Siti Surabaya

By F. Aziz Manna (author), George A. Fowler (translator)

Siti Surabaya by F. Manna Aziz is the Surabaya poet’s own amalgam of several of his earlier works in a single epic-length poem — “à la Octavio Paz,” as he has expressed it.

While the title’s protagonist is simply known as “Siti,” a common Arabic-derived female honorific, in the Javanese language this word also means “earth, soil, and land,” thus linking place and the people who stand upon it. Finally, “siti” can be understood as a homonym for “city,” hence Surabaya City, the fateful destination of destitute and “thrown-way people” (kaum tundungan). Aziz dedicates this resulting work as a historical mini-document about the victims of the man-made disaster that struck his own hometown of Sidoarjo in East Java with the 2006 “mud volcano.” The resulting displacement of the area’s residents who had for generations worked this land and who now, having lost everything, became landless lumpen-proletariat who now migrated to nearby Surabaya to eke out a marginal existence. And even there they are ruthlessly exploited and forced out from one miserable place to another by relentless land development.

F. Aziz Manna has called this work “experimental.” It is in fact a stunning multi-layered tour de forceof creativity to evoke in both realism and metaphor the devastation that modernity and greed wreak on the everyday, everywhere people of Indonesia.