Goenawan Mohamad

– A speech for the Ubud Literary Festival (11 October 2004)

Today, as the organizer of this unusual gathering told me, we are here to celebrate a transition ‘from darkness to light’. I must confess that when I heard the idea for the first time, I thought it had something to do with a typically Balinese problem – which is how to be free from a chronic blackout.

Later I was told that the phrase has a double import. And I found it to be quite powerful.

One is a metaphor for the change of ambience currently taking place in Indonesia — from a life of hatred, destruction and fear, to a life of trust and openness. The two bombs that killed almost 200 innocent people in Kuta in 2002 left a deep wound here and in other places, but Indonesia’s 2004 peaceful and free elections seem to redeem a lost hope.

The second meaning behind ‘from darkness to light’ refers to a book published in 1911. The book I am referring to is Door duisternis tot Licht, as it is called in Dutch, or, in the Indonesian version, Habis Gelap Terbitlah Terang. I am sure many of you have heard about it: it is a book comprising letters, tormented but thoughtful, written by the first Indonesian feminist, Kartini. Today’s gathering, initiated and organized by women from different parts of the world, is designed also to commemorate her. Kartini died in 1904, so this is a centennial memorial.

And so we have two meanings as well as two celebrations. But having been to Bali many times before, I could not help asking myself: Why ‘light’? What makes us think that ‘light’ comes as a corrective to ‘darkness’?

Bali is a place steeped in perpetual images of shadow plays. When you watch these plays, you will find it difficult to think of ‘darkness’ as a deficiency, or a shortcoming, or a situation in which you feel deprived of something. In Bali, you are bound to probe deeper into the matter: yes, perhaps ‘darkness’ means the absence of ‘light,’ but is absence equal to deprivation? Is darkness something without a substance of its own? What if one looks at it as another being entirely? What if the word signifies a difference that stands on the side of ‘light’”? Or is not ‘darkness’ something that ‘light’ can never dismiss?

Let me go back to Kartini’s book. It is commonly believed that the title of the book, meaning ‘from darkness to light’, is a summing-up of her struggle to liberate women from the repressive frame of the local tradition and the racial politics of 19th century colonial society. Joost Coté, for example, who translated the letters into English and assembled them into a book form, (it was published by Monash Asia Institute of Monash University in 1992,) writes in his introduction that the words ‘Through Darkness to Light’ are taken from a poem quoted by Kartini, a metaphor that ‘reflects…her own sense of her historic struggle’.

The interesting thing about it is that it might not be what Kartini meant. The other day I took another look at the letters. To my surprise, I could not find any poem suggesting Kartini’s description of her ‘heroic struggle.’ The closest thing is a quatrain quoted in her letter to J.H. Abendanon (in a letter written on August 15, 1902). The quatrain suggests a sense of joy in going through enlightenment, but instead of ‘darkness’, it mentions ‘night’:

Door nacht tot licht
Door storm tot rust
Door strijd tot eer
Door leed tot lust
….
…..

As I see it, there is a difference between ‘night’ and ‘darkness’. Unlike ‘darkness’, ‘night’ is by definition a temporary thing, a transitory segment in the passage of time. But more importantly, Kartini’s use of the word ‘light’ implies an entirely different trajectory. I bet many will be surprised to find out that the word ‘light’ in the quatrain quoted above is not a metaphor for women’s liberation. In fact, it signifies Kartini’s rediscovery of her identity as a Muslim.

We do not know who wrote the quatrain, or whether it is a poem at all. In the letter, Kartini connected the words to (I quote) ‘an old woman…from whom I have gathered many flowers that spring from the heart’. The old woman was probably her biological mother, the other wife of her aristocratic father – a mother she spoke of, with sadness, only to very, very few friends.

At any rate, she was the one who told Kartini to ‘fast a day and a night’. The belief implied in this advice is that ‘through abstinence and meditation, we go toward the light’.

Here, the word ‘light’ signifies Kartini’s new awareness. It was her appreciation of the significance of her Muslim faith. As she described it, in the past, ‘we were [only] Moslems in name, no more’. Of the same past, she said, ‘God – Allah – was for us…a sound without meaning.’ But having listened to the words of the old woman, Kartini said, ‘we have found Him for whom unconsciously our soul had yearned during the long years’.

Reading this letter you cannot help wondering why so many commentaries on Kartini begin with the assumption that the word ‘light’ in the title of her collection of letters is a metaphor for an era of progress, emancipation, and modernity.

