Nik Setiadarma

crumbles of time

Blog

  • Vicente Rafael, “Contracting Colonialism”

    Vicente Rafael, “Contracting Colonialism”

    Conversion is translation is conversion. Contracting Colonialism by Vicente Rafael is about the uneasy relationship between translation and conversion in the Spanish colonization of the Tagalog speakers of the Philippines from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. By reading curated Spanish and Tagalog sources during the period, Rafael examines “the impact of evangelization… Read more

  • Slice-of-Life

    Slice-of-Life

    10 February 1934. It was a Saturday afternoon, a twelve-year old girl walking on the street of Kepatihan-School, Djember. At the same time a man asked his assistant to put a car on his garage. The assistant did not have a driving license and inexperienced in driving. What he didn’t know: the break apparently wasn’t… Read more

  • Feeling Time

    Feeling Time

    When Brigitta Isabella wrote her piece in May 2016, I was in the middle of preparing for my travel to Manchester, UK, to study international development. I, back then, had no serious interest in history as a question because I was still convinced I would do work on policy analysis and such and such. “1955,… Read more

  • Toni Cade Bambara, “Gorilla, My Love”

    Toni Cade Bambara, “Gorilla, My Love”

    The joy of reading great, funny, and witty stories always overcome my sinister view of many things. I read Bambara’s short stories and writing this short note in bed as I’m currently struggling to recover from omicron. Her stories ease some pain, as I’m excited about the brilliance of her crafts. The plots, the style,… Read more

  • Natsuko Imamura, Lucy North (tr), “The Woman in the Purple Skirt”

    Natsuko Imamura, Lucy North (tr), “The Woman in the Purple Skirt”

    What a thrill! A kind of thrill that makes me … oh no oh shit oh why. The Woman in the Purple Skirt was not a nameless character, but the narrator, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, made her so (and herself too). We saw the Purple Skirt woman from the narrator’s eyes–she acted like… Read more

  • Merve Emre, “Paraliterary”

    Merve Emre, “Paraliterary”

    “Bad readers were not born; they were made,” wrote Merve Emre in her first book Paraliterary. She starts the discussion by citing Vladimir Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers” who, as a teacher, was frustrated with American readers’ aesthetic. But as Emre shows, the emergence of “bad readers” in the US was not so far… Read more