Goenawan Mohamad in conversation with Pamela Allen at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. (Photo credit: Reskiana)
“Like crime, poetry doesn’t pay.” – Indonesian man of arts and letters and press freedom icon Goenawan Mohamad explaining why he turned to journalism from poetry at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali.
This year’s Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali runs October 18-22. This five day twentieth anniversary edition features a top drawer lineup of Indonesian and global talent.
“Over the years, our festival has cemented its reputation as a world-class event that continually presents award winning, internationally recognized authors, thinkers, and activists, along with exciting new voices from the latest literary zeitgeist to intellectual commentary and current affairs,” festival founder and director Janet de Neefe says. “This year is incredibly special as it’s our twentieth anniversary, and our 2023 program will be no less exceptional.”
International literary luminaries coming to Ubud include groundbreaking Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo, additional Booker awardees Geetanjali Shree and Shehan Karunatilaka, and Pulitzer Prize winning historical novelist Geraldine Brooks.
Indonesian superstars include best selling novelists Eka Kurniawan and Dee Lestari, Laut Bercerita(The Sea Speaks His Name) author Leila S Chudori and legendary journalist and man of arts and letters Goenawan Mohamad. The program also features climate change and sustainability experts and activists working on five continents.
Back in its traditional format, the Ubud Festival remains a great opportunity to see and hear some of the world’s top writers and other creative artists up close and personal in one of the world’s most inviting destinations.
Osman Yousefzada speaking at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. (Photo credit:Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2022)
“Reformed fashion designer” Osman Yousefzada writes about growing up in a Pakistani-Afghan family in Birmingham, England, in The Go-Between. “It’s not the typical immigrant story of having a business degree and becoming a taxi driver,” he explained at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. “My story is completely different.”
Yousefzada’s parents weren’t literate in any language and lived according to ancestral ultra conservative Muslim traditions. His sisters were taken out of school at age 10, and his mother hardly ever left the house, where she ran a small dressmaking business, grounding Yousefzada’s career in fashion. As he approached puberty, he was increasingly shut off from women in their community beyond his immediate family, “removing the color from my life.” His family’s community didn’t like his book: “They didn’t want to show themselves.”
Margaret Thatcher’s bare knuckle capitalism attacked Birmingham’s unionized industrial base and, with it, Yousefzada’s father’s livelihood. “What Thatcherism took away, the petrodollar and religiosity replaced,” Yousefzada says. “When my father came to the UK in the 1970s, he looked suave, a sort of Cary Grant. Then he changed his appearance.”
With manufacturing virtually extinct in the UK, fashion production now resides in places like Bangladesh. Yousefzada traveled there and recorded garment workers’ views of customers buying the clothing they produce. “They believed their customers ate only fruit,” and wore clothes two or three times then threw them away. Rather than the Western mythology that anybody can become president or millionaires, a seamstress told Yousefzada, “I can only dream as much as I can afford.”
Now more focused on visual and performance art, Yousefzada approached fashion as an exercise in anthropology “about costume and space.” Making space for one’s self is a recurring theme with Yousefzada. “There’s a tug of war with myself: what do I want to call myself. I’ve settled as artist and writer.” Based on his Ubud events and The Go-Between, that seems to be a good fit.
Born in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings, the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival return live to foster cultural exchange and boost recovery of tourism on the Indonesian island after more than two years of Covid crimped international travel.
With more than 200 speakers from 19 countries, this 19th edition of the festival runs October 27-30 in Bali. This year’s theme is the Javanese concept Memayu Hayuning Bawana, Uniting Humanity.
“I am proud to announce that the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival returns with an exciting on-the-ground program,” festival founder and director Janet DeNeefe announced at a press conference.
“We will explore the power of storytelling and the role of the written word to uphold humanity’s values and freedoms. With the world becoming more fractured, our lives more disturbed, we will ask: how can we unite the many strands of different cultures and perspectives to create, deeper understanding, mutual respect, and equality?”
Balinese novelist and poet Putu Oka Sukanto, whose work examines Indonesia’s authoritarian past, has received the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “This award strengthens my determination to write and work for those that are left out and those that are marginalized by power,” Sukanto said in thanking the festival for the award.
Puteri Indonesia (Miss Universe Indonesia) 2022 Laksmi DeNeefe Suardana will bring her advocacy for literacy to the program. Daughter of the festival founder, Suardana said, “I’ve been with the festival since the beginning, and it has had a huge impact on me. I want to provide equal opportunities for Indonesian children.”
The festival is an annual highlight of the Bali calendar. As a fan and multiyear participant, I congratulate DeNeefe and her team for weathering Covid, and hope the festival continues to thrive as a forum for ideas and dialogue.
With Covid-19 shutting down international travel, Bali’s annual Ubud Writers Festival and Ubud Food Festival have moved online. Kembali – “come back” in Indonesian – begins Thursday, October 29 and runs through November 8 with an all-star cast of Indonesian and international luminaries in each field and most disciplines in between. The festival preview call, featuring founder Janet DeNeefe and several speakers, gives a taste of what’s ahead.
Going virtual means that sessions with the likes of David Byrne, Jonathan Safran Foer, William Dalrymple, and preview call star Bandana Tewari will be available on demand for a month from their release time. So no matter where you are, the festival is on local time and can follow your schedule.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming, a contributor to Forbes, columnist/correspondent for Asia Times, and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.
At the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali, Indonesia Researcher for Human Rights Watch Andreas Harsono enumerated three tools of democracy and rule of law that Indonesia’s Islamists use to advance their cause in the world’s third largest democracy.
First, there’s the Blasphemy Law, enacted in 1975 and used six times until Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono took office as Indonesia’s first directly elected president in 2004. Under SBY, the law was used 120 times, and 40 times more during the first five year term of current President Joko Widodo, prosecuting people for a variety of alleged offenses to religious beliefs, almost always non-Muslims accused of offending Islam. “And when you’re accused under the Blasphemy Law, you go to jail,” Harsono, author of newly published Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and Religious Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia, adds.
Islamists have also tried convert the constitutional guarantee of religious tolerance to a focus on religious harmony. “That means the majority should protect the minority, and the minority must respect the majority,” Harsono says. In practice, it means the majority has veto power over minorities – to “maintain harmony” – and it’s led to the closure of more than a thousand churches, as well as a handful of mosques in Muslim minority areas. Harsono notes that Christians represent 10% of Indonesia’s population, but churches represent 17% of the archipelago’s 100,000-plus houses of worship, so Islamists say thousands more should be shuttered.
Local jurisdictions have enacted more than some 770 Sharia-style laws. Harsono says he’s surprised that Islamists have even continued to expand their Sharia ambitions in Aceh, the only place in Indonesia where full-scale Sharia law is permitted.
Harsono sees the Islamists gaining further in President Widodo’s newly commenced second term due to new Vice President Ma’ruf Amin, a dedicated Islamist who supports the religious harmony view and wants to criminalize sex acts that convene hardline Islamic views.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.
When she came to the Ubud Writers Festival, Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto said she wouldn’t discuss politics or her family’s tragic political dynasty, just her new novel, The Runaways. But the novel, like Bhutto, is unavoidably steeped in politics.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.
On her first visit to the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, Indian novelist Anuradha Roy discovered Bali’s expatriate painter laureate Walter Spies. This year Roy returned to Ubud with All the Lives We Never Lived, a parable for modern India featuring Spies and Nobel Prize winning poet Rabindranath Tagore as key characters.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.
Muhammad Cohen 