5 Questions for Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

5 Questions for Norman Erikson Pasaribu Michelle Johnson (bio) and Norman Erikson Pasaribu (bio) Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s first collection of short stories, Happy Stories, Mostly, was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and published, in Tiffany Tsao’s English translation, in the US by the Feminist Press in June. Q In your conversation with translator Tiffany Tsao that concludes the book, you talk about the importance of music when you write, saying that you listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell, along with Batak pop songs from YouTube, while writing these stories. “Little Green” is the soundtrack for the story “So What’s Your Name Sandra,” so I listened to it while reading the story, adding another emotional layer. How did Mitchell come to feature so prominently in your writing soundtrack, and what are some other songs that would be on the playlist for this collection? A I love the color blue, so it was just natural for me, I think, to listen to an album called Blue. I discovered it when I was just out of college, during another rough patch with my parents, and I have been listening to that album—nonstop, pretty much—for a decade. I strongly hate the sound of a man shouting (even if he shouts nonviolently), and this album was an antithesis to all that. And you can feel that she was so serious with everything she said even from the way she pronounced her lyrics. Other music that will be great company when people read the book: Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Viky Sian-ipar’s songs, especially “O Tao Toba.” Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Raising Sand. My boyfriend was a big fan of Utada Hikaru, so her album Fantôme, since he would put it on between my Joni. Q Whose work has been most essential to your development as a writer? A One of them is the poet Claudia Rankine. Reading Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was transformational. She is one of the greatest poets alive. The way she switched between tones and modes of speech, the way she created a moment, the way she played with forms, the way she was continually being ruined and cured in every line she wrote just opened a whole new world of poetics for me. Q What else has shaped you as a storyteller? A Indonesia. Every single word I wrote was a response to Indonesia and Indonesians, how they continue mistreating us queers, erasing us, killing us. They punched and jabbed me again and again that my writing just can’t have a flat surface anymore. And, if I am being honest, whenever I wrote there was always a hidden motive to make my straight enemies admit their defeat. That I can be far more brilliant than them despite their lazy, intense hate. And, in contrast, the dear friends around me, especially Tiffany Tsao, who translated my books. I heard all the funny stories about the love/hate relationship between translators and authors, but Tiffany and I just clicked. I learned so much from working with her for our previous translated book, Sergius Seeks Bacchus. A storyteller would stop telling us stories when they’ve felt unheard for too long. Whenever Tiffany sent me the first draft of he translation, I felt so seen. And this feeling of being seen, of being properly close-read, helped me keep going. [End Page 30] Q The publicity materials for this collection describe twelve stories that probe what it means to be almost happy. Why almost happy? A Because I am “almost happy,” because my closest queer friends are “almost happy,” because my parents and the people like them are “almost happy.” Imagine: I came from a working-class family, where I had to beg and fight with my mother every day for lunch money, and then after high school I was accepted into this prestigious accounting school in Indonesia (in 2007, only 2,014 students were accepted from more than 125,000 applicants) that would open doors to steady jobs, which eventually would give me access to a better living condition. However, not long after winning...