June/July, 1998
No. 035/VI/98
cover story
After The Boom
What future is there for
Bali's modern theatre
scene?
Warung Society
Bali has its own history of
communal philosophising
and coffee-drinking
Renaissance
Twenty years of Bali's
Festival of the Arts
beyond
bali
Sumbawa's
Secrets
Photographs from
Kuang Amo
regular
features
Dangerous
Times
Orchestrating a
cremation in Ubud
Home Grown
A preview of
the Quicksilver Pro
Adventure
Getting over a fear
of diving
Health and Beauty
Foreign aid for
optic
health
The Painted Alphabet
reviewed
Food
Two boutique hotels,
two top chefs
Fiction
'Our Moon'
by Mas Ruscitadewi
advertising index for
Bali Echo web site
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The
Painted Alphabet by Diana Darling
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, 1994
Bali’s richly vibrant culture abounds with fascinating stories combining magic, myth and history, some of which are well-known variations of the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics and other fables which are uniquely Balinese. However, much of this literature remains inaccessible to a foreign audience. Visitors may be charmed by a dance performance or moved by a painting but have little idea of the intrinsic narrative. Visual representation and performance are the more common art forms here; stories as such are rarely written down or read but are preserved through a strong oral tradition. Without an extensive understanding of Balinese Hinduism or language, it is beyond most of us to fully appreciate them.
Therefore, Diana Darling is to be thanked for her skillful rendering of this traditional tale into the familiar form of the modern novel. Like most Western fairy tales, The Painted Alphabet tells of the ultimate conflict between good and evil. Ms Darling sets her story in a non-specified but near-contemporary period. Village elders feel uneasy about the changes occurring around them. They believe that this is the time of "kali yuga, the dark phase... that precedes the destruction of the world before fresh creation". Children have become insolent and demanding, parents sell their land and valuable heirlooms because they want to build bungalows and buy minivans.
Siladri, one of the key characters, is so troubled by this sense that "the world is old and dirty" that he leaves his home village to study and meditate on Mount Kawi with Mpu Dibiaya, the hermit saint. Handing over all responsibility including the upbringing of his son, Mudita, to his younger brother, Siladri renounces the corrupt material world and with his new wife, Kadek and niece, Kusuma Sari, travels into the mountains. Here, in Mpu Dibiaya magical domain, Siladri and Kusuma Sari study the scriptures; the ‘painted alphabet’ of the goddess of learning, and the arts of healing and exorcism. Above all Dibiaya instructs and cautions them in the use of sakti, "that charismatic instrument of the heart that is the faculty of magic" but is also "wild and ambivalent... like weather, like passion, like lightning." Magic, for sure but Dibiaya warns that "there are those who can accomplish quite horrible sorts of miracles." So, magic, both white and black.
In time Dibiaya dies leaving the two the legacy of his esoteric knowledge. In time they are joined by Mudita who naturally falls deeply in love with Kusuma Sari.
It is only a matter of time before the outside world will intrude into the tranquillity of their mountain retreat. Siladri and Kusuma Sari find themselves respectively pitted against the black powers of Dayu Datu the hideous archwitch and her precocious protégé Ni Klinyar. Now you can call me perverse but I can’t help finding the wicked twosome considerably more interesting.
We first meet Ni Klinyar in the nether world where her disruptive behavior causes the gods to decide: "Hell is not challenging enough for you. We are going to send you back to life on earth. Protesting violently, she is reincarnated, the product of two teenagers’ passionate but deeply sinful coupling. Even as a small child she is cruel and terrifying. "Subject to violent changes of colour... in a bad temper she seemed to pulsate in repugnant switches of burnt orange and chocolate bog." Her desperate parents are relieved to hand her over to Datu Dayu who recognises her potential for evil and witchery.
Dayu Datu is a true professional. She excels at transformation and can turn herself into a "an air-conditioner, a can of foot powder or a school of sharks" as well as the usual maiden, crone or animal. She drinks arak, smokes, snores and pins her "lazy" eyelid up with a thumb tack. She "amused herself with magic at a distance: making animals fart helplessly, cause birds to molt out of season." The catalyst who brings the characters together is the thoroughly unattractive Wayan Buyar who hears of Kusuma Sari’s beauty and innocence and is determined to take her as his wife. Initially unsuccessful he employs Datu Dayu to defeat Siladri who he claims is a black witch holding Kusuma Sari captive.
So the scene is set for the parallel conflicts which draw the story to its conclusion. To defeat Ni Klinyar and Datu Dayu, the white magic witches are forced to use their powers of sakti for destructive, potentially fatal ends. Evil begets evil. The night before the final confrontation, Siladri is tormented by doubts, asking to no avail: "Is what I am about to do God’s work? Or only my private sin?" Datu Dayu meanwhile puzzles over the power she can sense emanating from Mt Kawi. Unknown, but familiar. Attempting to get herself into the right professional mood she experiments with her office decor trying by turns "a morgue, a Soviet airport lounge, a crack house, an immigration office" (!) before unleashing her demons in all their appalling forms.
Ms, Darling’s flair for lyrical description and technique of combining the conventions of a traditional fairy tale with imaginative and startling images from the real world is reminiscent of the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende. She has a sharp eye for detail and a sensuous prose style. The pure fairy tale aspects are countered by a very earthy realism. Wayan Buyar, for example, is foul-mouthed, with a body that is "flabby and cheese-smelling" and punctuates his conversation with hawking, spitting and farting. Don’t assume this fairy tale is suitable bedtime reading for the very young. There are both raunchy and erotic love scenes and some nightmare-inducing descriptions of Datu Dayu’s stomach-turning creations.
A simple story, skillfully adapted and creatively embellished, The Painted Alphabet absorbs the reader into the magical realm of Balinese folklore. By melding together these two very different story telling approaches and balancing the tightrope of magic and reality, Diana Darling succeeds in conveying to us something unknown in a form that is familiar and accessible.
The Painted Alphabet was first published by Houghton Mifflin, New York in 1992 and will be published for Indonesian distribution only by Berkeley, Singapore in late 1998.
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