Ambivalence in Out of the Truck Box written by Iqbal Aji Daryono: A Study on Indonesian Diasporic Literature

The discussion of diasporic literature in Asia is often associated with canon literary works written by Indian and Chinese diasporic writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul, Hong Ying, Zeng Yi, Harry Wu, and Amy Tan who are some of the second generation of their diasporic ancestor who live abroad due to some dispersal reasons mostly of economic condition. The narrative of those diasporic literature usually implies the main characters’ ambivalence toward their hostland in which they adopt its culture with admiration but at the same time they make resistance toward the culture since they know it is not their root culture. That condition arouses identity crisis of the main characters as diasporic people which gives narrative a melancholy tone. This article will report a study which examines the concept of Bhabha’s ambivalence in a popular literary work written by an Indonesian writer who lived temporarily in Australia, Iqbal Aji Daryono, titled Out of the Truck Box. Different from the mentioned canon works, the narrative of this diasporic literature has a celebratory tone with satirical humor. The study on the novel tries to reveal what factors might influence the different tone of diasporic literature. The study applies qualitative research method using close reading to reveal what factors might influence the narrative’s tone of diasporic literature. The data is collected by clustering written expressions in the book based on the concept of Bhabha’s ambivalence, then they are analyzed with postcolonial approach. The result of the study shows that the tone of diasporic literature is influenced by the diasporic people’s traditional cultural bond, social class, the dispersal reason, the awareness of postcolonial discourse and the muclticultural hostland.