[Kabar-indonesia] Asian Writers in Bali Seek to Break Western Literary Stranglehold [+LAT]

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

also: LATimes: What's So Funny About the Nobel Prize for Literature?
[Critics of the decreasingly influential award charge that political agendas 
trump great writing, but maybe it's always been thus.]

Feature - Asians seek to break western literary stranglehold

By Sugita Katyal

UBUD, Indonesia, October 2 (Reuters) - Indonesian author Vira Safitri
is only 18, but already has two novels under her belt.

In a world where awareness of eastern culture often stops at Jackie
Chan and Zhang Ziyi, a new breed of Asian writer is aiming to turn
pages with writing inspired by distinctly Asian issues: such as the
repression of women, the politics of the hijab, political dissidence
and eastern mythology.

Asked how long it took to write her first novel, "Secret Admirer", 
a giggling Safitri said: "Four days and three nights."

"And in another week's time I had a publisher," she added.

Her two books, which touch on issues such as romance and child 
abuse from a teenage perspective, have jointly sold 9,000 copies 
and she is hoping they will be translated from her native Indonesian 
to English to get wider coverage.

Safitri is one a growing breed of Asian authors writing in a uniquely
eastern idiom who were at a writers' festival in the Balinese resort
town of Ubud seeking to make themselves heard above the western
literary clamour.

"Around two-third of the world's population lives in Asia while 90
percent of the world's culture is western. That's a huge anomaly and
anomalies have a habit of correcting themselves," Hong Kong-based
writer Nury Vittachi told Reuters.

"It's already happening. There are literary festivals in Hong Hong,
Ubud and Shanghai. Publishers are coming here. At one time there 
were no literary agents here, but now it's opening up," said the
shaven-headed author who has written more than 20 books, including 
a successful series about a Feng Shui detective, C.F Wong.

With literary agents and publishers heading there, not surprisingly
the Asian equivalent of the Booker prize is going to be launched this
year.

HEALING WOUNDS

Until now, many Asian language writers were rarely read outside their
countries. But some carved a niche in the global literary world
because their books were translated into English.

The mysterious world of China before the Great Revolution, for
instance, was unlocked following the translation of Chinese author Su
Tong's three-novella collection "Raise the Red Lantern", which was
made into an Oscar-nominated film.

Outside readers have also got a peep into Japanese society through
translations of Haruki Murakami, an international bestselling label.

But such names are few and far between.

The Ubud festival was launched three years ago after the 2002 Bali
bombing that killed 220 people, mostly foreigners.

"Literature is a way of healing wounds," said Janet De Neefe, the
organizer of the Ubud festival.

"Last year we had a session on terrorism. This year we have one on
Islam. It's such a misunderstood faith. We're addressing all the
issues with grey areas."

For the authors, it was a chance to discuss the trials and
tribulations of writing from an Asian perspective and thereby shatter
some of the misconceptions about their cultures, religion and history.

Malaysian writer Dina Zaman, who writes a column about Muslim life in
Malaysia called "I am Muslim," said she wanted to write from the
perspective of a modern Malay woman.

"Being a modern Malay woman could mean anything. I don't wear a hijab,
I expose my legs, but I pray five times a day," said the glamorous
young writer, sitting in a huge Balinese style gazebo perched at the
edge of a hill overlooking lush paddy fields.

Some like Sri Lanka's Elmo Jayawardena use personal stories to etch
out accounts of political conflict.

Jayawardena's book "Sam's Story" is the story of Sri Lanka in 2001,
war torn for many years, narrated by an illiterate houseboy whose
tends the gardens and dogs in the home of an upper-middle class
family.

"The fact that Asians bring an exotic flavour is part of the magic,"
said Vittachi, who also edits the "Asia Literary Review", formerly
known as "Dim Sum".

"Asia is trying to reclaim its literary heritage."

---------------------------------------

The Los Angeles Times
October 1, 2006

Opinion

THE NOBELS

What's So Funny About the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Critics of the decreasingly influential award charge that political 
agendas trump great writing, but maybe it's always been thus.

