Sapardi still content to play with words

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."