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.