Native essays: Goenawan Mohamad’s faith in writing
JENNIFER Lindsay has been translating Goenawan Mohamad’s columns since 1992. She has captured Goenawan’s Indonesian prose with striking clarity. Goenawan, of course, was editor of Tempo, the Indonesian weekly opinion periodical that he founded in 1971.
And for the journalist, activist, editor, poet, commentator, playwright and essayist, his output of essays for 40 years is staggering.
His worldview is typically Indonesian. New York-based writer Terrence Ward in his introduction to Faith in Writing: Forty Years of Essays (2015), described Goenawan’s writings as lucid, illuminating, urgent and timeless.
Ward asked who would begin an essay titled “Tso Wang”, by comparing fundamentalism to digital technology and then suggests “both are virtual. They don’t touch the soil”, before citing the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a 10th century Javanese mystical poem described as “sepi, sepah, samun” (“silent, vacant, secret”), and ending with the fourth century Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi of the Daoist School who said “the highest stage of knowledge is stillness without movement within what cannot be known absolutely with reason, a state called tso wang”?
Goenawan has indulged in the essay — an important, and powerful literary form in Indonesia, perhaps much under appreciated by the Malaysian literati, scholars and intellectuals. Much of the essay would appear in the newspapers and other periodicals, then print, but now also in blogs and other online platforms. Goenawan has developed the essay as an art form, and as a political tool, much unlike other Indonesian writers. Far from being a journalistic column commenting on recent events, Goenawan’s essays speak to the universal, drawing deep insights from the commonplace and far afield, always linking Indonesia to the wider world. His essence is undoubtedly Indonesian.
Goenawan’s writings were important in the time of Soeharto in Indonesia. They are still important today. He was, and is, a witness to Indonesia, alone, and exposed. His presence in Indonesia is terribly disturbing for the state. He played the role of the intellectual. As enemy number one, he is entrusted by history with a political mission.
Born in 1941 in central Java, Goenawan was five years old when President Sukarno read Indonesia’s proclamation of independence on Aug 17, 1945. He led Tempo and remained its chief editor until 2000, with a gap from 1994-1999 when the journal was banned because of its uncompromising investigative journalism. I first discovered Linday’s translation in “Conversations with Difference” (2002,2005), comprising essays written as a weekly column called “Catatan Pinggir”, meaning “Notes on the Margins” since 1992. Conversations is one of the three collections translated by Lindsay. The other two is titled Sidelines (1994, 2005) and Sharp Times (2011).
Apart from broadening Goenawan’s vision and ideals to the broader world, in Faith in Writing, Lindsay attempts to provide a taste of the vitality of the essay form in Indonesia and Goenawan’s mastery of it, the richness of the Indonesian (Malay) language, and the “unique thinking of an Indonesia intellectual whose voice the world needs to hear in our troubled times”. Australia-based Lindsay’s translations are brilliant, engaging and with gravitas. My purpose in highlighting Faith in Writing is to illustrate the power and spirit of the essay. It, at the same time, encloses and reveals our soul. It is a moving piece of art and thought on our immediate and metaphysical surroundings.
In Faith in Writing, Lindsay engaged us with three parts aptly titled “Indonesia in My Mind”, “Wider Worlds” and “Mythic and Sacred”. While some of the essays have appeared in Conversations with Difference, and other collections, the more enduring ones are in this book.
One essay is titled “Native Land” where Goenawan asked whether we can stop thinking about Indonesia for a while. “...Indonesia always comes. Indonesia always knocks. And precisely when we don’t want to care. Uncertainty makes us wary. The moment that hope becomes hard, despair is terrifying. I cannot run from this. A country, a history, a name. What does it all mean to you and me — what is the meaning of a native land?” In “That Name”, Goenawan revealed that names are not only signifiers, not just made and constructed. Names also construct. Names also establish an identity. “But names are not entirely born from the intention to make concepts. People say ‘Indonesia’ not only with a definition. Names are not abstract indexes”, but like a person. Indonesia is not only a place. It is a person. Names can be empty signifiers, or concepts with meaning. Or as Goenawaan cited a Dutch Parliamentary session in his essay that the name “Indonesia” would be better as a trade name for cigars.
History reveals. He cited two figures who to him, most succeeded in filling the name of “Indonesia” — one was Soewardi Soerjaningrat and the other, E. Douwes Dekker, both from the radical Indische Partij. In the magazine Hindia Poetra (1919), Soerjaningrat once said “An Indonesian is anyone who considers Indonesia his or her homeland”. Dekker, later known as Setiabudi, and of Dutch descent, wrote an open letter to Queen Wilhelmina on April 1913: “No, Your Majesty. This is not Your Majesty’s homeland. It is ours.”
In “Territorium”, Goenawan began with “History has not ended, geography is not yet dead”. And toward the end, he wrote the following, “The sacralisation of territory can indeed be awe-inspiring, but more often than not, it goes too far”. He remembered the song of praise “for a country called Indonesia”, which his teacher taught when he was in primary school: “your earth is sacred, your firmament holy.”
Secular state, sacred territory? The essays certainly connect us beyond the borders of Indonesia. I read the essays as both a foreign reader, as well as a native of the wider worlds in the living space and time of the archipelago.
...Goenawan’s essays speak to the universal, drawing deep insights from the commonplace and far afield, always linking Indonesia to the wider world.