Sitti Faizah finds fans in Italy

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 08/22/2007 1:22 PM  |  Life

Tony Hotland, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

You know that wonderful feeling of nationality when you're in some faraway land, conversing with friends in Indonesian, talking easily about the people around you? Well, you might want to take some precautions if you happen to be in Italy.

Because the people you're talking about with your friends just might be able to understand you.

They just might have had the pleasure of learning and practicing Bahasa Indonesia in Italy with a woman called Sitti Faizah Soenoto Rivai.

Sitti and I met in Rome a few months ago. As we began to chat, an unexpected wave of emotion swept over me -- it was one of enormous respect -- as I learned this 69-year-old woman had dedicated 43 years of her life to bringing Indonesia, its language and its culture, to mainstream classrooms at the Universita degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale (UNO) in Naples.

When our President last week awarded Sitti the Bintang Mahaputra Nararya, the state's highest civilian award for a citizen's merits, I took great joy in meeting with her again, this time in the company of her husband of 43 years, Amin Soenoto, and over a feast of Indonesian food, in Italy.

Sitti left for Italy in 1964 after a professor sought her assistance for the UNO's opening of its first Malay-Indonesian Language and Literature class -- which remains today the only one of its kind in Italy.

""I couldn't speak Italian, but it was an opportunity too good to miss,"" Sitti says.

""There were only one or two students the first year around, but we've been taking in some 70 annually now.""

For her very first teaching day, Sitti says she turned up in kebaya and konde at the Italian university. She says she thought the outfit couldn't have been more Indonesian.

""Besides, I believed the students had to have never seen it and I also wanted to present an older look,"" said the University of Indonesia's School of Literature graduate and mother of three.

She says she knows now it wasn't an interest in Indonesia that led students to her in her first few years in Italy.

Back then, she says, students thought Indonesian was a much less complicated language to learn and so passing the complimentary class would be easier than other Asian language classes.

And this, she says, has proven somewhat true for her Italian students, thanks to the fact that the Indonesian language resembles Italian.

The words are pronounced exactly the way they're spelled, Sitti says.

Even better, Indonesian is extremely loose in the use of tenses, if anyone nowadays even cares to use them at all.

But the fact that hundreds of Italians today line up for Sitti's class, before they travel to the archipelago to practice Bahasa, is proof enough students are taking her classes because they really want to.

Sitti says at the start of a semester, with a new class, she must always ask her students if they know where Indonesia is.

""Somewhere in Bali"" is the most popular reply, she says.

""I believe that to make people respect our language, they first need to know if there's anything worth respecting about us.

""And Indonesia has more than enough to wow these students.""

At this point in our interview, I took a little pause to savor the hot-spiced beef rendang in front of me, before secretly blessing the chef. These flavors I had drooled over in my sleep after weeks of pizzas and spaghettis.

After watching me eat with such enthusiasm, Sitti says, ""I tell my students too about our food"".

""Nothing in Italy, even in Indonesian restaurants here, tastes as good as the real thing,"" she says.

""Perhaps that's one reason enough for them to pack up and go to Indonesia.""

But on her students' return from the archipelago, Sitti says it not always a great big thank you or a gift she receives.

""They'd come to me, disappointed, and say they couldn't figure out the words Indonesians were saying.""

Sitti says she has to calmly tell her students the Indonesians they had met were probably using a lot of slang.

Who doesn't use slang, I though silently to myself... before becoming embarrassed about my own use of informal Bahasa.

Sitti says, ""I told them it's the same for anyone coming to Italy and picking up words on the streets"".

""Then the students start to feel guilty for having grumbled about the slang they heard in Indonesia,"" she joked.

Most importantly, Sitti's students learn to understand the correct form of the Indonesian language.

""They learn how to use affixes in Indonesian -- the word have in the present perfect tense in English is the hardest part of the class,"" she says.

""My father was in the Indonesian Commission of Terminologies, which was before the Language and Culture Center.

""He also opened this library back in my hometown of Banjarmasin called The Hip Garden of Readings.

""I guess that's how I got into books in the first place,"" Sitti says using text-book perfect Bahasa Indonesia.

Sitti's university role includes supervising her Italian students as they study Indonesian film history or ancient literature for their thesis. She says she most often speaks of her students achievements when she is before an international convention on Indonesian classics.

Today the professor is a busy woman - she says to relax before promoting Indonesia to the rest of the world, she often tries her hand at cooking in between preparing her materials for a conference in Paris, Leiden, Hamburg or Kuala Lumpur.

""All my three girls were born in Italy and I haven't seen them in a while.

""Two of them are doing their graduate schools in Boston, and the youngest one is in Britain.

""It's been a ride,"" the professor says, looking over to her husband.

As I scooped up my fried ice cream and wrapped up my interview notes, I wondered what Sitti would think if she knew I'd been writing my thoughts in English and not Indonesian.

I'm sure she would not have minded - I had to write my story in English -- but isn't it peculiar how teachers continue to affect us with that tiny twinge of guilt?

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