Editor’s Note: Throughout this article, the author refers to Indonesian-language poet and writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu as “Kak” Norman, as a form of respect for their older age and longer experience. “Kak” is a gender neutral honorific in Indonesian, but it can be used as a pronoun to refer to an older person, because referring to someone older by “kamu” (informal you) is considered rude and “Anda” (formal version of you) is considered very formal, more often used in official documents than in daily conversation.
In their latest poetry collection, My Dream Job, Norman Erikson Pasaribu painstakingly threads ink strokes connecting seminal points in their life, the ethereal tone of their intelligent poeticism gleaming through the smog of our third world reality.
A few weeks ago, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Kak Norman about their book. Despite having different ancestries – Kak Norman being Toba-Batak, and I a composition of Javanese, Chinese and Moluccan – we both inherit and struggle through queer, working class lives, as remnants and legacies of our ancestors’ bones and dreams.
While sharing similar religious lore, with me being Muslim, the conversation also became points of entry and translation for the complex Batak Christian imagery woven in their poems.
If I were to describe the book, My Dream Job would be an eclectic congregation of past lives and dreamy futures, shimmering their translucent robes, iridescent feathers and cheeky smiles like participants of a queer parade I imagine would rain upon our Indonesian streets. The transparency of their apparel wouldn’t cover the blood of our martyrs and anti-colonial revolutionaries – no, it would reveal wonderfully the rainbow cracks and the uncountable stories of our ancestors.
Composing these cuttingly clever poems, are images and words which play with the absent/erased/non-existent/dead/extinct/irrelevant/disappeared/fictive and tie them indelibly with what is painfully there; critical, speculative, fabulated archives of woven possibilities against colonial legacies which have burbled and flooded even the most intimate of our spaces.
English not as an inevitable fate, but as an alternate life
When a work gets translated, there is something disturbing about how everything in the end pools in the English. It reminds me of the empires’ linguistic conquests, looting from different tongues, intended not to appreciate, but to kill the intellectual tool for articulation. These languages have been absorbed and forced through linguistic surgery to sound like it belongs to the English tongue. When dismissing the ethical and political implications of translation, we might end up transporting stories for colonial enjoyment and English becomes an inevitable fate for all “foreign” literature.
Through choosing to publish My Dream Job fully in English, Kak Norman challenges this fate, telling me that “the book has a ‘different life’ in Indonesian.” And by making this life secret, protected from the prying colonial gaze, the manuscript strangely works up a satisfying revenge, furthermore withholding access to the pleasure of understanding how the “original” would be read in Indonesian. We can only imagine, speculate, and Indonesian minds might be able to conjure up the possibilities.
Yet, while the book is Kak Norman’s first to ever be published originally in English, it also interestingly contains a few Indonesian poems left intentionally untranslated. One of these, ‘Potret Ibuku Sebagai Sosok Tanpa Nama di Mimpi-mimpi Biasa,’ belonged to an abandoned manuscript, called Pekerjaan-pekerjaan yang Hanyut (Drowned Jobs). I ask Kak Norman why they made this choice, and they tell me that it is because the poem explores their relationship with the English language – as someone who isn’t born with English as their mother tongue, who developed a reverence for language by re/reading the corner articles in newspaper, short stories, and poems.
“I feel like [the poems would be] untranslatable [if they had been written in Indonesian first],” Kak Norman says. “Like it will lose its meaning when translated because the poems convey my relationship with English.” It comes to the ease and connection when our emotions are born in a specific language. Conceived in a certain tongue, if asked to adopt into a different one, despite any faithful translation, would fall short in expressing original tension. “It would be difficult to reach [the emotions],” they say.
Nevertheless, each time someone asks “Why English?”, we struggle with answering. I especially grapple with it when I think of why I write mostly in English. Even though there is still resentment for the colonial language, English presents itself as a sort of linguistic game and the feeling of so-many-things-to-choose-from when faced with the English vocabulary. Realising that English can be reclaimed in our Indonesian, even tribal, contexts, Kak Norman playfully reimagines and reconstructs these definitions into localised ways of being-in-the-world.
Kak Norman put a queer spin on every word in the English dictionary, even a character from a Christian missionary: Jacob, Ya’qub, Job. Bringing up the poem ‘Tell Me Your Body Count,’ Kak Norman says: “The phrase ‘body count’ would be used so differently in Jakarta today in comparison to in Tapanuli during the time of colonial wars. How it would be used so differently by a group of sassy, Indonesian gays meeting in Sarinah’s McDonald’s, and not by racist, German priests more than a century ago, writing the monthly report they would send to their headquarters. A cheeky, carefree word can have a violent and darker sentiment with a small switch of the speaker.
“Can a life, colonised, be thematically severed from the colonisations? Can it be severed from the colonists?”
