Purwanto, S.S., M.Hum.
Abstract
In patriarchal societies, language has been exploited to construct discourses that conform to male-defined standards. Feminist thinkers reject this patriarchal mindset that legitimizes male domination. One strategy to challenge such discourse is through texts that deconstruct the language of patriarchy itself. This paper examines Saman, a novel that transcends its narrative form to become a feminist discourse, actively contesting patriarchal structures.
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Keywords: sexuality, feminism, patriarchy, binary opposition, deconstruction.
Introduction
Saman, written by Ayu Utami, is a story passed through the lives of its exuberant female protagonists and the enigmatic Saman. The story in the novel is told through different kinds of narration and by different characters. Each character has his or her own way of telling stories. In Saman there is a playful exploration of female sexuality and a story about love in all its guises, while touching on all of Indonesia's taboos: extramarital sex and sexual repression.
Utami once commented that for a patriarchal society, the taboo is making women the subjects in sexual matters. So far, people exploit sex, but, by objectifying women. What she writes is no cruder than those pictures or rape stories that they write. But she wants to make women become the subjects (The Jakarta Post, 2005)
Saman was published only a few weeks before General Suharto was removed from power, and its publication was a sign of the approaching political change. Utami treats social taboos in an open way, thereby breaking with Indonesian literature to date. She writes freely about love and sexuality and hints at the correlation of language and gender in context with patriarchal discourse which is still observed in Indonesia.
This paper discusses Utami's effort as a female writer in writing in a feminine language that deconstructs patriarchal discourse. Saman seems to suggest a point that writing can give women a voice outside the symbolic order, to let women speak for themselves, instead of being spoken for by men.
Theoretical Review
Many feminist writers have considered patriarchy to be the basis on which most modern societies have been formed. They argue that it is necessary and desirable to get away from this model in order to achieve gender equality. Lerner (1986) stated that patriarchy, in a broader sense, refers to the system through which male authority is established and maintained, both within the family, where men hold power over women and children, and across society at large, where this dominance extends into social, political, and cultural structures.
In Indonesia, patriarchy and the subordination of women, which is structured into society, also takes into practice in the domain of language. Indeed, many feminist and postmodern theorists see language as a patriarchal construct that excludes women. Forte (1988) mentioned that the characterization of language is informed by Lacanian theory, which, in turn, is influenced by Freudian theory:
For Lacan, power relationships are determined by the symbolic order, a linguistically encoded network of meaning and signification that is internalized with the acquisition of language; and which Lacan sums up as the Name-of the Father, recognizing the inherent patriarchy. (p.220).
According to Kristeva as cited by Rice and Waugh in Modern Literary Theory, "many women... complain that they experience language as something secondary, cold, foreign to their lives. To their passion. To their suffering. To their desire. As if language were a foreign body" (p.131).
Referring to these feminists' definition of language, Utami, through her novel Saman presents her resistance to a patriarchal construct that regards males as subjects and females as objects. Saman tries to alter the way in which women and female sexuality are perceived.
Utami resistance goes together with Helene Cixous and other some feminist theorists' call for a feminine language, a feminine way of writing that would convey female sexuality in the same way that patriarchal, phallocentric language conveys male sexuality. Cixous calls for women "to terrorize patriarchal discourse by writing from the locus of the inscription of difference, i.e., female sexuality" (Forte, 1988, p.225). Cixous appeals that woman must produce texts which destroy the closure of binary oppositions and celebrate instead the pleasures of open-ended textuality, texts which will `blow up' the patriarchal law of language itself,. (Easthope, p.251)
Actually, the notion to deconstruct binary opposition concept is implied in Derrida's article, Differance, written in 1968. (Easthope, p.108-128). The term `binary opposition' which also bears a hierarchical concept is considered unfair, as stated in Encyclopedia Britannica 2004: "The oppositions challenged by deconstruction, which have been inherent in Western philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks, are characteristically `binary' and `hierarchical,' involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative."
