Title: From virgin to whore: The development of the nation in Mangunwijaya's "Durga Umayi"

Submitted by: Pam Allen, Lecturer in Indonesian, School of Asian Languages and Studies University of Tasmania, Australia

As Geraldine Heng has pointed out, there is a potent symbolism in the appropriation by nationalist movements of women, the feminine and figures of gender to anchor nationalist imagery to serve their need for self-representational vocabulary:

The would-be nation is represented, perhaps as a cherished "motherland" to be protected and renewed; an essential "mother tongue" is recovered and promulgated in the nationalist cause; or a selective configuration of womanhood, or traditional "mother culture", is posited, then defended, by those who eventually become the "founding fathers" of the nation (which is subsequently "born").

My paper focuses on an example from recent Indonesian literature of what may be regarded as a potentially recuperative maternalising gesture, namely Iin Sulinda Pertiwi Nusamusbida, the protagonist of Y.B. Mangunwijaya's remarkable 1991 novel Durga Umayi, whose development and maturation parallels that of the Indonesian nation from the declaration of Independence in 1945 until the boom years of Suharto's New Order. The fortunes of post-colonial Indonesia are depicted through the trials and tribulations of Iin and the many metamorphoses she undergoes until the novel reaches its ambiguous end: Will compassion triumph over greed? What direction will Iin, and the Indonesian nation, take?

The possibility of a recuperative "maternalising" gesture is ultimately precluded in the novel. The colonial legacy of the nation mitigates against it. It is a legacy which is inscribed in the novel in overtly sexual terms. Barely had the nation been born when it lost its innocence, signalled through Iin's awareness of her own sexuality. This loss of innocence is symbolised by two incidents during the Indonesian Revolution: the cold-blooded killing by Iin of a Gurka soldier, and her rape by Dutch soldiers - what Kadiatu Kanneh calls 'the familiar discourse of rape between coloniser and the colonised country'. She is spoiled, destined never to properly fulfil her role as life-giver and nurturer. However, there is a very real sense that this deflowering was somehow by her volition, an unavoidable and inevitable result of her sexuality. She is irrevocably tainted with the sins of Eve. After being raped, and languishing in a cell until the transfer of sovereignty, Iin 'has no choice' (tiada jalan lain, Durga Umayi, 66) but to become a prostitute and to expand even further the degree to which she engages in subterfuge, duplicity and manipulation - and to thus negate the maternalising gestures which periodically spring up in the novel.

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Carol Burnett
Asialink
The University of Melbourne
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Email: c.burnett@asialink.unimelb.edu.au