Wasafiri at Large: Indonesian Writers and Mental Health
In its inaugural year, Wasafiri was joined by five Editors at Large based in Southeast Asia and Aotearoa New Zealand. As part of our Wasafiri at Large series, each Editor at Large has shed a valuable light on their local literary scene.
Sebastian Partogi, our former Editor at Large – based in Indonesia at the time – writes about how more and more young writers from his country highlight mental health issues in their literary works. This examination on mental health themes in literature is conducted through an analysis of two emerging authors’ works, framed in a bigger sociopolitical and economic context.
In October 2021, I had the pleasure of being invited to moderate several panel discussions at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF), a prestigious arts and literature event in Ubud, Bali. The year before, the festival was conducted in hybrid mode, with writers who were physically present in Bali joining the event live onstage, while those who couldn’t make it were able to join the festival online, meeting the on-site speakers through Zoom, their presence broadcasted to the live audience and speakers on a big screen. I’d already moved to Bali as a long-term resident by then, so I could moderate all the events live on-site.
The most enlightening forum I chaired was the one on how writers and artists covered mental health issues in their work and how the prolonged stress associated with the Covid-19 pandemic was affecting their mental health and creativity. Speaking at the session were essayist, poet, and visual artist Ray Shabir, essayist and short story writer Tenni Purwanti, alongside visual artist Hana Madness. Both Purwanti and Madness had already publicly come forward with their clinical diagnoses at the time. Purwanti was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and Madness was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Shabir was the only one who did not talk about any clinical diagnosis in particular but said he loved to express disturbing or painful emotions through poetry and visual arts.
A common theme during the panel discussion raised by all the speakers was that they saw their works as having both personal and societal significance. On a personal level, they felt it was important to express all their emotions and thoughts related to their mental health struggles through artistic and literary works. On a societal level, they believed their work was significant not only in breaking down stigma associated with mental illness but also criticising the sociopolitical conditions which were making people sick, like financial stress due to inequality and poor life quality in big urban spaces. They also talked about how the Covid-19 pandemic had worsened their mental health conditions and, of course, how the horrors brought by the pandemic and its resultant financial recession was a culmination of multiple environmental and financial problems faced in a world dominated by a free market, libertarian economic system.
Looking back now, almost two years since that discussion was held and as we are all recovering from the physical and emotional shocks brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, I think the messages that they conveyed about mental health issues within the pandemic context remain relevant. Yes, we have survived the most horrifying aspects of the pandemic, but the struggle is not over yet. Various environmental and economic threats still loom large in our contemporary world. Late last year, many economists predicted that Indonesia would go through yet another round of financial recession in 2023. I myself have lost two full-time jobs between 2021 and 2022, due to the pandemic and volatile market conditions; the resulting uncertainty I faced in terms of my finances and career future was deeply traumatising. I always found myself going back to these panelists' works while I was struggling with those things.
I remember I was particularly thrilled to moderate the session not only because I’d already interviewed all three artists during my eight-year career as a journalist in Jakarta, but also because I was – and still am – a big fan of all their work. Adding to that was the fact that a prominent Indonesian literary festival had chosen to include a panel on mental health in its program, which demonstrated a positive trend, a sign that the discussion of mental health issues had become mainstream and the stigma surrounding it had started to chip away. Discovering these works during my own ongoing struggles with mental health issues was a relief. I could finally find literature and art that resonated with me deeply and made me feel less isolated in my experiences.
