On The Shelf

Manhattan Sonnet: Indonesian Poems, Short Stories and Essays; Editor: John McGlynn; The Lontar Foundation, Jakarta, 2001; xv+101 pp; Rp 75,000

The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, in New York, will go down in history as a momentous, world-changing event, when human beings could be viewed at their most desperate.

Within minutes, upon the impact caused by a pair of commercial airliners hitting the twin towers of the World Trade Center, these huge buildings, about half a kilometer in height and the very symbol of global financial power, crumbled, leaving thousands of people dead.

At almost the same time, another passenger plane crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington D.C., the building symbolizing the military might of the world's only remaining superpower. Reports of the tragedy traveled the world within minutes, sending a mixture of despair and joy to different people in different lands.

History, itself, will pass judgment on the real value of this seemingly desperate event, but the Lontar Foundation deserves credit for initiating the publication of this book, which, when read against the background of the tragedy, will provide readers with deeper insight into what New York means to the outside world, represented here by a number of Indonesian writers eloquently putting down their grim and bright experiences about New York.

It may be the symbol of a benevolent mother or, on the contrary, the embodiment of a giant economic tentacle that grips the rest of the world.

This book, bringing together 17 Indonesian writers writing under the general theme of New York, consists of 19 poems, four short stories, one news article and five short essays. It begins with the title poem by Ajip Rosidi, who prophetically asks in the first of the two triplets in the sonnet he wrote in the early 1970s: "Is it within these strong and rigid walls/One's sense of safety nestles?/All I find here is vigilance, the source of apprehension".

As Ajip rightly puts it, there is no safety in New York despite the "strong and rigid walls". He wrote the sonnet when the twin towers were not yet even conceived of. Three decades later, the World Trade Center tragedy attested to his poetic prediction.

The news article and short essays by Goenawan Mohammad are by far the finest as he was there when the tragedy occurred. It was also Goenawan who had proposed the compilation of these works.

In these pieces of prose, he contemplates the tragedy that has bred hatred and manifested itself in "self-narrowing patriotism and bomb-dropping anger". It is at this point that readers can take their own stance on the tragedy.

-- Lie Hua