For centuries, people—using the language that later came to be called Indonesian—tried to depict what was beautiful in a woman’s face using metaphors from everyday nature: the curve of a clove of garlic, the sphere of a cut wild mango, the shape of a hanging swarm of bees.

These similes became clichés and felt exaggerated and stale. The critic H.B. Jassin, in his book about literature  titled Tifa Penyair da