Translated by Jorgen Doyle, Hannah Ekin and Andy Fuller

Writing a short story is perhaps like meeting with a foreign planet on a strange orbit. Or a rare moment with a dead star. Short stories belong to an alien culture in this modern society living through the trauma of existing. The trauma inherent in the fundamental difference between the human and the non-human, male and female, dead and alive, black and white, god and devil: all of the other academic categories we create in order to understand, but which soon enslave us. The trauma of our insanity in trying to accomplish something.

Encounters with unusual grey areas; where categories melt; tempt me to write some prose. When grey areas become irrevocably fluid, or categories harden in polarisation. I experience the culture of prose as a difference between my expectations and the presence of a foreign body of prose, while I experience poetry as the practice of a mutant body. Modern society, whether in Indonesia or elsewhere, is growing as a mutant body in a digital ecosystem experiencing various waves of identity: it is looking for friendships in grey areas.

Afrizal Malna