Review: Journey to womanhood

Review: Journey to womanhood:

Eva Nourma’s novel provides us with a glimpse into the everyday lives of the Sasak community from Lombok – a group often overlooked in Indonesian literature

Maria Platt

Anyone who has visited Lombok has seen Mount Rinjani, the island’s tallest peak. No matter where you are, the mountain seems to looms large over the island. This is also the case in Eva Nourma’s latest novel, Sri Rinjani: Sebuah Novel Perjalanan Menjadi Perempuan (Sri Rinjani: A Novel of the Journey to Womanhood) where Mount Rinjani not only dominates the landscape but acts as a powerful symbol in the life of the book’s main protagonist, a teenage girl named Sri Rinjani.
Sri is Sasak – the ethnic group indigenous to Lombok. Nourma’s book, as the title suggests, is a coming of age novel that charts Sri’s life from adolescence to adulthood. While Sri’s journey is filled with all the typical themes that one might imagine occupying the life of a teenage girl, including falling in love and self-discovery, her story is unique in many ways.
Set in eastern Lombok, where Islamic piety and poverty are omnipresent, Sri is confronted with circumstances which force her to grow up quickly. The main challenge facing Sri is her family’s precarious economic position. The eldest daughter of a highly regarded yet poor family, Sri is acutely aware of the hardship that not only faces her family, but the majority

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