In writing poetry, I experience this body-that-writes as a mutant in language; I feel a different person is present in myself. In contemporary Indonesian literature, the writer Afrizal Malna has earned his own movement. How the body collides and rubs up against the textures of the city; of the varying intense urban spaces of everyday life. Our discussion covers the Afrizalian literary movement within contemporary Indonesian poetry and drama; the terrains of linguistic hierarchies and reader reception; and his latest poetry collection Document Shredding Museum , originally published as Museum Penghancur Dokumen in Afrizal Malna AM : This edition of Document Shredding Museum is actually a revised, second edition of the book; the first edition was published by the Australia-based publisher Reading Sideways Press in In Indonesia, it was published a decade ago.
This book was written between and , over a decade after the fall of the Suharto regime and the Reformasi. This regime ruled from to as a result of the tragedyβthe massacre of members of the Indonesia Communist Party Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI and those accused of being Communists, alongside the overthrow of the prior president Soekarno βwhich is still full of question marks even now.
Has there really been a fundamental change? We wondered if the powerful in Indonesia will always be prone to nepotism and its corollary effectsβsuch as legal, ethical, and human rights violations, as well as corruption. It was also during this time that I lived in Yogyakarta, in a Javanese cultural environment, occupying the boundary between village and city as a blurred space in Nitiprayan, Bantul still a part of Yogyakarta.
This became the moment for me to start from zero, and to allow my activities to mimic the wind, moving to find empty spaces and lowlands. This blank slate could shift the pastβwhich was filled with hope for political change, as well as hope for literature and art to respond the Reformasi. Global society at that time was facing social upheaval and natural disasters. When the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra happened, I was living in a house that I had rented from a family of farmersβan old, fragile Javanese house rumah limasan made of wood.
When the earthquake stopped, not a single part was damaged, but many of the houses made of stone or cement had cracked or collapsed.
