ASEAN holds women's story-reading evening

ASEAN holds women's story-reading evening

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Inen Maskerning and Ma Paw may not seem to have
anything in common. After all, one is from Aceh, the other from
Myanmar, and they both lead quite different lives.

But as their tales were told at the mezzanine foyer of the
ASEAN Secretariat last Friday, it turned out the two women have
an uncanny number of similarities.

Inen and Ma Paw were among the characters in eight stories
recited by women from ASEAN countries in a one-night program
called An Evening of ASEAN Women's Short Stories. The event was
part of ASEAN Women's Month '98, an promotional event centering
around the ASEAN Secretariat for the month of October. The night
was filled with laughter, exotic languages and one case of stage
fright.

Ten females from school age to middle age took turns to read
out stories, most of which were selected from Perempuan, an
anthology of short stories written by female writers from the
ASEAN countries.

The readers were generally the wives or daughters of diplomats
and ASEAN officials and, as the evening showed, they handled
intonations and articulations quite admirably.

The evening began with Mignon Tan reading Emergence by the
Filipino writer Lucila V. Hosillos. Tan, herself a Filipino, has
lived in Indonesia for quite some time. During the reading she
juggled three languages -- Hiligaynon, English and Indonesian --
with equal fluency as she flipped through the pages.

Through her effective rendition of Hosillos' dramatic writing,
she brought the audience into a young village woman's journey of
self-discovery as she reflects on her life by a river bank.

"...The darkness of her mind was brightened as if by a million
stars, making it bright as day. A light shone into her feelings,
thoughts, and her whole being. Everything conspired to make her
aware of her femininity for the very first time. This emergence
shining inside her now led her thoughts into a plan of
action...."

The program came to its most enlightening moments when Esther
Myint took the time to orate some cultural anecdotes before and
during her reading of Zawgy's Her Spouse. This is the story that
features Ma Paw, a simple village woman whose name literally
means "a not-so-intelligent female."

Through Myint's alternate takes of Burmese and English, the
audience came to know Ma Paw, the breadwinner who works hard
everyday while her husband, although kind enough to look after
the children, prefers a laid-back life sitting at home doing
nothing.

Ma Paw puts up with Ko Hsin because, after all, he is a good
husband, and a religious and charitable man who once spent some
years at a Buddhist monastery as an apprentice monk.

The family is thrown into turmoil when one day Ko Hsin decides
to become a monk again, relieving himself of any work and
responsibility in the process. Thereafter he spends his days
praying and showering anybody near him with religious preaching.

This comical story concludes with Ma Paw's ingenious strategy
to bring her husband back to his senses, showing in the process
that her name is one given in irony alone. Myint successfully
brought out the sardonic charm of this little satire with her
calm, unhurried reading.

Ma Paw found her soul sister in Inen Maskerning, the heroine
of an Acehnese folk tale introduced by the youngest reader of the
evening, eight-year-old Zulaika Husodo. The Al-Izhar Elementary
School pupil came to the microphone dressed in smart Acehnese
garb and gave a clear articulation of the village woman's tale.
Although getting a little bogged down by the English translation,
she breezed through the Indonesian parts without missing a single
beat.

Through Husodo, the audience encountered Inen, who, very much
like Ma Paw, is an industrious woman, a woman who would go an
extra mile to regain her family's happy life, and a woman who has
to cope with a husband half as industrious as she. Even though
this is not a short story in a literal sense -- it was not among
tales selected from the Perempuan anthology -- Inen's tale is no
less inspiring.

A mixture of ASEAN women, among them the strong, the weak, the
independent and the subservient, leapt out of the fine deliveries
rendered.

Norain Ali, a Singaporean ASEAN official, was apologetic every
time she switched from English to the Indonesian version of Miao
Hsiou's Return. "Don't laugh at my accent," she continuously
pleaded the audience.

But there was nothing to apologize for in her articulate and
well-read rendition of the piece, which tells of regrets and
missed chances.

Meanwhile, Indonesian author Marianne Katoppo read out her own
story, A Home for Prapanca, an amusing observation of life as
seen through the eyes of a cat.

Ratih Sanggarwati was assigned to the most stark and intense
selection, Nguyen Thi's The Departure, which chronicles the day-
to-day lives of three female Viet Cong guerrillas stationed in a
secluded village. She did her job well, even though, as the
evening's organizer Debra Yatim later confessed, the model-cum-
businesswoman was unfamiliar to her material until the last
minute.

The evening caught its sole case of stage fright when Netty
Chalermpalanupap froze in front of the microphone. The young girl
softly shook as her pleading mother, Polly, coaxed her to read
out her part of Kamsing Srinawk's Dark Glasses. The elder
Chalermpalanupap surrendered and told the amused audience:
"Everything was OK when we rehearsed at home." But the show did
go on as Netty's older sister, Netta, read the descriptive
paragraphs in English while their mother voiced the exchanges in
the delightful sounds of the Thai language.

Meanwhile, 14-year-old Malaysian Nadira Noordin made Cynthia
Anton's autobiographical piece Nannan her own. The Jakarta
International School student read the piece endearingly, as if
she was telling a tale of her own beloved grandmother, all the
way to the poignant end.

"...Her last words after she had done her cooking that morning
were, 'I think I am about to change'. In fact she really did
change.

"Paralysis in her body and other senses took over. Only her
eyes were left to do the talking. I often think that both her
eyes whispered, 'This is the transformation that I was waiting
for'. Six months later Nannan broke through her cocoon and left
us, alighting into the bright blue sky and yonder. The gold
sparkle of her wings continue to fall down onto our heads...."

Although the readings were mostly flawless, it was rather hard
to sit through the whole program, which dragged on for two hours
and forty minutes. Around 20 members of the audience were left at
the bitter end, down from around 45 counted at the beginning.
They alone braved the lengthiness of some of the stories, made
even more tedious by their rendition in two or three languages.

To break the monotony, Katoppo, Sanggarwati, Yatim and Enny
Soekamto read out a scene from N. Riantiarno's Women in
Parliament. Although they did it well, the play's rowdy, jovial
nature did not go particularly well with the elegant mannerisms
of the short stories.

Nevertheless, the program was successful in bringing together
the rich ASEAN palette of cultures, especially in its use of
prose to introduce ASEAN women to each other's heritage. One
mystery remained, though: the book Perempuan, which was published
by Yayasan Obor ten years ago and which does not contain a single
entry from an Indonesian writer (although the foreword was
written by Marianne Katoppo), is now out of print and was nowhere
to be found.

According to Yatim and fellow-organizer Geni Achnas from the
ASEAN Secretariat, no similar anthology was ever published in the
ensuing decade. That gives the false impression that female
writing in the ASEAN region died in 1988. Whatever went wrong,
here's hoping programs such as this will soon rectify this
misleading state of affairs.