Daniel Owen

(Project Title) 

For my SEALIVES project, I proposed to interview two people with whom I had long been acquainted. The first, Mbah Yem, was the proprietor of an angkringan in the Danunegaran neighborhood of Yogyakarta, where I often ate a delicious and convivial dinner of rice, vegetables, and assorted fried, grilled, and bacemed snacks when living in the area. The second, Afrizal Malna, is an internationally renowned contemporary poet and critic from Jakarta whose work—at once critical and playful—engages the shifting social world of contemporary Indonesia and explores the resonances of history in the present. The red thread linking these two somewhat disparate life histories is that both Mbah Yem and Afrizal are of the same generation. Born in the late 1950s, their stories occupy a similar duration when put next to each other on a conventional timeline of Indonesian history. In bringing together their life stories, my hope was to explore different perspectives on the social changes that occurred (and continue to occur) in concert with shifting economic conditions throughout the Suharto dictatorship and into the opening decades of the twenty-first century, after the so-called reformasi. I thought of this project as a diptych of complementary stories, fleshing out different angles of a shared time—Afrizal’s perspective self-consciously bardic, at once cosmopolitan and deeply rooted in the day-to-day struggles of the Jakarta of his early life, a practiced voice, accustomed to being a public, if perhaps subversive, figure; whereas Mbah Yem’s perspective would be that of a striving underclass Javanese mother and provider, a figure often invoked in scholarly and mass discourse but rarely actually given the time and space to tell her own story. Mbah Yem had worked her way across Yogyakarta from washing clothes in her home village in Sleman to running her own angkringan close to the city center, putting one of her sons through college, and ultimately buying her own land and house back in Sleman. She kept the neighborhood fed, and fed well. Further, as an angkringan proprieter, Mbah Yem was in on all the news, gossip, and goings-on of the neighborhood, a central node of local knowledge transmission in the Danunegaran and Ngadinegaran neighborhoods. Sadly, Mbah Yem passed away in late 2023. Though I had lost the opportunity to interview her directly for this oral history project, I was able to interview her husband, Pak Bagong, who had worked beside her night after night, about Mbah Yem’s life story. 

Description of Materials

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Grantee Bio

Daniel Owen is a PhD student in UC Berkeley’s South & Southeast Asian Studies program with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. His research focuses on Indonesian poetry and social change from the 1980s to the present. Research interests include translation studies, Indonesian history, small press publishing, critical theory, classical Malay literature, global modernisms, social movements, and critical racial and ethnic studies. Daniel is a poet, translator, and editor. Publications of his poetry include the books Celingak-Celinguk (Tan Kinira, 2021), Restaurant Samsara (Furniture Press, 2018), and Toot Sweet (United Artists Books, 2015). His translations from Indonesian include Afrizal Malna’s Document Shredding Museum (Reading Sideways Press, 2019 & World Poetry Books, 2024) and various poems by Malna and Farhanah that have been published online and in print journals. Since 2013, Daniel has edited and designed books and participated in various collective processes as part of Brooklyn-based nonprofit publisher Ugly Duckling Presse’s editorial collective.

Questions? Get in touch with Dan at daniel.owen87@berkeley.edu .

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