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I first discovered Ray Shabir’s work in 2019 through his essay collection Public Feelings & Other Acts. I found that I could easily identify with the struggles of young people of my generation (born in the late 1980s and the 1990s) who were trying to build a career and a ‘good life’ in the face of sobering multidimensional crises and uncertainties spelling doom for our generation. While Shabir does not mention this wider generational context explicitly in his essays, I could see it lurking behind his detailed explanation on how anxious he was to make a decision on what career to pursue, and the pressure to overachieve at such a young age. An anxiety and pressure which, according to my own humble observations, he is not alone in facing. In a 2019 interview with The Jakarta Post, where he explains the driving force behind his essay collection, he wonders if it was a coincidence that the financial crisis which happened in Indonesia in 2019, which in turn resulted in the shrinking job market, also happened to be the year that his essay collection was published. He writes:
When we were still students in university or in primary school we pretty much followed the same daily routines, all with the same friends, who shared the same fears. Now, they don't share the same fears anymore ... Each has his/her own aspirations ... Some want to pursue postgraduate degree studies, some want to get married … Thus stimulates a question: what am I going to do? Where's my life going? It's not about rat race or competition but just to have a sense of direction can be hard... To design our own life map and navigate it. I also worry all the time... What if I f**ked up? What if I make wrong choices? (np)
Getting a job is just one problem; staying in the job while enjoying steady welfare improvement is quite another. In her short story collection Sambal dan Ranjang (Eating Chili Dishes in Bed), Purwanti highlights the feelings of loneliness faced by people who live in shoebox rooms in Jakarta, who are so busy trying to make ends meet that they don’t have a chance to enjoy things which make life worth living, such as socialising with friends or having healthy romantic relationships.
She also highlights the plight of young executives in Jakarta who, despite working very hard and trying to live as simply as they can (again, by just renting shoebox rooms and trying not to indulge in expensive leisure activities), still cannot enjoy the kind of welfare or quality of life which they aspire to. My favourite story in the collection is ‘Sally Sendiri’ ('Sally’s Always Alone'), which I will talk about in further detail later in this essay. I resonate deeply with the main character Sally because she also works as a journalist, especially at a time when the profession can be stressful due to the uncertainties brought about by digital disruption.
The older generations have dismissed our generation’s tendency to wallow in endless anxiety and melancholy as merely a sign of our inability to grow up properly. They say we are simply ‘snowflakes’, not tough enough to deal with the realities of adulthood. Some senior Indonesian authors have also relegated the writing of young writers who focus on mental health issues to the ‘interior psychodrama category’, as though this body of writing is born out of a vacuum, and without any sociopolitical and economic contexts.
One such novelist is Ayu Utami, who is well known for her groundbreaking 1998 novel, Saman (which has been translated into English by Pamela Allen). The book offers a detailed account of the authoritarian Suharto regime which was toppled in 1998. Utami was a journalist and pro-democracy activist during the Suharto regime. In a 2016 interview with the Indonesian online cultural journal, Whiteboard Journal, she commented on the work of younger writers, especially female ones, as follows:
In this era, a lot of female writers focus more on writing about anxieties which are very interior in nature, compared to [writers from] my era. At that time, we were fighting against an authoritarian government repression, the government’s tense and chilling presence became a highly visible element [in our writings]. Meanwhile, their works showcase a highly personal conflict. But maybe this is because we live in a different era, it’s almost like you’re comparing paintings from the 1990s and the 2000s, because they’re exposed to a very different stimulus. (np)
Unfortunately, in this interview, Utami did not specify what the ‘different stimulus’ was. Therefore, I’d like to present my analysis on the global socioeconomic and environmental factors which might contribute to these writers’ personal anxieties.
As the socioeconomic gap has widened, and social welfare schemes have been shrinking all around the world, land and property prices have increased exponentially. We can no longer enjoy the prosperity which our parents and grandparents enjoyed in their generations. We can no longer buy houses with rising property prices, a problem made much worse by ongoing global economic turmoil. Financial crises have also happened more frequently in Indonesia due to the speculative and unstable nature of how stock markets work. This, of course, greatly impacts job security, with many young people’s dreams of having a long, steady career being dashed each time a financial crisis happens. The Covid-19-related financial recession in Indonesia, which left so many people jobless, has been traumatising.
This anxiety about the absence of a decent future to look forward to in terms of welfare and prosperity has contributed to the career confusion among people of my generation, who have just begun their careers under the shadows of the horrific 2008 global financial meltdown, and the other financial recessions which followed it. This lack of assurance of long-term economic and career stability (as it is possible for any company to just fold at any time) has also contributed to the non-committal behaviour of some young workers from my generation because what’s the point of being loyal to a company when you know that your employer cannot give you any long-term professional security anyway?