Accordingly, feminist theorists believe that patriarchal discourse is based on the binary opposition which places males as superior than females. Within the perspective of binary opposition and the feminists' effort to deconstruct the hierarchy of its perspective, Saman offers `new' concept to override the unfavorable one.
Analysis of Saman
Celebration of female desire is apparent in Saman. Female desire is not just described. Desires of sex in the four protagonist female characters of the novel: Laila, Shakuntala, Yasmin, Cok, is not something shameful or perilous, or something that should be hidden. To them sex is not a domain that has something to do with male domination. The four women are seemingly liberated female characters who openly reveal their sexuality. Some texts of the novel illustrate Shakuntala's promiscuity:
My name is Shakuntala. My father and my sister call me a whore. Because I have slept with some men and women. . My sister and father do not respect me. I do not respect them either. (p. 115)
Then he sucked the tip of my breast, unendingly, and told me his story. It was the first time he had sailed so far east. So far that he did not believe he could return to the West, even as the seas made you believe that the earth is round. In this country people thought that those in the East lived according to strange customs. Their men attached decorations to their penises, on the surface or within the skin. (134-135).
Actually, at the beginning of the novel the liberated behavior of the female protagonist is indicated by the identification of Laila as a bird that arrives at the park after having flew from a country million miles away. (p. 1).
There is other female character in the story, a mother, who is presented totally different from the stereotype mother. The bad side of this mother figure is shown implicitly in the story. She is the mother of Wisanggeni alias Saman. In the novel she is referred to by the name of `Ibu'. The mysteriousness of this mother figure is described through Wisanggeni's thoughts. Ibu is said to be a loving, reserved person who is also inclined to mysticism. At one occasion her attitude is described as being carefree with her family. Saman tells that her mother once went secretly to some place. Her mother is said to have two times of pregnancy but the unborn and the newly born babies dies or disappears unexplained.
But the room became quite as the door opened. There was no baby, ...It just the stillness of the room and Ibu who lay on the bed. She slept with a relieved smile. The doctor was called, and Sudoyo got the same answer: there was no baby in his wife's uterus. The unborn baby had gone without any drip of blood, as to vanish into thin air.(p. 50).
It vaguely seems that Ibu is responsible for the disappearance of her babies. Nevertheless, her husband and the family never blame her. Through Saman's story, it is implied that Ibu might have been involved in some kind of hidden affair with an unknown man. Saman's father however does not seem to be disturbed or suspicious of such possibility. He does feel the sorrow over the lost babies but he keeps being faithful to his wife:
Wis never heard of any complaint from his father. The man keeps loyal to his work and never asks his chief to move him out of the place which has involved his family into a series of weird and unfavorable event. (p. 53).
The positive attitude toward the mother figure is so apparent in that she is not punished for her misconduct and her secret affair. Instead, her `bad' side is accepted and is considered as part of her overall character. An acceptance which is likely intended to counter and deconstruct the stereotype attitude toward `naughty’ mother figures, as often found in some texts that observe the standard of patriarchal discourse.
Accordingly, the portrayal of mother figure in Saman breaks the stereotype of Indonesian womanhood, where the text of womanhood sticks to the dichotomy of good woman versus bad woman, virtuous versus dishonest, plain versus devious. These favorable characteristics of mother figure are male-defined. On the other hand, through Shakuntala, a somewhat attitude of hostility toward a father figure is shown in another part of the novel:
It was 1979. My father sent me off to a strange new city. It was a vast place, like a jungle, so when I set off for school my mother always gave me two bread rolls. One to eat. The other to tear into little pieces so I could leave a trail of bread to follow on my way home. I learnt a lot from Hansel and Gretel. They had evil father too. (p. 119)
Through Shakuntala, who seems to be the most daring of the four females, the concept of love and marriage is also under attack. She rebels against her father's patriarchal mindset. She, sarcastically, refers marriage as no more than just a hypocritical prostitution. It is like a call for a deconstruction of discourse or concept of marriage owing to the facts that many married lives turn out into a relation of master and slave, where love and romance are out of the questions.
