I went to the Netherlands with a broken heart. Anxiety of traveling. The unfinished grief from visa shenanigans. Long distance relationships with my loved ones. My best friend K in Amsterdam gave me a room to weep and a corner in the kitchen to watch her baby child and occasionally zone out. At night, I saw love in that kitchen but also frustration, exhaustion, and confusion. It’s not easy to be a parent. It’s never easy. For me, it’s even almost impossible. I came with my burden, but that feeling in the kitchen, as the coldness of early spring met with a warm tea, drove my impulse to hold dear the baby’s fingers and murmured in silence. “Hey kiddo, you are beloved. Thank you for coming into this world.”
My dissertation is currently a whole mess. I changed and changed and changed the subtitle as I read more materials. What is it exactly about the cultural production of home life in twentieth century: knowledge making, intimate public, or something else? I cannot think of one bigger argument while I spend most of my time describing the text and what the authors did with those scenes and figures. What I read about the past is too familiar with this current everyday life. Housework, child-rearing, marriage life, elder care, siblinghood. I do not read legal documents. I do not read government archives. The strangeness of the past felt so contemporarily familiar that I sometimes confuse the timeline.
I laid my back on the lazy chair at the house in Oegstgeest. Housemates often found me there, watching youtube and whatnot. The house was quiet in the afternoons; and it calmed me. I just realized how tired I was sitting for hours in the library, folding those pages, intrigued by contents, surfing surfaces. Another migraine kicked me in the head.
I finished the last revision of my piece on Siti Nuraini, a poet who actively wrote in the 1950s and 60s. I said yes to the editor because I wanted to wriggle over a small place in the literary world. The editorial guidance they sent bothered me a lot that I started to write with insistence. I truly want to control my words, but at the end I just let them. All over the place because clarity is often elusive for me. I look into Nuraini’s writings, her feminism, her poetics and politics, her. I talk about womanhood; I do not talk about womanhood. With her words, I keep checking my own bias and internalized misogynism. Embracing masculinity and queerness do not automatically save me from being a jerk. I listened carefully. My experience doesn’t matter; my experience does matter. What do I mean by queering reading, by queering poetry? Is this body enough? Is this soul enough? Nuraini, I ain’t your child. But be still with me in your words.
Then I got a fever. Another series of dysphoria. Brawling. Crying for help. Paralyzed. I cancelled appointments abruptly. I avoided physical stimulus. I locked myself in the room for days because I didn’t want to ruin people’s joy. I posted lots of stuff on twitter and instagram because I need to stay alive. Cis-passing, the evil in me said it again and again, even when I already declare my story and body. I was born female. I was made female. I somehow still play female. I don’t have excuses. I benefit from the system for my compulsory femaleness, the opacity of my closet. So, days and weeks of guilt and despair and hopelessness. Shivering. I cried over Andrea Long Chu’s sentences: may I desire the love that is so weak that nothing can defeat it?
I started to walk more and look upon flowers. Then, Pepe visited Leiden and we walked near the canal, sitting on a bench eating chips, near one of the oldest ports, bemoaning our postcolonial grief that we deserve to have nice things like clean air, green quite parks, and welfare.
The morning after I delivered my talk with KITLV, I got a mild hangover. I spent too much energy, adrenaline over-rushing that I could not sleep well. I used to be so low-energy on daily basis, so once I have a space to talk about something I’m passionate for with more than five people listening, I become a different person. My voice becomes so loud and dynamic. I feel so high. I become excited. It is so fun to share this history to other people. And usually during this time, any comments or criticism never bother me at all until someone came and asked “are you okay with that question?” and I was “huh? what’s not okay?” It is the same feeling I once had during my teen years in a music band, playing for highscool festivals and went wild with the audience. I would not care if people smirked over my band being bad because we always had fun. I know. I should not think of academic talk in that way, shouldn’t I? Well, the fun stays until the adrenaline runs off. After I get more hours to calm down, I usually revisit the ways I do things. That’s why it’s important for me to take notes during any of my academic presentation because I always come back to people’s comments and questions, and do no let the conversation stops there as a mere chatters of event (at least that’s what happens in my head). Then I think again, read again, translate again, continuing to reconfigure argument, trying again.
Rudolf Mrazék and I took a table in the middle of Leiden library’s café and spent an hour exchanging stories. I told him how his books compelled me to do history; “I want to write like you.” I should say wanted. A past tense. Things have been slightly changed. He nodded but also advised me to not say such a thing out loud. He wanted me to do my own thing. I know. I should. But it’s not easy to step outside the shadows of giant “Indonesianists” when my feeling for history is confronted by a self-defeating voice from within that there will be no job for me in the future. Is there a chance for me to reconfigure history when academia is now about competing over grant and securing a tenure office? What should I do with all these efforts of making knowledge? “Nik, you’re not a good scholar. And that’s good.” “I take that as a compliment.” “It is.” We laughed over stories of his generation of Indonesianists, and we disagreed on few things. The hour was up. In mutual respect, we said farewell, until later. Pak Rudy, thank you, I am my own poetic.
I now have new deadlines. Chapters. Proposals. Traveling back to Evanston. Etc. Etc. I want to get things done. I’m grateful with people’s generosity and their encouragement that they’re rooting and supporting me, although I’m very slow and hard-headed. I’m easily stressed out and distracted and I often pity myself and being a pain in the ass. But then I remember I love reading and writing, that’s why I decided to go to academia to have stable income while doing what I love. It is indeed difficult but I want to work hard, be a little bit better, and just write shit up (because if you’re too bacot in a non-formal/professional media, netizen sotoy would be like “mana karyamu?” fuck off. my existence is already a karya). Well, I’m just gonna quote Min Yoongi/Suga of BTS as he sang “Wings”: “You chose this path, don’t be a bitch, this is just your first flight.”
Nik Setiadarma 