I’ve finally caught up with a reasonably reliable ‘net connection – with power – at the Baby Face cafe on Jalan Monkey Forest.

I’m in Bali – for the first time – attending the wonderful Ubud Writers and Readers Festival which runs through to Sunday 0th October.

So I can sit a metre away from the passing traffic – pedestrian and vehicular – and spend a few hours between beers, coffee and a good feed catching up on the past few days email traffic.

Sitor Situmorang

Before I update the previous post I want to post this quick note from yesterday’s sessions.

In the morning I caught up with one of Indonesia’s most revered poets and authors, Sitor Situmorang. He has been a prominent figure in the Festival proceedings so far, speaking at the opening press conference, being honoured with a lifetime achievement award and yesterday morning I was at the Neka Art Museum to hear him talk about his life and work.

Others are better placed to comment about the rapid shifts in Indonesian politics and society in recent years – and I heard a previous Australian Ambassador, Bill Palmer, speak with Jennifer Byrne on that and other issues in the session following Sitor Situmorang’s.

What is apparent to me is that, and I may well be wrong, a few short years ago Sitor Situmorang would not have been able to speak as publicly or frankly about his experiences – and the operations of past regimes under which he and many others have suffered – as he can now.

The Festival provides the following biographical information about Sitor:

Born in 1924 in Harianboho, North Sumatra, Sitor Situmorang is one of the most important writers and poets of the ‘Angkatan 45’, the literary generation who came of age during the Indonesian revolution. A critical journalist and prolific writer, he passionately believed that literary works must play an active role in the struggle for social justice and human rights. His Sastra Revolusioner (Revolutionary Literature) essay, his past involvement in a cultural institution affiliated with a fading political party, and his general resentment toward the New Order regime’s strongman Soeharto resulted in his eight year-long imprisonment without trial in Salemba prison. He wasn’t allowed to bring pens and papers into his cell, but that measure failed to kill “the wandering bard” inside Sitor.

During the ensuing two year long house arrest, Sitor published two works he composed in Salemba. In the following decades Sitor spent most of his times in Paris and in Holland, where he lectured at Leiden. He penned numerous poems, short stories and essays during that period. For him, writing is a sport that keeps his body fit. Now, in his mid-eighties, Sitor is still writing poems. In 2006, a two-volume anthology of his works was published. The anthology contains more than 600 poems written between 1948 and 2005.

Yesterday he  spoke about his life in prison:

The first three days after I was captured I was put into goal and got my food from under the door. Later I I learned it was a military fort a military…members of the military when the put…I don’t know what kind of jail I was in – later I learned it was three days – three months – not knowing that it would be three months and then put in a a normal jail.

But before that for three months day and night in a dark room and you get your food from under the door.

…

I learnt from later Presidents that Amnesty International and that on the diplomatic level many countries were asking questions about the conditions of a certain Sitor Situmorang, who was put into jail but never known to the public…

He was asked the following question from the floor during the Q and A session:

Q: Could you tell us something more about your prison time because…I read that you were still writing…How did you manage to stay positive in the prison and how did you manage to write there?

Sitor Situmorang: To begin, in the military regime of Soeharto at the time, we were put in the goal without any accusation – informal or formal. You were just…one day you were picked up from where you stay by a military peleton then you are just dropped into…

And then, without knowing that it would be eight years, every day for a few months you keep asking – wherever you will hear of what you have done wrong. But never, never till…

I am not a political person – in my way I am very active but not with an ambition to get into Parliament or something like that.

He also read one of his poems

Malam Kebumen

Siapa nanti yang akan cerita bila juga pelita ini padam,

enggan menyala, dan lagi untuk siapa?

Kisah malam bersendiri ini tak mungkin lalu begitu saja

Goresan di hati gelap terlalu mendalam untuk lenyap

Di udara masih ada suara gema lepas

Tarikan napas terakhir manusia kehabisan kata-kata

November 1948

The English translation by John McGlynn is as follows:

Night in Kebumen

Who will speak of it if the flame of this candle dies,

reluctant to glow,

not knowing for whom it burns?

The tale of this night alone will not simply fade away

The tear in the darkened heart is too deep to disappear

Voices linger in the air,

solitary echoes

The last draught of breath of a man without words.

* Sitor Sitormorang will be joined by Debra Yati, Medy Loekito, Sutardji Calzoum Bachri and Wendoko in the Harmony in Words: Indonesian Poets festival session tomorrow, Saturday 9 October 2010 between 09:00 – 10:00 at the Neka Museum. Two living legends and two talented poets of the new generation sit together and ponder the meaning of being a poet and the meaning of poetry to the vast archipelagic nation of Indonesia.