Putu offers new way of presenenting short story

By Lenah Susianty

JAKARTA (JP): It was just like Putu Wijaya to pack his story reading presentation into such an intense performance called Protes.

With his theater group, Teater Mandiri, and gamelan musician I Gusti Kompyang Raka, Putu offered a new way of reading and interpreting short stories last Saturday at Jakarta's Gedung Kesenian. Even the name of the event hinted at something unusual. Called a "demonstration of short stories", Protes was totally different from the conventional story reading that often sends you to sleep.

Putu Wijaya, known for his terrorizing and shocking stories, began with a story called Democracy.

In a batik shirt and his eternal beret, Putu articulated the thought, monologue and conversations of the first person narrator from memory. He was accompanied by a Balinese gamelan.

"I love democracy," Pak RT, the head of a neighborhood area and narrator of the story, proclaimed. "So do residents of my neighborhood."

Then came the test. Ministry officers asked the owners of houses in the neighborhood to sacrifice two meters of their land for the sake of development. Their tiny alley was to be widened to allow employees of a neighboring textile factory to get to work easily. This unrealistic demand was met with strong protest.

The narrator added that the alley was bordered by small houses of about 24 square meters. Cutting their land by two square meters would be very unfair.

The narrator angrily marched to the textile factory to protest. What he got from the factory was an envelope filled with Rp 100 million. A gigantic brown envelope, with the figure Rp 100 million written on it, was dropped onto the stage to make the point. Putu embraced the envelope tightly. The Balinese music filled in the silence.

Pak RT stopped fighting. He even urged his neighbors to willingly let their land be taken for the sake of democracy. Everything returns to normal, but his neighbors secretly decide not to believe in democracy anymore. It hadn't acknowledge or defended their interest or property.

Maya

Putu sat on the left corner of the stage and loudly read Maya from a book for his second reading. He wrote the story in 1981. On the right, views of Jakarta's kampongs in the morning were displayed on a screen. People chanting morning prayer came from the stage where a two-meter tall chair stood.

Two men went through all the characters actions. One was on the chair and the other on the stage. The story relates, through a dialogue, how a man came to another man's house very early one morning and asked to meet with the other man's wife Maya in a very impolite way. Annoyed, Maya's husband dropped a vase of flowers onto the visitor's head from the second floor. The visitor immediately fell to the ground. Maya's husband returned to bed with his wife. He was confused, he could not explain whether he had really killed the visitor or whether it was merely a dream.

In the morning, Maya eyes bulged out. "Crazy!" she shouted, "It frightened me. I dreamt last night that you threw a vase at a man who was knocking on the door. Crazy."

I did not reply. I stayed calm. I have known beforehand., Putu ended his story.

One woman recited the sentence starting with "crazy" while another sat staring at her husband from the tall chair.

Dog

Anjing (Dog) was the next story. Presented by members of Teater Mandiri, it was more like a play than a short-story reading. In conventional short story readings, the reader is faithful to the text, Anjing was loosely interpreted.

It offered a rather grotesque scene. The artists looked terrifying and dirty as they shouted and roared with chains around their necks. It was a real animalism.

The story and visual effects confirmed Ellen Rafferty's thesis, The New Tradition of Putu Wijaya (published in Indonesia no. 49 by the United States' Cornell Southeast Asia Program), that Putu's literary style is characterized by a black and biting humor. Anjing did make the audience laugh, but it also moved people with its tragic realism.

If a tycoon walks his dog in a park, who is the real master? It is the dog. The tycoon has become the slave. Human beings are slaves, not masters of their pets. So, living as a dog is very fun. A dog has never been hassled by tax officers. It doesn't need to have a job or social status. It doesn't have to think about others. It is politically safe. It can bite anyone it likes, there is no jail for dogs. The life of a dog is free.

Other Putu stories read and interpreted that night included Cita-cita (read by Hussein Wijaya), Polisi (by Amak Baljun), Merdeka (by Abdul Muthalib) and Coro (by Putu Wijaya). Every story reflected social restlessness and urbanization. Coro for example, is a very short story about a cockroach named Tempo which never dies although it has been repeatedly attacked.

Mudik, a story about a young couple who finally decide to go home to their native village, was interpreted in dance. The last story, Bayangan, was presented like a Javanese wayang kulit (leather puppet) performance. A white screen reflected the shadows of the Teater Mandiri members. The dancing shadows told the story in a surprisingly enchanting way. The dance spoke more than words.

The entire show was a very strong visual performance, not the usual audio presentation you usually encounter at story readings. According to Rafferty, Putu believes that literature is a means of creating dialog between an author and his audience, not a means of delivering a specific message. In Protes Putu not only had an eloquent dialog with the audience but also fluently expressed his message about the lack of justice in Indonesian society.