Dr Julian Millie

What have I been reading lately?

Ahmad Baso, Pelesetan Lokalitas (2002).  Baso’s work is refreshing for his reluctance to accept broadly received constructions of categories such as religion, performance, culture, work and so on. This book helped me understand the constraints affecting performance and religious expression in the public sphere. His work cuts through the rigid definitions of these concepts that are accepted in public discourse, and invites us to take a deeper look. Ahmad is/was a researcher for a uniquely placed cultural studies project, the Desantara foundation.

Ibnu Hijar Apandi. Hijar is a low-key but intense man whom I frequently meet in company with the Centre of Sundanese Studies crowd in Bandung. He doesn’t speak much about his own work, which is mainly published as poems, articles and other pieces in the magazine Cupumanik, but the longer I am exposed to it, the more I think I understand his project. He makes me think that the destructionof the Sundanese writing genres he employs within his  prose pieces is a paralell process to the negative effects of development on the area he calls his own, namely the location of Cihideung in Northern Bandung (he comes from Suka Mulya – salam untuk Ustad Cecep!). The most recent piece of his that I have read describes, in warm humour, his efforts to become a flower-farmer in this fresh, highland area (this is a funny piece, Jar!). This includes many sisindiran: The land I work is as wide as a spade/I rent it from a Chinese landlord/The inheritance left by my ancestors/Is now owned by someone else.

Ajip Rosidi, Haji Hasan Mustapa jeung karya-karyana (1989). I am sure I will never understand this book – a remarkable and sprawling work of dedicated scholarship – for as long as I live. But I am trying! So is Kang Hawe: together we have been translating ‘Stages on the Journey to Islamicness’ for publication in a forthcoming volume about Hasan Mustapa. 

Andries (‘Hans’) Teeuw: Shair Ken Tambuhan (1966). This is probably not his best work, but it had a great influence on me when I was studying older Malay writing. I pulled it out to renew contact with him now that the great man has passed on (May 18, 2012). He opened up so many vistas for scholars of writing, and for that I hold him in utmost respect.  

Mohammad Natsir: Fiqhud Da’wah (1965). This is a must for anyone wanting to find out how the world looks to someone inspired in their subservience to monotheism. From that view, the world is rich with promise and potential, and this book conveys the intensity of that experience. Natsir’s humourous account of wayang as dakwah is an affectionate view of Indonesian Islamic performance, although behind this description looms the shadow of a Sumatran who never really got the Java thing. The book has been in constant print since being assembled out of his writings on dakwah in the mid-1960s.