Poetry, Old Age and Conversation

Goenawan Mohamad’s speech in receiving the 2024 Award for Life Achievements in Literarure, at the Ubud  Readers dan Writers’s Festival on October 23, 2024 at the Ubud Palace, Bali. 

Goenawan Mohamad attended the "Den Kisot" show at Ubud's Puri Lukisan Museum after the award ceremony at Puri Ubud. The show offers a fresh take on the classic novel Don Quixote, blending Cirebon wayang golek with modern artistic elements. Adapted by Goenawan Mohamad and directed by contemporary gamelan expert Endo Suanda, the story brings to life characters like Don Quixote, Dulcinea, and Sancho Panza through the unique visual style of wayang golek, while staying true to the heart of Miguel de Cervantes' beloved tale.

The organizer of the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival gives me an award for a Life Achievements in Literature.

I take it as a  gesture of appreciation, for which I am deeply grateful.  But I cannot help  seeing it also as a reminder that as a writer and a painter I am in a precarious period at the age of 83. In short, I am pretty old.  In an age constantly heralding youth — in an era gleefully advertising fancy hairstyles, newly innovated handphones, and flashy Kpop shows — to be old has its drawback, with or without osteoporosis.

To age is a curious verb. In the Indonesian grammar, verb is kata kerja — meaning word of doing, acting,  or working. But you know, there is neither act nor work required to get old. You just sit or sleep or eat nasi goreng as somewhere moves you into a different age bracket.

I have no complain about it, since it goes well with my literary works.

As many of you know, the Indonesian language tends not to pronounce active subjects. Perhaps it is indicative of  our social communication  that gives less emphasis on “Me”, the subject. Subject-hood is a tentative presence.

For me, this is good enough for  grey-haired poets.  In the winter of one’s life, one tends to sense the withdrawal of one’s subject from the hustling world. I always like the way T.S. Eliot describes it in his famous poem “Gerontion”:

 

“Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass.”

 

Poetry is not an act of “heaving a cutlass.”  Poetry does not antagonize the earth, the sky, mortals and the touch of the divine in the space embracing us. Poetry cannot be certain about its triumph. I remember Paul Celan, who says that a poem is like a message in a bottle, sent forth across the sea in a faith not always very strong with hope. The poet believes that it will go somewhere, anywhere, towards a different shore  that might be occupied by an approachable You, or as Celan says it in his beloved German, “ein ansprechbares Du.”

 

In short, writers, as many of us here, are prompted by a perpetual hope for a conversation. Sometimes they find it in a literary festival as enriching as this one in Ubud.

Thank you.