Jurneying through time with Goenawan's lyrical prose

kata, waktu - esai-esai goenawan mohamad 1960 - 2001 (word, time - goenawan mohamad's essays of 1960 - 2001); TEMPO Data and Analysis Center, 2001; xxv + 1493 pp; Rp 95,000

JAKARTA (JP): Noted essayist, poet and journalist Goenawan Mohamad produces poems full of fresh expressions, relying on common language that is charged with lyrical emotion.

This quality is also found in his numerous essays, a combination of a poet's insight and linguistic sensitivity and a journalist's observant eye to the happenings taking place around him. Few writers are like him in that he has maintained over a period of four decades his regular essay writing, particularly those he writes for Tempo magazine.

This collection of essays, published in conjunction with Goenawan's 60th birthday this year, is the manifestation of his acute observation of what has been going on in this country. Reading this book is like watching a mosaic of events take shape to form the Indonesia we know today.

Like his poems, which demonstrate his skill in using common language for his controlled but emotion-charged expressions, Goenawan's essays are always fresh to read as they mix his poetic emotion, journalistic observance and careful use of language. His use of ordinary words in ways that arouse poetic emotions on the part of the readers more often than not drives home his message.

His pieces reflect the borderline of what we now know as literary journalism and journalistic literature. On the one hand his essays may be considered literary pieces written in a journalistic manner. They are literature in that they offer Goenawan's philosophical insight into events, just like a writer makes use of an event to get across his philosophical ideas.

These pieces, however, at the same time read like journalistic pieces with a literary flair. His use of commonplace words in a poetic manner evoke in our memory the strength of his poems.

Journalistic prose and poetry blend together in his essays, demonstrating that he has combined with great ease the vernacular -- the language of the man in the street -- and the language of the intellectuals to convey even the most complex philosophical ideas.

Consider the following: "Man exists and meets himself in nature with all his marvels so how can he wish to die in silence and in limitless solitude, while confronting him are fragrances, colors and voices that reverberate." Or, similarly, "However, as literature brings us closer to a world devoid of innocence and monotony, it brings us closer to hope, to the coziness of life."

Notice the opening of one of the essays: "Martyrs die as a beginning." This is a succinct but powerful expression to begin an essay. It is poetry in its terseness, summing up the grand idea that Goenawan pours forth in this essay about Jan Palach, the Czechoslovakian student who in the cold winter of 1969 burned himself to death in protest of the communist Czechoslovakian government.

Similar examples of poetic and expressive sentences abound throughout the book. Flipping through the pages, you will easily spot poetically fresh expressions that lend esthetic weight to Goenawan's essays.

Linguistic excellence apart, the essays in this collection -- numbering about 650 pieces, selected from a total of some 1,000 essays -- is a demonstration of Goenawan's interest in and encyclopedic knowledge of world and domestic events and figures in the world's course of social, political and artistic history. These essays are comments on contemporary events and figures, an inexhaustible source of information about human development that Goenawan seems to have never once stopped tapping.

Reading through this collection of essays will bring you to a philosophical height from which you will see an expansive vista made up of a mosaic of social, political and artistic events that lure you invitingly to reflect upon their meaning. It is this reflection upon those events that Goenawan presents in his essays. At times he is a just an onlooker, objectively watching how circumstances evolve in the passage of time. However, at other times, he is deeply involved in the twist and turns of events, pouring forth in his essays his ideas based on his firsthand experiences of taking part in man's struggle for liberation from the shackles of both traditionalism and modernism for his development as a free man.

In this light, it is clear why many of Goenawan's essays are a denunciation of man's subjugation to any form of oppression in the course of human history. As he writes in one of his essays: "A tyrant or a Hitler can make a thousand slogans each and every day but he will never be able to make a true poem." His reason is simple -- a poem gives room to free conversation. Goenawan longs to see a situation where human beings have room for free conversation, for communication, something which is increasingly missing in this modern world.

Most of the essays in this collection were first published in Tempo weekly magazine in a one-page column known as Sideline. The Sideline essays were previously collected in several volumes and have been acclaimed as brilliant essays not only intellectually but also linguistically. To fit everything on one page, Goenawan could not go deeply into his subject matter. In most cases, he only introduces what he thinks should be of some concern to the readers, hoping that by opening this door, the readers, or the community at large, will be encouraged to enter and make their own exploration.

It is in this context that Goenawan's essays are valuable. They are like a map showing dots where a ship has to go to in its voyage across the sea of humanity. Go to these places and explore them to land something of value. These essays, selected by Nirwan Ahmad Arsuka, the editor in charge of the monthly cultural page Bentara of Kompas daily, have opened up many doors leading to challenging adventures in human thought through the years.

-- Lie Hua

The reviewer teaches at the Dept. of English, School of Literature, UNAS.