In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.
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Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?
Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.
TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?
DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion.
TD: In a Muslim majority country like Indonesia, is it hard to write about or discuss abortion? Does religion affect how issues can be discussed in literature or the public sphere?
DNW: Yes, of course. I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to talk about abortion when I speak at Ubud [Writers Festival] [this] week. It is extremely hard, and you get harshly judged by others for simply talking about abortion. It affects what you can or cannot say in public discussions.
I worked in an Arts Center in Jakarta called Salihara from 2012 to 2013. In 2012, we invited Irshad Manji, who is a Canadian, Muslim, and gay writer. She had written a book called Allah, Liberty and Love—which caused a huge uproar here. Basically, people stormed the place, and there was a civilian group called Islamic Defender Front that came to ban the book because it was about being Muslim and queer. I’m not sure how much Manji continues to practise Islam, but she identifies as Muslim and gay. I would say that I’m a practising Muslim. I’m a believer. And I have had abortions. I think women should be allowed to have an abortion when they want, or when they have to.
TD: Do you ever face persecution for the topics you write in your book, or are you ever in danger of being censored?
DNW: Luckily, I haven’t had that experience, but of course, public book banning and censorship still exist. It was much worse in the Suharto New Order era, and I guess it got better after the regime collapsed in 1998, but it’s still happening. When the government bans or sanctions books, it’s usually because they contain leftist ideology, and we’re very anti-communist in Indonesia.
Communism is still very much feared, and in literature, I feel that this fear has more to do with nonfiction, because when you write a book that’s blatantly leftist—talking about leftist figures in the 1960s, for example—it would definitely get banned. But I haven’t had this experience and I don’t want to. It hasn’t happened to some of my friends either, even though they wrote about their sexuality.
TD: How did you come to write about the subjects in your book, especially the linked relationships between Rukmini and her half-sister, Engel? The Rukmini section touches on Indonesia’s colonial history and the comfort women issue during the Japanese Occupation.
DNW: It started from my grandmother’s life. When I was younger, she used to live with us, and she told us stories about her friends who disappeared during the war. They returned with half-Japanese babies. I’m not really sure if I remember correctly, but I think my grandmother said she hid, and managed to escape that fate. That was my first exposure to women’s issues.
It’s not something very well-known in Indonesia, even when talking about colonialism or World War II. I think there’s a lot of shame in it, with the stigma that comfort women were prostitutes—which is not true, of course. The situation here is different than in countries like South Korea, where they demand apologies in public. There are hardworking activists in Indonesia campaigning on behalf of comfort women, but it’s not a well-known issue. I went to a place in Semarang formerly used as a brothel during World War II, and people there didn’t know what kind of place it was. They just said that there are a lot of ghosts there.
I myself don’t know that much about comfort women. My friend recently told me that there were comfort women in Aceh, which completely surprised me. That was how I started writing about Rukmini, and why I wanted her to have a half-sister. In colonial times, we had the nyai, which Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote about in The Earth of Mankind; basically, they’re the Indonesian wives of Dutch men. I am also the Indonesian wife of a Dutch man, so I wanted to write about it and compare it to other experiences.
I like to compare and juxtapose different topics; it’s just what I’ve done since early in life. It’s related to an illness. Comparing yourself to others is an illness, but it’s what I studied in London, too: comparative literature. So I wanted to compare everyone’s experience and connect it in one big story. And growing up in a country like Indonesia, under colonialisation for so long, I noticed that people here have a lot of fascination towards white Westerners. My grandmother always told me she loved the Dutch and hated the Japanese, who were so cruel; meanwhile, I grew up with anime and manga. I was curious why Japanese culture was so readily accepted—aren’t we supposed to have war trauma or something? These questions are why I wrote about such topics.
TD: What about the Dutch settlers who were also conscripted into being comfort women? Have the Indonesian survivors teamed up with Dutch survivors to demand reparation?
DNW: I learned about Dutch women as comfort women from a book by Eka Hindrati; she wrote a book called They Called Me Momoye (Momoye Mereka Memanggilku), and that’s how we learned that white people were also comfort women. Reparations are complicated, you know; only just recently did the Dutch recognise the year of Indonesian independence as 1945 instead of 1949. It was literally only this year, the official recognition. I don’t think that we as victims, Indonesian and Dutch, work together much. There’s a complicated relationship between us.
TD: You self-translated your novel. Can you tell us about this experience?
DNW: Ever since I moved to Europe, I rarely use Indonesian. Now, I struggle to write in Indonesian, so I thought I would try it for fun, to practise a little bit. I think Eka Kurniawan does that too; he translated many recent English books into Indonesian to practise. And then, somehow my book found an editor. They asked if I wanted a translator but I’d already done half, so I just finished it myself. It was fun, because I also have translated for other people.
This time it was different because the “customer” was myself, and that meant I knew my book a lot better than others would have. It was easier for me to find the words I wanted. With Makramé, I worked with a translator and realised that it was a lot of work to understand each other. You need to talk, to sit with your translator and talk in-depth, in person, to achieve what you want—but sometimes it’s not possible.