By Susan Salter Reynolds

SIGN ON TO Ladbrokes.com, Britain's premier gaming/betting site. Below 
horses, greyhounds, hurling, snooker and even ladies football -- click on "Nobel 
Literature Prize." 

There they are in all their glory, this year's contenders for the world's 
most coveted writing award: Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (3-1 odds), Syrian poet 
Adonis (4-1), Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (5-1), Joyce Carol Oates 
(6-1), followed (ouch) by Philip Roth (10-1) and down into the nether regions 
of Nobel hopefuls, a list that veers closer to the sublime -- South Korean poet 
Ko Un, Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer, novelists Milan Kundera and Thomas 
Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Julian Barnes, Paul Auster and, last but 
not least, Bob Dylan at 500-1 
-- than the ridiculous. 

The winner will be named on an unspecified date not long after all the other 
Nobel categories are announced beginning this week. And of this you can be 
sure: There will be grousing. The general consensus over the last few years seems 
to be that the Nobel Prize in literature has become, as Roger Straus, 
co-founder of Farrar, Straus and Giroux once claimed, a "joke," or as Charles 
McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, has said more 
diplomatically, a "great mystery." It's been a difficult decade for the 
prize-to-end-all-prizes (though the charm of the 10 million Swedish kronor - or close to $1.4 
million - remains indisputable). 

Last year, London literary critic Robert McCrum bemoaned the Nobel's loss of 
innocence. The 1997 selection of Italian communist anarchist playwright Dario 
Fo, he wrote, caused "near universal dismay," and the 2000 award to Chinese 
novelist, playwright and poet Gao Xingjian mere "bafflement." The 2004 choice of 
Elfriede Jelinek, the belligerently unreadable Austrian feminist, was even 
more controversial, and caused Knut Ahnlund, one of the 18 members of the 
Swedish Academy (whose members serve for life) to walk. "Degradation, humiliation, 
desecration and self-disgust, sadism and masochism are the main themes of 
Elfriede Jelinek's work," he wrote in the conservative paper Svenska Dagblat. "All 
other aspects of human life are left out." 

Ahnlund accused Horace Engdahl, who has been permanent secretary of the 
committee since 1999, of "destroying the moral nerve of the nation." The New 
Criterion magazine chimed in with a conservative attack, calling the selection of 
Jelinek "a new low" and, while it was at it, saying Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel 
Prize served, sniff, only to "cheapen" the prize.

Engdahl, a mere schoolboy at 57 compared with some of his colleagues on the 
committee, enjoys a kind of notoriety in Swedish literary circles that he often 
refers to as hurtful. Why do they hate him so? While Ahnlund likes a good 
human story, Engdahl is a post-structuralist who believes in things like "textual 
analysis." In his speech at the presentation of the Nobel to Jelinek, he 
quoted Hegel (never popular at parties): "Woman is society's irony." 

"If literature is a force that leads to nothing," Engdahl pressed on, 
addressing Jelinek, "you are, in our day, one of its truest representatives." 
(Thunderous applause.) 

Engdahl has said that he wants to broaden the scope of the prize, "enlarge 
the mandate"; that it should "develop as literature develops." Some 
prize-watchers take this to mean a larger opening for journalists and philosophers (like 
Bertrand Russell, who won in 1950, or Winston Churchill, who won in 1953, or 
journalist Ryszard "5-1" Kapuscinski).

But what does it all mean? Where is Derrida when you need him? When Alfred 
Nobel, who died at 63 in 1896, made provision for the prizes in his 1895 will, 
the language delineating criteria for the literary prize was, well, obscure. 
The prize, he said, should go "to the person who shall have produced in the 
field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction." Hmmm. But 
then this was a guy who, just a few lines down, wrote that it was his "express 
wish that following my death my veins shall be opened, and when this has been 
done and competent Doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains 
shall be cremated in a so-called crematorium."

Today, the overriding question is how much do the writer's politics factor 
into the nomination and award? Is the prize for literature or for politics? 
(It's a dessert topping! No, it's a floor wax!) "It's a literary prize," McCrum 
insists, "not a platform for sending political messages." 

