Man Tiger

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The most exhilarating part of literature’s history is that it has no teleology and is not driven by the chariot of Progress. The most original writers seem like unexpected meteorites. Who could predict the arrival of Sophocles, Virgil, Lady Murasaki, Cervantes, Melville, Lu Hsün, Shakespeare, Proust, Gogol, Ibsen, Márquez, or Joyce? They are in one sense the product of their epochs and, in another, of the vernacular languages into which they were born and raised. But uncountable numbers lived at the same time, spoke the same languages and wrote nothing memorable. Class and education cannot explain their arrival. Their familial ancestors and descendants rarely show any substantive literary talents.

Eka Kurniawan is certainly Indonesia’s most original living writer of novels and short stories, and its most unexpected meteorite. He was born on November 28, 1975, the day that the little ex-Portuguese colony East Timor declared its sovereign independence from Lisbon. On December 7, 1975, Pearl Harbour Day, President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger arrived in Indonesia to bless the tyrant Suharto’s launching of a bloody occupation (using American weapons) to annex East Timor. Eka is proud of his birth-date because it marks the beginning of twenty-two years of stubborn resistance by the East Timorese that eventually forced Jakarta to abandon its cruel colonial rule.

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