For Remy Sylado, 23761 are the Magic Notes

For Remy Sylado, 23761 are the Magic Notes

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Just what do you talk about with a man of such
diverse talents and interests as Remy Sylado?

Everything. He speaks intelligently about theater and poetry.
He can give a scholarly analysis about Indonesian music, then he
will switch to a deep discussion on theology. Next, it's film,
sociology, history, you name it. Sylado speaks eloquently on a
wide range of topics, from Sitti Nurbaya to The Beatles. The man
is clearly a walking encyclopedia of arts and humanities.

And that encyclopedia would record his rich, artistic life's
work: countless poems, dozens of novels, hundreds of paintings,
several music recordings and numerous stage plays and television
films he directed and acted in. Sylado is a cultural observer as
well as an artist: he wrote newspaper columns, essays and
criticism on the arts and philosophy, and he has published a
number of textbooks on theater and music.

"He is a phenomenon," playwright Putu Wijaya said. "He is
extraordinary. I admire him because he can sing, he can write, he
can act and he can even read Greek texts. I wonder how he does
that."

"People may get the impression Remy is playing around,"
renowned poet Sapardi Djoko Damono said, "but he is really
serious in his work, and perhaps he is not satisfied with just
expressing himself in one field of art."

This phenomenal man has now added to his long list of literary
works: Ca-Bau-Kan, a novel published by Gramedia Popular
Literature. Ca-Bau-Kan tells about the life of the ethnic-Chinese
in Indonesia between 1918 and 1951. One prominent aspect of the
story is the active role played by the ethnic-Chinese in
Indonesia's movement against colonialism.

"I am interested in writing about the ethnic Chinese community
because their story is barely told," Sylado said. He sees
Indonesian novels only tell about native-Indonesians, never
taking the time to tell the stories of nonindigenous people.
Sylado also had an ethnic-Chinese character in his previous
novel, Kembang Jepun, which was published as a series in Surabaya
Post but never as a book. He next plans to write about the Dutch
in Indonesia during the colonial era.

"We always see the Dutch as mean, nasty colonialists. As an
Indonesian author, I want to write about the Dutch as human
beings, just like Ca-Bau-Kan looks at both the good and the bad
sides of the ethnic-Chinese as human beings."

For his latest novel, Sylado conducted research in Semarang,
Jakarta and Bandung, interacting with the ethnic-Chinese
community and getting close to them. But he has had ethnic-
Chinese acquaintances before, among them Tjoa Tjie Liang, his
journalist mentor, and Bandung musician Tan Deseng. Sylado also
began a crusade for the cause of ethnic-Chinese: he once wrote a
furious article criticizing the ban on Teater Koma's production
of Sam Pek Eng Tay.

"Our national motto is Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in
Diversity). But there's too much unity and not much diversity.
All unity, uniformity, when in fact we have the ethnic-Chinese
living in the Indonesian community. I feel sorry for them for
being so deprived and lacking courage and living in fear," he
said, pointing out that he wrote this latest novel during the New
Order era.

The multidimensional persona known as Remy Sylado has come a
long way since he was born in Ujungpandang, South Sulawesi, on
July 12, 1945, as Yapi Panda Abdiel Tambayong. The son of
Minahasan evangelist Johannes Tambayong, he never dreamed of
becoming an artist, much less a multitalented one. Because of the
agricultural environment he was living in, his aspiration was
obvious.

"I wanted to be a farmer," Sylado said, "but that never
happened because I never had land, never had livestock." However,
during his early years, he was always immersed in art,
particularly music. Both his father and grandfather composed
music, and although Sylado considers himself "just a songwriter,
not a composer like my father and grandfather", he seemed
destined to venture into the arts.

Yapi spent most of his childhood and teenage years in Catholic
schools in Semarang, Central Java. There he further developed his
interest in art, acting in school plays and taking part in and
sometimes winning painting competitions. After graduating from
high school in Solo, he enrolled at both the Art Academy and the
Indonesian National Theater Academy in Solo.

He worked as a journalist for Tempo magazine and Sinar
Indonesia in Semarang, and was an editor at several magazines,
including Aktuil and Vista. He wrote many short stories and
essays under several pseudonyms, and one of them -- a
pronunciation of the musical notes 23761 -- became his official
nom de plume.

"It's the opening notes of a Beatles song," Sylado said about
the name, humming the tune of And I Love Her in musical notes --
re-mi-ti-la-do.

The Fab Four were able to inspire Sylado's moniker because of
his great admiration for the group. "The Beatles were pioneers in
rock music, in every aspect, the music, the harmony, the lyrics,"
he said. "They're the rebels who discovered a new model of
entertaining music."