But the people at the New Criterion certainly don't think that it's being 
treated that way. More and more, they say, the prize "has gone to a person who 
has the correct sex, geographical address, ethnic origin and political profile - 
'correct' being determined by the commissars at the Swedish Academy."

Swedish literary critic Mats Gellerfelt, quoted in a long New Yorker article 
on the prize in 1999, agreed: "The ideal candidate for the Nobel Prize today," 
he said, "would be a lesbian from Asia." 

Close followers of the prize process refer to Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz's 
win in 1980, the same year the Solidarity movement formed, or William Butler 
Yeats' win in 1923, a year after Ireland won independence (to name just two) as 
proof that the prize has always been politicized. 

British playwright Harold Pinter, who said he was amazed when he won last 
year's prize ("It never occurred to me that I was a contender," he told the 
Guardian), credited his politics - not just the literary merits of his 29 plays. 
Pinter previously turned down an offer of knighthood from John Major, but he 
accepted the Nobel with relish, looking in photos, after a fall in Ireland that 
left his face bloody and scarred, like a happy pirate. His work is unabashedly 
left-leaning, with recent references to President Bush as a "mass murderer" 
and to Tony Blair as "a deluded idiot," and condemnation of the war in Iraq 
sprinkled generously throughout. (According to Pinter, a British news channel, 
mistakenly thinking that he had died after his fall, reported in the morning that 
"Harold Pinter is dead," only to change its mind later and announce, "No, 
he's won the Nobel Prize.") 

Whatever the criteria, there's no question that many literary giants have 
failed to win the prize. Critics point to the glaring omissions of Leo Tolstoy, 
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, among others (but 
then again, Gandhi was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, so maybe there's 
some kind of freakish reverse psychology thing happening). Boris Pasternak and 
Jean-Paul Sartre both refused the prize, though Sartre's relatives high-tailed 
it to Stockholm after the writer died to demand the money, a demand that was 
refused.

(Meanwhile, the entire nation of South Korea has waited patiently for almost 
a decade for its front-runner, Buddhist poet Ko Un - 12-1 at Ladbroke's - to 
win, each year expressing polite disappointment, resignation and hopefulness 
for the coming decades.) 

There is something smarmy (or perhaps merely pathetic) about a writer who 
sets out to build his career around hopes of winning the Nobel, something many 
American writers, including Norman Mailer, Updike and Oates, have been accused 
of. (Never mind that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wanted it so much that he 
reportedly invited Swedish writers, critics and academics for lavish vacations at 
his seaside villa on a regular basis.) Roth, whose tireless campaigning to 
publish the work of Eastern European writers has always seemed out of sync with his 
usual subject matter (himself) also has been accused of brown-nosing for the 
prize. In the opening scenes of Mailer's 1971 book "The Prisoner of Sex," he 
describes himself as a writer who, after "twenty-one years of public life," 
longs only for the chance to put the acronym "FNPW" (for Famous Nobel Prize 
Winner) before his name. 

Douglas Messerli, publisher of Green Integer, right here in our own L.A. 
backyard, has had many writers nominated for the Nobel over the years. This year 
he has two poets fairly high up on the list: Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) and Ko Un. 
Adonis, who was born in 1930, is one of the first Arab poets to write 
explicitly about sex and love. He's an experimental writer, with political statements 
embedded throughout his writing.

This is the third time he's been nominated for the prize, and Messerli, over 
on Wilshire Boulevard, gears up each year for an emergency print run, should 
either Adonis or Ko Un win. 

"We're talking another 1,000 or so copies," he said, not the millions that 
tend to accompany the announcement of the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most 
prestigious literary prize. Why? Because of the highly literary nature of the work, 
and because it's poetry. 

Isn't this a sobering and lovely thought in these days of greed? The Nobel 
Prize in literature, one of the most lucrative prizes a writer can win, goes, 
more often than not, to the least commercial work in the world. Surely Alfred 
Nobel, whose lifelong tinkering with nitroglycerin produced some of the most 
destructive materials and deadliest weapons in the world, and whose name is now 
synonymous with world peace, would appreciate that small, triumphant irony. 

Susan Salter Reynolds writes about books for The Times. 

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