1 - Back to the Narrative 'With Good Legs' Connecting Archipelagos through the Yusuf's Stories

Utendi wa Yusuf (Sw.), Cerita Yusuf (Jav.), and Hikayat Nabi Yusuf (Malay). These, amid few, are the vernacular names ascribed to  narrative translated in very different periods and parts of the globe –  from the Middle East up to insular Southeast Asia – inspired by the Perso-Arabic prophetic tales Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ and further adaptations, as well as the Qurānic Sūrat Yūsuf . The oldest example of the Yusuf story in Malay dates back to 1604 and is found in Aceh, North Sumatra (Wieringa, 2017). In contrast, the oldest Swahili manuscript is said to be lost, and later copies were composed in Swahili in Arabic script on Lamu island, northern Kenya coast, between 1895 and 1913. Madura, Bali, and Lombok have produced many lontar palm-leaf manuscripts about the story of Yusuf in Javanese dating back to 1633-34 (Arps, 1992). In this paper, I would like to push the Swahili boundaries of the narrative (Raia, 2021) through a comparative archipelagic look at the other performative retellings of the story from insular Southeast Asia, where the story traveled and got adapted. As a pilot ‘insularchives’ study, I will comparatively investigate the Javanese, Malay, and Swahili poetic renditions by placing manuscripts-to-oral forms as the loci where the world-local literatures interact and generate relational and multiple meanings. How has the Yusuf story been written down, performed, and received by different Indian Ocean archipelagos’ inhabitants? Considering this traveling story and question, a new axis of distant literary heritages production and circulation is wished to be inaugurated.