THE LONTAR FOUNDATION

We are an independent, not-for-profit organization based in Jakarta, Indonesia,

promoting Indonesian literature and culture through the translation of its literary works

The Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Short Stories

Short Fiction from the Twentieth Century
Volume 1: Pre-Independence to 1965

BOOK OF THE MONTH

The poet Acep Zamzam Noor is a faithful bearer of what is known in Indonesian poetics as “silent songs” whose language is especially distinct from the bureaucratized-sounding language of the mass media. His poems are a kind of wrapper for silence containing images of death and failure. Beauty is transitory, something that quickly passes, and while poetry may attempt capture it, the effort will be futile.

Nonetheless, and as if even silence has a due-date, in Acep’s more recent poems he has allowed—even “invited”—noise and pollution to enter his poems. Irony, however, changes into a darkly bitter chastisement of the self. Acep appears to intentionally create a tension between lyricism and jargon so that we readers can take our own stance in the “democratic fiesta” that so frequently invites chaos instead.

But even as he tries to address the socio-political world around him, Acep’s poems are still anti-heroic. So it is, for instance, that his subtle eroticism (where the “I” in a poem is often harassed by his lover) is an alternative to the political machismo which is, by nature, corrupt. Or when his poems are playful or full of mischievous, it as if this mischievous is a challenge of equal force to the State’s arbitrariness and injustice.

“The Smiling Semar from America” (Semar Mesem dari Amerika) is a documentary film devoted to the life of Gregory John Churchill (1947-2022) and his love of Indonesian puppets. During his decades in Indonesia he collected more than 8,000 puppets from around Indonesia and other parts of the world.

The film was produced by the Lontar Foundation under the supervision of John H. McGlynn and directed by Eva Tobing.

GALLERY

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