While there is this complacency among the more skeptical and cynical Millennial/Gen Z generation, on the other side of the same coin there is also a pressure among some of them to excel, to overachieve, and to start their careers as young as possible in order to buffer themselves from the possible macroeconomic or political shocks which could throw them into destitution. Hence, the anxiety in Shabir’s essays about having to have everything about your career path and life choices completely figured out by the time you graduate from university. The long years that our parents could spend to experiment and explore upon graduation before they finally settled on a career stream are long gone.
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All these trends are just the tip of the iceberg of global movement towards more right-leaning economic policies, with more nations and corporations refusing to be encumbered with too many responsibilities for people’s welfare. But political aspects aside, the shrinking welfare of workers also has something to do with the disruptions brought about by digital technology, which have dramatically changed the conventional business model as we know it. Specifically speaking of the Indonesian context, the country’s social welfare scheme is still very much intact, however, the above-mentioned recent financial crises have shaken young people’s confidence in the prospect of a financially and professionally stable life.
One of Purwanti’s short stories in the anthology, titled 'Sally Sendiri' ('Sally’s All Alone'), reflects how these macro forces affect an individual character’s life. The story’s protagonist, Sally, is a female news reporter living and working in Jakarta. She starts building her career at a time of great online media disruption, which has pretty much turned print media into a sunset industry. As fewer brands turn to print media to advertise, many media outlets – including Sally’s employer – have no other choice but to reduce their workers’ salaries. Burned out after working so hard for many years as a journalist in Jakarta’s polluted, gridlocked streets – a vocation which has drained her time and energy – without any welfare whatsoever, Sally begins to question her life choices when her supervisor subtly tries to talk her out of getting a promotion and salary increase:
But that second question instead caused Sally to consider getting a new job. It turned out, the reason why her office had relied on her so much was not simply because she was always willing and able to carry out any assignment at any time, but also because she never asked about salary increase. Sally had become too lost in her job, loved her job too much, so much so that she’d forgotten to “live”. She’d forgotten to value herself, to love herself. All this time she felt her human existence was very useful due to her work as a journalist who reported news which were vital to the livelihoods of so many people, but in that process, she’d become useless to herself. (153)
With the amount of time and energy sacrificed for this highly demanding but low-paying job in journalism, Sally has found herself lonely, as she can’t even find time to nurture quality relationships with other people. Not to mention that in Jakarta’s notorious traffic jams going from one place to another can take hours of commuting, which is also another reason so many people in the city would rather go straight back home after working; there’s little energy left to chat with friends or to lend them emotional support.
Singaporean author Sharlene Teo’s 2018 novel, Ponti, also carries similar mental health issues, detailing how two women from traumatised and disadvantaged childhood backgrounds attempt to cope with the apocalyptic changes of the times. While in Purwanti's and Shabir’s work sociopolitical and economic contexts for the characters’ mental health struggles are implicit, by the end of Ponti, Teo is explicit in addressing these bigger issues, the consequences they have on youngsters who have just embarked on their careers, and the choices that these individuals can make amid all the uncertainty and instability faced by their generation. Teo’s characters struggle with a lack of certainty and confidence in a long, fulfilling professional life due to digital disruption and the possibility of human workers being replaced by AI. For instance, the character Szu loses her job because she can't keep up with the pressure of social media marketing, which often sets impossible targets beyond the control of social media officers.
The main character Circe’s sense of crisis, meanwhile, is exacerbated by the climate emergency, which continues to threaten human survival. One of the biggest threats to survival in the Southeast Asian context is the haze caused by forest fires resulting from slash-and-burn agricultural practices which, embarrassingly, are still very common in Indonesia. There are scenes in Ponti which detail how the haze from Indonesia harmed the health of neighbouring Singaporeans. Another factor exacerbating environmental threats in Indonesia is corruption, especially in the natural resources sector. The corrupt government system accelerates the loss of habitats, biodiversity, and green areas.
