Hamid Roslan

The Encounter

The Encounter is a research-based manuscript that brings my life into proximity with that of the 19th century Javanese painter Raden Saleh. The project began as a desire to write about a historical figure and the similarities and differences between his life and my own, but became an encounter with the limits of what can be known, recovered, or addressed through writing. Rather than treating archival deficiency as a problem to solve, I began to understand it as the condition that determined the work’s form. The method of composition emerged directly from the materials available to me—fragmentary biographical traces, portraits, letters, historical scholarship—and from the absences that structured them. In this sense, The Encounter is not only a manuscript about a subject from the past, but a practice of working through silence, incompletion, and failed access. The manuscript unfolds through three interconnected modes: nonfiction prose, drawing, and asemic writing. The prose moves between research, memoir, and reflection, asking what it means to approach a historical figure whose image survives more fully than his interior life. The drawings are my response to portraits of Raden and they are concerned with how other people in his life viewed him. The asemic writing arose as a necessary third mode: a form of address by Raden. I think of these pages at once as a response from him, a formless translation, a record of failed address, and a way of making contact without the guarantee of legibility. The work turns toward what cannot be fully said, and does so by indirection in these three modes.

See also: between these two poles my heart is divided