Putu offers new way of presenenting short story

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.