Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

Poetry in Shadows: Puppets of the Wayang Kulit

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Ethereal music from bronze instruments plays a tune somewhat discordant to your ears. An oil lamp or single bulb sends out a light projecting images of kings and princesses, clowns and demons onto a white cloth. A dalang is the shadow puppet master of the Wayang Kulit, who, behind the cloth, calls up the spirit of ancestors, following a tradition of more than a thousand years.

The puppets act out scenes from the Ramayana, an epic poem brought to the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali by Indian traders and sailors. Or the Mahabharata, one of the world’s longest poems that also contains the Bhagavad-Gita.

The play will last three to four hours. Careful if you find yourself drifting off. You may find strangers from the play enter your dreams—Semar who is both a clown servant and a god. He serves Prince Rana, reincarnated from the Hindu god Vishnu. The beautiful Sita, Rana’s wife, also appears, as does the magical bird, Jatayu, who dies when it attempts to rescue Sita. Or perhaps members of the Pandawa and the greedy Korawa families play out their rivalry in an epic conflict from the Mahabharata.

No matter the play or poem, you will spend time deep in a forest thick with greenery, filled with creatures hiding where the sun doesn’t linger. The forest is the scene of banishment or refuge.

“All is clouded by desire, Arjuna,” Kresna tells the prince of the Pandawa family. “As a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust. Through these, it blinds the soul.”

With one movement of a prince’s hand, giants are defeated.

See my post, Water from the Moon, to find out how I was introduced to the Wayang Kulit.

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Water from the Moon

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“You do whatever you can about the misery that’s in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light.” Billy Kwan, The Year of Living Dangerously

The flickering illumination of a nearby fire filters through a white cloth. Children’s voices accompany the Gamelan, traditional percussive music from bronze instruments. There, on the island of Java, shadow puppets of the Wayang Kulit act out a scene from Hindu mythology.

Click here to watch.

This is the opening of my favorite movie, The Year of Living Dangerously. The shadow puppets come to represent the characters in the movie that stars Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver.

Look at Prince Ajuna. He’s a hero. But he can also be fickle and selfish. Krishna says to him, “All is clouded by desire, Ajuna, as a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust. Through these, it blinds the soul.

The movie contains many stunning and sometimes powerful images. The camera hovers over a mountainous landscape of rich greens as a vehicle moves through it. A grieving mother pours water over her lifeless young son, nestled in white lilies.

In the movie, photojournalist Billy Kwan—a male played by the female actor Linda Hunt who won a best supporting actress Oscar for the role—moves between two worlds in 1965 Indonesia. One world is that of his profession capturing images of a beautiful land on the verge of tragedy. He spends brief moments in the other world trying to improve the lives of one family living in extreme poverty.

Most of us become children again when we enter the slums of Asia. And last night I watched you walk back into childhood. With all its opposite intensities: laughter and misery, the crazy and the grim, toy town and a city of fear.

For a time, Billy navigates both worlds successfully. He occasionally joins in the camaraderie of his journalistic peers while also providing monetary support to a mother and her very young son. When the child dies in spite of Billy’s efforts, and he can no longer ignore the callous exploitation he sees in his colleagues, Billy is thrown into a conflict he can’t resolve, except with one last, desperate act.

Between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians were massacred during what was known as “The 1965 Tragedy.” “Water from the moon,” one of the Indonesians in the movie says before he goes into hiding. “Something you can never have.”

I took that phrase, “Water from the Moon,” as the title of my first novel, a story of “what if.” What if we lost our precious democratic institutions? What if the United States ever found itself under dictatorship? The story was inspired by what happened when the longstanding democracy of Chile in 1973 was replaced with dictatorship. The main character of the novel, Adrienne Dylan, struggles with choosing the best way to respond to the increasingly oppressive situation of her home country. She can live an isolated life or put herself at risk working with those who want to change the situation. She can choose to react violently or nonviolently.

Always in the back of Adrienne’s mind is her late father’s possible role in the overthrow of democracy, and in the increasing evidence that he was responsible for the death of her birth mother when Adrienne was a child.

On a recent trip to Guatemala, as a van carried me from Lake Atitlan to the colonial town of Antigua, I wanted to immerse myself in music to drown out the incessant droning of a fellow passenger. I chose to listen to the soundtrack I created for Water from the Moon. Each song evoked a scene, and I soon found myself drawn into the emotional story I had created years ago. I sometimes looked around at the mountains surrounding the Pan American Highway and found it hard to believe that not that long ago, Guatemala found itself in the midst of a civil war that had lasted decades. Recently, it has arrived at a place where shoots of stronger institutions that are crucial for democracy have started to grow.

Here in the United States, we live now in turbulent times, and the upheaval has many of us wondering and worrying about the future. We have limited ability to know what will come. We seek the answer as to the best road to take. It feels sometimes we are looking for a few drops on our parched tongues from some lunar spring thousands of miles away.

