Goenawan write of human hopes

Misalkan Kita di Sarajevo (If We Were in Serajevo), A collection of poems by Goenawan Mohamad

Kalam, Jakarta

First printing, November 1998

vi + 61 pp

ISBN 979-95480-1-2

JAKARTA (JP): A new collection of poems by Goenawan Mohamad, bringing together 31 poems spanning between 1993 and 1998, is here with us now. As is the case with most -- if not all -- poems by Goenawan, the poems in the this collection are also rich in fresh images and choice of words, simple as they are.

One easily noticeable thing about this collection is that 18 poems have names in the titles (11 names of persons and seven names of places). Some of these names may not be familiar to us but their presence, instead of bringing about confusion, intensifies the images that the poems can evoke in our minds.

The collection begins with a fairly long 1993/1994 poem titled Untuk Frida Kahlo (For Frida Kahlo). One may not be familiar with Frida Kahlo but, after reading this poem, one cannot help sharing what she went through and then one will be able to picture Frida Kahlo as a full human being, no longer alien, in one's mind. Her feelings, her fate and her thoughts in her final years become clear to the reader, to whom Frida Kahlo will no longer be unfamiliar.

The following quotations (stanzas 1 and 15) may give one an idea of who Frida Kahlo was:

Frida Kahlo writes in her diary: "A still life,/the giver of the world, what counts most is the absence of hope."/She also mentions there the dawn, the morning, her red comrades,/the blue large room, the leaves held in the hands, the noisy birds ... and

What is death actually? Reportedly -- before she was carried/to the fire of cremation, someone came to see her in her bed/ and kissed her face, for the last time, "Frida, you were/the feeling of amazement at the aroma of brandy, a smile/in a conversation and the ripeness of a banana at a dinner./You were thrilled by anything brief."

In his poems in this collection, Goenawan seems to contemplate contemporary human sufferings and hopes. Hence his poem dedicated to the leader of an East Timorese proindependence group, Jose Alexandre "Xanana" Gusmao, and another one titled Aungsang Suukyi, Myanmar's woman opposition leader.

He writes in the poem dedicated to Xanana, among other things, as follows:

Seven soldiers dragged him out of the hospital bed,/seven soldiers took him to the edge of a forest and slaughtered him there,/seven enemies killing a head rolling, chopped off the body, and/shaking, flutteringly, and only coming to a stop, still, after his bleeding mouth/bit a handful of sand from between grasses.

This prisoner is now wrapped here, in the remaining piece

of a shroud of unbleached cotton./He was only 21. Look at his face. A handsome son."

(Zagreb) and to Suukyi he writes the following:

Someone will be free and will always be/as green as the dry season//Someone will be free and be as black as the acid/rain of the wet season//Someone will be free and will run/or feel tired//And the sky will be reduced and the stars/ shift//

(Aungsang Suukyi)

As the title suggests, the poems in this collection tell us a lot about how people have been plunged into a miserable life by war and violence. The choice of Serajevo is Goenawan's clever ploy to evoke in the reader's mind the miseries and hopes that any war and acts of violence are certain to entail.

Therefore, when one reads through the collection, one will feel as if one were reading reports about contemporary events in different parts of the world, happenings that are familiar to us due to print and electronic media.

It is in this context that names -- of persons or places -- become meaningless. Events involve people. People act and events take place. We see unfolding before us a montage of events in different parts of the world, all bearing the same theme of man's tragic fate -- hope in the certainty of hopelessness. The following quotations will give you an idea of Goenawan's contemplation of man's tragic fate and his eternal longings:

Hundreds of years later he will return,/traces, crusts, residues, marks: transitory, perhaps not so. (To an island)

Separation is a signal of death, the glass-selling old man/said and asked, who are we really, why. (At a flea market).

But, if we were in Serajevo:/close to the museum we would also pay our respects/and clean ourselves: "Let me die/in a crimson color." (If we were in Serajevo)

Then I will simply pass/and the day runs/and you no longer exist (In one June)

What is your name, I asked./I don't remember, you replied. (In Malioboro)

It is also interesting to note that two poems in this collection -- A request of someone kept in Nanking for those five years and In Malioboro -- are dedicated to Agam Wispi, a leading poet belonging to the People's Cultural Institute (Lekra) who spent many years in China after the aborted coup on Oct. 1, 1965 allegedly masterminded by the now-disbanded Indonesian Communist Party, and to a person reminding him of Iramani (the pen name of Nyoto, deputy chairman II of the central committee of the Indonesian Communist Party, who was killed in 1965).

Goenawan seems to have transcended narrow humanism. Man's plight is seen as a tragic fate of human beings, irrespective of their political or ideological leanings. What concerns him most is man's life, his hope, fear and miseries. As poems preserve the best of human feelings, it is just this that Goenawan has done in this collection with poems that eloquently speak of true humanism.

-- Lie Hua

The reviewer teaches at the Department of English, School of Letters, at the private National University, Jakarta.