These were his lessons: First. It is the prerogative solely of the male to approach the woman. A woman who chases a man is a whore. Second. A woman shall give her body only to the right man, who shall support her for the rest of her life. That's what is known as marriage. Later, when I had grown up a little, I decided that marriage was nothing more than a hypocritical prostitution. (p. 120-121).
From these texts above, Utami indicates that patriarchal discourse puts women as the passive objects of men which Utami herself disagrees. She presents it through Shakuntala's resistance which stresses that in sexual matters women must have equal rights with men, in that women should also be the ones who initiate, who can choose, who can make initial approach to the men they like.
Utami's criticism on the imbalance of male-female relation is in favor with Lara Mulvey's. Mulvey mentioned that the sexual imbalance places woman as image and man as the bearer of the look:
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed. Woman displayed as sexual object. (Easthope, p.162)
Binary opposition which puts males and females into a discriminative discourse considers males as the sexes who are given the advantageous exceptions not to mention in sexual matters particularly concerning women's body and their virginities. Males are given `dispensation' not to follow the rule that applies to females only. This is an issue that rhetorically is being criticized.
My mother said I would never crack as long as I kept my virginity. I was taken aback: how could I preserved something I didn't yet have? She told me that there were three openings between my legs. Don't ever touch the middle one, she said, because that's where it's kept. Later I was disappointed to discover that I wasn't special. All girls are the same. They might only be teapots, bowls, plates or soup spoons, but they were all made of porcelain. And as for boys? They were ivory: and all ivory cracks. When I grew up I found out that they're also made of flesh. (p. 124)
And as the acts of rebellion continues, Shakuntala breaks her hymen. It may be that her act represents Utami's view that women has been misled by the myth of female hymens created by the discriminative patriarchal discourse. Thus, Shakuntala's act of destroying her hymen symbolizes a suggestion to end a myth.
I made a decision. I would give my virginity to my lover the ogre. On that last night, under a purplish moon, I crept out to the pavilion and tore it out with teaspoon. It looked like a red spider's web. (p. 125)
Conclusion
In Saman, the interplay between deconstructionist and feminist perspectives is evident, accompanied by an underlying tone of post-structuralism and postmodernism. Within the feminist mindset of the writer these perspectives serve to deconstruct patriarchal discourse which covers the domain of sex, love, marriage, and the likes. Through her protagonists, Utami presents her resistance by breaking and deconstructing patriarchal codes. They also imply her offer to seek for alternative concepts which destroy and override binary oppositions, by indicating that there is, indeed, masculine and feminine nature in each of male and female sex. And as an `answer' to Kristeva's concern, Utami uses her texts and language of her own, the language that seems to accommodate women's voices, not the language that alienates women.
In a world where patriarchal discourse is considerably strong, certainly textual deconstruction is not enough. Nevertheless, as a text, Saman can serve as a tribute to the feminists' appeal to `terrorize' patriarchal discourse. Evaluating patriarchal discourse using either a feminist or deconstructionist perspective results in a relatively similar outcome which is negative and unfavorable. There are imbalanced relations found in patriarchal discourse. These unfair relations principally side with male sexes. Hence, it can be concluded that, to some extent, the deconstructionist and feminist approaches produce agreeing interpretations and seems to complement one another.
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References
Easthope, Antony & Kate McGowan (eds.) (1992). A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Forte, Jeanie. (1988). Women's Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism. Theatre Journal.
Junaidi, A. (2005, November 13). Ayu Utami on literature, sex and politics. The Jakarta Post.
Lerner, Gerda (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy. Women and History. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 238–239. ISBN 978-0-19-503996-2 – via Internet Archive.
Rice, Philip & Patricia Waugh. (Eds). (1989). Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall.
Silverfishbook, http://www.silverfishbooks.com/KLLitFest2004/ Retrieved December 15, 2005.
Utami, Ayu. (1998). Saman. Jakarta: KPG.
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