In memory of poet Chairil Anwar

By Harkiman Racheman

MEDAN (JP): On April 28, 1949, Chairil Anwar died at the Jakarta General Hospital from numerous chronic diseases. His medical records show that, during the latest stages of his 26- year lifespan, this most prominent poet of the Angkatan '45 ('45 Generation) suffered severely from incurable syphilis, typhus and other serious infections.

Chairil's sudden death, a surprise to his family and all his friends, became the most talked-about event in the country's literary scene. However, how many of us today realize that throughout his six-and-a-half year's of creativity, Chairil was, in fact, pondering deeply and expecting his own death?

In order to experience the intensity of his almost forgotten obsession with death, it may well be essential to revisit the poet's life and, especially, his poetry. Hopefully, this effort will bring fresh to our mind the heritage this literary master has left us.

Born in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, on July 26, 1922, Chairil Anwar apparently did not have any tragic experiences in childhood. It is not known what cause his life- long fascination with death.

And, in his poetry there are no signs to explain this. On the contrary, Chairil's childhood was mostly marked by pleasant, self-fulfilling and unforgettable experiences.

Given such a relatively pleasant early life, it is not surprising that Chairil would later refer to his childhood days as a kind of lost paradise. His poetry, for instance, testifies to his frequent desire "to become a child again".

In the early 1940s, Chairil left Medan for Jakarta with his mother. It is said that this was due to his parents' decision to live separately after an official divorce. It was in the capital, which was no doubt the center of important cultural and political life in those days, that Chairil may have begun to nurture a keen interest in broader human issues.

During this time he became increasingly preoccupied with, among other things, the philosophical significance of human mortality. This sudden mental inclination may well have been triggered by his extensive readings of the fatalistic philosophy of existentialism then in vogue.

Chairil's early poems project death as an object of philosophical speculation and contemplation. Looking at it at this stage as an abstract object of concern, he clearly distinguishes death as a fatalistic concept, as opposed to an actual flesh-and-blood event.

In Suara Malam (Voices of the Night), for example, the poet philosophizes about death as a dry, static, emotionless, passionless and extremely boring experience. Having no first-hand knowledge whatsoever of what it is (something which begins to show through meaningfully only in later poetry) and being in utter uncertainty, Chairil here is still speculative about all aspects related to death.

The word "perhaps" in the following extract portrays the typical philosophical doubt of the poet:

Perhaps it is only silence and stiffness/While being one with the calmness/Which subdues pleasure and pain/Which is immune to dust and desire./Lying down unconsciously/Like a wrecked ship on the ocean floor/Tired of the pounding waves.

There is profound disappointment and despair within the poet, reminiscent of the mythological suffering of the first man Adam and his famous spouse Eve when they both realized that -- after their exodus from the Garden of Paradise -- they were mortal, or death-bound. Human mortality is perceived by Chairil as only parasitic in nature: The transitoriness/which marks all things is attached so strongly to the tree of life (from Kepada pelukis Affandi, To the painter Affandi). Therefore, in so doing, the post-lapsarian mortality continuously decreases the intrinsic integrity of life.

In Penghidupan (Life), one of Chairil's earliest published poems featuring this notion explicitly, he compares human life to a dyke being ceaselessly crashed by the "waves of transience" (or death). As life cannot maintain "the reward of happiness" forever, true happiness will only be "uselessly nurtured, uselessly cultivated".

This brief poem, which is worth quoting in full, most clearly depicts the poet's philosophical stance on the idea of destructive death:

The baseless ocean/Forever banging/Testing the strength of our dykes/Forever banging/Until broken into pieces/The Reward of Happiness/A little heap/Uselessly nurtured/Uselessly cultivated.

It is interesting to notice, however, that in light of such a state of affairs Chairil shows no signs of despair. On the contrary, as indicated in the poem Merdeka (Freedom), he had a tremendous amount of courage to break free from it. He says in Merdeka, "I want to be free from all/To be free".

In order to stay alive under the pressing shadow of death, the poet plunged himself completely into a carpe diem lifestyle. Although, as it turned out, the chosen mode of living appeared to only have ruined his already vulnerable physical condition.

In the celebrated and most often quoted poem Aku (Me), this lifestyle is compared to that of a "wild beast/Cut off from his herd".

By assuming a bohemian lifestyle, mortality for Chairil seemingly became a concept of the distant future; while sensual pleasures (now capable of transcending his fear and disappointment with death, though only momentarily) were the primary need of the day.

The poem Kita Guyah Lemah (We Wobble Along), which provides a justification for Chairil's bohemian existence, clearly suggests that to rebel against orthodox life is for him a legitimate choice. (Also, compare this point to Chairil's own lines in Aku: Let the bullets pierce my skin/But I'll keep on groaning and attacking). For Chairil, only by overcoming or, rather, subduing life, can he really expect to put an end to his suffering.

Put metaphorically, as a full moon effortlessly cuts through clouds, so does he wish to transcend his suffering in order to control his life. Chairil writes: Let's stand straight/Snap at the surroundings/Tonight the full moon breaks through the clouds.