Working towards an erased destination
Stories are part of both mine and Kak Norman’s job. Stories might even be where our passion lies. Mentoring children in creative writing for me isn’t just the technical aspect of developing skills to be able to write well, but more importantly helping children reclaim their sovereignty in knowledge production through story-making. I love the constantly surprising, humbling processes of un/re-learning involving my students that always lead me to new knowing. I am very fortunate to be able to access and nurture this job. However, passionate work means very different things for queer disabled neurodivergent working-class people from the Global South, compared to those from the Global North and those in the upper middle class who profit immensely.
I find this quote from Renyi Hong’s book Passionate Work apt: “Finding passion for one’s work is often described as a positive ideal. It is commonly held in relation to the ‘good life,’ something that hinges on the uncomplicated desire that work might provide human life with purpose, financial well-being, and success.” Meanwhile, passion reveals its resistance and resilience through making space and archive work. Keeping sanity in a world that’s out to break you, something as simple as doing what you love, is a privilege and a necessity for marginalised communities.
Someone who learns a language at university versus someone who was born and lived and breathed in that language are disparate realities. So is someone who produces knowledge from their own lived experience versus someone who only studied it as a major.
People with immense privileges often forget there are inequalities among us – among us people, among us writers, among us translators, among us artists, among us activists, among us workers, among us all. Some people only need to wake up in their cosy bed in the morning and pick up a book on their bedside table and start reading. While some others have to work like a dog just so they can pay rent that will be due next week. Some people have two rooms of one’s own, some others only have a few squares of tile for a whole of their life.
The so-called “dream job” is altered in my reading of this book, no longer as our child self’s past life, but as a post-colonial afterlife. Each time our ancestor dies, they leave with us their unrealised dream. When they die, from revolution, illness, guerrilla, a bombing, a raid, sexual assault, or hunger, our existence and realities become their afterlives. The memory that resides in our bodies and stories embody their trust that we will take care of these dreams. It is an inheritance of their hope and desire which had no space or right to exist back then. And it is our duty, our job, to elbow for room, to dig a hole in our inch-by-inch garden, and let this titipan flourish.
In this afterlife, our dream job is not there for our self-actualisation bullshit. It’s our means of self-preservation. We both have found it an immense relief just to work, in all aspects of our lives, with honesty. To let the inequalities be visible, which every poem in My Dream Job does in a rainbow of facets.
The queer body sub/merged in unsettled waters
Many of the poems in the book describe Kak Norman’s experience of going abroad as a Toba-Batak person. In the poem ‘Report on Norman,’ which is a vulnerable record of life from the perspective of an omnipresent, omniscient entity, the narrator refers to them as he/him. “At that time, I didn’t know what using he/him meant,” Kak Norman confesses. “When I became more immersed in English, I realised that he/him aren’t the right terms to describe or refer to me. That’s why in the next poems, I used non-binary pronouns.”
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What was beautiful for me was that glimmer of not knowing that Kak Norman, and every queer person, experiences when they dance at the threshold of queerness. Unlearning everything we’d ever known, all for a piece of freedom and hope that there is something else. It is inherent and inseparable from radical queer, working class existence. It’s frightening not knowing what you can afford to eat the next day, and how you’re going to pay a friend back for money you owe them, and how to pay your bills and gather everything that you need. “There are structures everywhere, and there are steps for everything,” Kak Norman says. “But often these structures and business steps overlook our needs as a person.”
For Kak Norman, the jellyfish somewhat reflects this sticky, fluid, tentacular dis-epistemology. “I wondered if my ancestors knew what a jellyfish looked like,” they laugh.
The jellyfish in the poem ‘Notes on the Machine’ expresses the ephemerality that transcends timelines between past, present, and the future, which we are living now. As a creature which symbolises rebirth and flowing with life, its afterimage printed across these pages pulses with the possibility of alternate lives. Following “a jellyfish of revisions”, in a clutch of science fiction, the speaker who plants “some immortal, deep-sea jellyfish” rallies powerfully for queer rights.
Realise the life you’ve led is already the final timeline, after a jellyfish of revisions.
Alterations were engineered even before the emergence of the correctees.
[…]
Lady of the Unemployed Gays, will you be my reference?
See this darkness around—I planted it years ago with my own bare hands.
Some immortal, deep-sea jellyfish.
Trusting our erotics
Particularly when decolonised, queer rights become more than just about marriage and adoption rights, but also work environments liberated from oppressive structures, access to jobs with equal pay, security and stability, while also finding passion in the workplace.
Here, I define passion as opposed from capitalised commodified passion, rather queer crip erotics which embrace the workings of our bodies and our many, many desires for the world. A mosaic of images come together, creating a nest of stained glass and not-yet-glass sand, and it reminds me of the concept of “Eco-spiritual nesting.”
Habiba Afifi introduced this to me as material ecology through alam Barzakh – a liminal resting space for the soul post-life/-death/-whatever you wanna call it, before the soul and body are revived on the Day of Judgement. The concept is to let nature take control, work the way it always has, to operate in the subliminal and to relegate all our sustenance to the subliminal.
