Goenawan Mohamad

# A Talk at Serambi Salihara, November 11, 2010

I have to confess that in this conservative time, I am not completely comfortable sitting here to speak of “morality.” The question Abdoumaliq Simone poses in his summary may become a good start for our discussion (“Does morality in the city now mean people leaving each other alone, even as globalization and Facebook brings us all together?”). Yet, morality, to me, is a politically loaded word. My problem is that I see it as a normative order, normally reinforced by the discourse of faith and social cohesion, while I am aware of the incommensurability of such an order with its very claim of universality. I am of the opinion that society, especially in its urban setting, is shaped by a partially settled and historically contingent system of regularities.

Hence there is a perpetual contention. No Hegelian Sittligkeit, or norms of morality operating inside a community generating a natural sense of coherence, is without conflict or exclusion. I am in full agreement with Simone when he quotes James Tully suggesting that today “cultures are continuously contested, imagined, and reimagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through their interaction with others”.

It is interesting that Tully, as Simone quotes him, speaks of the other way of looking at cultures (or other identities like cities, for that matter) which is “a panopticon of fixed, independent and incommensurable worldviews in which we are either prisoners or cosmopolitan spectators in the central tower.” Tully speaks of it negatively. This brings me to what I believe to be an antithesis of the “panoptical” perspective. Being a writer, I find it in works of literature touching upon urban lives and landscapes. These are the kind of modality that articulates, to borrow Michel de Certeau’s description, a “poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning.”

Let me begin with a story by Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his collection, Cerita dari Jakarta, written in the early 1950s. In the story, Aminah, a prostitute, lies down, near death, on a Fromberg Park bench. Suddenly, the past and the present, things distant and near, appear to her simultaneously.

Di depannya terbentang rawa dengan air hitam. Pinggirnya dilebati lalang. Tetapi kereta yang ditumpanginya berjalan laju dan tenang. Kadang-kadang udara berubah-ubah warna: biru, kelabu, merah, hijau—segala warna. Kadang-kadang di langit terjadi peperangan dahsyat antara berbagai senjata.

Tiba-tiba segalanya lenyap.

Dari jauh ia dengar imbauan suara emaknya:

“Aminah! Aminah! Saleh akan kawin dengan adikmu. Engkau tak datang menyaksikan?”

(Before her is a swamp of dark water, rimmed by dense, tall weed. But the train she is on is running smoothly, calmly. Sometimes the weather changes it color: blue, grey, red, and green – all colors. Sometimes in the sky you see a battle is raging, a clash of various weapons.

Suddenly, everything disappears.

Her mom cries from a distance, “Aminah! Aminah! Saleh is going to marry your sister. Are you not coming to see?”)

In the quoted passage, the organized space, time and things prevail no more. In literature, especially in its Modernist temper, everything is seen not from the top, from “the central tower”, but through a body that dreams, a body in pain or in delight or in boredom. The architectural elements of the city – the park, the railway, and the rest – are submerged into a microcosmic subjectivity. As in the poetic geography I discover in a poem by Chairil Anwar, “Kamar” (A Room):

Sebuah jendela menyerahkan kamar ini
pada dunia. Bulan yang menyinar ke dalam
mau lebih banyak tahu.
“Sudah lima anak bernyawa di sini
aku salah satu!”

Ibuku tertidur dalam tersedu
Keramaian penjara sepi selalu
Bapakku sendiri terbaring jemu
Matanya menatap orang tersalib di batu!

Sekeliling dunia bunuh diri!
Aku minta adik lagi pada
Ibu dan bapakku, karena mereka berada
di luar hitungan: Kamar begini,
3 X 4 m, terlalu sempit buat meniup nyawa!

(A window submits this room
to the world. The moon, a prying sneak,
peeps in.
“There are five kids living here.
I’m one of them.”

Mother weeps in her sleep
It is like a clamor in a cell: always desolate.
Father lies down, bored,
his eyes looking at someone crucified on a stone.

The surrounding world suicides!
I asked for another brother
from mom and dad, because they are not
on the register: this room, as it is,
3 x 4 square meters, is too small to blow away a soul!)

