'Personal ties part of bilateral relations': W.S. Rendra shares

'Personal ties part of bilateral relations': W.S. Rendra shares neighborly insights

Cynthia Webb, Contributor, Brisbane, Australia

Indonesian poet W.S. Rendra has recently completed a three-week Australian tour of Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane that included readings of his poetic works, several seminars and a dramatic workshop in Sydney.

Rendra traveled Australia's cities with his wife and artistic collaborator Ken Zuraida, and assisted by well-known Indonesian musician Sawung Jabo, who contributed musical accompaniment to Rendra's poetry readings.

The warmth of the poet's personality, his energy, intelligence, humor and depth of understanding of the ways of the world, reached across cultures and touched everyone. It is hard to believe that he is 70 years old when one listens to him and observes his manner, particularly when he is speaking about the subjects about which he is passionate -- language, education and the story of Indonesia becoming a nation.

Expatriate Indonesians flocked to hear him, as did artists, writers, Indonesia-watchers and academics. A national treasure of Indonesian literature in the eyes of many, Rendra is famous for founding the Bengkel Theatre in 1967. He is also known as a man who is unafraid to speak his mind, and Rendra was jailed for this quality during the times of both Sukarno and Suharto.

In Brisbane, Rendra addressed a seminar at the Queensland Art Gallery, entitled "The Evolution of Indonesia's Perception of Australia", which presented in association with Griffith University's Asia Institute.

He has been quoted previously as saying that "Australia's role is to offer an alternative 'West' in the East", which gives some indication of his hopes for the future of our region.

In opening the seminar, Rendra made it clear that he was not speaking in any official capacity, only as a poet and a free individual. "I am not a politician", he said, laughing and looking glad to be able to say so.

Rendra went on to stress that the most important component in a bilateral relationship is person-to-person connections. While government-to-government relations are sometimes tense, warm and creative friendships exist between the people, he said, reflecting upon the beliefs and activities of his friends Sawung Jabo and Suzan Piper of Wot Cross-Cultural Synergy, who conceived and organized this tour of Australia.

He also mentioned that among the visiting foreign tourists to Indonesia, the most welcome are Australians, and to a lesser extent, the Dutch and the Japanese -- even though the country's involvement with the Dutch and Japanese has not always been ideal.

Rendra used this fact to illustrate that, although thing might look bad politically -- even to the extent of foreign occupation -- Indonesians are a perceptive people at the personal level. Their history, he said, has taught them not to blame individuals for what governments do, and that on a one-to-one basis, people can still build good relationships in spite of ever-changing political situations.

An important connection between Indonesia and Australia, Rendra said, was the Australian Union Boycott of Dutch shipping at the end of World War II, which greatly assisted Indonesia's independence drive.

Fielding a question from an audience member, Rendra replied that he didn't know if the younger generation of Indonesians knew about this historical fact, but underlined that it was written in their history textbooks in the section on the independence movement. Although Rendra himself remembered learning about the Australian boycott at school, it was still a contemporary event at that time.

As for a different kind of "assistance", the University of Queensland Press in Brisbane published his poems during one of Rendra's terms in prison. And although it was banned in Indonesia, his play The Struggle of the Naga Tribe was performed in Australia, and is part of the educational curriculum here.

Further, Australia provided a platform for poetry readings, and Rendra toured the country during the Suharto era reading poems that were banned at home.

In providing a flip-side account, Rendra told the story of Australian professor Herbert Feith, who made a huge difference in the lives of so many young Indonesians during his tenure in the 1960s at the University of Indonesia, where he taught humanities subjects, which were officially prohibited.

Intelligent young Indonesian minds were opened up, and many of his students went on to become political activists. Feith died in 2002 in a tragic train crossing accident in Melbourne, and his death was widely reported and deeply mourned in Indonesia.

At this point, an Indonesian exchange teacher in the audience asked Rendra why the Indonesian people did not have an appreciation for their own diverse culture. The teacher had seen Australian schoolchildren performing Indonesian ethnic dances as part of their curricular activities, but he had not seen this at Indonesian schools.

At many Australian schools, Indonesian music and other traditional art forms are taught.

Rendra's reply went into a retrospective of Indonesian history, and he explained that historically, not enough value or time has been given to teaching humanities subjects in Indonesia, and that this situation still prevails. He considers this to be a legacy of colonialism, when the ruling Dutch implemented a deliberate policy to make sure these "intangible" subjects were not taught to the general populace, and thereby enable their continuing control.

"People were not educated to have a thoughtful, insightful or scientific outlook. We are too adaptable. We became Hindu without being Indian. We became Muslim without being Arabic, then we became colonized, and the colonial masters did not teach us the humanities because this was their tool to rule the population", he said.

