Poetry from home and away featured at festival
By Mehru Jaffer
JAKARTA (JP): If poetry indeed be trouble drowned in tears, then be prepared for a full flood at an international poetry festival to open here on Thursday.
In collaboration with Winternachten, The Hague's yearly literary event in Holland, Theater Utan Kayu (TUK) has chosen 21 poets from 10 countries to come here and pour their hearts out in verse, especially about the pangs of being in a minority and about identity politics in pluralistic societies.
"The purpose remains to expose Indonesians to poetry being written in other parts of the world," explains Ayu Utami, the program coordinator, an author and also editor of Kalam, TUK's literary magazine.
She feels that a festival like this one is sure to find a great reception in a society where an oral tradition of story-telling remains strong.
As one belonging to the small community of media activists along with those who like to participate in intellectual and artistic activities free from censorship and pressures of the market, she feels that like-minded people here lack contact with writers even from other Asian countries, especially those not from English-speaking ones.
"There exists a language barrier within countries. We simply do not know each other's language. With this festival a network will develop," she hopes.
For the same reason some of the participating poets come from countries as far flung and diverse as South Africa, Austria and Japan.
One of the many Indonesian guests at Winternachten, Utami was inspired by the unique event where literature remained the nucleus and intercultural relations received a tremendous boost.
On her return, it became her dream to hold a similar event at TUK that has been the venue since its inception in the mid-1990s of many an intimate, noncommercial performance.
According to Ton van de Langkruis, artistic coordinator of Winternachten, his festival too receives continual requests to hold the event outside the Netherlands as well. The Jakarta festival is the first one to be organized under the new name of Winternachten Overseas, to be followed by a meeting of authors in South Africa next year.
Apart from readings by poets, the event includes an exhibition and a literary book festival too. At the newly opened Aksara Bookstore in Kemang, South Jakarta, poets Eddin Khoo, a Chinese- Indian from Malaysia, and Mustafa Stitou, who is Dutch of Morrocan origin, will initiate a discussion "Minority and Identity Politics in a Plural Society".
Senior Indonesian poet Sutardji Calzoum Bachri thought that it was a good idea to give young and promising poets a platform to both air and share their thoughts.
He feels it is time to listen to the voice of the times and of the future. It is true that the eldest Indonesian poet participating in the event is perhaps no more than 40 years old. While Taufik Ikram Jamil, B Prasetyo, Alkatiri, Acep Zamzam Noor and Joko Pinurbo will participate in the three-day festival in Jakarta, others like Dorothea Rosa, Sindu Putra, Ulfatin Ch and Zawawi Imron will join the festival when it moves to Yogyakarta for another three days on April 30.
Most eagerly awaited is the poetry of Surianto from Suriname whose ancestors left their village in the Pekalongan area of central Java decades ago. Interestingly Surianto writes his poems in old Javanese, which he has inherited from his family now settled in Suriname, in a somewhat distorted form, so to speak.
Sitot Srengenge from TUK who received about seven poems from Surianto for translation into Indonesian for the festival catalog discovered that the poet no longer followed the formal structure of the ancient language that is divided into three levels for communication with the revered, the not so familiar and intimates.
For information on the festival, telephone 8573388.