The Japan Foundation Award 50th Anniversary Messages from Previous Awardees - Goenawan Mohamad

(c) Aryatama
2022 The Japan Foundation Award
Poet, Writer and Painter
Goenawan Mohamad
[Indonesia]
A kind of Sanctuary
If I were to write a science-fiction about the future, I would create a not-so-flattering world of verbal noise -- the world of Amecas.
Ameca is the name of the most advanced robot made in UK with sophisticated Chatbot-GPTs. The humanoid is known as a superior conversationalist that algorithmatically absorb and digest billions of information and then, in no time, spout words. Or, to be more precise, borrowing a famous line from Hamlet: words, words, words.
In such a setting, silence would be Other. Marginalized, it would become suspect in a milieu of distinct sounds, clear voices and occasional screams and shrieks. In my gloomy fiction, that would transform dialogues into mere chartters. They are not necessarily as bad as “idle talks” disdained by philosophers; nonetheless an Ameca-induced verbal environment tends to use language to communicate without truly connecting.
So, I presume, we need an alternative — or even a sanctuary.
Outside of my unwritten fiction, I am thinking of Japan. Or at least Japan of my mind.
I remember sitting in a slow train from Tokyo to Shibu Onsen, a hot spring town in Yamanouchi in the fall of 2009. Along the trek, until the last station, the throbbing colours of the leaves outside the train windows created a fleeting kaleidoscopic screen.Time was blissful transience, as my Budhist friend once said. From my seat I imagined seeing the shadow of a Noh actor — stepping out from the clumsy urban map of roads and buildings, a geography of clamor.
My compartement was almost empty. There was only a slender, attractive Japanese woman sitting one seat next to me, and a pale, old gentleman who joined the train from the Yudanaka Station. But everyone utters no word.
Or perhaps I misunderstood it.
“No word,” wrote Japan’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, “can say as much as silence”.
Kawabata is my favorite writer; oddly, I always think the novelist as a poet — or to be more precise, a 20th century haiku poet.
In one of the stories in his First Snow on Fuji he introduces us to Mita, the narrator, and Omyua Akifusa, a 66-year-old author who had chosen to remain silent following a debilitating stroke; he “will no longer write even a single letter or character”.
Mita, who is also a writer, drives from Kamakura to visit Akifusa and his daughter, Tomiko. He wants to save the older author from “verbal starvation”. He insists talking to him to initiate a conversation.
An akward situation follows. As Akifusa stubbornly stays wordless, gradually Mita fumbles with his own words; he knows he speaks too much. Finally, when it has become clear the unspeaking novelist would not respond to any of his utterances, Mita starts wondering if it is the right thing to invite Akifusa back to the normal verbal milieu —by violating his “sanctuary of silence”. “Hadn’t my own experience taught me that no word can say as much as silence?”
Later he muses, “Silence is certainly not meaningless… I think that sometime before I die, I would like to get inside silence, at least for a while.”
The story does not say whether Mita becomes a taciturn writer, or decides to stay in a Trappist Dai monastery in Hokaido, where monks spend their days and nights without uttering a word. In the early part of his story Kawabata briefly mentions an entirely different speechless being: a woman ghost who often turns up near the crematorium outside the tunnel on the way to Zushi.
I love that he stops his story short.
A good prose continues to be good when it does not deny the ambiguty, or the tension, between the power of words and their emptiness. I am by no means an expert in haiku (I speak no word of Japanese), but I notice in Baso’s pieces, their seventeen syllables were written as if to serve the silence of the other parts.
It is said that one day the poet climbed over a thousand steps to the temple of Risshaku-ji that is located in the steep rocky mountain, surrounded by forest — and composed his famous haiku:
Ah, the Quiet, but piercing the Rocks — the Cry of the Cicada
閑けさや 岩にしみいる 蝉の声
Kawabata says “words have their origin in love”. But I think he would agree that so does the unpronounced.
I have an English friend who told me a story, that hours after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and killed people of all ages in thousands, some survivors gathered in a grove. But there was almost no voice spoken. The smell of the burnt flesh was the only sign of the hurt and agony, maybe because, as one writer puts it, physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it. The horror emerges from the quietude…
If I were to write a futuristic fiction, I would describe, with no claim of originality, the subversive power of no-language in a world of Amecas. As life would be dominated by cerebral Chatbot-GPTs, silent pain, muted joy, speechless desire —human situation deeply immersed in the body — would make the world stay alive and meaningful.
And I would imagine myself working as a painter at the quiet base of Noto Peninsula. My kind of sanctuary.
Goenawan Mohamad
(Original text in English)
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