Goenawan Mohamad

A speech at the ceremony of the Alumnus of the Year 2007 award, at the Euroopean Parliament, Brussels, 6 December 2007

The honor you have bestowed to me this evening is a gesture of immense generosity – an act of reaching and remembering, because this opportunity is given to an ancien of Collège d’Europe coming from a distant history and geography.

On this occasion I wish I had more words of gratitude than I presently have at my disposal. I thank you not only for nominating me for the Alumnus of the Year award, but also to reconnect me with one of the most valuable memories of my life – which is learning about new things at the College, forging friendship with a delighful group of people — some of whom are here tonight — and simply being in Bruges.

For several months in 1966 I walked, almost every day, on the neatly paved cobblestone paths of this old Flemish town, where the past came to us and we became its guests. Each day, people drank their coffee, the newspaper boy went on his daily rounds, the streets gathered pace, buses resumed their duties, yet all such 20th century normalcy were linked with that which gave this town its pulse: the presence of history. Lanjut..

I

Pada akhirnya, saya hanya menulis sejumlah fragmen. Tentu hal ini sudah diketahui umum: selama ini yang saya tulis adalah potongan-potongan pendek dari pengalaman, pengamatan, dan pemikiran, yang tak cukup memberi kesempatan buat argumentasi yang jauh dan dalam. Saya selalu bisa punya alasan bahwa hal itu dikarenakan waktu dan ruang yang terbatas. Tapi sebenarnya ada alasan lain: ketakmampuan. Seandainya pun saya nanti menulis tiga jilid buku dengan satu tema, saya tahu semua itu juga akan merupakan sekedar ‘percikan permenungan’, seperti sebutan untuk kumpulan karya Roestam Effendi di pertengahan dasawarsa kedua abad ke-20.

Sebab saya tak mengerti, apa yang dapat tuntas ditulis di zaman ini? Ungkapan klise – tapi tak berarti keliru – sejak paruh kedua abad yang lalu ialah bahwa hidup kita telah dirundung bukan saja oleh perubahan, tapi juga oleh ‘kejutan masa depan’. Banyak hal jadi usang dan ditinggalkan zaman dalam tempo yang kian lekas, seakan-akan masa depan memergoki kita tiap dua hari sekali, dan pelbagai bidang yang kita ketahui semakin berserpih-serpih.

Sementara itu harapan untuk sebuah sintesa, untuk kembali kepada satu totalitas, tampaknya hanya menggantang asap. Apa yang dulu dianggap bisa jadi dasar pelbagai pengetahuan telah kehilangan daya: filsafat telah diabaikan oleh pemikiran, metafisika telah diinterupsi oleh ironi dan tinjauan transendental telah jadi problematik…. Lanjut..

Goenawan Mohamad’s opening speech at the World Poetry Festival, Kuala Lumpur, 17 August 2004

I would like to thank you for having me here, in this extraordinary gathering of poets, and for giving me the honour to begin our conversation.

However, I must confess my nervousness; I know that each time poets get together they become acutely self-conscious of their peculiar trade, especially in today’s world. When words relentlessly multiply, like they do nowadays, the verbal deluge makes us wonder what will happen next to the hidden side of language, which is silence.

I hope you understand my hesitation. From this rostrum I will be speaking about silence, yet I cannot help using so many words.

Lanjut..

“Cinta itu sabar…”. Perempuan itu mendengar. Di gedung yang tak dihuni itu, di bawah bulan yang nyaris seperti limau, seseorang datang membacakan surat-surat itu sepotong-sepotong: lembar-lembar di sampul kulit yang sumbing dan berdaki.

Ada yang mengatakan seorang Suriah telah membawanya melewati gurun. Tapi perempuan itu lebih senang membayangkan seekor sphinx yang terbang karena ia menyukai mimpi.

Tiga hadirin lain sedikit gugup. Ia mencoba mengingat-ingat wajah penulis yang pernah singgah itu — ia disebut “rasul” – dan memang ada seorang pembuat tenda dengan tunik lengan pendek yang dulu menginap di antara puing yang tersisa di Korinthus. Tapi kini hanya terasa kembali apa yang terpercik dari kata-kata si tua: harapan itu dalam namun jauh.

Lewat tengah malam, seekor kucing berjalan melintasi peristilium, seperti bayangan abu-abu, tapi lentur, nyaris tak terlihat, mungkin ia dewa yang terusir. Di sisi yang agak gelap dari beranda si pendatang meneruskan baris berikutnya: “Cinta tak irihati…”. Suara itu, dengan logat awak kapal, sedikit bergetar, sedikit asing. Atau mungkin hanya karena angin.

Di luar: jalanan kota tidur. Tak sengaja. Bukit di utara seakan-akan canggung menunggu fajar, dan kini perempuan itu menyimak gema yang terhimpun di teluk dari ombak yang bersungut. “Cinta tak menyombongkan diri”, kalimat berikutnya dibacakan, dan ia ingat sebuah sajak tentang camar yang menghilang, entah kenapa.

