In memoriam: Agam Wispi was a true political poet

In memoriam: Agam Wispi was a true political poet

Nur Zain Hae, Amsterdam

Agam Wispi passed away on Jan. 1 in a nursing home in Amsterdam.
His was another death that immortalized an old premise: le poete
maudit. He was solitary, quiet and wasted thousands of miles from
his homeland. The ultimate exile.

He was one of the most important Indonesian poets of the
1960s. It was Wispi who invented the charming combination of art
and politics, a never-ending source of argumentation in
literature, which was once a heated subject in the field of
Indonesian literature.

He was idolized by the young poets of his time. He
internalized communism and was involved in the communist People's
Cultural Institution (Lekra) as the secretary of the literature
section.

Wispi was born in Pangkalan Susu, North Sumatra, on Dec. 31,
1930. He began writing in the 1950s, and wrote short stories,
plays and essays. His works were published in newspapers, such as
Pendorong, Kerakjatan, Indonesia, Budaja, the Sunday Courier,
Zaman Baru, and Harian Rakjat. He was the arts editor at Harian
Rakjat.

One of his most popular poems during the 1950s was Death of a
Peasant (1953). The poem succeeded in matching the intensity of
esthetics and ideology, one of Lekra's criteria of quality art.
The peasants' resistance was pacified by a military regime at the
time yet it didn't stop them from their course of action. The
poem was written in a very concise and precise language, with a
nuance of pantun (rhyme), which gave it a musical effect when it
was read.

As both a poet and a journalist, Agam absorbed everything that
went on around him and turned it into poetry without losing its
poetical touch. His efforts in turning everyday reality into
poetical reality" seldom escaped the objectives of propaganda
from his party, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

Yet he found numerous ways to dodge the burden, and he claimed
he enjoyed the freedom to apply what he called politics in art.

"How he applies it is totally up to him. It couldn't be
directed, neither could it be defined. And it couldn't be judged
just like that," said Alex Supartono and Lisabona Rahman from the
research team on Indonesian exile literature in 2000.

He wanted to return it all to mankind. His lyrical poems
always juxtaposed human beings against the world. The outside
world could be tyrannical, destructive, exclusive or another form
of repression and exploitation. There would always be the
optimism to resist, although in reality the resistance could
fail.

The energy of resistance was something he tried to maintain.
Far before Wiji Thukul cried: "Hanya ada satu kata: Lawan!"
(There's only one word: Resist!), Wispi warned that every poet
had to keep aware of his surroundings. Poetry had to stay free to
resist: In the world of thievery even poetry is stolen/silenced
by the police or consumed by taxes/or poetry is dulled and
pacified/care not whether the sky is gray or blue: Resist!
(Quoted from Bukan Alat Jinak/Not a passive tool)

The same spirit was inspired by the struggle of the Vietnamese
against the U.S. and France. He toured Vietnam from May 1965 to
August 1965 as a reporter for the Harian Rakjat and wrote his
book War Poems (1970). He turned his journalistic reports into a
collection of poems that he called "a small contribution to the
solidarity of people around the world for the struggle of the
Vietnamese".

From Vietnam he went on to China, but failed to return to
Indonesia after the attempted 1965 coup d'etat. He stayed in
Nanking for five years. This period is marked as one of the most
painful periods in the history of Indonesian exiles. The days of
isolation from the outside world, being obliged to study the
thoughts of Mao Tse Tung every day, drove some of them to the
brink of insanity.

He wrote On Top of the Ruins (1971) during that time. Besides
portraying the pain of Indonesian exiles longing to return, his
poems were also inspired by Chinese communism. Mao Tse Tung and
the Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, kept surfacing in his works,
with praises scattered throughout them.

His exile to Germany and the Netherlands was the longest and
most uncertain periods of his life. The hope of returning to his
homeland vaporized again, and the waiting game continued. Wispi
tried hard to absorb, live and mingle within the society around
him. The alienation remained, as if it was growing thicker in his
poems. He wrote several poems titled Exile and used the same
title for one of his manuscripts in 1988.

Memories of the homeland consumed the exiles when alienation
became too much to bear. The people, the wives and children they
left behind! Yet what was there to remember about the New Order
regime that forced them into exile? Developmentalism, political
tragedy, mindless old men. These were the main themes of their
works, including Wispi's.

It is in this poetry that Wispi failed to control the sound of
his poems. The anger and the urge to curse -- the cynicism --
kept emerging from his works. The words were too lucid and
straightforward. Metaphors and diction vanished. His recent poems
had lost their brightness, an aesthetical downturn compared to
Death of a Peasant.

Thirty years of being an exile had completely changed Wispi's
life. In 1996 and 1998 he visited Indonesia. One of the main
reasons was to settle legal matters with his ex-wife -- and some
say he had had someone visiting him regularly when he was in
Amsterdam.

He also began to criticize concepts, such as ideology leads,
which had been Lekra's main principle in the past. "Politics had
been hit, and writers too, were hit. Down to nothing! They were
the generals, we were the soldiers. I don't like it. This is not
right, putting artists as second class citizens."

To him, a poet, just like any other human being, deserves a
prominent place and poetry became his final destination. His
home. That was what had made him a mature humanistic poet who
went far beyond his ideological background, which had once
devoured him in the past.

-- Nur Zain Hae is a poet and member of the research team on
Indonesian exile literature. Translated by Lisabona Rahman.