News | Sunday, 1 January 2012 | sundanesecorner.org
Hawe Setiawan
Ericka (in red) with her parents and brother (Photograph: Hawe Setiawan)
Young Indonesian writer Ericka Citra Sejati (21) launched her novel in West Javanese city of Ciamis on Saturday morning local time. Entitled Ranting Jangan Mudah Patah ‘A Twig that Shouldn’t Easily Broken,’ it is the second book Ericka has issued for the last two years. Her first work is Kutunggu di Pintu Langit ‘Waiting for You at Heaven’s Gate,’ which consists of poems, short stories, paintings, and phtographs.
The book launching took place at a Ciamis hotel, where her parents and brother along with local journalists, students, schoolteachers, and many others joined the party. The speechless author tried to reply questions from the floor. I myself assisted her in introducing the novel to the audience by taking into account its story and form as well as her possible achievements in the future.
Ericka’s novel tells a story about the engagement of Sabilla and Runo, a couple of middle class youths in an urban lifeworlds of Bandung. It is told from the first person’s point of view, with Sabilla as its heroine. Sabilla’s dream of marrying her fiance to build a happy family is unexpectedly canceled, for Runo is bounded by an arrangement with his workplace and even has to go abroad for the sake of his career—and that’s the epicenter of its whole plot. This is a story of how an Indonesian young girl tries to keep searching and developing her true self amid adversaries that come one after the other into her daily life.
As its title suggests, this novel seems to presents an allegory of love and hope, yet also of sufferings and setbacks—with, in turn, a happy ending.
What makes me interested in this work is the social reality it tries to represent. In the fictions written by some other contemporary Indonesian authors, mainly those of new comers, you may find how family life appears to have been declined. Rather than idealizing marriage-bound family, for instance, they tend to idealize a sort of togetherness between male and female. You may also find in those works how sexuality seems to have nothing to do with marriage. Contrary to this general trend, Ericka’s novel does emphasize the significance of marriage in social life. As the narrative personas of this novel live an urban life—residing at middle class appartements, having lunch at cafes, commuting between different cities by shuttle buses, and even going abroad to advance their scholarly studies and professional careers—this story seems to inherit a sort of familiar ideal for most Indonesians: building a happy marriage-bound family life.
As she develops her own central theme, however, Ericka seems to be in need of mastering some technical requirements for the sake of her realism, e.g. harmonizing its social setting with its point of view, situating sequences or fragments to constitute its whole plot, representing dialogues among different charracters, etc. Yes, this young Indonesian twig shouldn’t easily broken for the sake of her future literary career.
In one of her poems issued in her first book mentioned above, Ericka says, aku akan selalu menyalakan api/dan itu untuk menerangi jiwamu ‘I will always light the fire/and that’s for illuminating your soul.’ Hope so.***
