Beneath the burqas

TEACHING high school chemistry, she was the picture of propriety, not an inch of flesh exposed except her hands and a cheerful face framed by a tightly pinned head scarf. Her students were separated according to the Islamic school’s strict rules: boys on one side of the class, girls on the other. Lessons stuck to dry theory, like rote explanations of the periodic table and how atoms and molecules bond.

But during the school break for the holy month of Ramadan, Dinar Rahayu was free to indulge her fantasies. At a desktop computer, in the middle-class home where she lived with her parents, she wrote a novel whose two main characters think they are incarnations of the god Apollo and a Valkyrie, a Nordic deity. Theirs is a world where women dominate men with abusive sex.

It is an explicit story from the start, conjuring scenes of strippers, child rape and sadomasochism. In one of the opening chapter’s tamer passages, the skillful strokes of a transsexual named Dinar persuade her lover Jonggi to put down his can of soda and the TV’s remote control.

“I like to be with him,” Dinar says of Jonggi. “I do everything to make him happy. And I bet he’s happy. I’m sure of it. In fact, he lets my hand slide inside his underpants toward that bulge.”

Rahayu, 36, is one of a small but bold group of female writers exploring the transgressive edges of sexuality in Indonesia, home of the world’s largest Muslim population. The country got a global reputation for prudishness last year when Playboy’s debut on the newsstands sparked protests and prosecution. But far edgier work by the country’s most provocative female authors is printed without fuss by mainstream publishers, including some of the biggest names in Indonesia’s book industry, and widely available in bookstores. Instead of banning or burning the books, government and religious leaders have largely ignored the erotic works, even as some of the best-written race up the bestsellers list.

Indonesians’ conflicted attitudes toward sex and women play out in the reception of these explicit works. And the books themselves, which range from fumbling attempts at making art out of raw sex to skillfully written, sensual literature, offer rare entree into the sexual imagination of the modern Muslim woman.

They emerged only in the last decade, the first appearing in 1998, the year the Suharto regime collapsed and democracy took hold. Former journalist Ayu Utami led the way with “Saman,” a novel that explores women’s sexuality and taboos against the backdrop of the oppression of plantation workers. It is considered the quintessence of a genre that some critics have labeled sastra wangi, or “fragrant literature,” a term female authors consider patronizing.

The market has proven to be hot for the works that have followed Utami’s path. Though Indonesian-language fiction rarely sells more than few thousand copies, Djenar Maesa Ayu’s “Don’t Play (With Your Genitals),” a 2004 collection of 11 short stories, took off. Combined sales of “Don’t Play” and another of Ayu’s most popular books total almost 42,000 copies.

The genre’s popularity is inspiring younger writers to take more risks. Ayu said one of her readers started a conversation by e-mail, and while revealing she was a lesbian, said she was determined to be a writer. The woman, whom Ayu declined to identify to protect her against discrimination, recently published her first book.

“I don’t want to look like a hero,” Ayu said, “but at least when she started to write and blurt out the burden of her subconscious, it was a relief for me.”

First impressions

TO those who judge books by their covers, Rahayu would appear an unlikely champion of risque writing. She met to talk about her novel conservatively dressed in a floral-print head scarf, or hijab, and with loose-fitting, modest clothes that covered her arms and legs. In downtown Bandung, a city about 110 miles southeast of Jakarta, she was in the minority among women wearing hip-hugging jeans, short-sleeved tops and other Western fashions.

“Every woman, every person in this world -- no matter what religion -- in their soul they have very unique thoughts,” Rahayu said over cold drinks at Starbucks. “Many of my friends also wear this hijab, and they are also restless. If they see something happen that isn’t right, they also want to speak out about it.”

Writing her first novel, “Ode to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,” was a liberating experience for Rahayu, who favors expressing desire instead of suppressing it as evil.

Indonesian women don’t just talk about “simple, traditional marriage,” she said, but about their own sexual desires, how they want to be treated by the men they love. “I guess it’s our right to speak about such a thing, our right to feel it about ourselves -- not to let it be determined by a creature called husband or boyfriend. We don’t have those halo things on our head. We’re human.”

Rahayu’s novel hasn’t been a bestseller. She’s not even sure how many copies have sold because she had a falling-out with her publisher. But Ayu had a breakout hit with “Don’t Play (With Your Genitals),” which, despite its title, leaves more to the imagination than Rahayu’s novel.

The title story is told from the point of view of four characters, each watching a single relationship fall apart. “To say the relationship is only about playing, or worse, pure lust, I firmly refuse,” says one. “I know the rule of the game. For a beautiful woman like me, it takes only a few hours to play, from playing with my eyes to playing with genitals. Imagine! How many times can I play in five years?”

