The Father, Rage, and Fire

Delightfully titled, The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks, translated into English by Annie Tucker, is the most recent work to come from the pen of Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan. The novella’s mode is that of the confessional – more specifically, the transgressive-confessional strain. With its singular narrative focus and its drawing of the reader into an ethical dilemma, the novel puts one in mind of writers such as Albert Camus and Marguerite Yourcenar. Similarity to the French recit, however, does not imply an influence, more a common formal register. Kurniawan’s subject here is rage and its ramifications – a rage principally directed at the narrator’s father, a rage that, ultimately, only fire can promise to assuage.

The narrator, Sato Reang, about whose time of life and present circumstances we can only speculate, is looking back on his childhood and at the traumatic events which have shaped his life. The novella begins at what will become the conclusion of the tale, where Sato, upon the death of his father, is no longer following his father’s wish that he be ‘a pious child’. It also introduces Sato’s mirror image, Jamal, the obedient ‘pious child’, about whom we know little, and whose own demons are only hinted at, even as the narrative concludes.

Sato Reang (named after a character from one of his father’s unpublished silat – martial arts – stories) is a child of limited horizons, and one who enjoys simple pleasures. He has little interest in school and likes to hang out with a small group of boys, playing ball, tormenting creatures such as butterflies and crickets, and engaging in a range of pranks. He is not a particularly sympathetic character at face value. However, in the sad telling of this story, we see a child suffocating under his father’s strict regime, whose desires are thwarted at every turn, and whose minor rebellions have unexpected consequences.

Sato’s father is determined that his son will follow in his footsteps: that he will go to the small local mosque and study prayer and recitation. This is the last thing Sato wants to do.  Furthermore, every small pleasure of Sato’s is curtailed, every source of joy obliterated. The narrator attributes this authoritarianism to his father’s own disappointments, his failure to succeed as a writer – whether of silat tales, or religious da’wah magazine articles. Frustrated, the man takes to the machete and the match in a traumatising manner, destroying two objects dear to the boy, a soccer ball and a stuffed monkey. This leads Sato to become progressively, and pathologically, obsessed with fire, and to use it as a vehicle for revenge.

The narration has a self-analytical feel to it, and in focusing on these two key events from his childhood, it is possible to read the narrative as a response to some kind of hypothetical medical assessment, a psychological evaluation. In this regard, Kurniawan employs a technique, throughout the novella, of switching between first and third person, even from sentence to sentence. The result is a doubling of perception, of situating the boy in the wider narrative, perceived externally, while simultaneously allowing us access to what becomes an interior confessional: ‘So back then was Sato Reang a pious child? After considering everything I did in my childhood, the answer is, maybe not. At least not until I turned seven.’

The first key incident occurs after Sato has purchased a plastic ball of his own. That ball feels like a friend, an inseparable one: ‘He felt himself soar every time the ball was kicked into the sky. But only in retrospect did he realise that he was the ball. The ball was him. To be a child was to be nothing but a ball.’ 

A kick by Sato sends the ball into the shutters of the simple village mosque, which is followed by loud whoops from the boys. They continue to play. Suddenly Sato’s father appears, carrying a machete, and slices the ball in two:

The pain from this incident does not fade. The sight of balls for sale in the market, of other kids playing ball, anything to do with a mosque, all trigger him thenceforth: ‘[a] pain traveling like a current from the crown of his head right down between his legs’. The incident is seen as marking the end of his childhood: ‘There were no more afternoons spent kicking the plastic ball around with his friends, no more cricket-fighting until they bit the dust.’

Using poetic imagery to good effect, the writer has his protagonist at the age of twelve experiencing what becomes a recurring dream, of being alone in the ocean in a small boat, which ‘[leaves] him with a feeling of impending, overwhelming dread’. However, the dread is accompanied by a strange pleasure, an intimation of freedom: ‘Would he find a place to land, or would he be drifting in uncertainty forever? In his dream, even the rippling water made no sound.’

