A series dedicated to literature in translation whether classic or contemporary.

Translated by the author.

Originally published as Jalan Lahir by Kepustrakaan Popular Gramedia (2021)

Scribe (2023)

In four interrelated stories, Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri explores the torturous relations between men and women. These stories, braided together like a tapestry, span generations, nations, war and peace, self and others. The first story focuses on an unnamed narrator’s pining for his unrequited love, Nastiti. And then one day, without explanation, Nastiti disappears. The second story Rukmini, a young Indo-Dutch girl growing up in the Dutch East Indies prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The girl, Semarang, through the calamities of war, enters a prison-of-war camp and then is recruited by the Japanese military to become a “comfort woman” to the The Commander. In the third story a war photographer remembers Hanako, the wife of a traumatized ex-Imperial soldier. And the final story takes place in Osaka where Dara works to escape her past, struggles to conceive a child, and becomes obsessed with a Japanese porn star.

On the surface, these stories seem fascinating, albeit possibly a little too cliché. We’ve heard these narratives before. What Wuri does with them is nothing short of genius. The title, Birth Canal, comes across as a bit on the nose, a bit too knowing in its own cleverness. But when one reads these stories, by turns entrancing, sensual, erotic, and knotty, these narratives reflect back upon each other. To take just one example. Rukmini, the Indo-Dutch, girl is renamed by Hana by her captor. She is demeaned and enslaved, turned into a sex-object simulacra, a pathetic attempt by a military petty tyrant to turn his victim into a simulation of his wife. The following story concerns Hanako and the ex-Imperial officer has been humiliated by military defeat and the trauma of losing both arms in battle. The searing horror of personal bodily harm and the grotesque loss of limbs immediately triggers the previous story’s nightmarish eroticism in passages like this:

“One hand began to touch her body, reached under her dress, touched her breasts, played with her nipples, twisted them with his forefinger and thumb, gently, as if full of love; he kissed her face, crushed her lips, his tongue pushed into her mouth, the man sighed and groaned, and Rukmini was paralysed with fear. But she would be alright. She just needed to endure it a little more, and what would be would be. What could be worse than this, anyway? She could have been lying dead.”

The passage’s sensuality and eroticism is poisoned with the war’s unfair (and non-consensual) power dynamic between the Commander and Rukmini. She eventually escapes at war’s end, only to be confronted with the post-colonial chaos, the Malayan insurrection to be swiftly crushed by the British reimposing colonial rule, this time mirroring the racism and cruelty of the Japanese Imperial occupation. The global post-colonial struggles exposed the “good guys” of the Second World War as racist imperialists. The Good Fight had to the peoples of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America a transparently moral fraud.

(This isn’t to say that these post-war activities meant the Nazis, Fascists, and Imperial Japenese were the actually the good guys. It simply illustrates how international events and the re-imposition of a some sort of status quo ante make foreign policy a game played in a miasma of gray chaos. To cite an example, the Arab Spring, and the American foreign policy establishment making heads or tails of the situation, since the United States favored, funded, and aided a rogues gallery of dictatorships, despots, and depraved monarchies, so long as they were against Al-Qaeda and offered cheap oil and good trade routes. All the ideologies and -isms merely paper over a ruthless mercenary everyday business where global capital and military projection of power go hand in hand.)

Long aside finished: Further complicating Rukmini’s relationship with the Commander is her status as a mixed-race woman and as a Catholic. To the Commander her mixed-race status (half-white, half-Indonesian) turns her into an exotic objet d’art. It turns the tables on the sexual and political gamesmanship of colonist and subaltern. A way of getting back at the colonialist whites. (Doubly ironic, since Japan’s adoption of Western mores and technology during the Meiji Era was especially rapid and zealous.) Rukmini’s Catholicism leads to long passages of inner torment. She has to contend with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy among other things after she escapes.

Rukmini’s story reads like a combination of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hiroshima mon amour, and Graham Greene’s Quiet American. The narrative is conveyed with sensitivity, political acumen, and a deep understanding of the moral and ethical quagmires besetting women during wartime.

This is only one story among four. The stories reflect and refract off and against each other. Each successive narrative builds upon and complicates the previous. It would be rewarding to chart these braided narratives and explain each parallel, mirroring, etc., but it would negate the absolute pleasure of reading Birth Canal. For such a short work, it contains multitudes. Expertly translated by the author, itself a testament to Indonesia’s convoluted British colonial heritage. Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri is about the eponymous biological organ, a physiological formation that can make turn an individual into a family, a woman into a matriarch, and an eternal liability, the prey of theocratic bullying power freaks. It can turn someone into a sex slave. It can turn into a weapon. But Birth Canal reveals the triumphs and tribulations of several generations of Indonesian women, each dealing with their own personal struggles with their lovers, humanity, and the course of world events. There are births, abortions, and infanticide, all done with a sensitivity and nuance that confronts the individual with the everyday challenges and obscenities of human existence.