They are in one sense the product of their epochs and, in another, of the vernacular languages into which they were born and raised. But uncountable numbers lived at the same time, spoke the same languages and wrote nothing memorable. Class and education cannot explain their arrival. Their familial ancestors and descendants rarely show any substantive literary talents.

Eka Kurniawan is certainly Indonesia’s most original living writer of novels and short stories, and its most unexpected meteorite. He was born on November 28, 1975, the day that the little ex-Portuguese colony East Timor declared its sovereign independence from Lisbon. On December 7, 1975, Pearl Harbour Day, President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger arrived in Indonesia to bless the tyrant Suharto’s launching of a bloody occupation (using American weapons) to annex East Timor. Eka is proud of his birth-date because it marks the beginning of twenty-two years of stubborn resistance by the East Timorese that eventually forced Jakarta to abandon its cruel colonial rule.

For most of his first ten years he was in the care of his mother’s parents in his birthplace, a tiny isolated village (without any road access) on the dangerous coast of the Indian Ocean in the southeast fringe of West Java. The grandparents were literate, but there were no books in their simple home. Little Eka got his early connection to “literature” via two village women and an invisible man. His grandmother loved to narrate the legends, the fairy tales, and the history of their village. An old lady (a distant relative, too), who lived alone, was a much more skilled storyteller. Almost every evening, after prayers at the local mosque, she gathered the village children on the porch of her house and enchanted them with uncountable magical tales.

The invisible man was a storyteller on the radio who knew how to create different voices for the characters in his wider-ranging legends of West Java, an area mostly populated by the Sundanese (Central and East Java were dominated by the Javanese).

In 1984, the little boy was sent to join his parents and continue his primary schooling in Pangandaran, a small market town right on the border between Central and West Java, where a mixed population used mutually understandable vernacular Javanese and Sundanese. The town had no bookshop or municipal library. But Eka’s father, who worked as a tailor and a creator of T-shirts for the occasional tourists, was in his way a proto-literary man. He had two contrasting sidelines. As leader of prayers he taught little Muslim boys to memorize parts of the Koran, even if they did not understand the Arabic. He also served as a part-time teacher of English at a local school, and from its skimpy library he would come home with books for his children. In his youth he had studied at a teacher’s college, but never finished. Perhaps this was why in the evening he would compose sermons for the nearby mosque and write religious articles for various Muslim magazines (which, Eka says, he never read!). More important than all the above was Eka’s early discovery of what were then called “gardens of books,” one at the bus station and another behind the little seaside tourist hotel. In the gardens, vendors sold or rented out Indonesian horror and action comics, as well as the badly translated Nick Carter detective series and the romances of Barbara Cartland. Periodically, bicycling vendors would also stop at the family home to sell or rent out the same kind of reading matter. All this stimulated the eleven-year-old Eka to start writing poems, short stories and even sketches of novels.