Women poets fight for sexual emancipation

Women poets fight for sexual emancipation

By Cecep Syamsul Hari

BANDUNG (JP): Ideas about matrimony and gender relations are
major themes in the poems of contemporary Indonesian women poets.
Dorothea Rosa Herliay, Oka Rusmini, and Nenden Lilis A. are three
prominent young poets who have explored these themes.

Matrimony is a dreadful destiny in a collection of poems by
Herliany (b.1967), called Nikah Ilalang, The Wedding Grass
(1995). Emotions of horror and doom prevail in her poetry,
reminding me of the work of Sylvia Plath, which turns its face
with steady consistency toward death, not life.

In Wedding Song, Herliany writes: "that bride walking over the
hanging down souls/ go to the groom house, a hut with the bone/
pole, and the trinkets of a corpse. across the dead/ stream,
strive for the honeymoon bed - a very lone/ coffin.// our wedding
has been blessed by loneliness. that bride/ passing through the
distance journey into the empty/ world: a space for naked fray, a
place for coition/ in row and passion!"

She perceives matrimony as an empty world, akin to feelings
experienced by Sue, a character in Jude The Obscure, Thomas
Hardy's last novel, which focused on the themes of sex and
marriage.

It is also an insecure world for her. In The Wedding Suburb
she writes: "in mindfulness, I married the neurotic world./ while
I have changed prayer into hope. I have changed/ promises into
tears."

It is also like Dedalus's labyrinth. In The Wedding Knife she
writes: "arrived at nowhere, I was lost/ in a labyrinth. the
longest trip/ without a map. and there is the color of the dark
exactly/ completely. I touch an alley between the river/ and
ravine.// there's scream, the same song. maybe from/ my own
mouth. I hear moaning, like/ purring. perhaps from my own sound."

Like Herliany, Nenden Lilis A. (b.1971), who launched her
first collection, Negeri Sihir, The Voodoo Land, in 1999,
describes matrimony as a strange or an odd labyrinth.

In The Odd Labyrinth she writes: "no journey's morning/ when
people are gone to a given place/ here I am alone, standing
faltering before the bend without the sign// my life is so very
dreary...// for no departure, no arrival at all/ day by day I
stay/ in the steep house/ under the bronze sky/ during the rainy
storms quenched the lamp."

In this dazzling poem, she signifies it as "the world inside
the home", a lonely place, a crossroad without a sign post.

And then, in Condolence, she portrays gender relations in a
deep mood of sorrow. While the woman stays alone,"... men locked
the doors; they wander/ woman wears her own dress of mourning/
buries her own remains beyond the horizon."

Oka Rusmini (b. 1967) also views matrimony as a journey of
pain. In Woman III she writes: "earth has ever hatched/ the
chronicle's continuation/ it is you, woman/ ensuring the sins/
and the blood of men/ the long knife pricked/ gives another gasp/
you must stand up//... woman doesn't really have/ any breath/ for
it's often stolen by a man/ and children borrow it/ with their
smile."

A wider spectrum of gender relation issues abounds in her
work. She creates anguished poetry which cuts through Bali's
traditional sense of the female in the cosmology (see Monolog
Pohon, The Tree Monologue, 1997).

Her uprising is very symbolic. She picks up on the word
"color" to symbolize the caste system. Her big question is, why
should human beings, and of course, the relation between men and
women, be discriminated against by the caste element?

In The Seeds Poem she writes: "I have chosen the color of a
goddess/ and your sermon grows up my tree/ make me pick/ I do not
care other trees do not know me/ I wanna be a new tree/ cover you
forever// you leave over the grass flower/ you entwine it with
the help of the sun// I see/ you have gone to the earth's ground/
to teach the new trees."

And then, in Our Colors, she writes: "let's find our own
colors/ in the earth's glowing strength/ pierce the soil and the
sky/ like our dreams/ discard the day star's shell/ hand over our
colors to the land/ and give birth to the earth."

The female characters in the poetry of Herliany, Lilis, and
Rusmini, may remind readers of Sarah Ellis in The Daughters of
England: Their Position in Society, Character and
Responsibilities (Lorna Sarge, 1980). "If then for a man it is
absolutely necessary that he should sacrifice the poetry of his
nature for the realities of material and animal existence," she
said, "for women there is no excuse -- for women, whose whole
life from the cradle to the grave is one of feeling rather than
of action; whose highest duty is so often to suffer and be still;
whose deepest enjoyments are all relative; who has nothing, and
is nothing, of herself; whose experience, if unparticipated, is a
total blank; yet whose world of interest is as wide as the realm
of humanity, boundless as the ocean of life, and enduring as
eternity!"

Ellis wrote this work in the middle of the 19th century, when
women in England remained oppressed by patriarchal attitudes. The
gender discourse that started at this time in the West would
rapidly develop and shape a variety of feminist outlooks. Yet,
male domination, which puts women in a position of subordination
in the name of sexual ideology, remains in force, even at the end
of the 20th century.

In Indonesian literary discourse, the poems of Herliany, Lilis
and Rusmini, as seen in the above pieces, at least reflect two
things. First, that sexual emancipation is an important theme in
Indonesian literature. Second, that there is a conceptual war
against gender domination. And for the three female poets, poetry
is part of their struggle.

The writer is a Bandung-based poet.