Sapardi still content to play with words

By Chris Brummitt

JAKARTA (JP): At the age of 17, Sapardi Djoko Damono left behind a childhood spent playing in the shadows cast by Surakarta's royal court and moved to a village on the outskirts of town. And became a poet.

The reason was simple: "My childhood days were over and I had to replace them with something new. And that was writing," he says.

More than 40 years later he is still writing. Perhaps not as prolifically as when he was a student at Gadjah Mada University, where he remembers finishing 18 poems in one long night, but steadily.

To mark his 60th birthday on March 20 this year, his seventh collection of poems, Ayat-Ayat Api (Fire Verses), was published by Pustaka Firdaus. It contains some touched-up old poems, ones which had a limited publication and a handful of new verses.

Sapardi appears happy with the collection as a whole, thinking it will have lasting value. The test of time is important to him; reading foreign literature as a student impressed upon him that poems written long ago and far away could still affect him.

"A poem which lends itself to many interpretations is a sign that it will last. It's a sign that at a later date it will continue to have different meanings for people. It won't die, and every generation can interpret it for themselves," he explains.

Murdered labor activist Marsinah is pictured on the book's cover and is the subject of one of the poem's inside, Dongeng Marsinah (The tale of Marsinah). It covers her life as a worker and her death at the hands of a capitalized and sinister Someone. At one point she is allowed to speak from beyond the grave:

I'm Marsinah/the watch factory worker./Is this heaven?/Don't banish me to earth again. Don't send me back to that hell.

Alluding to the apparent absence of social criticism in Sapardi's work, Seno Gumira Ajidarma once asked in Kompas, "Is Sapardi talking about anything relevant?" Asked whether Dongeng Marsinah and others in the collection marked an emergence of a social conscience in his work, the poet replied that he always had one.

"Actually, ever since the fifties, my poetry has been like that (social poetry). Not protest poetry though. I have written about thieves, beggars and mentally disturbed people." Pressed further he admitted it was the first time he had dealt with these themes in an explicit manner, though in doing so he stayed true to his "artistic strategy".

About the poem Ayat-Ayat Api, which over 15 verses makes reference to the victims of the May riots, he says, "I wasn't protesting anyone. But my sympathies were with those corpses."

For Sapardi one of literature's main functions is to provoke debate, and even offend if need be. Later in the conversation, he says the "great Indonesian novel" is still waiting to be written, although "the possibility (of its appearance) is being hampered by one concept which I think is very wrong, and that is SARA (the acronym for tribal affiliations, religion, race and societal groups). If you write about something in Indonesia, you can't touch upon another person's race, another person's religion, you can't touch upon other people's culture. So what's left for us to touch upon? Because novels are indeed about religion, novels are about race, novels are about tradition ... so if we can't touch on them, what are we going to write about?"

Other poems in the collection are less clear, relying on beautiful, strange and interesting images, or combinations thereof, for their effect. The first verse of Ada Pohon Bernapas (There is a tree which breathes) reads: There is a tree that breathes deep inside us/in each of its inhalations one hundred birds go home/hearing their chicks cry out.

It is up to the reader to find meaning in the words. "I have my own interpretations, other people have theirs," Sapardi states. "I want to make someone look at something, just that. What people see in that poem, and what they make of it is up to them."

This subjective approach to poetry has a limit though: "I'll give you an example. A painting. Someone paints a horse and then three people interpret the painting. And one person says, 'Oh, that's a stallion,' another says it's a mare and a third person says, 'Oh, that's a tree!' There are still critics who don't know the essence of a horse and the essence of tree."

Poems from the collection will be read aloud at Taman Ismail Marzuki arts center in Central Jakarta on Thursday afternoon, but Sapardi will be in the audience, claiming he cannot stand reading his poems aloud. He is a quiet and thoughtful man, and is uncomfortable with the dramatic oratory style Indonesian poets favor.

In a region with a rich oral literary tradition, Sapardi stresses the importance of the opposite: the private consumption of literature. In this context, he wonders if the recent trips made by poets and authors to read their work in schools will have a "long-lasting effect".

"I went along to Bandung. I was happy, it was a good thing. It's just, as I see it, that what we need to develop is a writing and reading tradition, whereas this was a listening tradition. So what those children listened to they will never read because there are no books. So they are returning again to the listening tradition."

Even though he remembers his grandmother singing Javanese classical poems to him as a young boy, it was through reading that he first became interested in literature. He was reading T.S. Eliot in middle school, and he points out that Chairil Anwar, Indonesia's greatest poet, was not know for attending poetry readings, but rather for reading.

Sapardi was on the editorial board of Indonesia's premier literary journal, Horison, until 1994, when it was publishing "innovative and avant-garde" writing. Since he left, he has seen the journal's target audience change to schoolchildren.

He argues that the journal now is more for "literary appreciation" purposes, and, as such, he says: "There is something missing. The editors have to reconcile the appetite of school kids with the appetite of the avant-garde. And if there is something, let's say 'high risk', in a poem or a short story, then people have to think that those who are reading it are schoolchildren. But actually, there is no need to be afraid. When I was a kid I used to read 'strange' stuff and nothing happened."

Sapardi is not just a poet; he also teaches the sociology of literature and comparative literature at the University of Indonesia, as well as writing literary criticism and translating fiction and poetry into Indonesian. If he had a choice and could live off his poetry alone, however, he says he would not.

"I am of the opinion that an artist should live like a normal human being. I think that precisely the inspiration which is needed for poetry comes from everyday life. Experience from communicating with people, from work, from all of those kinds of things."

For how long can he continue?

"I was cursed to be a poet, so whatever happens I will always write." And remembering his childhood once again, he adds with the satisfaction of a man who has summed something up neatly, "Whereas before I was playing with friends, now I am playing with words."