Indonesia's small presses keep the books the market skips

Indonesia's independent publishers are small, and that is close to the point. In an interview for Indonesia at Melbourne, Clara Siagian talks to Syarafina Vidyadhana, who co-founded Cahyati Press in Bali and works as its commissioning editor, the person who decides which books get made. Cahyati publishes books, zines, and artist editions by writers the commercial market usually passes over: queer authors, working-class authors, and researchers from minority backgrounds. Independent publishing, she says, is less about size than about the freedom to publish work because it matters, even when it will not sell.

The timing gives that argument some weight. Room for public argument in Indonesia has been shrinking, and LGBTQ Indonesians in particular have faced sharper discrimination and political attention. Syarafina, who has spent about twelve years in the trade, argues the answer is not only to publish accounts of hardship. She wants the ordinary parts of queer life recorded too: friendship, family, work, migration, desire, boredom, joy. She calls it a quiet form of resistance, which mostly means keeping stories so they cannot be lost. A book that exists is a fact that is hard to argue away later.

There is an outward-facing side as well. Cahyati is part of a growing network of small publishers stretching across Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe. Siagian's reading is that this shifts Indonesia's position slightly: less a country that foreign researchers travel to and study, more a place that sends its own writers and ideas out. It is a modest shift, and it is one of the few routes by which Indonesian voices reach readers abroad without a government programme behind them.

Why it matters

If you write, translate, or run a bookshop, this is the part of the industry where an unusual first book still has a chance, and where work no chain will stock gets printed anyway. For everyone else, the health of small presses is a fair early signal of how much space there is to say things in public. The pressure point to follow is distribution, since a publisher can print anything and still be stopped before the book reaches a shelf.