An author with cultural sensitivity

An author with cultural sensitivity

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Dewi Anggraeni has published five books and written numerous
articles for leading publications both in Indonesia and
Australia, yet when she first started writing 44 years ago her
parents did not consider her work serious enough to become a
career.

"Story writing in my family isn't considered as something
serious, it's something you do in your spare time, like a hobby,"
Dewi said, explaining that her parents had expected her to get a
job along the lines of a translator for the United Nations.

But writing stories was little Dewi's outlet, the "voice" for
her experiences. Born in Jakarta on April 16, 1945, the youngest
of five children, Dewi always felt that her thoughts were not
taken seriously, either by her parents or her siblings.

"Because I didn't get attention vocally, I hoped to express my
thoughts through writing," she said, explaining that she wrote
numerous stories for her newspaper and the Star Weekly magazine's
teenage section when she was still in junior high school.

"You know what teenagers are like, I wrote about myself. Oh, I
would write about my misadventures, about a trip to see my
grandmother and so forth," Dewi said. In those days, she would
write under a pseudonym because it was more important to her to
get her stories read rather than becoming known for writing them.

"I didn't care at first (about people knowing I wrote the
stories). It's like I have a story to tell and I have to tell it,
that was all," she said.

Dewi continued her studies in the French department of the
School of Letters at the University of Indonesia in 1963 and
graduated in 1969.

"France is so rich in literature and ideas. French literature
has more emotion than even English literature. And some of the
best philosophers come from France," she said by way of
explaining her choice of major.

But Dewi could also speak English, which she learned both at
school and at home, where she was expected to speak and entertain
her businessman father's foreign associates.

Her English became more refined when she moved to Melbourne,
Australia, in 1970 to marry her Scottish-Irish husband, Ian
Fraser, and she now writes fluently in both English and
Indonesian.

"When I moved, the ambience became English. I could still
conduct interviews in French but I can't write fiction in it,"
Dewi said.

In her new country, she taught Indonesian and French studies
in colleges and universities, besides writing for various
publications in Melbourne.

"I also did some contract work for editing text in magazines
and specialist publications," Dewi said.

Her move to a new country and a new culture influenced her
writing, which is full of emotional and cultural interplay.

Dewi's first novel, The Root of All Evil, is about an
Indonesian woman who is married to an Australian. The woman is
called to the bedside of her dying father in Jakarta, a city now
grown strange, where she faces the complications of unfamiliar
attitudes of hierarchy, betrayal and violence.

Parallel Forces tells of sorcery, psychiatry and the cultural
blocks of an Indonesian woman whose life is split between her
past and present in Surakarta, Central Java, and Victoria.

The same cultural clash is explored in Journeys Through
Shadows, the bilingual short-story compilation Neighborhood
Tales, and Stories of India Pacific -- three novellas set in New
Caledonia, Australia and Indonesia.

Her mother is of Sundanese and Chinese descent and her father
is a Chinese-Indonesian. This background gave her the cultural
sensitivity that is invaluable for a writer. In this light she is
often consulted by journalists on Australian-Indonesian cultural
ties.

"Being exposed to different cultures made me much less
judgmental about cultures," she remarked, adding that she feels
she can look at her own native culture more objectively and
discerningly now that she lives in a foreign country.

"Sometimes I don't know where I belong anymore, I have a
virtual domain that overlaps both sides (Australia and
Indonesia)," she explained.

In 1986 Dewi began work as a foreign correspondent for
Indonesian magazine Tempo.

"Tempo needed someone in Australia and Goenawan knew that I
could write," she said, referring to the magazine's founder
Goenawan Mohamad.

She also wrote for The Jakarta Post and Forum Keadilan.

"When I'm in a conference for fiction writers I call myself a
novelist, and when I'm around journalists I call myself a
journalist, but generally I refer of myself as a writer," Dewi
said.

The difference between fiction and non-fiction writing,
according to Dewi, is that whereas in fiction the ideas come on
their own, non-fiction writing first has to be researched.

"In fiction, the ideas come naturally and then have to be
researched," she said.

Sometimes her ideas come from two seemingly unrelated things
that she has experienced, and the two events just "short-circuit"
in her brain to become a story.

A lot of her own personality and experiences also go into her
work, Dewi said, adding that no matter how impersonal the themes
of her stories may be, they nevertheless carry her mark.

Dewi is currently working on a story about an ancient ornate
pin, the idea of which resulted from a holiday in Malaka,
Malaysia, and a television program she saw on cursed objects. She
plans to title the novel Snake.