Indonesians in Focus: Sonia Piscayanti

By Barrie | April 28th, 2007 | No Comments

Sonia Piscayanti dressed, talked and giggled as lively as any other 23-year-old Balinese girl. Yet her writings, both their themes and literary sophistication, reflect a wisdom and maturity far beyond her age. “Unlike the majority of the country’s young writers, the proponents of the so-called teen-lit and chick-lit genres, who are busy writing shallow stories on mundane stuffs, Sonia dares to tackle more difficult issues,” senior Balinese playwright Mas Ruscitadewi said.

Mas was one of dozens literary figures who thronged Denpasar’s Museum Sidik Jari on Sunday night to witness the launch of Karena Saya Ingin Berlari (Because I want to run), Sonia’s debut book.

The 176-page anthology features 14 short stories written from 2004 to 2006. Sonia, who has garnered several national accolades, is one of the island’s most promising young authors.

“I believe that Sonia is the very tip of the emerging wave of young writers who will significantly change the island’s literary landscape,” senior poet Tan Lioe Ie noted.

The anthology is a powerful testimony to Sonia’s mastery of words as well as her almost magical familiarity with subtle nuances of human emotions. Moreover, it also underlines her ability to seamlessly weave the real with the unreal.

“Reading her works is a captivating journey that takes readers from the simple reality of daily life into a surrealistic world of mind-boggling occurrences,” literary scholar Sugi Lanus said.

Sugi pointed out that desolation and the search for the true meaning of love were the main ropes that bound Sonia’s works together.

“Her protagonists share similar characteristics of living in psychological and emotional isolation. In some cases, the isolation is the result of the protagonists’ own choice. In a few cases, the mental isolation is being imposed on them by certain authoritative figures,” he said.

It is this desolation that later provided the protagonists with the necessary space to question and then to redefine their views on love, amorous or otherwise, and other sacred elements of their existence.

“We have a protagonist who went into self-inflicted exile because she wanted to understand love and the loss of love,” said Sugi. “On the other hand, some characters were being forced into that exile because their parents and peers couldn’t understand their emotional turmoil. The prolonged exile later triggered their quest for love.”

The best example of that desolation and quest for love is provided in Dunia Dalam Celana Dalam (The world within underwear), by far the most captivating story in the collection.

The protagonist is Sunia, a young girl who grows up in a fractured family. Sunia’s mother leaves the family after she is accused of being unfaithful by her husband. Later, Sunia’s father remarries. This stepmother, in Sunia’s words, “is loving and caring but does not understand me”.

“The story is a literary tour de force driven by Sunia’s questions about her mother’s love and fidelity,” commented Sugi.
“Sunia could not seek out the answer because she was in a sort of emotional and psychological confinement. This confinement was built and fortified by the authority of her father, Sunia’s own weakness — her fear to uncover the truth — and nurtured by a transient gratification provided by the memory of her mother stored in her abandoned collection of underwear,” Sugi said.

Through the underwear, Sunia recreates various fantasy worlds where she and her mother live in jubilant happiness.

As she breaks free from her confinement, she must first acknowledge that the truth about her mother has always been around.

When she finally comes face to face with the truth, everything else — every little truth that was created as the product of her imagination, dreams and memory stored in the underwear — cease to exist. In fact, everything else loses their importance, their power over her Self.

“This is a story about one person’s journey to gain her personal freedom, the freedom that could only be reached by embracing reality and abandoning the unreality of dream and imagination,” Sugi added.

Moreover, the story also reflects Sonia’s rebellious attitude toward traditional taboos that are usually avoided by her seniors.
Through the story, Sonia questions parental authority, raises underwear to a hallowed position, and discusses sexuality and adultery in an open manner.

“In traditional Bali, you shouldn’t question the authority of your parents. In that realm, underwear is an impure object while sexuality and adultery are definitely not the kind of things you discuss in public,” noted dramatist Putu Satria said.
Sonia doesn’t stop there.

In Karena Saya Ingin Berlari, she also talks about pedophilia and one protagonist enjoys a brief moment of gay intimacy.

In Tarsih, Sonia explores the noble aspects of prostitution while lambasting the Balinese hypocrisy toward religious rituals.

“Unlike her seniors such as Oka Rusmini and Cok Sawitri, who are still being heavily burdened with traditional issues such as inter-caste tensions and who still love employing traditional symbols and imagery in their works, Sonia is a product of modern Bali,” Sugi said.

Naturally, her issues, language and perspectives are modern in nature. Domestic violence, child abuse and gender inequality takes center stage in Sonia’s works as she breaks free of the mental cell of traditional myths and taboos adhered to by her seniors.

“Sonia could do that easily because, probably, for her the taboos never existed at all in the first place,” said Sugi.

I Wayan Juniartha