Semar’s Cave: An Indonesian journal (2004) by Australian poet John Mateer (born in 1971) gives an account of his time as writer-in-residence in Medan in Northern Sumatra, and later in Java. Unlike the cases of Bouras and Turnbull, Mateer’s transnational life predates the travel that is the subject of his book. He was born in Roodenport, South Africa, and migrated to Australia in his late teens, in 1989.^[20] When Indonesians and Australian expatriates ask him why he is visiting Indonesia, he explains that he hopes to learn about the origins of Cape Malay, one of the languages spoken in the Cape Colony of Southern Africa in the eighteenth century among slaves from the Dutch East Indies, and the language of poetry he found inspiring as a child. Moments in the narrative in which an Indonesian experience triggers a memory of South Africa often have a particularly strong emotional resonance, as when Mateer’s housekeeper in Medan takes him shopping: ‘Squeezed together, with Ibu Enim’s fleshy arm pressing against mine, I feel as though I have slipped back into my childhood: an African nanny taking care of me.’^[21]

Courtesy Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Mateer conveys sensations and images memorably: the gurgling of drains at night, the sight and sounds of becaks (bike-taxis), motorbikes and yellow sudakos in the street, the feeling of being a passenger on all of these. The starkly evocative poems he embeds in the text are especially forceful engagements with place, often creating a productive discomfort in the reader. From a transnational perspective, the most striking aspect of the country portrayed in Semar’s Cave is its precarious status as a nation, where distinct regional worlds have been forcibly yoked together, a status epitomised in a Chinese Indonesian’s saying: ‘[T]here is nothing else holding Indonesia together—only the army and this language, Bahasa Indonesia.’^[22] Perhaps Mateer’s own transnational trajectory makes him more receptive to such angles of vision than Australians who write of Indonesia in more straightforwardly national terms, against a background sense of their own country as a unified nation.^[23]

Mateer is interested in the issue of translation as it relates to poetry and cultural assumptions about the role of poets. He presents himself as frustrated by problems of translation at a poetry reading in Medan at which he has to read out his own poems. A Sumatran poet has chosen the poems Mateer will have to read, and they are not ones he thinks are likely to engage his listeners, whose English he suspects is limited. He is bemused at the lack of fit between what the audience expects a poet to be—someone with a claim to national status—and who he happens to be. Someone asks him why he is not mentioned in a history of Australian literature. Mateer is unwilling to take on the role of cultural representative that he feels is being thrust on him by Indonesians in the audience and Australian officials alike.

Considering his reasons for writing the memoir, Mateer reflects: ‘I don’t write to present an objective account or a truth but to interrupt the norms of storytelling, travel-writing or even history by giving more detail than opinion; real images instead of my thoughts.’^[24] The implication is that the reader, presented with these concrete details, can come to his or her own conclusions about the Indonesia portrayed in the book. The idea, however, that one could convey ‘real images’ without also conveying thoughts about them seems problematic. The book’s privileging of images appears to confirm Michael Cronin’s observation that ‘engaging with the external signs of alterity may…involve less personal risk (signs seen from a distance) than the direct dialogical encounter of language’.^[25] Mateer’s descriptions of his interactions with Indonesians include very little explicit comment; they are almost as pared down as transcripts of a tape recording, a method that could be read as privileging Indonesian voices and giving up any claim to authoritative comment. The attitude that comes through in his reported conversations is, however, generally sceptical and critical, not to say aloof.^[26]

A typical exchange occurs when Mateer is on his way out of Medan, travelling to the town of Berastagi. A man helps him to find a less cramped position at the front of a crowded bus. They talk as they travel:

What is interesting about this dialogue is that Mateer doesn’t contextualise either the wedding invitation or his own response to it. There is no acknowledgment that a wedding in Sumatra might be a different kind of event from one in Perth, not necessarily a private occasion. As a result, despite his helpfulness, the man appears intrusive. Mateer seems to transpose his expectations wholesale, making no allowance for cultural difference, as though to do so would be to exoticise.

A particularly pronounced example of this one-sidedness is found in his representation of his Bahasa Indonesia teacher, Harkiman, who is of Chinese descent. We learn that Harkiman studied in New Zealand, where he did a thesis on the poet James Baxter. We later learn that he becomes an important source of knowledge of Indonesian literature for Mateer. Harkiman writes poetry himself and is evidently drawn to Mateer, as a poet and an Australian, someone who provides an indirect link with the world of his studies. The attraction does not seem to be mutual:

As with the man on the bus, Mateer responds to Harkiman’s questions as though they were rude, rather than expressive of a different cultural style of interaction, one that does not necessarily assume that there are ‘personal’ questions that are off-limits. Harkiman asks Mateer what his religion is and ‘beams’ on learning that it is Buddhism, as he himself is a Buddhist. ‘According to him,’ writes Mateer, ‘this is a wonderful coincidence.’ He tells Mateer that he looks forward to their classes. Mateer writes: ‘I’m a bit taken aback by his enthusiasm. His forcefulness makes me uncomfortable. I’m relieved when…he rises to go and talk with some other people.’^[28] The effect of the dialogue is to expose Harkiman as pushy and foolish for imagining a connection with Mateer when there is none. Mateer’s discomfort with him is presented as being the natural response to this kind of behaviour. As in the quotations from the memoirs by Bouras and Parks, here there is a resistance to a way of speaking that displays the person’s strong feelings, what Mateer calls Harkiman’s ‘enthusiasm’. This resistance likely has a cultural, as well as a personal, inflection.

During their first class, Harkiman digresses from the language exercises and gives Mateer a ‘crash course in Indonesian literature’. He is enthusiastic about Chairil Anwar, Indonesia’s first modern poet. Of a major modern poet before Anwar, Amir Hamza, we’re told, ‘Harkiman has a criticism…an anecdote…and a moral’.^[29] There’s something reductive in the way Mateer classifies what Harkiman says into these three types of utterance. In her searching review of Semar’s Cave, Amanda Johnson has drawn attention to Mateer’s ‘remote narratorial stance’ that, eschewing ‘other people’s accounts’ as unreliable, ‘can only lead to generalised judgements’.^[30] The narrator’s interaction with Harkiman seems to me a prime example of this distanced quality. Mateer goes on:

The reference to excited discussion comes as a surprise because Mateer’s side of the exchange is missing. By not revealing anything potentially vulnerable in his own behaviour, Mateer gives his negative impression of Harkiman an aura of impartiality. We are left wondering if Harkiman’s apparent ‘sense of impropriety’ is really confusion at having failed to elicit much response from his listener.