“new ways of imagining”: An Interview with Writer & Academic Intan Paramaditha
Lydia O’Donnell, BWR’s 2024 Managing Editor, interviews Intan Paramaditha, our 2024 Flash Contest judge.
LYDIA O’DONNELL: I often feel that so much of writing is reiteration; all of my stories and poems have been shaped by everything I have consumed. I particularly love the interplay in your writing between familiar stories, such as the Wizard of Oz or classic fairy tales, and your own writerly voice. What draws you to reiteration and how do you transform these stories?
INTAN PARAMADITHA: Writers are first and foremost readers. I think this is why we always seek to create a dialogue with what we’ve read and pay tribute to literatures that have inspired us. Stories are always repeated, but they are retold with some kind of variation. Heart of Darkness, the frontier myth of America, Western films are all narratives of discovery, but the stages, characters, and political concerns are different. We have also read countless tales about aging parents and disobedient children, and King Lear wasn’t the first. Retelling is always appealing because they tap into something familiar, evoking a sense of “I’ve been here before,” but what makes retellings really captivating is the new framing of old stories. For instance, how do we tell Lear’s story in the 21st century, marked by job precarity, Covid-19, and the climate crisis?
My stories always involve intertextuality because it allows me to connect with readers and other writers. Familiarity serves as a point of connection, but again, it’s always important to offer new perspectives, cultural/political contexts, or new sets of characters that would change the dynamics of the story. These new elements provide new questions, what ifs, and perhaps new ways of imagining.
LYDIA: Speaking of stories and art, if a new writer comes to you for advice on developing their writing, what books, essays, poems, short stories, or other pieces of art would you recommend?
INTAN: In the past few years, I have been asked to teach creative writing or creative media, and I always tell new writers that the craft and the politics of writing are equally important. Craft-related books can help new writers develop their style and voice. One excellent resource is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft. It helps us learn about elements of writing (e.g. point of view, voice, sound) from Le Guin’s perspective as an author. It also offers interesting writing exercises.
The politics of writing is important. Why do you write? What kind of landscape is your writing located, and what intervention do you wish to make? I always recommend Gloria Anzaldua’s essay, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers,” written in 1979 and published in the anthology This Bridge Called My Back. Addressed to women of colour, it shows that the condition of writing for women of colour is very different and that they are often excluded from a literary scene that privileges middle-class, educated white men. The letter urges the readers to reclaim writing by considering race, gender, class, and sexuality as part of their embodied experiences. Anzaldua has a very powerful reason of why she writes: to fight erasure and rewrite stories.
In terms of books I use in my writing classes, I always incorporate works by women in translation, such as Bora Chung, Aoko Matsuda, and Mariana Enriquez. I think it’s important to read widely, read women, and learn about different kinds of structures and resistance.
LYDIA: One of the things I loved about your novel, The Wandering, was its choose your own adventure form. It was a delight and one I don’t often experience as a reader. I felt as though I was collaborating with you! What made you choose this form? And what have you found that a writer can gain from choosing a non-traditional form for their writing?
INTAN: I see my fiction as a collaborative work to some extent. I love spreading clues and references here and there and allow the readers to play, find easter eggs, explore different possibilities, and ask questions. With a choose your own adventure novel, the form itself makes the interactive features more prominent. The idea of making choices reflects the choices that we travel and cross borders. Often it seems that we have options, but those options have been predetermined. So what does the freedom to choose mean when our options have been shaped by our socio-economic background, gender, race, nationality?
The CYOA structure also allows me to play with multiple stories and multiple selves. There are 15 different plots in the book, and in each plot, you live your life as a particular person, making choices that are different from the choices that you will make in the other paths. One path can be an inverted mirror of another path.
I think by choosing a nontraditional form, a writer will need to learn to be reflective. Why are you using a particular form? Does the form align with the themes you want to raise in your work, or is it merely experimenting for the sake of the form itself?
LYDIA: When reading a new story, what will catch your attention? What are the most important things a writer should do to capture their reader?
INTAN: I pay attention to stories that matter. Why do I need to hear one particular story in a world filled with competing stories? Does it ask a new question, provide a new perspective, demand me to consider a voice (could be a character, a subject position) that I’ve not thought about?
