Text: Fairuza Hanun Illustration: Hayfaa Chalabi
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.
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.
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.
Text: Fairuza Hanun Illustration: Hayfaa Chalabi