Stories from two noted Indonesian poets

HUJAN MENULIS AYAM; (The Rain Writes a Chicken); Sutardji Calzoum Bachri; Indonesiatera, Magelang, 2001; 94 + xiv pp; Rp 16,000

Pengarang Telah Mati - Segenggam Cerita; (The Writer is Dead - A Handful of Stories); Sapardi Djoko Damono; Indonesiatera, Magelang, 2001; 156 + ix pp

JAKARTA (JP): All literature uses real life as its origin. Events, involving men and their fellow beings or men and nature, are the sources from which writers depend on for inspiration. There is no literary work, just like works in any other art genres is divorced from reality, however abstract it may be.

A poem is unique in that, like painting, it presents reality in a compact form. A poet is inspired by a certain event, extracts the essence of this event and expresses it in his poem. In short, a poem tells a story in a very brief manner, if not in the briefest. To be able to get across his message, a poet will rely mostly on images. Words form images and through these images the reader can share the writer's ideas. This leads to a common, but not necessarily correct, belief that reading a poem is more difficult than reading a story or a piece of drama. More than in the other literary genres, words in poems are everything and must be used as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Sutardji Calzoum Bachri and Sapardi Djoko Damono are two of Indonesia's leading poets. Sutardji, who once claimed to be the Indonesian president of poetry, is famous for his creed, which says, in essence, that words must be liberated from the shackles of meaning.

Words, in Sutardji's belief, must be allowed their freedom. Putting his creed into practice, Sutardji is noted for his "abstract" poems -- some call them magic poems as single words are often repeated continuously throughout them to inspire a magic atmosphere. These poems can be understood only if the reader interprets them phonologically first before attempting to attach a semantic significance to his interpretation. In Sutardji's poems, words are like wild horses galloping in a boundless expanse of the savanna of our imagination.

Sapardi, unlike Sutardji, is noted for his tender rendering of reality in soft images. He is like a craftsman shaping a poetic reality from ordinary words. In his hands, words we are all too familiar with in our everyday lives, can find new images and a subtle meaning. His poems are the world of images imbued with poetic beauty so that when he talks about violence, this idea becomes more profoundly understood because it is presented very gently to caress our imagination before eventually keeping it in its grasp. Words never become wild in Sapardi's hands. He seems to believe that the world is all gentleness. He never rebels and even if he does, his rebellion would be conveyed in a highly imaginative manner.

These two poets, who seem to stand at two opposing extremes in Indonesian poetry, have now surprised literary buffs with their first collection of stories. Sutardji has come out with nine stories while Sapardi has presented 27. The title of Sutardji's collection is made up of the titles of his three stories, while Sapardi's collection bears the title of his longest story.

These two collections of stories are surprisingly similar in the choice of themes. Being poets, both Sutardji and Sapardi are more drawn to life's trivialities. Compared with a short story writer, a playwright or even a novelist, a poet usually pays greater attention to small matters, things that usually escape our attention in our daily activities. A poem is interesting to read because it reminds us of trivial things. We are made aware that life is not concerned only with grand things. There are too many things which we think are commonplace but which we, actually, only have a little knowledge about. A poem will make us realize that such small things exist and that they have their own wisdom.

It is in this light that the two collections of stories are interesting to read. In "Hujan" (Rain), Sutardji tells a story about Ayesha, a teenage girl, and her friendship with the rain. The more she gets acquainted with the rain, the better she under stands it and finally the rain becomes a part of her. The end of the story is pleasingly surprising. At the height of her dance with the rain, her mother comes into the room. She looks at the ceiling, but there are no leaks. Yet, Ayesha is soaked with rain. She takes a towel and dries Ayesha with it and this slowly brings Ayesha back to the world that is as dry as a bone.

In a similar vein, Sapardi is attracted by drizzle in his story titled "Gerimis (Drizzle). Drizzle comes to see us through a small opening in a window. It protects us from a kind of longing that we know not where it comes from. Yet we dream about drizzle, about its velvet-like legs. Sapardi does not openly state that this world is as dry as a bone, yet his depiction of drizzle and our longing refers to this. It is surprising to find that Sutardji is attracted to the rain while Sapardi, usually considered a gentler poet, prefers to deal with drizzle. Yet both seem to lament about our dry world, a world that needs both the rain and drizzle.

While Sutardji's collection contains relatively short stories, Sapardi's has one long one Pengarang Telah Mati (The Writer is Dead). This is quite an interesting story in terms of structure. A writer is dead and leaves behind a manuscript of his unfinished stories in his computer, kept in 15 files.

This story is interesting as in Sapardi's imaginative world there is a mixture of reality and non-reality. The story is divided into three parts: Tamu (Guest) - File Ragangan Cerita (Files of Story Draft) - Aku (I). In Tamu, the speaker is Sukram, one of the characters in the unfinished story. He talks to someone he calls Saudara (you). This "you", Sukram says, must know that the dead writer has an unfinished story because the "you" comes to the writer's burial and must get some info about this.

Sukram asks "you" to save the files, asks the writer's wife to read them and then determine what to do with them. Then in the second part, we can read 12 files of the story, which is full of recent events, like discrimination against the nonindigenous people, the shooting of students, the occupation of the building of the House of Representatives and so forth.

Then comes the third part, Aku. This "I" reads the files and then, at Sukram's request, finds three more in the recycle bin of the computer. The "I" gets permission from the dead writer's wife to edit the files and later publishes them in book form. But Sukram never appears again. The story has a surprise ending when the "I" says that he sees Bonar and Yatno, two characters in the unfinished manuscript, during the burial of the writer. The "I" also says that these two characters approach him and tell him about the unfinished story. In short, Sapardi talks about the power of words, which can change imagination into reality.

Both collections seem to bear what Sutardji says in one of his stories Menulis (Writing):

"I have seen ordinary things ... I want to write what I have seen, what I have felt and what other people have felt, too, but have forgotten or ignored (p. 59)."

The two poets -- or better yet, story-tellers -- dwell on very ordinary things as some of the titles reflect: Human Waste, Hand, Chicken (Sutardji) and Arithmetics, City Bus, Leaf, Calendar and Clock, River or Spatial Layout (Sapardi). They talk about grand ideas through small things. They talk about life but choose topics which are narrow in scope. Their stories, just like their poems, give us surprises because they remind us of what we usually forget or ignore. In their small way, these stories open up the horizon of our mind toward the greatness of life, multifaceted and colorful.

One last thing to say about these two collections is that the language that both Sutardji and Sapardi use in their stories are poetic and full of images. Very often they read like long poems. Or perhaps they are indeed long poems. The boundary is blurred.

-- The reviewer, Lie Hua, teaches at the Dept. of English, UNAS Faculty of Letters, Jakarta.