Berdiri di antara dua tiang yang gumpil, ia, yang merasakan malam tambah dingin, mengetatkan syalnya pada pundak. Seorang lelaki lain kini mengambil lembar-lembar itu dari si pendatang dan ia melihat sejumlah kalimat yang nyaris terhapus: “Cinta menanggungkan segalanya, percaya segalanya”. Ia membacanya keras-keras seakan-akan ada yang harus dikatakan kepada tanah genting yang kosong itu.

2006-2009.

SEBUAH RUANG DENGAN DUA PERMUKAAN.

DI ATAS TAMPAK SEBUAH KATIL TERTUTUP KAIN.

DI BAWAH: SEBUAH GAWANGAN DENGAN BANDUL, SELEMBAR MORI DUA KACU YANG SUDAH SEBAGIAN DIBATIK, SEBUAH DINGKLIK, SEBUAH WAJAN DI ATAS ANGLO, SEBUAH TEPAS. SELEMBAR TAPLAK. BEBERAPA CANTING. SEBUAH BANGKU.

DI LATAR BELAKANG BISA DITAMBAHKAN LAYAR, TEMPAT DIPROYEKSIKAN SATU ATAU BEBERAPA FOTO HITAM-PUTIH, DARI TAHUN 1945-AN. ATAU TAK PERLU APA-APA.

PEREMPUAN ITU 33 TAHUN. NAMANYA SURTI.
SENDIRI.
__

BUNYI KECREK.

Saya ingin bercerita panjang. Saya hanya bisa melakukannya jika saya sendirian, seperti sekarang, ketika rumah kosong.

Saya ingin mengatakan tentang satu hal yang tak pernah bisa saya katakan dengan lurus. Saya selalu bingung di mana awalnya, di mana akhirnya. Barangkali semua cerita seharusnya demikian, tapi saya tahu saya harus memilih. Tidak gampang. Tidak gampang.
Lanjut..

PROLOGUE

CHARACTERS: SANJAYA & CHORUS.

CHORUS: No thing existed, nor did nothing exist,
There was no space spread, no sky beyond.
There was no sign of night, no sign of day
There was neither death nor immortality.

NARRATOR: And all things were one,
Like an ocean,
Until one day the edge cracked,
The sun breathed,
And My Creatures came.

Outside the conclave of the gods,
Brahma created Death
He said, ‘Kali will come,
She will wave her purple hands,
And things will be all right.’
Inside, the gathering said nothing.
Later someone saw Death hopping
From a slow-moving moon,
Dancing with a headless corpse.

It was Kali’s first dance.

Lanjut..

I

Difference as an intense moment of (re)discovery is what art is all about. To find out about it you don’t have to go to a big exhibition hall filled with works of diverse painters like this Jakarta Biennale. Even a pisser, in the hands of an aesthete, can serve as a powerful reminder of the tenuousness of indifference.

Of course I am referring to the legendary urinal of Marcel Duchamp, a “real aesthete”, as Robert Lebel, the author of Sur Marcel Duchamp, once called him. The story of his Fountain is well-documented in art history books. Signed under a different name, entered for the Society of Independent Artists show in New York in 1917, and irately refused by the committee, it has since succeeded in becoming the world’s most celebrated ready-made object. It has become a work of art.

Yet its very success is a story of a flop. Duchamp’s original plan to make it into “a distraction” missed the mark. Years later he would say of the mundane objects put outside their usual, functional context and exhibited as pop art or Dadaist pieces: “The fact that they are regarded with the same reverence as objects of art probably means that I have failed to solve the problem of trying to do away with art.” Lanjut..

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Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, a pornography of torture, focuses on the details of the corporeal, or better, animal parts of the story; hence its monotony, its claim of ‘realism’, and its violent cutting off the flow of the narrative. The rest of the Gospel is bracketed; the crucifixion is the only story. And the ‘veil’ recommended by Goethe to cover over the sufferings of Christ as a way to revere it is totally torn.

For this reason, I would like to go back to a small poem written by Chairil Anwar, the leading poet of Indonesian modernism of 1940s. Based on the poem, this essay is a collage of fragmented thoughts on God, violence and man. Lanjut..

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In the streets of the world, there is always a stranger. She is the one whom we meet, who walks with us and probably lives among us, or even lives within us, since, as the Book of Leviticus says, we were once strangers.

A stranger is by definition an unidentifiable entity. At a crucial moment, however, a stranger is transformed into something else; she becomes a foreigner. It is the moment of inclusion and exclusion; it is the moment when the border is pronounced.

Lanjut..

I

This essay is about Srimulat, a troupe of Javanese comic performers whose history is a story of cultural fluidity and perpetual transits, whose performances a continuous translation.

The name is derived from the founder’s.

Srimulat was born on 7 May 1908 in the village of Botokan, in the town of Bekonang, Central Java. She was the youngest child of a titled local chief administrator who claimed to have a blood link with the royal family in Surakarta.

Lanjut..