Hi everyone,
Our short talk in class about religion that is considered as the source of gender inequalities made me think that it would be good to share you a link about a polygamy movie in Indonesian setting. This movie was produced in 2006 and it received two awards: Best Foreign Language Film from the Golden Orchid Awards and the movie of the year from Guardian e-awards. The writer and director of this movie Nia Dinata was considered brave in touching one of sensitive issues in Indonesia, the biggest Muslim country in the world. This movie is originally entitled Berbagi Suami. Berbagi means share, and suami means husband. In its free translation it is Love for Share. In my opinion, this translation into “Love for sharing” not “Husband's Sharing” is related to the topic of representations that we have discussed in the class. In commercial movies, it is almost always women are represented as object rather than subject. This movie, represents women as the main subject of the narrations. They do not accept polygamy at first, but then they have their own reasons why they accepted polygamy and decided to share their love to everyone including to the new family after their husband's marriage.
Polygamy (read: polyginy) is controversial in Indonesia since some Muslim groups consider polygamy is legal in Islam. This misdirected belief of the legality of polygamy, brought few numbers of Indonesian men into justification that their practicing polygamy is true and is in religious frame. The other Muslim groups who are contra to this polygamy's legality base their rationality on a belief that Muslims who consider polygamy is legal in this current time have not had a coherence understanding on Islamic teachings so that Muslims do not arbitrarily use several part of verses and neglect the others. (this debates were also portrayed in one of the movie scene).
The movie however tells not only about the realities of Muslims' polygamy critiques, it also criticize the practice of polygamy in Christian community in Indonesia. Ming (acts as an Indonesian Chinese waiter in famous Chinese duck roast restaurant in Jakarta) is in affair with the chef and owner of the restaurant. Because the chef is a Catholic believer and it is not allowed to divorce his wife, he took Ming as his second-secret wife, without his first wife approval of course.
This is a good social critiques on one of gender problems in society, and if you are interested to watch, it is available online, here is the link for synopsis of the movie: :).
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ReplyDeleteThank you very much for the link. Your posting has highlighted once again that men interpret canons of religion for their personal benefits. Just last week, I learnt that Jacob Zuma, President of South African Republic is polygamist and Christian at the same time. It made me surprise, because I used to believe that the polygamy,presently is practiced either in Muslim countries of Middle East/North Africa or in some primitive tribal areas. I am just wondering how he combines his religion and polygamy and what is the stand of official clergy towards his actions.
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