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.