I will then look at how ideas translate into the question of who’s telling the story (POV, how the story is being told (style, word choice, sentences), who are the players (characters), where they are (does location inform actions?), and the solid structure that allows everything to happen. These elements are all important. But first of all, a writer needs to ask themselves: why does this story need to be told?
LYDIA: As a writer who writes in multiple languages, do different translations uncover new aspects of your stories? Or lose them? Do you work together with your translators or is the end result a surprise?
INTAN: I only speak and write Indonesian and English, so unfortunately I can’t say anything about translations of my work in other languages. In terms of the English translation, I work closely with my translator. The process of reading drafts of translation and queries from my translator (all of my fiction have been translated by the same translator, Stephen J. Epstein), allows me to learn more about my work and how it is being interpreted. Stephen works with great detail, looking at the style, recurrent motifs, secret codes, and all that is shown and hidden. Reading translation of your work is a process of re-discovering.
LYDIA: You’re not only a cross-genre writer, but also an academic and activist. Do you find that each of your roles influence each other? For example, has your activism influenced your creative and academic writing, and vice versa?
INTAN: I work with a collective in Indonesia called Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (The School of Women’s Thought). This is a trans-archipelagic feminist collective that mobilises feminists across the Indonesian islands. Our practice has been informed by intersectional, Global South, and decolonial feminist framework, and this is also a framework that shapes my academic and fiction writing. Although my fiction, academic, and activist work influence each other, for me it’s also important to acknowledge their particularities and limitations. My fiction writing is political, and it might contribute to the larger feminist discourse, but I’m not sure if I can call it activism. I believe that activism requires a collective effort—you can’t do it alone. Authors may engage in social-justice issues through individual works, but we need to be really careful because individual endeavours are easily co-opted by neoliberalism. Yes, we need to acknowledge every individual feminist thinker, from Angela Davis to Arundhati Roy, but we need to avoid the neoliberal trap of individual feminist brands. We also need to remember that these important writers do not work alone.
LYDIA: Since beginning your first book, what have you learned about the world of publishing? Do you have any helpful tips for our readers who may be in the process of putting together a book or querying agents and publishers?
INTAN: The so-called global literature is dominated by Anglophone countries, particularly the US and the UK. What I’ve learned from this world of publishing is that it is very hard to navigate the politics of inclusion and exclusion. I am an Indonesian woman writer writing in a language that’s quite marginal in the map of global literature. I am lucky that some people have championed my work because they support women in translation and also literature by women of colour. In general, however, the space for writers from underrepresented backgrounds is still limited. Of course we must not stop critiquing the system, but changes as slow. My only suggestion is, if you believe that your voice and your community’s story need to be heard, keep writing, keep fighting for your voice, and keep fighting for others at the margins.
LYDIA: Are there any new projects you have recently completed, or are currently working on, that you would like to discuss?
INTAN: Last year I published my second novel Malam Seribu Jahanam (Night of a Thousand Jahannam) in Indonesia. It’s a dark tale about remorse, shame, and ruptures in the dominant, middle-class culture blending the gothic style, Southeast Asian myths, and Islamic stories. My translator and I are hoping to make this available in the English-speaking world in the upcoming years.
LYDIA: Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers or bring their attention to?
INTAN: Yes. What has been happening in Gaza shows on the one hand, inspiring solidarity across borders, and on the other, the ugly sides of the arts and literary world we are living in. Many writers, artists, and cultural institutions remain silent or resort to the rhetoric of ‘complexity’ as they speak from a place of privilege. Palestine makes me ask many questions around cultural practice: What does it mean to write or create art now, in the time of genocide, displacement, starvation? Is expensive production even ethical? What was my mode of creative production like and what must change? Does my story even matter? What does it mean to tell a story when writers like Refaat Alareer die for telling a story?
I am not losing hope, but the last 10 months demonstrate that we need to interrogate our writing, ways of being, everything. The process of decolonising the structures that support arts and culture is long and painful, but we need to keep fighting, resisting, and imagining a more feminist, just, and anti-colonial future.
To learn more about Intan Paramaditha & her work, you can find her website here. If you’d like to learn more about BWR’s 2024 contest, you can read the guidelines on our Submittable page, or flip through our most recent contest issue, 50.2, by snagging yourself a copy from our online store.