I Believe the Man in the Attic Has a Gun

The Old Man with No Name” is the opening tale of Budi Darma’s short story collection People from Bloomington. He penned the set of seven stories in the 1970s, during the years he spent as a master’s and doctoral student in the English department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Except for a fleeting mention that one narrator is a “foreign student,” the stories are about Bloomingtonians and feature an all-American cast. In a global literary climate that tends to value Indonesian literary works as ethnographic material on Indonesian culture, Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington quietly refuses to play by their rules. “The Old Man with No Name” sets the stage perfectly for the collection as a whole, describing Bloomington through the eyes of a newcomer and introducing thematic concerns that will be significant throughout all the stories: severe loneliness, the atomization of modern society, mysterious illness, and old age, to name a few. During our correspondence on the translation of his work, Budi Darma described his encounters with old people who would “chase” him to tell him stories, or frequent supermarkets to avoid being lonely at home. His compassion for these elderly Bloomingtonians is especially apparent in his portrayal of the nameless, friendless man in “The Old Man with No Name.” And the fact of this compassion highlights another theme of the collection, already implicit in the story’s non-Indonesian subject matter: the universality of the human condition. Budi Darma felt moved to write about old people in Bloomington, and people generally, because he felt that he was able to empathize with and understand them. Indeed, in his preface he writes, “These stories just happen to be set in Bloomington. If I had been living in Surabaya or Paris or Dublin at the time, I would likely have ended up writing People from Surabaya, People from Paris, or People from Dublin.” I am often wary when writers make claims about the ability and right of fiction to roam untrammeled across race, culture, and countries. Overwhelmingly, such roaming tends to be unidirectional, with Western writers depicting other people and countries rather than the reverse. Works like Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington are exceptions to the rule. If arguments defending a writer’s right and ability to cross cultures are to maintain currency, then the Western literary community must show themselves able to appreciate literary works that run counter to what they are accustomed to. Thankfully, appreciation is all too easy when it comes to Budi Darma’s darkly humorous yet profoundly sympathetic tales. – Tiffany Tsao Translator of People from Bloomington