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Returning to the question of mental health and trauma, it seems like the crises of the 21st century – including financial meltdowns, political conflicts, environmental destruction, and the Covid-19 pandemic – have also forced some Indonesian writers to be bold enough to come forward about their own personal traumas, and how this prolonged chaos has affected them. Case in point: Purwanti’s work. In late 2021, she released a memoir called Butterfly Hug (referring to a technique that people use to stabilise their bodies and minds during panic attacks). The memoir opens with a confronting account of how her fears of the Covid-19 pandemic – triggered as she watched the broadcast of Indonesian President Joko Widodo announcing the country’s coronavirus patient zero in March 2020 – caused a panic attack, the symptoms of which felt like a heart attack, while she was working:
I’d never thought I’d go through this kind of attack again in 2020. When Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced the first COVID-19 patient in Indonesia, I was watching it from the 20th floor of my office. (5)
I once again looked at the news report on TV in the office canteen which was broadcasting the President’s statement. My heart started beating faster. I knew what kind of symptom this was. But I tried to take a long, deep breath to calm down. I was able to finish my meal, but the fear which suddenly came was still there. (6)
She then went on to explain how the sensations and emotions, that in the beginning looked like a “normal” state of anxiety, began to become more intense and overwhelming and started to feel like symptoms of cardiac arrest:
While I was sitting down, everything felt even more intense. I had cramps on my hands, which trembled uncontrollably. I felt suffocated, my heartbeat became even faster. I saw people starting to form a crowd. I also saw two of my coworkers who happened to pass by and stopped. I could still hear her shouting, “Look at her hands. Her hands are trembling.” I tried to tell her “It’s alright. I’m alright.” (7)
The story becomes an entry point for Purwanti to discuss her overall mental health condition. Purwanti examines her life when she was first diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder, and how her mental illness has been caused by various traumatic and distressing events in her life. She also tells the story of how a financial scare at her previous employer, a struggling print magazine, triggered her first ever panic attack and led to her being diagnosed with a mental illness. Although her most recent attack in 2020 prompted her to come forward to her coworkers about her mental illness, in the years prior to that, she had always been secretive about her mental health issues. She’d feared that it could get her fired from her work, despite the fact that mentally ill employees can still function, assuming they take all the modalities of treatment they need.
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The works of these writers are an exciting addition to Indonesia’s literary scene. More than just speaking about the ‘interior world’ without any sociopolitical significance, Purwanti, Shabir, and Teo give us clues into how members of Millennial and Gen Z cohorts have responded to the current crises of our times. Hopefully, their works push mental health awareness further into the mainstream, while reducing stigma and discrimination of mentally ill people through promoting empathic understanding.
I’d also like to see Purwanti’s works being translated – into English, but other languages as well – in order to help readers, particularly young international readers from the same generation, understand how young Indonesians also struggle with the same fears and anxieties. Meanwhile, Shabir writes in English and it will be interesting to see his books being acquired by international publishers to achieve previously mentioned goals. It’ll also be great for Indonesian authors and readers to be able to read how their peers from around the globe are also dealing with the same thing. This kind of exchange can ultimately help to create global fora for discussions of mental illness. This can help people create safe spaces where they can share their struggles, feel less alone, and find a support system which can be there for them in times of difficulty.
We also need to encourage people not to see their mental health issues as merely “personal” struggles, but to also become aware of how they have suffered from unjust and unequal social structures. Only by making this connection between people’s personal experiences and the macro factors which frame them can we actually use our own mental health struggles to prompt us to conduct radical reforms of sociopolitical and economic constraints, as well as injustices that have turned so many people mentally ill in the first place. Just criticising the system, however, is not enough; it is also essential that we all work together in a collective effort to make sociopolitical reforms to improve people’s welfare and quality of life.
By helping more people become aware of how the bigger economic and sociopolitical structure has harmed people’s physical and mental well-being, discourses on mental health issues in literature and the arts can help ignite a collective consciousness which might bring about a global social revolution.
