Encouraged to share his literary secrets with a sharp-suited British diplomat, John Mateer admits that he finds it difficult to trust other people’s work. ‘I am forced into the present, to write in the present tense,’ he says. ‘This is why I am interested in reportage, writing that takes the details of daily life and personal experience as the evidence of unfolding history.’
Readers would be misled if they approached this account of Indonesia after Suharto’s fall as journalism, or reportage. While author Timothy Garton Ash has called his essays on European communism a history of the present, Semar’s Cave is closer to a prose poem.
In late 1998, Mateer left for Sumatra to become the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Australian Centre in Medan. Stricken by bouts of sectarian violence and the impact of collapsing economies across south-east Asia, Indonesia provided the stuff of history in the making, but none of this is examined at great length in Semar’s Cave. Rather, the South African-born writer says his reason for going to Indonesia was a curiosity about the origins of Afrikaans, the ‘kitchen Dutch’, or Creole, used in the Dutch East Indies.
‘This fascinates me, because not only does it undermine the official history of Afrikaans,’ he says. ‘The idea that Afrikaans was a language with its origins in Europe, belonging to ‘white Africans’—the Afrikaners—but it also reflects the secret history of the language.’
Such reflections sprinkled throughout the book are its greatest strength. Few are fully developed (little is heard of this theory following a bracing exchange with a historian who recommends Mateer learn Dutch before embarking on this research), but in a world full of instant experts, this reticence may not be such a bad thing.
Semar’s Cave is hard to characterise. On one level it follows a stranger-in-a-strange-land trajectory. (The poet arrives in exotic Medan with its ‘tropical, volcanic scent of the earth, its monsoonal freshness and its spice of exhaust fumes’, travels to tourist sights such as Lake Toba, on to Java, and then flies home.) Along the way Mateer encounters a range of English-speaking expats and a few barely sketched Indonesians. On another, it is a self-portrait of the artist as a young man.
It is written in a deceptively straightforward style. Very little happens to the author-narrator, or more generally, but this stasis appears intentional: ‘I don’t write to present an objective account or a