Songs of the Heart

Singer Anggun C. Sasmi listens to the echoes of her past in her life today.

 

 

Anggun C. Sasmi does not find inspiration to write songs every day, but she says she keeps her “antennae” up, always aware of her surroundings. Airports – where she spends a lot of time – are a current fascination for how they reflect their respective peoples and countries.

 

Denmark, she finds, is neat and utilitarian, and the people speak in appropriately hushed tones. Italy and France are “loud and disorganized”; people-watching will take in stressed-out individuals as well as a fashionista who has miraculously pulled together a perfect look for her early-morning flight.

 

And what of Jakarta, the city of her birth, where she started her career as one of the country’s teen “lady rockers” but left almost 20 years ago to pursue her international dreams?

 

“It represents how slow things are here,” the 37-year-old said in November, upon her return for a greatest hits concert and promotional appearances as a spokeswoman for Pantene hair-care products. “In the rest of the world, people are power-walking through airports. At Cengkareng, they are walking slowly, walking and eating and shopping. Probably because the flights are delayed.”

 

Lest her comment be construed as ragging on Indonesia from the now French national, note that it is delivered with a good-natured laugh. She is aware of how her choice to pursue a career abroad is sometimes used against her, or as she told me in an interview in 2010, mimicking her detractors, “she has completely sold out, she married a bule [foreigner], how dare she say she is Indonesian when she holds a French passport, etc.”

 

She made that statement at a very sensitive time, when she had protested a local news portal’s decision to omit her from a report on an event she attended as UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization.

 

Today, even though the PR minder’s pre-interview list of “do’s and don’ts” included strict prohibitions against questions on religion, her first husband and her “passport”, Anggun seems thoroughly at home curled up in an armchair at her suite at a five-star Jakarta hotel.

 

She is here so often for her commitments that some people think she has “pulang kampung” (come home) for good, she says.

 

“They will meet me and ask, ‘where do you live in Jakarta?’ No, I don’t live in Jakarta, although I spend a lot of time here.”

 

She does not even have to worry about satisfying her famous craving for Tehbotol. The cooperative at the Indonesian Embassy in Paris is replete with goodies from home. “And if you have a special order, then it will be delivered in a couple of months,” she says.

 

World of Her Own

 

Anggun’s first album as a skinny, big-voiced preteen was Dunia Aku Punya (The World is Mine) in 1986. She made true on that promise by leaving behind her trademark beret to go abroad at age 20, first to London and later to Paris, and learning a new language (French). It led to a huge international hit with 1997’s Snow on the Sahara, still one of the top-selling international albums by an Asian artist.

 

She says she was in danger of “believing in my own promotion” before she left Indonesia.

 

“I probably would have followed the same path as everybody else, doing albums as endorsement deals and sinetron. But maybe I would have been happy getting married, with a couple of kids, and asking my husband if I could perform,” she adds wryly.

 

In the years since, she has had several more hit albums (Chrysalis, Luminescence), lost her father to lung cancer, had a daughter, Kirana, in 2007, with the French writer Cyril Montana and also, along with Jane Birkin and Charlotte Rampling, become one of the expatriate entertainers embraced by the French public as one of their own.

 

“I think that they are happy when they see that you are trying to learn their language and culture,” says Anggun, who will represent France at the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest.

 

She has also grown up. The title of her self-produced 2011 album, Echoes, pays homage to the musically gifted nymph of Greek mythology who was ripped to pieces. In a sense she is putting in order the sometimes discomfiting experiences of her life through her songs.

 

“The songs are very personal, and I talk about some things that are very painful. They will always be a part of me, but it’s also a reassurance that it’s no longer in me.”

 

She takes a long, hard look at herself in “Impossible”, singing “maybe I’m just like any other girl/who eats too much and sometimes too little/…Not a saint but not quite the devil.”

 

“It’s about knowing, accepting and taming yourself,” she says. “I fight with myself and my contradictions, and it’s impossible to change me.”

 

It was also time to put to rest her grief over the loss of her father, the writer Darto Singo, seven years ago.

 

In “Eternal”, she sings, “one love goes and comes in this life circle/a story that goes around with no end/made by love and flesh we’re only mortals/but somehow something will always remain.”

 

“It’s a song about losing someone, but ultimately it’s about how he remains eternal in us,” she says.

 

She regrets that he did not get to see his granddaughter –“he would have loved her ... I will say, eyang [grandpa] was like this,” she says. “When she asks what happened to him, I tell her, ‘well, he smoked a lot ...’”

 

Another song on the album, “Buy Me Happiness” – “all those fancy things fail to make my heart sing” – is a stinging rejection of materialism. Because, today, it’s Kirana who makes Anggun’s heart sing and keeps her grounded.

 

“The center of my life has changed. I’ve said goodbye to my social life. Whatever happens, when she cries, I need to feed her. At home, it’s ‘I need a drink, fix my hair, I want to go to school’. I don’t have all this,” she says, looking over toward her retinue of a manager and makeup and PR people.

 

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Anggun says she has also found meaning from her role with the UN, and identifies with her mission because money was tight during her childhood.

 

“When you grow up with that, it always stays with you, and the good thing is you have a sense of responsibility. With my role with the UN, I get to be taken seriously, I am not just an entertainer. There is an actual mission, and an actual role. And if the worst comes to the worst this is something I can continue to do. I want to be useful, not to be superhero but for the world around me.”

 

Her fans, for whom she held the Jakarta concert, are also a source of happiness. In the elevator going up to her suite she had made sure to sign a CD for one of the members of her “Anggunesia” fan club.

 

“I always want to make them happy. They will put everything on hold to follow me. At the end of the day, that’s a pleasure for me, too.”

 

During her Jakarta concert, she charmed local fans by sprinkling some Javanese phrases into her repartee, and gamely donning a beret for the closing number, her old hit “Tua Tua Keladi” about an aging playboy. She also gave a “bonsoir” shout out to a group of French fans who had come to see her.

 

It was indicative of how she moves between two lands, her birthplace and her adopted homeland, mentioning both “pulang kampung” and having a “rendezvous” with fans in the same sentence. Her rendition of Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise” (The Javanese) seemed destined to be.

 

The song “A Stranger” from Echoes discusses her identity issues.

 

“The path I’m drawn into/… Made my heart torn in two/Looking in the mirror/I’m a stranger/To this land and air/Belong to elsewhere.”

 

It’s the sense of statelessness of the long-term expatriate, of being part of many societies – including all those interesting airport lounges – but no longer belonging to one.

 

“It’s a perpetual feeling of, well, being a stranger wherever I go,” she says.

 

But while the words of “A Stranger” are poignant, they are not regretful. In the same song, she acknowledges that it is the result of pursuing her “dream to fulfill”.

 

She went her own way, and made her own choices. The echoes of the past are with her, and she has made peace with them.

 

So is she happy?

 

“My father prepared me, he said as an artist you will never be fully satisfied, there will be a lot of frustrations. And that is true in that I always want to be better in what I am doing.”

 

Nevertheless, she is grateful for what she has.

 

“I will probably never know what satisfaction is, but I’m blessed with many things. And for that I am happy.”

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