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paperback $15.95
Monsoon Books
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
More reviews by Kerry Brown
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Jakarta Undercover by Moammar Emka
The blurb on the back of JAKARTA UNDERCOVER claims it as Indonesia's answer to America's 'Sex and the City'. It has sold over 200,000 copies in Indonesia, and proved something of a sensation, lifting the lid on the sexual adventures to be had in the world's fourth largest capital, and giving the lie to the image of a puritanical Muslim nation.
But MOAMMAR EMKA's book probably proves the truth of a different adage: that one country's erotica is another's turn-off. The exploits chronicled here are described in a spare, bland style, both slightly cold and offputting. Emka talks about the services available for the rich and favoured in the new Jakarta -- expats, the wealthy business people, some politicians, the elite -- and only once or twice does he does mention that Indonesia is still one of the poorest countries in the world, where the sort of prices he mentions here for nights of wild excess would add up to earnings for a year or more.
The clients come across as one-dimensional, barely believable, dripping in Rolexes, bombing round Jakarta in their BMWs, living in swish apartments, and seemingly utterly detached. Emka even does a take on Desperate Housewives a la Jakarta, chronicling the exploits of four middle-aged, attractive ladies who explore the perimeters of desire by, seemingly, doing nothing more than going to a couple of pubs till quite late, ending up with a man who 'supplies services' to them, and waking up bleary eyed in a stranger's apartment the next day.
But in fact, for all Emka's verbal gesturing and postulating, this is a tame book, and by shocking Indonesians ends up proving that they are probably pretty conservative after all. It is a pity is that Emka, while describing the surface of this underworld, gives no voice to any of the participants in it. The beautiful women in their alluring dresses and with their seductive ways exist only as props, who come, do what they are paid to do, and then disappear. Emka doesn't seem to engage with any of them.
The big difference in Emka's work, and that of Sex in the City (of which, I have to make clear, I am no great fan) is the use of irony, and the idea of authorial participation. Emka doesn't do irony. He describes everything with a deadpan seriousness, throwing the odd appalled comment (usually about the prices for the sexual services offered) to indicate disapproval of all this sordid debauchery. But in fact, most of what he describes (eating sashimi off naked women, orgies in suburbs, companies supplying, God help us, sex under the cover of massages) is pretty much what you'd expect on a mild night out in a London satellite town, and that's just for family entertainment!
Emka only observes all these events and never gets involved with the dirt and grit himself, giving his accounts a slightly analytic, detached and, it has to be said, moralizing tone which sits oddly with his evident deep admiration for the greater obscenities of extreme wealth and with his semi-worship of the appearance of the women.
There is important work to be done on the erotica of other countries. Nicholas Bornhoff, in the early 1990s, wrote a fantastic account of sex in Japan, called Pink Samurai. The real crux of that book was the truly extraordinary event of a sex show he describes in Tokyo in which audience members were literally hauled up on stage to have sex with two 'performers' in public. Bornhoff also addressed the various, hard-to-fathom obsessions of Japanese contemporary pornography -- schoolgirls and extreme torture. His account goes a long way to confirming that in this particular cultural area, a society really lets its guard down and reveals all sorts of interesting things about itself.
To be truly erotic you have to take risks, have imagination and wit. And that is hard do when you are sitting on your chair on the sidelines, crossing your arms and tut-tutting.
Kerry Brown
25/01/2006
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