The Question of Red

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

Either your life does your name justice or you might as well not have been born at all. The elders have a phrase for this: keberatan nama. It means a state of being burdened by a name too great, or too portentous.

They understood instinctively that telling is always retelling, casting the old anew.

She knew that you had to feel your way through a marriage, not unlike politics. Just when you thought your relationship with your husband was firmly in place, the tables began, ever so slightly and unfathomably, to turn. But as she went to the kitchen and laid down her sad and shriveled vegetables, it was plain that she was annoyed at her husband.

How is it that some people are happy and others are not? How can you make your life meaningful when you know you are unhappy? Or does meaning come with unhappiness? Is it unhappiness or is it just a feeling of emptiness? When does a feeling of emptiness become suffering? What does it mean to be able to create great works because you are suffering?

History had knocked on the door. Soon it wasn’t content being a guest in the living room; it also wanted to snuggle in bed with you.

When she translated a line, never mind an entire work, she became aware that the original ceased to be, as she had led it to a place where it could not survive in its pure form.

All adults liked to warn you about life’s dangers. They did so not because they knew about the world, but quite possibly because they were cowards.

The sense of tension was physical, the feeling that something momentous had taken place, something uncontrollable, with the power to determine who would live and who would die like a dog in some ditch.

After all, reality had a sick way of mirroring myth; surely years of being abroad didn’t wash away this instinct?

Why is it, she thought, that men have a way of compartmentalizing their needs?

“If we had not known their names, if we had called them by different names—mountain, bird, wind—would it have made any difference? Would we have felt differently toward each other? How can our names matter? How can they make you other than you, and me other than me?”

A golden European family gathered at a European table, their supper prefaced by the grace of a European-looking God who transformed water into wine and bread into flesh, put knowledge in a bite of fruit and immortality in a cup. A European-molded family with shared morals, culture, and perceptions, feelings that united them, yet said nothing about who they really were.

Does Bhisma care about women and their fate? Do all women have to be fierce warriors and die like men, as Rosa Luxemburg did, to earn his respect?

It would not be until later, after Bhisma vanished from her life, that Amba would arrive at a conclusion that never before entered her mind—that at certain critical junctures, politics and duty are one and the same.

Plant almost anything in this Buru soil, even a political prisoner, and it will live.”

After a while, his mind begins to ponder different aspects of the works: their balance, or their lack thereof. The juxtapositions of color, image, texture, shape. And miraculously the pieces respond to him, telling him he is neither liberated nor trapped. Just here, now, in the present.