Suryatati A. Manan: JP/Bunga Sirait

When attending a function, there is one thing Tanjungpinang city mayor Suryatati A. Manan always makes sure she has ready a pantun, or poetic quatrain.

“I always prepare a pantun to open and close events. Outside the city, I also introduce myself to the public through pantun,” she said.

Once such example was at the 9th Culture Night of the Bahasa Indonesia Congress in Jakarta, where the education minister, Prof. Dr. Bambang Sudibyo, presented her with an award for her efforts in preserving language and local literature.

In Bintan island’s Tanjungpinang, the capital of Riau Islands province, poetic quatrains and other genres in traditional Malay poetry, such as gurindam, seloka, karmina and others, are not reserved solely for literature classes.

Rather, in this bustling port city, the old forms of literature have survived for generations — and are used in everyday communications.

Billboards hold pantun reminding people to pay their taxes, youngsters use pantun to flirt via SMS and it is a custom for the quatrains to be recited at weddings.

“Pantun are an important way for Malay people to express their feelings,” Suryatati says. “And you have to be clever in using words, because pantun have to be concise and have to have beauty in them,”

Although the city’s love for classical Malay poetry has endured for centuries, it was Suryatati, or Tatik, as she is called, who officially made Tanjungpinang the home of pantun.

In her first year as the city’s first elected mayor, Tatik — dubbed “the Queen of Pantun” — established a contest for a slogan to encapsulate the city’s identity. In 2001, the winning entry was “Kota Gurindam Negeri Pantun” (The City of Gurindam, The Land of Pantun).

“With so many historical treasures of classical Malay literature held in this city, we have to move fast to claim them before some other country tries to steal them from us,” she says, with a meaningful smile.

Pantun lessons have been added as an extracurricular activity for schools at all levels. Sharpening future poets’ skills, every Monday for the past couple of years, elementary students have been asked to create their own pantun.

“Sometimes I’m still amazed to see how these children at such a young age can make such fresh creations,” Tatik says.

Tatik also plans to build a “Pantun Castle” to record one million pantun created by students. “So far we already have 10,000 pantun. We should be able to make it next year,” said the 56-year-old.

Her support of poetry is not surprising given her own reputation as an accomplished poet. Since 2006, the mother of four has written 184 poems, published in four books. Her latest anthology, Surat untuk Suami (Letters to my Husband), which was launched last month in Tanjungpinang, is a kind of autobiography, as the poems walk the reader through her childhood, adolescence, marriage and widowhood.

More than 200 people crowded into the city’s small Aisyah Sulaiman art house to hear their mayor read the poetry she wrote in remembrance of her late husband. When she read her poem “Letter to my Husband”, which tells of a lonely widow longing for her late beloved, Tatik delivered it as effortlessly as if she were reading a letter. However, the poignant words moved some members of the audience to tears: “... a promise to be together till death do us part / a promise of newlyweds on a honeymoon / a promise to never remarry, if my husband should leave before me ...”

Yet after finishing the recital, Tatik surprised everyone with a joke: “Well, actually, it depends who wants to propose to me,” bringing laughter to those who had felt her sorrow.

At the end of the event, Tatik explained the reason for her flippant remark: “I have to do that, or else

I will cry. I don’t want to cry in front of other people.”

In person, Tatik is reserved, yet many of her poems blatantly express her feelings about a number of issues: governance, public complaints, corruption, prostitution, journalists and public servants. She has found that her simple “meaning behind the meaning” style of poetry can be a way for public and government to communicate subtly. Another piece, “Toilet”, shows how she also uses her poetry for self-criticism, noting her shame at the problems with poor hygiene in public toilets.

Tatik also speaks openly about her personal problems through her poems. When a legal case in 1997 raised questions about her identity, she responded with “Melayukah Aku?” (Am I Malay?). In that poem, she confesses she was adopted from a Chinese couple, but, raised by Malay parents, feels truly Malay. Palpable among the lines is her sorrow at realizing that even though her parents never doubted her heart is Malay, others still do.

Behind another poem “A Mother’s Plea for her Daughter” deals with a complicated case of deception between her first daughter and her son-in-law that caused a brouhaha in local media. She wrote the poem in bed in the middle of the night.

“I wrote it with tears in my eyes. I really wanted people to know the truth,” she said.

“Thankfully the case is over and now my daughter is happily remarried,” added Tatik, who lives with the couple and their children at her house in Sei Ladi, away from the heart of the city.

Many wonder why, given her public position, Tatik is willing to expose elements of her private life.

Some warn that expressing personal issues could backfire on her at some point, but others claim that Tatik’s simple and unpretentious poems have brought her closer to the public, meaning they can relate better to her as a city mayor, a mother, a woman, a widow, or simply just as a person.

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