You can discern the anguish, trapped inside a little geometrical space, and yet it survives as a human voice with a multiplicity of tenors and nuances.

This reminds of me of another poet, Lorca. The famed Spanish poet from Andalusia lived in New York in 1929-1930. In additon to a group of powerful poems, he wrote a cluster of notes about the city.

One of them is a perceptive description of the dialectics that make a city a unique narrative. On one side if what he calls “extrahuman architecture” (arquitectura extrahumana) and on the other side is “furious rythm” (ritmo furioso). Another pair of “elements” are “geometry” (geometrica) on hand hand and “anguish” (angustia) on the other.

The way I read his notes, I think what Lorca tries to suggest is that despite the forceful linearity and intimidating structure that mark the city-scape, there is an expressed gaiety, looseness, pain and chaos that are parts of urban geography. Lorca even did a drawing of New York suggesting a similiar impression:

Figure 1 In the background is a series of straight lines and unvarying dots evoking the opaqueness of the city’s buildings; in the foreground is a gathering of living forms – strange animals, a pained human face, anaroxic plants — sketched in different curvy and supple shapes.

The “geometry” is powerful, but the “anguish” is apparent. The “extrahuman architecture” comes into sight prominently, and yet the “furious rythm” of lifeworld carries on, despite of its fragility. The city is posed between the panoptical perspective and the localized movements of the passerby, between the view revolving around the monumental and the steps on the grass and in the streets below.

In this sense, what we have is less of a space than a mobile transmutation, or better, a temporal dialectic between the two urban elements mentioned by Lorca. Accordingly, from Lorca’s as well as from Pramudya’s and Chairil Anwar’s pieces, we can speak of the city as not as a space of morality, but as a narrative of ambivalent sharing and tolerance. (Chairil Anwar: “This room, as it is, 3 x 4 square meters, is too small to blow away a soul!”).

To be sure, the urban setting is a space that is also “the principal stake of goal-directed actions and struggles” (the words are Lefebvre’s), but the goals are multifarious and the struggles have no fixed protagonist. The notion of morality as a commonly held precept from which people make sense of the disorderly situations around them is problematic.

It is a poignant reminder that Aminah, the prostitute in Pramoedya’s story, speaks more cogently about Jakarta than, let’s say, an urban planner or a flâneur of Walter Benjamin’s type. She views the city from the corner of the street, in the darker parts of the park, anxious, threatened and yet seductive, and to a large degree free from the established form of uprightness. She is a commodity and simultanously the owner, even a tortuous one, of the commodity. She is a victim that is willing to defy the border normally closed to women.

Pramoedya also has another “hero”. “Gambir” is a story of a pancong-cake seller. He walks the city streets, as an active member of the market, and yet he is quite remote from the modern rules of trading in the management of money and time. His regular patrons are railway station coolies, and in this way, he is a faithful observer of the dark side of Jakarta. But he is capable fo free himself from the city’s normative order on the question of the “good” and the “bad”, the “guilty” or the “not gulity”. With minimum words, he gives support to Hassan, a coolie accused of murder who escapes arrest by mingling with other members of the lumpenproletariat invisible to the city’s architecture of power. His position is a case of ambivalent sharing and tolerance I mentioned earlier.

An urban anthropologist, if there is any, may call such a position an extension of “urban involution”, in which the limited space and opportunity generate the necessity of repressing competition and antagonism as survival practices. It is not totally unlike “the agrarian involution” described by Clifford Geertz in his account of “shared poverty” in Java’s rural life. Whatever it is, it is a shifting mishmash of “chaos” and “cosmos”, a precarious balance between social entropy and consensus.

If there is a distant echo of the ethical in this jumble, it is the unwillingness to eliminate the otherness of the other. It is the avoidance, or reluctance, of comprehending the other into a definitive sense. I like what Simone says in his paper: “In fact the practice of not making sense has been a critical factor enabling a large number of urban residents to survive in the cities they inhabit.” *

Salihara, Jakarta, 11th of November 201