Rendra told his attentive audience that the Indonesian people are moved by the way the Australian people stand up for them when they are in trouble. He recalled being told by the Acehnese people after last year's tsunami that they trusted the Australians even more than they trusted other Indonesians. They said that the Australians worked very hard and were very efficient, bringing them medicine and clean water and even assisting in washing the bodies of the victims of the tragedy.

"We like Australia, but we never really do anything for Australia", Rendra said. "Maybe because they never have a crisis," he added with a smile, and the audience laughed with him.

The poet, wearing a broad smile, then reminded his audience that this was the good side of the story and raised the negative perception among Indonesians regarding Australia's alteration to maritime boundaries.

Indonesians call their nation as Tanah Air, or "our land and water", so it was shocking to them to have those long-standing boundaries changed without their consultation. The alternation affected traditional fishing grounds that have been visited by Indonesian fishermen for many centuries, and so created a problem for the present day.

Rendra said "Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and Australia must all use the ocean in a peaceful way, otherwise it's not good for the future. If tensions arise there, it will create the possibility of conflict. Regarding the incidents involving the fishermen from Roti, Indonesian people find the situation unjust and so have begun to reserve their attitude towards the Australian government. There must be peaceful solutions, because it's important that the sea is for the benefit of both."

It goes without saying that language is the tool of Rendra's trade and so, consequently, it is a subject near and dear to his heart. His passion was evident as he continued, "Through sea trading, we built a nation before we built a state," and went on to expound upon the lingua franca, Bahasa Melayu, which had been the language of trade from approximately the 14th century.

During the 17th century, poetry was written in Malay, indicating an already existent feeling of nationhood -- the writers assumed there would be readers for their work in Malay.

By the 19th century, people in the outlying islands identified themselves as Indonesians, and wrote in Bahasa Indonesia. In Sulawesi, Bali, Central Java, West Sumatra and the Batak lands of North Sumatra, people wrote in Bahasa Indonesia.

"Sukarno was an important element in unifying the country, but nationhood was created by the people," stressed Rendra. "That is why our water is so important to us, because it was really sea trading that made us a nation."

Rendra went on to discuss Australian Prime Minister John Howard's comment, that he felt he had a right to launch a preemptive strike, at some future time, on a hypothetical terrorist base Indonesia, if he thought this would prevent a terrorist attack on Australia.

"To Indonesians, this sounded imperialistic," said Rendra.

A journalist in the audience stated that Australians' impression of Indonesia was often related to its presidents, and asked for Rendra's opinions of Australian prime ministers -- in particular, Paul Keating and John Howard.

Rendra answered that Keating had been very popular in Indonesia, and was seen as "very Australian" in his informal greeting of Queen Elizabeth, which apparently received wide coverage. As for the second part of the question, he just said, "John Howard... Hmm... He was born in Philadelphia, wasn't he?"

Continuing with contemporary bilateral issues, Rendra said that many Australians had asked him, "Why were we the target?" in reference to the 2002 Bali bombing.

"I don't think Australians have become the target -- I don't think so. You see, that's not the feeling of the (Indonesian) people, and that's not the teaching of the Muslim religion. These people (terrorists) are a secret underground organization, some of them trained in Afghanistan by the CIA during the last stages of the Cold War," he said.

Rendra himself was brought up as a Catholic by his missionary father, but he converted to Islam in 1970.

Further, the poet believes that it would be impossible for fundamentalist Muslim groups to realize their ideal of an Islamic state in Indonesia. "Indonesians will refuse to accept this. Even now, the government in Aceh has refused to apply sharia (Islamic law) in Aceh."

Indonesia is known erroneously as the world's largest Islamic nation -- Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, at 80 percent of 220 million people, but it is not an Islamic nation. Even so, Rendra doubts that, in actual fact, Muslims are really the majority religious group in Indonesia. "It is just because our nation has a very large population," he said.

He reminded the audience that the Catholic, Protestant and Batak churches are full, and that Balinese Hindu ceremonies are attended by almost the entire population of Bali. Meanwhile, Buddhists are many in Indonesia, as are followers of traditional faiths, mostly of animist beliefs, who live scattered throughout the Indonesian archipelago.

According to Rendra, however, to call this "animism" is incorrect, and should instead be pesona -- enchantment or spell.

"To them, everything is pesona... The rocks, the trees, everything. It is kedaulatan -- the religion of the sovereignty of nature," he said.

And as for Rendra's personal philosophy, he said: "For me, my poetry is a temple where I can worship the Highest One, the One with no name."