Not Knowing our work means to be ambivalent about the kind of structures policing our work and to care for our gut – erotic – sensations. In few workplaces, there will be environments in which you are embraced as a queer person, but you also know that your basic needs aren’t fulfilled. In most, it’s the other way around, sometimes you still can’t even sustain yourself. It’s difficult to have a vision about a “humane” work situation, because even the basic stuff such as getting your invoices paid, can drag on for a long time.
As we wrap up the two hour-long interview-slash-sesi curhat, I ask Kak Norman about what humane policies can be made. “Being ‘humane’ isn’t complicated,” they respond. “If we are honest to ourselves, creating a ‘humane’ policy might be simpler than we assumed and definitely attainable. But the desire to enforce control often persists. And to control often starts with demonising.”
When it comes to queer soul-bodyisms, I like the Indonesian word “penafsiran”, which literally means interpretation, but also the processes, methods and praxis to articulate something that lies within the realm of not (able to be) known. A rumination; a critical, speculative fabulation; a de/tangling of string figures. Instead of policies, which aim to control and exact, what about a gentle framework where work is a gathering of energies and parallel lives, an intra-actional entanglement of fates at capitalist stake, and enable you to feel the different rhythms and materialities of experiences of the hands through which this work passes?
What can you do?
Read:
It is a beautifully curated anthology by queer Indonesian and Southeast Asian writers. An assortment of poems and essays contextualising the diverse rhythms and rituals of living for queers, guides on how to go to public bathrooms as transgender and non-binary, making food as mutual aid, and treating the common ailment called masuk angin.
- “The Divine Shade” by Xuân Tùng, in: Room/Ystafell/Phòng
This is one of my favourite essays about queer spaces of ritual and performance. As much as it exudes passion of the queer artistry, it talks about the voyeuristic consumption of queerness, made a performance and source of entertainment that cis people capitalise off of.
Employing critical fabulation to recollect an erased history, Saidiya Hartman challenges the parameters for “credible” knowledge production and revival through speculative narratives that make use of crumbs left in the wake and that witness beyond what’s been archived. This is where I realised Not Knowing was a tool for new, liberating knowing.
In Anglo-centric spaces, I feel like queerness is extremely divorced from religiosity. This book by Amar Alfikar helped me reconcile with my own conflicting identities as both queer and practising Muslim, and reorient how I approach both queerness and Islam—that I don’t need to pick one over the other, or sacrifice an integral part of me for another.
Also Kak Norman and I talked about how “being religious” has different connotations and nuances in Indonesia, which are absent in the Western world—also exemplified in their poem “Glossary” in My Dream Job. In Indonesia, we have various words to call our shades of religiosity, so when someone calls you “religious” (the English word), it makes you think twice about what they mean by that.
Crip epistemology, to me, is inseparable from queer epistemology. Re-conceptualising and -orienting our bodyminds to a different kind of way of being-in-the world is a crucial process to heal. This book grapples with slowness, failure, ambivalence towards progress and the state of the world, and abolition, building an “addict/crip epistemology” that I do my best to practise.
A seminal masterpiece giving critical guidance and tools on organising for disability by disabled queers for disabled queers. It’s here that I learned that ambivalence, failure and non-linear processes, which mark our struggles and experiments, need to be embraced as tools for transformative healing and further invention, rather than be seen as setbacks.
Watch:
This film has rooted deeply in my body, because I’m a teacher, queer, with also baby queer students. It urges us to reimagine humane environments as beginning from the home, the school, all of which are adults’ workplaces (afterlives) and children’s first lives. When we listen to children and see what worlds they imagine and desire, we might sooner find ways to break free.
This realistic, raw and vulnerable portrayal of queer youth, written by the original queer novelist Sang-young Park, is timely in the film scene where cis perspectives of queerness have become increasingly normalised. It broaches the stigma of disability and ambivalence towards love that affects the experience of working-living in a metropolitan city, somehow all its hard edges softened by the liberation of (queer) friendship.
Similar to Love in the Big City, despite relationships being the focal point of the story, domestic intimacy intersects with work, vice versa. How and who we love is deeply intertwined with our jobs, the political landscape of our domestic economy, and what our parents might define as “a respectable life” for us.
Illustration by Hayfaa Chalabi @hayfaachalabi who says: “No matter how many times the author wrote about the struggle around queerness, class, and coloniality, they always went back to describe dreamy futures, floating transitions between languages, and shimmering worlds of fluid sexualities. The jellyfish Kak Norman used in the poem ‘Notes on the Machine’ symbolises these floating epistemologies and identities. Using methods from Critical Fabulation, I decided to create an image depicting Kak Norman’s work as a place for dreamy floating. The colours, patterns, and suggestion of the body of water in this illustration symbolises all the afore-mentioned elements.”
