'Rainmaker' spins indelible tale
'Rainmaker' spins indelible tale
Marianne Katoppo, Contributor, Jakarta
The Rainmaker's Daughter
Richard Oh
210 pp.
Metafor Publishing 2004
The Rainmaker's Daughter is a title die-hard feminists would
strenuously object to. She is the heroine, so why is her
character derived and not defined?
But as I started reading, I soon realized that names really
are irrelevant here. Would "The Woman Who Swallowed the
Whirlwind" be better?
The personality of the woman in this story is such that there
is no name, no description that would do her justice. She is the
only woman in the story -- or is she? -- and none of the male
characters can vie with her in strength of character.
As she says herself: "Names are too definitive, ... too
confining. As soon as we are given a name, we're immediately
pegged to a certain character or trait. From then on you are a
captured soul."
It is akin to apophatic theology, in that we can only say what
God is not. To give God a name, any name, would be to confine
God.
The Rainmaker's Daughter opens, almost in flashback, to a
remote, unnamed village on the western shores of Kalimantan. A
place and a people still shrouded by superstition, where the
pawang's daughter is a young girl called on to help the fishermen
in a time of crisis. She stands in the boiling sea, facing the
howling whirlwind headed their way. And then, "Like a gigantic
python being lured into a trap, the whirlwind leapt forward and
in one swoop disappeared into the mouth of the Pawang's
daughter."
The daughter of the village pawang, or rainmaker, actually
saves her people, Buginese settlers, from catastrophe and ruin.
She liberates them from the impending disaster so that they may
continue to pursue their lives and livelihood -- fishing, and the
villagers, in turn, ascribe her the great -- and terrible --
power to work miracles.
As with all icons, however, this awesome and fearful power can
easily become the root of retribution and vengeance. The
villagers suddenly lose faith in her and she flees -- or to be
more accurate, disappears -- but love turned to hatred is a
powerful driving force, and the village sends a man out to bring
her back, unaware of the disastrous consequences they have set in
motion.
While she might have captured the whirlwind to save her
fishing village, she is one who cannot -- will not -- be
captured: "I want to be whoever I want to be."
Against this headstrong strong woman is the male protagonist,
Hadrian, a successful attorney who makes his living saving
Indonesian tycoons "from legal intricacies that they should have
known better than to get into in the first place". As he admits,
he has learned only one thing really well during all those years:
how to kiss somebody's behind. Hadrian meets the woman by chance
at a bar he frequents, and from the first glance, he is hooked.
But she does not conform to the standards set by beauty cream
manufacturers. Her face and skin are "hewn by the wind, shaped by
the sun" -- which is probably an apt description for millions of
Indonesian women and their natural beauty.
Men fall at her feet in droves, and so does Hadrian.
Hadrian is almost the mirror opposite of the rainmaker's
daughter, who knows exactly who and where she is: he is looking
for something. After all, he turned the junkyard behind his house
into a greenhouse with the most beautiful and exotic of flowers.
In response to his yearning for attachment to this elusive
woman, however, she throws out her belief that it is the tragedy
of mankind to want to get connected: "Since the day they cut our
umbilical cords, we've been trying to break free."
She actually eats Hadrian's prized flowers in a frenzy of oral
symbolism that is a reflection of an earlier, more intimate
moment. However, her adamant refusal to be named leaves her in a
void of distance, and she never reveals her true feelings,
although they are strongly implied.
Most of the story is actually set in that most modern of
metropolises here, Indonesia's pride and joy of Jakarta, which
some people -- such as Matalius the boat-maker -- perceive as
"this damn city, this most corrupted metropolis, where the vilest
and the most cunning constantly prey upon the helpless."
It is clear that Richard Oh is a very good storyteller. He
weaves the complex strands of myth and tradition, love and
passion, ecology and social criticism, and guilt and sacrifice,
together into a fascinating tapestry. Oh also manages to include
within his fiction an account of the ethnic conflict in West
Kalimantan in a way that is profoundly moving without being
sensational.
We are left to ponder what is the true jungle: the village in
Kalimantan or the stockbrokers' metropolis.
What is the true horror: superstitious villagers turning on an
innocent girl and making her the scapegoat, or the jaded lawyers
having a philosophical discussion about the annual floods as they
enjoy the best cigars and choicest wine?
Oh evokes the atmosphere, the feelings of the people in this
novel and turns them into full-blooded characters -- whether
named or not.
We feel the grief of the mother unable to feed her dying
child; the despair of the village girl stranded in the
stockbroker's jungle; the frustration and disgust of the men who
know they are responsible for the uninterrupted opulence of the
people who are bleeding the nation dry; the persistence and
patience of the loyal boat-maker to save his beloved against the
orders of the village chief.
Aside from his allegorical creativity and dynamic imagery, his
English is a joy to read. In a day and age where the "f-word" is
considered stylish and trendy, Oh's English is reminiscent of
Conrad or Tagore. Like those two literary masters, Oh is not a
native speaker, but his prose flows with elegance and generosity.
As an aside, let us remember that Tagore was the first person
to win the Nobel Prize for English Literature.
Switching chapter to chapter from real time to flashback to
Matalius' narrative, which speaks directly to the reader as a
disconnected participant, if not neutral observer, Oh takes us on
a journey following the rainmaker's daughter along her solitary
path of self-imposed exile.
This is not a story you come across every day, and was
conceived and written over the past four years for publication
late last year.
The Rainmaker's Daughter and its multiple themes will haunt
you for a long time to come.