Friends are reading 1984 by George Orwell. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Iron Heel, by Jack London. And It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. I often consider removing Water from the Moon from the metaphorical bottom drawer and rewriting it for our time. That consideration has never been stronger than in the last few months. Storytelling has great power–to both take us to those dark places and give us the opportunity to ponder what we can do to pull ourselves back into the light.

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The Hill that Inspired the Little Prince

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In 1938, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the beloved children’s book, The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), crashed his plane in Guatemala. During his recuperation, he spent some time on Lake Atitlan, a volcanic lake about three hours outside of Guatemala City. There, as the legend goes, he saw the Cerro de Oro, “hill of gold,” that inspired a drawing and scene in The Little Prince, published in 1943. The hill, sitting at the edge of the beautiful volcanic lake, does resemble  an elephant with a boa trailing off at its head and tail as if it were being consumed.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be attending a writers’ workshop conducted by writer Joyce Maynard. Joyce is author of several novels—including Labor Day, made into a motion picture with Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin—and a memoir, At Home in the World, that partially describes how she met and developed a relationship with J.D. Salinger when she was 18 years old.

The workshop will be conducted in a town we have in common—San Marcos La Laguna. We both own houses there, and when my spouse and I were considering purchasing ours, a Google search revealed a story in the New York Times on Joyce’s.

With the Cerro de Oro in the distance, I hope for inspiration during this learning opportunity, and a chance to get to know Joyce and other workshop participants. As we ponder writing and produce our work, somewhere across the magnificent Lake Atitlan, a boa constrictor and an elephant in the form of a companion to volcanoes will be keeping watch.

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The Story of “La Milagrosa”

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la-milagrosa

In a sprawling cemetery in Havana, Cuba, a female figure keeps watch over a grave. She is carved from white Carrara marble. Her right arm is wrapped around a cross, a symbol of sacrifice. Her left arm holds a baby.

The grave belongs to Amelia Goyri and the date of her death is 1903 at the age of 23. Amelia’s story is tragic. While pregnant she acquired pre-eclampsia, causing high blood pressure and other health problems, and following seizures, she and her baby son died. Her grieving husband visited the grave daily and each day he engaged in the ritual of knocking three times. The story told is that when the grave was opened to re-inter Amelia’s and the baby’s bones, as is the custom, what they found was an intact body. A miracle, hence the name “La Milagrosa.”

The rest of the story varies. Some say Amelia was found holding her baby in her arms. One guide through the cemetery said that the baby was found resting at her feet and was later returned to her arms when she was reburied.

Regardless of the truth of the story, Amelia Goyri’s grave has become a revered monument in the cemetery, a place where fresh flowers are always found and where people come to seek miracles of their own.

Touch the foot of the baby. Tap the marble slab three times. Consider your wish. Many say those wishes come true. They believe that from a tragic death comes something beautiful to those with faith who show reverence to this symbol of tragedy.

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Myths, Folklore and the Child who Melts into the Night

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Flying Girl copyBefore writing my book, The Island of Lost Children, several times I read the book that inspired it, Peter Pan. One of the sections in J.M. Barrie’s book that intrigued me most was Peter’s explanation of how the lost boys came to be:

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses.”

I’m not a scholar who has examined the work in the context of its times. Still, I have a theory that Peter’s explanation is in response to conditions during a period when infant mortality was still quite high. This was a time when children died of all sorts of illnesses like influenza and diseases prevented by vaccinations which didn’t exist at the time. Barrie’s explanation of lost boys disappearing and being spirited to a magical land might have been a comfort as well as a simple explanation for curious children.

I wondered about how stories from folklore in other times and settings might have served the same function. In the folktales of many cultures, mythical creatures steal babies or young children and leave a sometimes deformed creature in its place. In Irish mythology, for example, faeries substitute a child with a changeling, a less than perfect version of the baby it replaces or even an old faery brought from the Otherworld of the sidhe to die on the human side.

After recently writing about the myths of Chiloe, a group of islands off the coast of Chile, I encountered the story of the invunche. The invunche is a first-born son fewer than nine days old who has been kidnapped or sold by his parents and who eventually ends up in the hands of witches or warlocks and guards their caves. The story is quite gruesome: one leg is broken and his foot attached to the back of his neck, and he’s fed on black cat’s milk, goats, and even human flesh. You know, what every parent wants for his or her son.

As disturbing as these stories are, I’m always fascinated about how the human mind conjures up explanations in the most creative ways. These tales in the oral traditions of the past, or in a popular book like Peter Pan, are testaments to our eternal search to try to understand. To convince ourselves that there’s some way to make sense of what may be incredibly difficult to accept.

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Welcome.

I write for children. I write for adults. I write fiction short and long, real and fantastical, foreign and domestic.

Here you'll find my stories and links to my novels.

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Copyright Kim Batchelor