Hardly blatant, it’s still the kind of writing that can set a fundamentalist’s blood boiling. Ayu, who was raised in a liberal home by a Muslim father, a famous film director, and Christian mother, a movie star, says she is just writing what is real to Indonesian women of any religion.

“The reason why I wrote the book is because I think art is a reflection of its time,” said Ayu between sips of beer. “There’s me, and many other woman writers who dare to talk about that sexuality, which is also a reflection that women nowadays do talk about it in daily conversation. We’re not talking only about cooking.”

She’s not worried that her literary success and visibility will make her a tempting target for extremists.

“If people think I’m weird or radical, I wonder why. I am confused,” she said. “Because I think what I do now is very natural. This is nothing. They are radical, not me.”

To some Indonesians, official indifference toward novels like Ayu and Rahayu’s is a sign of maturity for a democracy born less than eight years ago. But Rahayu and her peers suspect Indonesia’s moral guardians have left them and their books alone not because they approve but because they haven’t paid attention.

“I guess they don’t read literature that much,” she said.

She and the others think conservatives attack more high-profile symbols, with mass-media visual images of what they consider Western-influenced immorality, such as Playboy, to get more attention.

“I think it is easier for them to attack people who are more popular,” Ayu said. “I believe those people were not doing it because of their religion or because of their faith. They’re only looking for money, popularity. So they will attack familiar faces, well-known people.”

Playboy editor Erwin Arnada went on trial in December under an anti-pornography law, even though the most revealing pictures of the initial Indonesian edition were of women in their underwear. The magazine’s contents were “unsuitable for civility and could arouse lust among readers, so they violated feelings of decency,” the prosecution alleged. A verdict in the trial, which was closed to the public, is expected this year. Arnada faces up to 32 months in prison if convicted.

In 2002, when a small publisher put Rahayu’s novel in bookstores, she was afraid of provoking a similar backlash. Her brother had read the manuscript and her tales, such as a boy raped by several women, scared him. Even a third-grade classroom has overtones of sadomasochism in Rahayu’s imaginary world. As a boy, Jonggi is obsessed with a math teacher named Ms. Lin. He gets a thrill from thoughts of her disciplining him.

Yet when the book went on sale, she didn’t hear from scolding mullahs or finger-wagging prosecutors -- just literary critics.

Helvy Tiana Rosa, a writer and lecturer, complained that Rahayu’s sex scenes were so graphic and vulgar that they made her nauseous. To Rosa, the book was more like a manual on sadomasochistic and transsexual behavior, or “cheap pornography” that degrades women, than literature.

“As a woman, I feel sorry that these novels only raise women’s obsession with sex,” Rosa wrote. “Of course we don’t have to be hypocrites because sex is an important matter for anyone, including women. But don’t we need a high-quality novel that contributes something to this falling nation?” Rosa has written 35 books, including novels that focus on human-rights abuses against women in conflict zones such as Aceh or Palestine. When sex comes up, it is in metaphors because otherwise “the literature will lose its soul,” she said.

Rosa also thinks that as a Muslim, she must write responsibly because “it will be questioned at the end of the day. For me, I am what I write.”

Ten years ago, Rosa founded a group of writers who offer a clean alternative to what they see as smut, convinced that theirs is a better strategy than burning what offends them. “We fight books with books,” she said.

A price to pay

THE harshest reaction to Rahayu’s novel came from the administration at Bandung’s SMU Plus Muthahhari, a conservative Islamic high school where she was in her fourth year teaching chemistry to freshmen.

Another staff member read the novel and complained to school officials, calling Rahayu “a bad role model.” A staff meeting was hastily called to discuss the matter; Rahayu was not invited. “I didn’t want to be kicked out, so I resigned,” she said.

Rahayu says the episode left her traumatized, but she got another job, teaching community college students, and likes the feeling of being a pioneer, exploring the bounds of what society considers proper.

“If the path is already clear, you don’t have to write it,” she said. “If it’s a gray boundary that not many people would go to, you have to explore that thing. It’s hard to define. It’s a new frontier to be explored, that gray boundary.”

But stung by being run out of the Islamic high school, told she had a “pornographic mind” by some critics, Rahayu turned to writing short stories, mainly science fiction spiced with a little sex.

When asked if she considers herself an observant Muslim, the author sounded a little adrift, nagged by doubts about whether everything in the Koran is the word of God and what the word “God” actually means. She knows that’s a risky thing to admit.

“Isn’t that sad?” she said. “We think different things about God, and then many other people say that it’s dangerous and it’s not the way we should think about God. He or she knows better than we do. The one who condemns us is not God, but other people. They think they know God better than us.”

paul.watson@latimes.com