Poems by Sitor Situmorang

Sitor Situmorang is an award-winning poet, essayist and writer of short stories from Indonesia. Born in 1924 and active as a journalist in Medan, Jakarta, and Yogyakarta in the days of the Revolution, Sitor belonges to the So-called Angkatan ‘45, the “Generation of ‘45,” a term that has been coined to refer to the loose group of anxious artists who came of age during the Japanese occupation and the Revolution and shared a certain attitude towards life. They were iconoclastic, vibrant thinkers, uprooted from their place of birth, open to the world, obsessed with the idea that everything should be different. However, it was difficult to find one intellectual leader who could give voice to this generation and forge a cohesive agenda. Sitor Situmorang had arrived in Jakarta from faraway Medan in 1946 as a young and restless journalist, looking for a footing in this world in motion; it should not come as a surprise that he, too, was inflamed by revolutionary fervor. Feeling close to those vociferous intellectuals and artists who had stormed the stage, he managed to become acquainted with some of them – and before long he was accepted into their circle.

Once the world had recognized Indonesia as an independent nation in 1949 and the turbulence abated, these men of letters were forced to redefine their revolutionary anxiety and reflect upon the role they were supposed to play in the new Republic of Indonesia. Before long their excitement faded, their elation evaporated. There is irony in the fact that critics canonized the term “Generation of ‘45” to refer to almost everyone who had produced literary work during the Revolution and shortly thereafter while this loose configuration of Jakarta friends and sympathizers was quickly dissolving. In retrospect, it could be said that as early as 1950 the stage was being set for the heated polemics that were to dominate cultural life in Jakarta in the early sixties, leading to the showdown in 1965 that landed Sitor Situmorang in prison, “the longest address of my life, the longest place I have ever lived without a break.” In his essays Sitor returned to the same point again and again: a truly Indonesian identity would be a long time in the making, and the intellectual discipline of his generation was still too weak to give it shape. Members of his generation did not fully realize that the experiences of the Revolution would soon fade as a source of inspiration and that other issues should be probed for the national cause.

From the start, Sitor Situmorang found himself somewhere in between the two extremes that were represented in concrete literary work as well as in criticism. On the one hand, he did not agree with the idea that art could be appreciated solely on its own merits. Art should reach out for readers and make them aware of the world around them; it should give rise to discussions about life in Indonesian society as a whole, and not only about its artistic qualities. On the other hand, Sitor couldn’t relate to the communist analysis of society and the idea of a “People’s culture” either. It all was too strict, too grim, too totalitarian. He believed that creative activity should explore the possibilities of finding a “national culture,” which might serve as a meeting place for all Indonesians. 

With the publication of Green Paper Letters, Sitor established himself as a prominent poet, respected and admired.  In an essay he wrote some thirty years later he would state that the poems of this collection expressed a single theme only: “love and wanderlust being two aspects of one and the same experience.” 

At that time, Sitor was a prominent member of the Institute of National Culture (Lembaga Kebudayaan Nasional/LKN); he supported the idea of providing the Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia/PNI) with a cultural agenda that could compete with the PKI’s efforts to implement the communist or radical nationalist ideas of culture encouraged by Lekra. That agenda could also compete with the efforts of Muslim parties to formulate an Islamic concept of culture through organizations like the Indonesian Muslim Cultural Association (Lembaga Seni Budayawan Muslimin Indonesia/Lesbumi).

Sitor and the LKN did not hesitate to take sides with Soekarno. As the self-proclaimed helmsman of the unfinished Revolution, the president tried to stand above all conflict and dialectic in order to preserve some form of harmony and prevent Indonesia from disintegrating. The conflicts in the cultural field – even when looking back, personal and ideological confrontations are hard to disentangle – found their climax in the polemics around the “Cultural Manifesto (Manifes Kebudayaan),” published in August 1963 by a number of leading intellectuals who made an appeal for the defense of creative freedom and held up Chairil Anwar as their exemplary hero.

When nine months later the Cultural Manifesto was banned as being anti-revolutionary in intent, both Lekra and the LKN applauded the decision, loudly and triumphantly. In 1965 all possible polemics were brought to a violent end: the military seized power, pushed Soekarno aside, and did not stop the large-scale killings of people accused of being communists. Many of the prominent members of Lekra were imprisoned and their publications banned, communism being declared anathema to the Indonesian state ideology. Sitor found himself in jail in 1967. His poetry was silenced.   

Sitor Situmorang was released in 1976, without ever having faced trial. Not surprisingly, he kept a low profile in the following years. New collections of poetry were published. On his return to the scene, his search tor roots and origins intensified. His work was discussed, reviewed and studied. The large selection of his poems that appeared in 1989 under the title Flowers on Stone: The Prodigal Son (Bunga di atas Batu: si Anak Hilang) can only be seen as a definite monument to his poetic persona.

Most of the work is of such a personal character that it tempting to fuse Sitor the man with Sitor the poet. Time and again we are told of the poet’s journeys, love affairs, longings, and reminiscences. This occurs in such a repetitive and obsessive manner that we are tempted to think we know much of his personal life, a temptation that does not always make it easy to ignore the poet’s personal biography. One can decide, too, to make the verbal leap and undertake a poetic reading that goes beyond the personal, beyond the referential.

The main characteristic of Sitor’s poetry is the simplicity of its wording, the clarity of its syntax. The tales and descriptions bear a deceptive transparency: they suggest a coherence and control that is only confirmed in the regular rhymes and rhythms – but once readers set themselves to a serious interpretation that transparency fades. The very lucidity leaves many open places that are not filled by making connections with other poems. Sitor’s poetry is a poetry of words, evoking concepts, calling up series of pictures and images that never come full circle. 

(The poems below as well as the introduction is excerpt from a longer version by Henk M.J. Maier first published in English in the book To Love, To Wander by the Lontar Foundation in 1996.) 

Incommunicado (Hostage)

The cell is solid black,

the locking-up proceeds

from cracks in the door electric lights

pierce the eyes.

(at the nearest mosque

the call to evening prayer

has just finished)

A civilian informant looks around

then strikes a match,

checking to see

that his prisoner is still there

(while outside civil war rages)

He lights a candle,

a stub from last night,

then suddenly asks:

“So you’re sitorsitumorang?”

I stare at the candle

let my eyes grow accustomed to the light

and the buzz of that name

like the name of that one

in Eden

when God was looking,

and calling out: Adam! Adam!

Outside is civil war

History counts victims and dreams.

Between the informant and myself

is but the candle light

and a yawning gap

between God

and the first man.