![]() ![]() ![]() There are at least two factors that shape my biography: Jakarta (where I was born and raised) and the Indonesian language that lives in Jakarta, which I use daily, between the identity migrations and waves of historical change that condition and cause identity to become increasingly composite.”Īfrizal Malna first came to public prominence in the early ’80s through his decade-long involvement with Jakarta-based experimental theater company Teater Sae. “How could I write poetry using biography as a primary source? Biography isn’t something that floats around untethered. “Prometheus Pinball opens with an agenda,” Malna writes in the book’s introduction. The book’s chapters are arranged as ten-year intervals on a timeline that begin with Malna’s birth in 1957, follow him through a coming-of-age period that coincides with Suharto’s usurpation of state power with the mass killing of leftists in 1965-66, and conclude in 1997, preceding the collapse of Suharto’s totalitarian New Order regime the following year. Within the friction between personal memory and public history, Malna tracks the shifting terrain of Jakarta’s socio-cultural environment through the years of General Suharto’s dictatorship, seeking out the collisions between identity, history, and urban life that compose his biography. Orienting the book’s inquiries are the challenges of living within the ever-shifting ground of a modernizing city. ![]() ![]() Published in 2020 by the Indonesian/Australian publisher Reading Sideways Press, the book is a document of Malna’s Jakarta that combines autobiographical narrative with material pulled from the internet to excavate, renew, revise, and reconfigure biography into a poetic form. “Third-Person DNA” and “Incident Before Monday” appear in the first chapter of Prometheus Pinball, a verse memoir of Jakarta by the poet and playwright Afrizal Malna. ![]()
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January 2023
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