Book Review: Meeting Without Conversation

With "Prayer“, Chairil surrendered: “My God/ I lost my shape/ crushed… My God/ At Your door I knock/ I can't look away.” With poetry, Chairil mocked religion:

“I also ask to reach heaven
which Masyumi Muhammadiyah said was a river of milk
and strewn with thousands of angels.

However, the poem entitled “Heaven” it doesn’t stop there. The final lines read:

“Who can say for sure anymore?
there really is an angel there
her voice was heavy swallowing like Nina
Do you have Yati's kerling? ”

From Chairil's poems that question religion, which is often used as a (last) support for humans, Arief Budiman (AB) in "Chairil Anwar: A Meeting" states that 'The Wild Animal' is more than just mocking religion. For AB, he even rejects religion to the extreme. Because, he does not want to exchange, let alone sacrifice, what he has with something that is uncertain in the future. "'Again, who can say for sure that there really are angels there?'who are as beautiful and flirtatious as Nina and Yati,” the women who were present in his life (p. 51). From AB's statement, we know that Chairil chose the definite 'here' and 'today' rather than the uncertain 'there' and 'in the future'.

Despite rejecting religion, AB said, Chairil was a religious figure. Because, he struggled throughout his life to find the meaning of this life. Citing Paul Tillich, AB differentiates between religion and faith. A religious person does not have to have a religion, although a religious person can be religious. Because, a religious person “… tries to understand this life further than just the external boundaries” (p. 48). Meanwhile, a religious person is a person who submits to religion: “an institution that offers a meaningful life if people are willing to believe in it” (p. 48).

The question is, what kind of meaning of life was Chairil continuously searching for? What brought him to that point? How did his search end?

“I” and Death

At one time, AB and Goenawan Mohamad (GM) 'proclaimed' literary criticism The Gathering: responding to literary works sequentially and completely. For these two close friends, analyzing literary works in their entirety and sequentially is a prerequisite for a literary work to have a living meaning. In other words, if a literary work is analyzed based on its fragments only, then the meaning of the complete mood will be lost, and it will be nothing more than a dead work.

It seems that AB's thesis at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Indonesia (UI) about Chairil was the starting point The Gathering in Indonesia. In 1976, the thesis was published for the first time as a book entitled “Chairil Anwar: A Meeting“—the foreword to the book was written by AB in 1973 in Paris (p. 13). Reading the book is like a short journey through Chairil's poems, because AB reveals the poems of 'The Wild Animal' sequentially and in their entirety, from the first time he wrote poetry until the days before his death—the discussion presented in this book is 'only' poems from the early and late periods of Chairil's life.

From AB's work, I did not find a depiction of Chairil (a teenager) who was so fascinated by Sutan Takdir Alisyahbana with his advice to "look to the West", nor Chairil the pioneer of the generation of '45. What is there is Chairil who is constantly being hounded by questions about death.

Death, AB wrote, began to approach Chairil when his grandmother passed away. At the age of 20, he then wrote his first poem entitled "Tombstone“. From the poem, there are two things that he realized: 1) humans will be powerless in the face of death; and 2) death will not compromise with humans (p. 17). Faced with this reality, Chairil wondered about the meaning of life, hopes, ideals, and desires: Isn't all that meaningless if death comes? (p. 18). AB's reading of the poem shows that Chairil, like a philosopher, is a human being who tries to find out the depth of the meaning of life.

Even though he did not find an answer, Chairil did not stop looking for an answer. From the poem "Prince Diponegoro“, Chairil then got the answer. Although death is looming, life must be filled with meaning. Death, therefore, is in a lower position compared to something greater. At this point, for Prince Diponegoro, what is higher than life itself is the independence of the country (p. 19). Unfortunately, Chairil's enthusiasm only lasted for a moment. Because, he found that Prince Diponegoro could only be locked up in prison in Makassar without breathing the air of freedom (p. 21).

The tension between holding on to principles on the one hand, and facing life as it is on the other hand is what Chairil had to choose. Chairil through the poem "Not Worth It" finally chose a life without principles, which is what it is, "dry and barren without color", even though the consequence of that choice is loneliness (pp. 22-23). Faced with loneliness, Chairil escapes, such as drug abuse, and leads him to a (temporary) answer: death by committing suicide. However, like Albert Camus, Chairil ultimately does not choose that path, and strengthens himself to face everything (p. 25). At this point, the most popular lines in the treasury of Indonesian literature find their meaning:

“Let the bullets pierce my skin
I'm still inflamed and charging forward
Wounds and I can carry it running
Run
Until the pain and soreness disappears…
I want to live another thousand years”

As in the time when he first published his poems, Chairil also talked about death in the days leading up to his death. In 1949 (the year of his death), Chairil at the age of 27 first published the poem "Young Mirat, Young Chairil“. At the end of the poem, he states that death is approaching: “Mirat and Chairil live with great speed/demands high not a step away from death.”

For AB, Chairil in the poem, which describes Mirat, is not Charil what's happening, but rather an experience long past. At this point, memories take him back to the past, remembering Mirat, when death is getting closer, getting closer. Humans are generally thrown far into the past, to a happy time in their lives, when they are about to face their death. And this is what Chairil experienced: the seemingly happy experience with Mirat slipped away when he realized that death was coming for him (pp. 32-33).

Interestingly, AB wrote, death at the end of Chairil's life was not an obsession like in 1942, when he first published poetry, but rather a certainty, because humans must die anyway (pp. 33-34). However, death remains incomprehensible, it remains a mystery.

Postponing Defeat

Chairil who appears in this book is an appreciation of AB's poems. In other words, AB had a meeting with Chairil, or more precisely a meeting between AB as a person who appreciates and Chairil's poems as works of art. In AB's words, "Between the two there is a dynamic blending. From this blending a value emerges, the value Gestalt or more precisely perhaps the value The Gathering, which occurs between the meeting between subject and object” (p. 10).

For me, the meeting between AB and Chairil was a very subjective meeting. With all his cultural experiences, AB internalized Chairil's poems which were none other than Chairil's personal experiences of the world around him. Therefore, the Chairil who appears in this book is AB's Chairil. In other words, he is not the Chairil of his mother or the girls who have appeared in his life. With or without his poems, Chairil is ultimately something that is interpreted differently by each person.

Even though AB's writing flows very well in this book, and is the most beautiful writing I have ever read, AB seems to 'lock' and close the discussion about what he experienced. "Regarding an experience like this, of course we cannot question whether it is true or not," he wrote (p. 12). Furthermore, he stated: "Because the most important thing is not whether our observations are true or not, but rather the intensity or not of our experience" (p. 13). How then can we test the authenticity of AB's experience of experiencing Chairil's poems? Who can be the judge of that experience?

In the end, what AB did was just a meeting without conversation. A meeting requires bodies facing each other, open mouths and ears, and hearts that understand each other. Maybe, yesterday or today, somewhere I don't know, they both had a meeting, a real meeting. And maybe, tomorrow we will join them. Because, borrowing Chairil's poem, "life is just postponing defeat.”