Each year, when the Swedish Academy announces the winners of the prestigious Nobel Prize, people almost always debate about the merits of giving one to certain winners.

For more than five decades, Bob Dylan has had a stellar career in music and inspired an untold number of fans, but the Swedish Academy’s decision to award him a Nobel Prize in Literature in late October last year got people talking. Critics were aghast, while fans were overjoyed with the announcement. As for Dylan himself, he was silent.

But on Wednesday, the Swedish Academy revealed Dylan will receive his Nobel literature prize diploma and medal in the next few days in Stockholm, where he is due to perform this weekend.

Gang without Borders, a brand new discussion platform, in its debut discussion earlier this month, decided to tackle the issue by inviting folk-singer and writer Harlan Boer, Dylan enthusiast Taufiq Rahman and American journalist Sam Howard to share their insights.

The discussion, held at a coffee house near the University of Indonesia (UI) campus in Depok, West Java, kicked off with Kinanti Munggareni, one of the platform’s founders, by screening testimonials about Dylan from renowned poet Sapardi Djoko Darmono and the lead singer of indie band Efek Rumah Kaca, Cholil Mahmud. Before long, the discussion got heated over what there is to love and resent about Dylan.

“People often get Dylan wrong in this country. Some people may possibly associate Dylan with songs about love of nature, or that he was humorous, just like Iwan Fals, who is known for putting humor in his songs, just because of their similarities,” said Harlan Boer, who is known for his signature acoustic guitar-based songs.

“People have different interpretations of his songs. For Dylan fans here, it’s really hard to understand him since he seems like he is reciting his own lyrics, rather than singing melodically.”

Harlan unwittingly pointed to the reason Dylan was not too popular in the country. Even the legendary poet Sutardji Calzoum Bachri, who is known for his Beat-inspired poetry, claimed to have not known about Dylan and only learned about the lyrics to his songs after conducting a Google search on the internet. In a testimonial video broadcast during the discussion, Sutardji said he thought Dylan deserves a Nobel Prize for his lyrics.

Not only Sutardji, a few of the people who attended the discussion admitted they heard about him being a winner of the Nobel Prize only after Gang without Borders published a poster about the issue. Subsequently, the topic lead to another issue of why it had to be Dylan who won the Nobel.

The discussion eventually turned quite intense after the conversation began to analyze Dylan’s lyrics, to see if Dylan’s lyrics could fit in the category set by modern-day literature.

Musicians, artists, poetry enthusiasts and curious teenagers took turns expressing their own judgements of the main problematic issue, finding it very interesting to understand each other’s notions and clarify the ambiguity of the term “literature.”

“Literature has already been seen as somewhat an output of the printed media, or else it isn’t literature. With the common perspective of literature, we need to trace back to the meaning of literature itself,” said Aditya, an activist from UI’s literary scene said.

Addressing the uniqueness of Dylan compared to other lyrical geniuses, artists and poets, Harlan considered Dylan’s greatness to have come from the blending of his traditional instruments with his observational lyrics, which could transform his music into more than the product of a popular culture.

Howard, an American citizen who swears he lives by the music of Dylan, also felt the same way when he told everyone in the room a fact hardly known by Indonesians: that Dylan’s music had been taken seriously in his home country, to the point where a number of universities and college had their own Dylan department.

As the medium changes, perspectives adapt too. Whether people agree or disagree about the merits of giving the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Dylan, the American literature scene had proved that there is no limit to what could be categorized as literature and the decision of the Swedish Academy to give the award to Dylan, however controversial it was, it could make the Nobels more relevant to a wider audience.
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The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post.

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