“My Dearest Javanese Concubine”

©Luca Desienna

There are some photographic books capable of telling particular, intense stories. Which helps to reflect.

One of these is certainly Luca Desienna's reportage “My Dearest Javanese Concubine”, released in 2019 by the Polish BlowUp Press.

I searched this book for a long time, it is not easy to find. It's set in Indonesia, precisely in Jogiakarta, where I was on one of my very first trips to Indonesia, in 2014.

 

It's a small book with photos in grainy black and white interspersed, from time to time, with small color photographs.

The dear Javanese concubine is Tira Yohanes Soepomo, a transsexual who lives in the margins of society after several unsuccessful surgeries, to better define her female sexuality, have reduced her face to a painful and deformed mask.

Tira is deeply loved by Dayang, a young boy who is also marginalized, without work, with a child's face.

The photographer lived with them, documenting every aspect of their lives, in the small six-square-meter squat, until Tira's disease took her to death at 48 years old from HIV.

Dayang never abandoned her, even knowing that she was ill and that he could become too.

In the book, there are many rough photographs of sexual intercourse but also sweet tenderness.

As the sentence that opens the book goes:

“Tenderness has never so delicately surfed among the darkness.”

 

 

I knew what the subject of the reportage was but I hadn't seen the images yet.

The style is that of strong empathy without moral judgment in the wake of the works of Nan Goldin, D'Agata, Araki.

An approach and a topic that deeply interests me: that of the search for sweetness, love, and light where it is easy to see only misery, abjection, and darkness.

The book also has a short but splendid introduction by Peggy Sue Amison, who manages in a few lines to perfectly describe this story and its singularity.

She begins by saying how in other cultures, most likely, Tira would have been considered a sacred being because of her indefinite sexuality, a teacher of life.

But almost always our lives are also marked by the place where we are born. It's inevitable that growing up in that indefinite body and face deformed by incompetent doctors, have made Tira the very evidence of her “sin” in a profoundly Islamic city like Jogiakarta.

 

©Luca Desienna

 

But she has Dayang, this other waste of society, with his inseparable wooden guitar, as is often seen in large Javanese cities.

I still remember the first time I saw in Jakarta, in 2010, these guys as skinny as nails, with ripped jeans, often punk shirts, going to ask people for a few cents while playing these little guitars. Those with me told me to be careful because they were bad boys, drug addicts, dangerous.

Honestly, I never saw anything wrong with them, if only as a boy I was once like them – I still remember when my maternal grandmother wanted to give my mother some money to buy me new pants because they were all ripped at the knee when I was still in middle school. And then because now, at this point in my life, I certainly don't judge someone because they sleep on a street corner or have ripped jeans.

Indeed, Dayang is almost tender in these photos.

As I said, this is a book that can certainly shock or disgust someone, but it is in the sweetest photographs that I like best.

Not so much in the wild embraces but in the two lovers intent on caressing each other's face or in Dayang who sleeps placidly on Tira's side, in a bus, with a child looking at them from the side.

Even if Tira is strong and Dayang is in love, and now abandoned to their existence as it is, one wonders if one can ever totally get used to the looks of repulsion and moral judgment of others.

As Tira says in a sentence quoted in the book:

“Luca, people don't know what I am,
and they don't want to know...
they just stop at the entrance
and stay there, staring...
staring at the surface.”

 

Beyond that surface, inside their squat apartment, is what Amison calls the “lust for life and the courage to be themselves.”

What is taken for granted for ordinary people, they must fight to conquer it, or the right to live their bodies, to be recognized as authentic, “to be loved and make love, get drunk, sing, dance, pray – to be human. To be seen.  

They were sacred to each other.”

 

©Luca Desienna

Because, as Amison poetically concludes, some lives are intensely burning flames and Tira was a supernova.

Beautiful image, which hangs up at the starting point. The stars need darkness to shine. And making our lives shine, even if imperfect, marked by sin, borderline, is always love.

The Greek pietas, the piety.

As D'Agata taught us in the most terrible and painful way – about which I hope to write one day – capable of feeling sincere love for the prostitutes and HIV-infected women of the brothels in Cambodia: his photography was his way to give them light, for a moment, in the desolation and darkness of their lives ignored by all.

Desienna does the same, right up to the last images of the empty bed, perhaps in a hospital, and Dayang wandering alone with his gaze lost and stunned through the busy streets of Jogjakarta.

In the end, this was the meaning of Tira's sentence: it is easy to stand on the edge of the door, to judge from there, without taking the step inside.

Who are we to judge the lives of others?

There are no loves of high or low level.

Dayang chose to love those deformed, ill beings, many years older than him, until her last breath, at the cost of his own life.

Outcast, judged, despised.

 

Yet sacred in the eyes of those who loved him.

 

Light in the darkness of the eternal night of the universe.

This is a supernova, whose brief exploded light can exceed that of an entire galaxy.

 

In Memory of Tira
Yohanes Soepomo
1965 - 2011

 

©Luca Desienna

Luca Desienna: “My Dearest Javanese Concubine” (BlowUp Press, 2019)

Italian version