Meet the Author!

PARTY HAPPY SEPTIANI
1706983982
FIB Universitas Indonesia

Meet The Author of “Membongkar yang Terkubur” Novel

            Last week, on Tuesday, February 18, 2020, creative writing prose and drama class got a chance to meet and greet with the novel author of “Membongkar yang Terkubur,” Mrs. Dewi Anggraeni. Mrs. Dewi put her focus on her writing about socio-political and cultural issues regarding her experience during her life in the past. The novel she wrote is more than one, which is My Pain My Country in English and Membongkar yang Terkubur in Indonesia. During the seminar, she shared her experience, the challenges she faced while writing, and her background related to the novel.

            In her writing, she told her condition as the Chinese descent while her nationality is Indonesia, how she was treated in Indonesia, and how the invaders made use of them. In this novel, Mrs Dewi made the protagonist was a person whose age around 70, Prita Setyawati because it might show that the protagonist has faced lots of things in her life, and she could tell people the real situation in the past about the racism. She told that at first, she claimed herself just as an Indonesia woman. Meanwhile, she started to recognize that the people around her look her differently, because she is Chinese. In her novel, she also told about how Dutch colonist used Asian people, especially Chinese people to collect taxes from Indonesian laborers, and they took advantages without regard to the life of colonizer.

            Aside from this, Mrs. Dewi also gave us advice about what we have to do when we want to start writing a novel. She suggested to us that “plot is not something to be put in cement, but it should be something to ‘grow’. In other words, there must be a development or the progression of the flow of the story. “Feeling is the starting point,” she said. We need to put our feeling in the story we want to write to be able to write the story. Without any feelings or emotions, you will not get the passion to write and no progress at all. Another important thing, Mrs. Dewi also encourages us to think about the context that is relatable to the language we write. For example, when she wrote her Indonesia novel, she thought about Indonesia and visualized it. Also when she wrote her English novel in Australia, she thought about context in Australia. Anyway, because she lived in Australia and she used English for her daily conversation with neighboorhood, she did not feel hard to write the novel in the English language.