If the destruction of the ball signifies the end of childhood, the second incident, even crueller and more horrifying, sets up what appears to be a propensity for arson. Now sixteen years old, Sato sometimes goes to the night market on Saturdays. On this particular occasion, he sees a new ring toss game. He wins a stuffed monkey and, in a rare display of affection, takes it home as a present for Kasih, his little sister. However, his father accuses him of gambling:

Needless to say, alienation and resentment grow. One evening, going into town on the pretext of buying a snack, he heads into the deserted cinema, which he has been forbidden by his father to enter:

He lights a match. The cinema is soon in flames, but his crime remains undiscovered. As a consequence, ‘Sato Reang never again had to hear his friends gather around cheerfully discussing the films they’d seen. He’d learned from his father how fire obliterates.’

There is what one might consider a third key incident. It occurs after his father’s death. As his rage continues unabated, Sato considers what he should burn next. The market? The school? But he realises that arson has been ineffective in assuaging his trauma:

It’s a realisation that seems improbable for a child of Sato’s age, and more of a plot device to end the arson. He turns to drenching the market’s fruit supply in urine, but this has the feel of a tacky shock effect, an unconvincing denouement.

Still, fire remains a pervasive theme in the novella.  Even prior to his protagonist’s realisation of the limits of arson, Kurniawan inserts something of an interlude into the narrative by introducing Barkah, a fisherman friend of Sato’s father. Barkah is a solitary, enterprising man, and what we learn of his past – a lover lost to the ocean – adds an element of romance, a variation on the key of bleak, to the narrative. Sato enjoys the old man’s company and his tales of the sea, perhaps seeing him as a second father. And he is fascinated by one particular story: ‘I think old Barkah’s tale of burning his boat embedded itself in my soul’:

This somewhat romantic portrayal of burning is presented alongside a more mundane one: Barkah and Sato’s father meet regularly while burning trash. We learn also that Sato’s father used to take the rodents he would trap, and burn them too, before feeding them to the catfish in the small pond in the yard. One morning, after Sato’s father’s death, Barkah approaches Sato as he is burning trash, saying that from a distance, he looks very like his father. Sato comes to realise:

In what appears to be a nod to the book’s title, The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks, the unnatural burning of waste and the corruption of natural appetites occurring in the pond resonate symbolically with the thwarting of Sato’s natural boyish impulses and the corruption of spirit that Sato experiences as happening within him. Sato turns to burning his father’s possessions at the request of his mother, and he ‘did it happily. I’ll burn them, I thought. Fire would scorch all that remained.’ Catharsis via fire leads briefly to a refreshment of the spirit. ‘For the first time in a long, long time, my spirit felt weightless – as light as a kapok blossom floating on the wind, a sure sign of the coming rain.’

But Sato’s bullying ways take over once he returns to school, and his target is a boy called Jamal.  Complementing the split subject/object positioning of Sato is this casting of Jamal as his mirror image.  While Sato rebels against all attempts to become ‘a pious child’, Jamal is obedient, and even tries to become friends with the unwilling Sato, who induces Jamal into becoming part of his gang by teasing him about his family’s connection to Darul Islam, an organisation known for its agitation for the establishment of an Islamic state and proscribed by the Indonesian government. Jamal’s grandfather, a preacher connected to Darul Islam, has been arrested, and Sato encourages the other boys to tease him, with tragic consequences for Jamal.

A blame-shifting confessional, and potentially a case study on the perils of indoctrination, the narrative clusters around these key connecting points: the father and play, the father and the mosque, the father and the ball and the stuffed monkey, the father and fire, and, ultimately, the tragedy of Jamal.  And yet, there is something underwhelming and hollow when these connecting points are charted, which goes to show that a map of a tragedy does not necessarily yield greater insight into its substance. The single perspective, despite its inner/outer, subject/object construction, permits only one point of view, the self of the self. Ironically, this structured, seemingly methodical analysis of a life ends up presenting the reader with a clearly unreliable narrator.  The father is depicted as the person to blame for it all. Certainly he goes about it in the wrong way, but his intention is to make his son a better person, unlikely though it may be.