As I see it, the issue at hand is not about different interpretations and different uses of metaphor. The issue is about the way a dominant discourse shapes meaning and languages.

My theory is that when the editor of Kartini’s letters called the book Door duisternis tot licht or Habis Gelap Terbitlah Terang, the language of the time was deeply imbedded with the ideals of Enlightenment (with a capital ‘E’.) As you may recall, Enlightenment is a moment in European history marked by a humanist sense of autonomy – meaning the autonomy of the human subject that has done away with ‘immaturity’ or ‘dependence’ or, as Immanuel Kant famously put it, ‘Unmündigkeit’.

To be sure, Kartini was a singular voice speaking for Indonesia’s modernity in the beginning of the 20th century; she was doubtless a great believer in the project of Enlightenment, out of which modern Europe was born.

Still, she was not entirely free from ambiguity when she wrote about Europe and the Europeans. She seemed to have her own doubts when she talked about the capacity of the human subject to be the center of knowledge and of knowing. Kartini’s letter we discussed above ends with an obvious tone of faith: ‘God alone understands the riddle of the world.’

This is, of course, a Muslim cliché. But to me the most interesting thing is that when Kartini spoke of ‘light,’ she simultaneously spoke of the ‘riddle of the world.’ ‘Riddle’ suggests an enigma, a mystery, something that associated with obscurity or ‘darkness,’ if you will. In other words, for Kartini, ‘darkness’ is not a deprivation of ‘light’. ‘Darkness’ is a different realm entirely, suggesting that the order of ‘light’, like the order of knowledge, is not the only order.

This recognition opens the door to different conversations, but since we are in a gathering of writers, let me explore how it is related to literature.

As I see it, we are living in a time when language moves like the horse in the ancient Indian ritual of Ashvamedha. As with the sacrificial horse, so it is the powers-that-be who decide that language has to be seen as free as possible to roam. In practice, however, a host of officials follow it and claim whatever territory it enters. At the end of the day, language, like the horse, is slaughtered to enhance the mystique of the throne and the pulpit.

Often times, the state, the religious authorities, and the high priests of the media create a ritual for the dead language, solidified in a single book with a secured meaning and commanding content.

This mania for ‘secured meaning’ generates a false belief that language, with all of its pleasing vowels and compelling consonants, is quite capable of adequately representing everything that happens in the life-world. But we know that this is not the case. An Indonesian poet, Toto Sudarto Bachtiar, put it succinctly, ‘karena kata tak cukup buat berkata,’ ‘since words are not an adequate means with which to speak.’

In other words, there is always a residue of riddles in the way we communicate. There is always an echo of something dark in our words, in our literary works, especially in a time when trauma, paranoia, and fear pervade our human world. Paul Celan, who survived the Nazi labor camp where his parents died, who wrote poetry expressing the absurdity of modern life and the difficulty of communication, and at the end drowned himself in the River Seine in Paris in 1970, says a lot about it when he speaks of das Gedunkelte Splitterecho, the ‘darkling splintered echo’.

But it is the darkling side of poetry that renders it suspect, especially in an era shaped by the market and the mass media, an era relying on a language that is predictable. In such a period, language becomes readily promiscuous, meaning it belongs to everyone.

Unfortunately, this is also an era marked by the technological need for clarity and by the politics of religious and ethnic purity. This era inevitably sees poetry as an alienated pursuit, the product of the grammar of nonsense.

Many see this alienation as a loss, and there have been attempts to redress the ‘problem.’ One of them is to draw poetry out from its marginality and push it back into the impulse to communicate and create consensus. And sometimes writers are more than willing to fall into the trap.

In the process, literature becomes a story of knowledge, power, and genius, in which the poet can claim, without the slightest embarrassment, that he or she is the ‘legislator of the world.’ Poetry will thus work to serve linguistic and cultural systems that propose themselves as possessing the ultimate truth.

But of course, at the end of the day, no authority possesses the final truth: what it can offer us are merely words which are bound to defer meaning ever onwards. Literary works are a witness to this perpetuity: the enigmatic passages of the ancient Mahabharata text are still being interpreted, just as the brilliant allegories of Nukila Amal’s novel, Cala Ibi, will continuously excite readers. Literature defies any closure. It is a paradigm of what Andre Malraux calls ‘anti-destiny’.

That’s why we will always talk, perhaps endlessly, about it. That’s why today is one of those beginnings of, if not of a beautiful friendship, a life-long conversation.

Thank you.