Speaking about music, Sylado describes the nation's musicians
as "only being able to demonstrate what has become the fashion in
America."

"Just name anybody in Indonesian pop music," he said, "none of
them are free from the fashion introduced by music from America.
We only take over something already complete from the western
world without going into or at least understanding it by studying
the process of how it happened. We just Indonesianize it, but
never really reinterpret it."

Sylado takes a matter-of-fact attitude about Indonesian music.
"Since the 16th century, our music has always been diatonic," he
said, referring to the typical scales of western music. He said
that because of Catholic missionaries and western influence in
Indonesian musical education, Indonesians know diatonic music
better than pentatonic music, the indigenous scales which are
strong only in Java and Bali. "We will just have to accept this
fact," Sylado said, "instead of trying to seek for our
'identity', for an Indonesian national music, which is more of a
political slogan. We cannot speak of returning to traditional
values if we never actually left in the first place. Don't make
up things that don't exist. Maybe our present tradition is our
tradition."

To this day, Sylado sees that Indonesians have not really
mastered music like the Japanese, for example. "We really can if
we are serious," he said, "but when we study music, it shouldn't
just be about the do-re-mi, but also the scientific knowledge of
music."

Sylado is clearly erudite in the subject of music, with his
book Sociology of Indonesian Music and his stint teaching the
history of music at Theater and Film College in Jakarta. But he
is most remembered as the person who introduced Puisi Mbeling in
the 1970s. Characterized by the cheeky, rebellious nature of the
poem structure and wording -- mbeling is the Javanese word for
naughty -- his work indicates he is as much the rebel of
Indonesian poetry as The Beatles were of pop music.

"He is an important figure in Indonesian literature for
initiating the idea of mbeling poetry in 1972 or 1973," Damono
said. "It greatly influenced the development of Indonesian
literature. Many poets have been inspired by the mbeling idea; it
broke the conventions of poetry that existed then."

"He has done us a great service," Putu Wijaya said, "by
providing space in Aktuil magazine for the birth of mbeling
poetry."

And what does Sylado have to say about the current state of
Indonesian poetry?

"Some of the young poets, like Afrizal Malna and Sitok
Srengenge, deserve praise," he said. "But what's saddening, I
haven't gotten spiritual enrichment from most poems since the
1970s."

But if we are to talk about the development of poetry, we have
to talk about the willingness of publishers to publish them,
Sylado said. "If they don't see them as something that needs to
be published, that's a disgrace to Indonesian culture. When
publishers only want to publish what is commercial, that is a
disaster."

Sylado's poems have been published in the compilations Potret
Mbeling and Kerygma. He has another anthology coming out this
year, which will include poems from 1969 to 1999. "The mbeling
poems will be in this one (anthology)," he said.

His current projects include some television plays adapted
from literary works of ASEAN authors for state-television TVRI.
And the three-time Citra nominee for Best Supporting Actor (at
the now defunct Indonesian Film Festival) is returning to the big
screen, acting in Slamet Rahardjo's yet-to-be-released film,
Telegram, based on a Putu Wijaya story.

"I'm not interested in directing big-screen films," he said,
"because there are people more able than I. I can probably do it,
but definitely not better than Slamet or Garin (Nugroho). I have
no worries about acting in them, but I'd get queasy about taking
the responsibility of directing a film."

Sylado lives with his wife of 23 years, Maria Louise, in a
house decorated with his paintings in East Jakarta. The couple
have no children. At least once a month he travels to Bandung to
meet with a regular group of artists who gather at his home in
Bandung.

With all of his accomplishments, is there anything he has not
done?

"I haven't come up with thoughts that can contribute to the
world," he said. He has written a number of papers on contextual
theology, with local culture playing an important element in the
discourse. He hopes the papers will be published and will be his
contribution to the world, introducing an Indonesian's thoughts
on the subject.

Now middle-aged and gray-haired, Sylado certainly doesn't look
as fierce and haggard as he did in his younger, rebellious days.
The long hair and thick, sinister beard have been replaced by a
neater coif and a stubble of gray moustache. Certainly that
frequent, friendly chuckle that accompanies his speech doesn't
jibe with a man who once wrote in a 1975 essay, "let's slaughter
all those poet wannabes who are moronic, dumb bastards", and was
brought to trial in 1981 for insulting the vice governor of West
Java.

"Oh, the way I'm offering contextual theology through local
culture, that's a kind of rebellion too," he said, smiling that
generous smile. "I'm still in my mbeling attitude."

"He is not the type of artist that can immediately become
popular because his ideas may be considered strange by people,"
Damono said. "But a person like him is important in the realm of
art because even though he himself is not rewarded, other people
will benefit from his 'strangeness' and will be able to move
forward."