Scenes of school and play, of village life, with reference to a few male characters, are deftly, if marginally, drawn. But there is also an incomplete jigsaw feel to the novella’s depictions: references to women are rare, and female characters are near invisible in this tale.  There is no account of Sato’s relationship to his mother, and she only appears in the funeral scenes, and when she expresses a passive hope that her son will return to school.

The eerie absence of women from the story is indicative of a fiction which, despite the disturbing effect – as if the narrative has undergone an airbrushing – is a change from Kurniawan’s other works, in which the battering, rape, and sometimes murder of women play a prominent part. In both Man Tiger and Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, the beating and raping of women is core to the plot. His debut novel, Beauty is A Wound, situates the narrator as a dalang figure, swiftly and skilfully moving from one episode to the next, employing stock characters in a method similar to the conventions of wayang (and also, comic books). Set during a tumultuous time in Indonesian history, spanning the final days of Dutch colonialism, the Japanese Occupation, the War of Independence, and the horrific mass killings of 1965 and aftermath, Beauty is a Wound, with its originality of style and clever use of the generic elements of the ghost story, was generally a critical success, both in the original and in translation. However, the novel relies heavily on relentless depictions of women being violated over several decades. That they are beautiful, and capable of very entertaining, cheeky repartee, does not mitigate the fact of their brutal treatment, making the book a very difficult read.

The objectification of women in fiction and the arts in Indonesia has, generally, been a lingering problem, as if some artists and critics cannot bear to part from this canonical and well-established norm. However, with the current vibrant state of Indonesian literary production, there are many alternatives. To name just two: Norman Erikson Pasaribu with their tender and heartbreaking poems of stories of queer life in Indonesia, and Leila Chudori with her compassion and empathy towards characters regardless of their gender.

The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks is Kurniawan’s third book to be translated by Annie Tucker, and, stylistically, it presents a marked change from her other two translations of his work, Beauty is A Wound, which I speak of above, and Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, a novel in which comic conventions are transposed into literary form. A mark of a successful translation is that it captures as much as possible the texture of the original writing, its musical or compositional signature. Annie Tucker has translated the text of The Dog Meows in spare prose, appropriate for the condensed narrative and its focus on a few crucial plot elements. Consequently, this book feels like it has a lot more in common with Man Tiger, translated by Labodalih Sembiring. Both novellas have a circular structure, with Man Tiger involving well-placed time shifts, which reveal a number of crucial incidents as it proceeds to the climax.

Unlike this latest novella, Man Tiger employs an omniscient narrator, and the central character, Margio, is drawn more sympathetically than Sato, as a much put-upon young man with a real heart who is finally undone. Margio endures his father’s incompetence and violent abuse of his mother, but the casual dismissal of his mother, by her lover, no less, becomes the final straw. Eka Kurniawan has been lauded by some, in particular, by the renowned Indonesianist Benedict Anderson, as successor to the late great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Man Tiger perhaps comes closest to Pramoedya’s writing, with its vivid description of village life and its humanist ethos. Kurniawan himself, according to Anderson’s introduction to the novella, professed his admiration of ‘a melancholy three’ (Anderson’s term) when it came to Indonesian writers: Amir Hamzah, executed during the Revolution; Pramoedya; and Widji Thukul, a poet who disappeared during the demonstrations against Suharto in 1998.

To return to The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks, Sato Reang in time does come to regret his behaviour and its consequences: ‘Long after, when he ruminated on it, Sato Reang would think it would have been better if they’d just left that kid alone. Jamal had never made any trouble with anyone. Usually he just sat on his bench, looking neat and tidy and polite.’ However, such a reflection comes across almost as performative, rather than genuine, contrition, particularly since the novella centres so heavily on Sato’s complaints about his upbringing. Well-constructed as the portrait of Sato and his early life may be, it is a detached one, devoid of the warmth of human engagement observable in Man Tiger. As an analysis of patriarchy, it is intriguing, but the strictures of such an approach ultimately work against it.