Writer’s Block

The most humiliating event in Maggie Tiojakin’s writing career took place aboard a jumbo jet high above the Pacific. Here she recalls her unknowing brush with greatness.

I was all of 21, and flying was a habit I had only recently acquired as the result of living abroad.

Of course, at the time, I was not a writer, more a writer wannabe, still making my fumbling attempts in the literary hierarchy. Little did I know that I would commit a major faux pas that no doubt had Leo Tolstoy turning in his grave.

I was seated next to a young woman with dark curly hair and the most exotic face I’d ever seen. She carried a copy of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits; in my hands was an English-language translation of Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell -- a book I randomly chose at Borders because of the grimly intriguing title.

It didn’t take long for us to strike up a conversation. She was an anthropology major on her way to Beijing to participate in an exchange program, and I was returning to Jakarta for a couple of weeks to see my parents. She wanted to discover an ancient city, I wanted to write. Hearing this, her face lit up.

“My father wanted me to become a writer, too,” she said, leaving her sentence in mid-air, wondering whether she should divulge more information when, suddenly, she stopped caring.

“Is your father a writer?” I eventually asked.

She nodded, but I could tell she was uncomfortable with the question.

“Have you ever read Love in the Time of Cholera?” she inquired.

Now, let us pause for a moment. In my defense, I should explain that a year isn’t a long time in a lifetime. Even though I had been living in Boston for almost 12 months, there was no way for me to familiarize myself entirely with the who’s who of the English-speaking literary world.

Plus, I was busy trying to get my bearings: memorizing transportation routes, landmarks and how to get from point A to point Z; making friends, spending time together at cheap diners discussing who had the worst instructor at the language school; doing chores at the home of the family I was living with and, basically, making an extra effort to “fit in”.

Moreover, the life I had in Jakarta before I went away was not exactly one influenced by world literature. Reading was only encouraged if the materials were from school (everything else was either a waste of money or a waste of time.) Degrees of importance were applied to the things we read, contingent upon how much information we had to cram into our heads.

For instance, history books would trump books containing mathematical theorems; and mathematical theorems would trump, let’s say, gym theory.

The only piece of literature I remember reading in high school was Chairil Anwar’s collection of poetry — which is, you know, nice, but hardly adequate to contribute to a sense of literary acumen.  

College didn’t do much for me, either. A study of English literature usually meant two hours of grammar, three days a week, over the course of a semester. The final exam went something like this: Number is to math as ___ is to ___.

Therefore, the answer to whether I had read Love in the Time of Cholera?

“No,” I said.

She smiled at me, the kind of smile I knew was trying to conceal a certain amount of surprise.

Later, in my attempt to change the awkward course of our conversation, I pointed at the book she was carrying and asked if it was any good.

“This is my third time reading it,” she said, then cast me a curious look. “You never read The House of the Spirits?”

I suddenly understood what it must be like to be the village idiot standing before a jeering crowd.

Unfortunately, the humiliation didn’t stop on that plane trip. I would continue to stumble into conversations I was not equipped to participate in, and then find myself flailing hopelessly to make a connection. Everybody else seemed attuned to the comings and goings of personalities in the literary world, no matter where they came from.

I learned that, in Albania, most high school students are familiar with the works of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyam, Immanuel Kant, Nizami and Anton Chekhov. Once I met a 15-year-old girl from Burkina Faso who could recite stanzas straight out of Homer’s Illiad.

So I spent years catching up on my reading and bookish knowledge, turning the local library into my base and Googling authors dead and alive.

But I found out that I was not alone in my literary ignorance. Five years later, back in Jakarta, when I told the humiliating story of my chance encounter with Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s daughter to my friends and colleagues, most of them threw a blank look at me. “Oh, from the telenovelas?” they said.

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