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Azhari: The author of Aceh
JP/Prodita Sabarini Melancholia has always been close to Acehnese writer Azhari
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JP/Prodita Sabarini
Melancholia has always been close to Acehnese writer Azhari. During the oppressive military occupation in his homeland, he voiced his people's woes through short stories.
The sad events during the war between the military and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), from 1989 to 1998, inspired Azhari to write his stories, collected into an award-winning anthology titled Perempuan Pala (Nutmeg Woman), in 2004.
However, when another wave of sorrow hit Aceh in 2004, it didn't inspire Azhari to write. Instead, it temporarily killed his passion for writing.
In the two years following the tsunami which struck Aceh on Boxing day, 2004, Azhari stopped writing. The tsunami killed nearly 170,000 people in Aceh, including Azhari's parents and only sister, flattening large areas of Indonesia's easternmost province.
While he was voicing the sadness of the Acehnese people, he couldn't write about the tsunami just yet, Azhari told The Jakarta Post recently.
"I don't think it's time," he said in hilly Ubud, Bali. Azhari was in Bali for the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival last month.
"It's too soon. There are still unresolved problems such as the reconstruction of houses for refugees.
"And I don't want to exploit their sadness," he said.
The short stories in Perempuan Pala, Azhari said, were something else. Azhari wanted to depict the situation during the occupation through literature. His stories include tales of missing fathers and nameless buried bodies.
"Aceh's people were in pain. They were suffering. I wanted to write about their sadness and their pain - being oppressed, while guns and the military were everywhere.
"I was very honest in my writing. I write what I see and what I hear. I tried to convey something about Aceh that journalism rarely does.
"You know, the kind of journalism at that time was embedded journalism. With literature, we can go deeper."
For Perempuan Pala, Azhari was awarded the Free Word Award by the Netherlands-based Poets of All Nations in 2005.
Azhari started writing when he was in junior high school. His first short story, Karnaval, was published in a local newspaper when he was a high-school freshman. Now, Azhari's short stories have been published in a number of national newspapers and local media outlets.
Azhari's first encounter with storybooks was in elementary school in Lamjamee, on the outskirts of Banda Aceh.
"I found a box full of books at my school.
They were donations from someone. I took them home with me after checking it was OK with the school guard. He said they were being thrown out."
Azhari became enraptured with stories.
"I love writing that has a sense of humor. I find good humor intelligent," he said.
His favorite authors are Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, Lebanese Amin Maalouf, British-Pakistani Tariq Ali and Japanese Haruki Murakami, all of whom have a tinge of humor in their work.
After two years in writing hiatus, Azhari is now working on a new novel about pirates of 17th century Aceh. He threw out his previous plan for a novel, due to its material being lost in the tsunami.
Azhari has also incorporated humor in his latest work.
"Why write a novel on 17th century Aceh? Because it's so far from my time, I can write about it without getting too involved with it," he said.
"If I wrote about the tsunami, I would have to deal with feelings that I want to set aside for the moment."
Azhari says he may consider writing with a backdrop of the 2004 tsunami "in five or 10 years from now".
Now Azhari lives at his office at the Tikar Pandan Community NGO in Banda Aceh. Azhari has pledged he will not own a home until all tsunami refugees have places of their own.
This, he says is his way of pushing the Aceh-Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency (BRR) to complete their work in building homes for tsunami refugees.
"Four years later, I still see people living in refugee camps," Azhari said.
The agency's mandate ends in 2009. Azhari believes the agency would not build a house for him, since many other houses for refugees have yet to be completed.
Tikar Pandan is an organization Azhari founded with friends from Syiah Kuala University, Banda Aceh. Through the NGO, he now works at a grass-roots level to facilitate villagers in education, financial independence and political awareness.
The NGO also has a writing school, Sekolah Do Karim, using the name of an Acehnese poet who lived during Aceh's struggle against the Dutch.
"The Do Karim School teaches a little bit of literature. It trains high school students and housewives how to write. I think writing is a political means to express opinions, and we need to nurture this in Aceh because we have a very strong oral tradition."
