On The Shelf

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