TD: What relationship do you have with the Indonesian language now?
DNW: My next book will only be in English; I have the idea to no longer write in Bahasa Indonesian, because I can’t anymore. My relationship with the language is totally different now. I still read in Indonesian, but I don’t really use the language anymore. I speak it to my son, but he’s a baby. It’s like a little kid language, and I’ve lost the connection I had to it. Embarrassingly, I have more connection with English now in writing, and I think I should follow my heart. This isn’t a very strange development, I think, considering the likes of Jhumpa Lahiri, who writes in Italian now. Writers should choose the language most comfortable for them. It’s a big discussion in Indonesia too, where many writers are writing in English. People debated how appropriate and ‘nationalist’ it was.
TD: What has your experience with publishers been?
DNW: If you publish internationally, it’s a good thing to have an agent—which I don’t yet. My experience with English publishers has been quite different from Indonesian publishers. English ones are more proactive in marketing and promotion, compared to the Indonesian publishers, but there’s a different culture of reading in Indonesian so it might not be fair to compare them. Indonesians don’t read that much—which I hope that will change in the future—but because of that, Indonesian publishers work for books that they know will sell.
TD: You reference photography in your novel. Can you discuss the role of photography and visual representation in it?
DNW: Talking about women without the male gaze is difficult because women have been immortalised since the beginning of history. I wanted to touch on the representation of women which can be largely visual—but also in talking about history, photography is really important. As a teenager, I learned about the Japanese adult video world from male classmates and thought it was fascinating. When I thought about the women I wanted to write about, I came to the conclusion that I needed photography and visuality to bind everything together; the women could be connected through photography, whether in a good or bad way. In terms of Rukmini, the act of being recorded by this scholar in the Netherlands was also important. Basically she doesn’t do it herself, her daughter does it, and as such, it’s not through the male gaze. I wanted to underline that. Also, when writing the book, I really loved this poem by Carol Ann Duffy, “War Photographers”. That’s the base of my third chapter.
TD: Is there a difference between seeing and listening? The male photographers in the novel look, but do not listen.
DNW: Yes, definitely. Nowadays women’s bodies are still controlled, and our roles disputed by the government and society. I think it’s really important to listen to women more; I’m a woman but I still have to listen to my own kind more, as everyone’s experience is different, and our pain and our struggle should be believed. In reality, it’s not that easy.
I’m lucky to live in a country that’s a bit more progressive. I’ve struggled with mental illness my whole life and here, they don’t say it’s because you’re a woman; they say it’s an illness. It would be great if that were the case in Indonesia, where we still have a long way to go. But I’m not saying it’s perfect in Europe.
TD: Which chapter was the hardest to write?
DNW: The last chapter, I think. I was feeling very suicidal when I wrote it, and it helped me to cope. Some readers struggled to read it and said that it should have trigger warnings. They told me they had to put it down and breathe. I think the book works in raising awareness, but I know it can be hard to read.
TD: Is literature effective in raising awareness of women’s issues?
DNW: I believe so. It’s not perfect. It’s good that we have a lot more women writers than a century or two ago. The Indonesian literary scene is no longer exclusively about men, especially since the end of the Suharto era. My good friend and colleague Ayu Utami was one of the pioneers writing about sexuality and politics as a woman, and we’re following in her footsteps; she opened the gates. It’s a good start. We’ve come a long way since 1998.
Of course, the term ‘women writers’ can be problematic too. Is ‘writer’ male as a default? Are we not just writers? Fortunately, people no longer use the term “fragrant literature” (sastra wangi) to refer to Indonesian women’s writing. They had used the term because these writers were beautiful women who wrote about sexuality openly, but it’s not a very nice one. I’m glad it’s over. I haven’t heard it in a while.
TD: Are you working on anything new right now?
DNW: I’m working on an autofiction [narrative] right now, and I’m still figuring out what to do with it, because I’m not very familiar with autofiction. Of course, all writers write their own experience as fiction, but autofiction is another level; it’s your own life as fiction, but not fictionalised. I’m learning about it. It’s an honest journey through my life as a daughter and my struggle in Europe as an immigrant. I don’t know if I can publish it because it talks a lot about my in-laws as well and their mental health journeys, and juxtaposes those with my own childhood. I also talk a lot about discrimination and racism in the Netherlands against Indonesians, though there are a lot of us here. We’re not foreigners.
Dias Novita Wuri was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1989. She graduated from Universitas Indonesia, majoring in Russian Language and Literature. In 2019, she earned a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from Queen Mary, University of London. She has published short stories in Indonesian newspapers since 2012. Her first book, Makramé, was published in 2017 by Gramedia Pustaka Utama, and was longlisted for the Khatulistiwa Literary Award in 2018. Her second book, Jalan Lahir, was published in 2021 by Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.
Thuy Dinh is coeditor of Da Màu and editor-at-large at Asymptote Journal. Her works have appeared in Asymptote, NPR Books, NBCThink, Prairie Schooner, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and Manoa, among others. She tweets @ThuyTBDinh.
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