Umar Kayam

enam tjerita peʹndeʹk

Seribu kunang-kunang di Manhattan

"In my mind rose a misty picture of a little girl in a floral dress. As for her face: nothing. I could only hope that she had been pretty. I sat overcome. What a procession of developments in one day! Only that morning I had left Madiun; at midday I was wobbling on a buggy past an ocean of rice fields; tonight, suddenly, I had been renamed by my parents and handed a wife." Thus begins Sastrodarsono's life, returning to his village as a newly- appointed schoolteacher, and by virtue of that position, a member of the "priyayi" - functionary gentry awesomely elevated above the peasantry of his origins. From those most traditional of Javanese institutions - change of name and a virtually imposed marriage-he moves on with his bride to found a line of modernizing generations active across the whole span of recent Indonesian history: the 20th century late-colonial period, Japanese occupation, war of independence and two decades of social disorder ending in the mid-1960s with the rise of Suharto's authoritarian New Order government. The ideal of gentrification threads through this saga, both in the implicit concerns of a variety of characters and in the hopes of wretched villagers for whom the literacy necessary to approach that higher status is largely a forlorn dream.

A Novel

Javanese Gentry

sebuah novel

Para priyayi

Social ethics on Javanese way of life; collection of articles.

Mangan ora mangan kumpul: Sketsa-sketa

Literature of Indonesia

Sri Sumarah, and Other Stories

Born in Ngawi, East Java, in 1932, Umar Kayam obtained his masters degree from New York University and his doctoral degree from Cornell University. It was there, in New York, where he began to hone his literary skills. The publication of his first collection of short stories, A Thousand Fireflies in Manhattan, in 1972, gained him national fame as a short story writer. The light and semi-ironic tone of Kayam's "New York stories," in which the author viewed an archetypal cast of New York characters through the lens of a nai ve Indonesian outsider vanished completely in the next phase of the author's career when he dealt with the impact of the incarceration and killings of hundreds of thousands of Communists or alleged Communists that took place after the rise of Soeharto's militaristic regime. Kayam's highly nuanced portraits of the innocent victims of "1965" again earned him critical acclaim. Kayam was a regular contributor to the literary column of "Kompas," the nation's largest newspaper, and during the third and final stage of the author's literary career, it became an almost annual event for him to contribute a story about Lebaran, the holiday that marks the end of the Muslim month of fasting, a time when millions of Indonesians who have moved from the communities where they were born attempt against numerous odds to return home. The stories produced by Kayam during the three stages of his literary career vary greatly in subject matter and tone. What binds them together is that in each and every one, one hears is the voice of the common man.

Umar Kayam

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