Dialogue:
Hendri Yulius Wijaya & Edward Gunawan
Hendri Yulius Wijaya on Edward Gunawan’s Translation of “Gay Daun Kelor”
This poem was one of the first queer poems I ever wrote, and I was surprised by the sardonic humor that emerged—a tone that continued to appear in my subsequent work. Gunawan’s translation successfully captured not only this tone but also the rapid, hyperkinetic feelings of dislocation embodied in the poem. The constant movement and the juxtaposition between well-known global symbols of Western queer liberation and obscure local symbols are also skillfully conveyed through Gunawan’s masterful and careful choices of English idiomatic expressions to maintain the rhymes. For instance, the translated phrases, “Juliana Jaya Vermak Lives. because Lives on IG Live are to be consistently permark-ed” retain the playful rhymes without changing anything from the Indonesian version. Some of ‘local’ symbols are undoubtedly difficult to translate into English, but Gunawan’s translation further convinces me that translation of this poem is an act of challenging the known with the unknown coming from Indonesian queer experiences, further complicating and dislocating upper-middle class Western queer liberation narratives.
Edward Gunawan on Hendri Yulius Wijaya’s “Gay Daun Kelor”
What drew me to translate Wijaya’s work is very much evident in this poem—the sharp, irreverent humor while conveying uneasy and complex truths about the amalgamation, and at times sobering clash, of global queer identity and individual socioeconomic realities.
The speaker begins with the distinctly Indonesian proverb "dunia tak selebar daun kelor" before zipping through various markers of class, status, and privilege. The sparkling Louvre in Paris, the UN headquarters in Geneva, and embassy gala dinners in Kuningan stand in sharp contrast to the humble ITC Mangga Dua mall, neighborhood warung stalls, or the modest "Juliana Jaya Vermak Lives" mom-and-pop business.
These specific details are hurled at readers to mimic both the disorienting frenzy of our globalized world and the experience of scrolling through Indonesian social media, where wildly disparate points of reference and life experiences—from micro-local to larger-than-life global—coexist. To me, this strategy not only effectively and powerfully conveys the speaker's positionality and dislocation but also the disparity between the two worlds in which they are trapped—neither a powerless victim of “amnesia privilege” nor one with complete autonomous agency to travel the world and enjoy the countless sights and experiences it can offer. What we want does not mean we can, simply because social (or traditional) media seems to say so.
In one of our conversations about this piece, Hendri shared that: “I aim to emphasize ‘dislocation’ as inherently political—where Western symbols of queer liberation often fail to capture or align with our non-Western queer experiences. Dislocation becomes a productive conflict, where the local resists what is hegemonically labeled as ‘global’ (read: Western or U.S.-centric) while both remain entangled with one another. In other words, it’s akin to a ‘top-bottom’ relationship, where the boundaries between subject and object, or dominant and passive, become blurred, and pleasurable.”
As such, the poem reflects the existence of many queer/trans folks in many parts of the world (including the US) who are still struggling for basic economic and material survival before they are able to pursue “loftier” aspirations of self-actualization, including gender expression and sexual identity. Post-liberal democratic discourses on freedom that are supposed to be inclusive and expansive can often become hegemonically exclusive and paradoxically oppressive when they fail to take into account the wholeness of an individual's life circumstances and intersectional identities such as nationality and socioeconomic status.
I am grateful to Hendri for trusting me with the English translation of his work. What a joy that I get to share his unique perspective and distinctive voice, whose work interrogates our complicity by broadening and enriching widely-accepted Western framings of liberation and gender/sexual identity politics.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.