In Kepada Kawan (To A Friend), the poet says further: So/Fill up the glass to the brim then finish it off/Exploit the world and turn it upside down/Embrace and kiss the girls, but leave them when they flatter/Choose the wildest horse and spur him faster/Don't tie him to the noon or to the night/And/Smash what you've done to pieces/Off you go without inheritance, without family/Without begging for forgiveness for all your sins/Without saying a farewell to anyone.

By surrendering himself to the most primitive drive (that is to say, his inner desire to seize the most sensual pleasure in any possible way without worrying about consequences), Chairil aimed at nothing but to rule over death.

In the poem Kepada Kawan, this objective shows through exceptionally clearly: "Let's decide once and for all/The death that is dragging us will strangle itself."

However, at the end of a series of confrontative reactions, a certain awareness arose in him. The poet was made increasingly aware of the fact that there is no way mortality can be eliminated or abolished from the surface of physical human life. It was due to this psychological awakening that he began to lose faith in the chosen path of bohemians; which, according to one poem, "is only a temporary game".

The poet himself was of the belief that, in spite of the hypnotic remedy of escapism, there was no way the self- destructive lifestyle could have ever settled the philosophical question of the meaninglessness of life.

He said in Buat Album D.S. (To D.S. Album), That an escape will always remain an isolation,/And in that distant land the sun will not return either.

Likewise, the poem Kabar Dari Laut (News From the Sea) suggests that his debauchery would eventually only demolish his physical integrity. It would only lead him ever faster into complete physical surrender. To his lover, who explored the ocean of intense sexual adventures with him, the protagonist of the poem now talks about his bodily impotence in some detail:

Now there is a wound in my body/Ever-widening, spilling out bloody/From the part where you once kissed lustfully and fiercely/I am only weakening and surrendering.

The struggle by way of sexual ecstasy, and other carnal pleasures, as it turned out, seems to have offered only a brief hypnotic escape. It was, in other words, still far from touching the heart of the issue. Therefore, the poet's acceptance of his own death reflects, if any, only the inability of the carpe diem lifestyle itself in coming to terms with death.

However, viewed from the context of his entire body of poetry, Chairil's acceptance of death is not to be taken lightly or, worse still, simplistically. Not a self-surrender at all in the psychological sense (something which is out of Chairil's character), the poet's acceptance of his own mortality more importantly indicates his physical incapacity.

The well known poem Yang Terampas Dan Yang Putus (The Ravaged and the Broken) projects a poet who welcomes his own mortality peacefully, in the silent world which overwhelms his later body of works. This poem impressively portrays an imaginary dialog between the lyrical narrator and his personified death.

Here, death is spoken to directly. The conversation takes place in terrifyingly clam natural surroundings (the night is penetrating deeper/ the jungle as dead as a monument/). This dialog occurs as the protagonist is on the verge of his physical collapse

In preparing himself, alienating himself emotionally from the objective world by entering the transitional stage symbolized here by the lonely, cold deathbed, the protagonist attempts to befriend his approaching death. All kinds of intruding thoughts are shied away and replaced by only positive projections of death. Among pleasant thoughts is that death is an old friend to be feared by no one.

With absolute peace and maturity, the protagonist who is now "silent and alone" waits to be fetched up by his old mate for a long one-way journey to Karet graveyard. To this particular friend, he has the following to say: At Karet, at Karet (my future abode) reaches the howling wind/I prepare myself and my heart in my room in case you come/and I can share other new stories with you.

Within the last minutes of his life, the poet's overwhelming vitality appeared so strong, as well as the apparent peacefulness and maturity. Derai-derai Cemara (The Whispering Pines) regards this vitality as his life's remaining energy, still kept intact in case the long-awaited physical breakdown begins.

The key word in the poem which suggests Chairil's salient vitality is "to defer". There is an implication here that the poet's life energy can no longer support the continuity of his physical subsistence. It has, in fact, deteriorated significantly from an offensive stance to a defensive position. There is no more emotional rebellion, aggression or rejection. The remaining life force exists only as a necessary accompaniment for the death-defeated poet.

Chairil writes: To live is to defer death/We become increasingly distant from the puppy love of school days/And know there is something that remains untold/Before we finally surrender.

Chairil's life was an intense adventure of grappling with his own pressing awareness of mortality. The struggle is both philosophical, psychological and empirical.

Philosophically, it is a rebellion against "the dissolution into nothingness", while psychologically, it constitutes a fight which culminates in "the calm that will come".

The most tangible of all is Chairil's struggle with death in the empirical sense. As such, it constitutes his effort to liberate himself from "the danger in all corners", that is to say, from the various manifestations of haunting death.

For Chairil's reader, all this indicates that the relation between the poet and his obsession with his own mortality, even though this area of interest has not been thoroughly discussed, is really a long-time self-involvement.

To use Chairil's wording in Puncak (Mountain), his problematic association with death is an age-old obsession -- it is "an old question, an old query, an old one".

Thus, in commemorating the life and death of the country's once most celebrated literary giant, it may be essential to look back at Chairil's poetry to discover the mystery of his obsession that has not up to now been fully unraveled. At the same time, it is worth remembering that there are many more possible fascinating journeys into the work of one of the most inspiring Indonesian literary figures.

The writer graduated from the faculty of arts at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Based in Medan, he is currently teaching English and Indonesian literature.