The Blue Mountains of the Bukit Barisan
Rudy Kousbroek and Sitor Situmorang about Sumatra
By Dirk A. Buiskool
Much has been written about Sumatra, but few have presented the island as beautifully as Rudy Kousbroek (1929–2010) and Sitor Situmorang (1924–2014). Two writers, a Dutchman and an Indonesian, both born on Sumatra. In their youth they never met, in later years they became friends. Kousbroek wrote rave reviews for Situmorang’s oeuvre and the latter dedicated a poem to Rudy Kousbroek for his seventieth birthday.
Sitor Situmorang
Sitor Situmorang was born in the valley of Harianboho on the shores of Lake Toba. As the son of local nobility, Sitor received a Dutch education. He became a journalist and made a name for himself with his reports of the peace negotiations between the Netherlands and the new republic of Indonesia. After the transfer of sovereignty, he was invited to the Netherlands by the Foundation for Cultural Cooperation between the Netherlands and Indonesia. He then spent two years in Paris and in 1956 in New York and Los Angeles. Sitor Situmorang was a restless mind, always looking for new impressions. In Paris in particular, he became fascinated by European literature. At the same time, he was homesick for Sumatra, so both themes, the European influences and the traditional Batak culture and Lake Toba, come to the fore in his literary work.
Lake toba
I long for the joy of the child, / Who awaits the arrival of his father, /
Who brings a flute from the mountains, / A reed from the swamp. /
../ I’m homesick for my sisters, / they’re homesick for me, /
I am homesick, homesick for the voice of Mother, who is buried on the shore of the lake. / I’m homesick for the church bell that rings all the time, / …
On Christmas night, the story of the three Wise Men from the East, / Come to honor the Son of Man, / yonder, on the shore of Lake Toba, / where I was born. [1]
When he returned to Indonesia in the late 1950s, he quickly belonged to the literary elite. He wrote short stories, poems and translated political essays by Eduard du Perron, among others, into Indonesian. A critic of Suharto, he was imprisoned without trial in 1967 and only released in 1976. The year of his release he was awarded the Hadiah Sastra Nasional (National Literature Prize of Indonesia). In the years that followed he lived in the Netherlands, Islamabad, Jakarta, Paris and sometimes he was back in Harianboho. [2] About his childhood at Lake Toba he wrote in De Oude Tijger:
In my youth, between 1924 and 1931, the people of the valley of Harianboho were still cut off from the outside world; they lived from agriculture and retail trade in the valley… As a small child I had little contact with my parents. From the second year of life, the village is directly involved in social activities with children of the same age; tending sheep, fishing in the river and lake, hunting, stealing fruit from the others and attending adat ceremonies in the midst of the group when animals were sacrificed to the gods. [3]
In the 1980s he taught at Leiden University. He wrote the anthropological study Toba na Sae about the Batak peoples and Pulo Batu an opera about the Batak. In 2006 he received the Hadiah Sastra Pusat Bahasa (Literature Prize of the Center for Language) and the South East Asian Writers Award in Bangkok. During the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali in 2010, Sitor Situmorang was honored with the first Saraswati Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. On his death, President Joko Widodo tweeted: My condolences on the passing of our great national writer, Sitor Situmorang.[4]
Rudy Kousbroek
Rudy Kousbroek spent his childhood on the Poeloe Radja plantation near Kisaran on Sumatra, where his father was a planter. During his school days, he attended boarding schools in Pematang Siantar and Brastagi until the Japanese invasion. Kousbroek distinguished himself in his essays by his ‘rational passion’, businesslike and at the same time passionate. With Rudy Kousbroek it was not so much about purely intellectual analyses, but mainly about the feeling he got when he read or heard something. Such as when reading the letters of Harm Kamerlingh Onnes from 1923 about Sumatra. Kousbroek:
When I read these letters it sometimes feels like I hear my father’s voice. [5]
During WW2 the Kousbroek family was interned in various camps on Sumatra, in 1945 they repatriated to the Netherlands. Rudy later left for Paris where he founded the magazine Braak with Remco Campert in 1950. Rudy Kousbroek wrote about the most diverse subjects, from literature, junkyards, eroticism, mathematics, visual arts, cultural philosophy to Chinese politics, but especially about his childhood in the former Dutch East Indies. With his clear, ironic, always curious humorous essays, he became the face of the Cultural Supplement of NRC Handelsblad. His most famous book was published in 1992, Het Oost-Indisch kampsyndroom (The East Indian Campsyndrom), a collection of intellectual and at the same time highly sensory essays with memories, associations and feelings related to his childhood in his country of origin. In 1975 Kousbroek was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize and in 1994 he received an honorary doctorate in philosophy from the University of Groningen as “most prominent representative of the essayistic tradition in the Netherlands from the 1970s onward.” Like Sitor Situmorang, Rudy Kousbroek cherished his childhood memories:
It is already getting dark in the garden, but the flying dogs, which pass high in the sky, still catch light. This is not a dreamed or fantasized setting; it is real, or at least it once was, it has existed, even beyond my memory. Where? There is, it is clear, only one place in the world where such a scene has been able to take place: Indonesia. Such wonders are daily work in that archipelago… Darkness that spreads as if someone is pouring Indian ink (the name says it all) over a watercolor. Nights full of demonic noise, with flies flying through the sky burning. Smoking mountains. A roof full of monkeys. Mornings fresh and quiet as the birth of the world, pink and mother-of-pearl… Life in paradise, childhood memories. [6]
The blue mountains of the Bukit Barisan
It was in Paris where Rudy Kousbroek met Sitor Situmorang and where the latter gave him some poems. In the poem ‘Message to a friend’ in the collection To Love, to Wander, Sitor Situmorang described his captivity during the Suharto regime. When he finally walks out of the prison gate after 11 years, the poem reads:
I turned my eyes to the southern sky / Searching for the two peaks in the Preanger Mountains: / the Goenoeng Gedé / and the Goenoeng Salak / Whom I arose always knew / Without fail / Soaring above / The vegetation and the clouds. / Eternal / forever / waiting / ready for the moment / that I would emerge from behind those high walls /.
This was the moment of recognition for Rudy Kousbroek. When he walked out of the gate of the Si Rengo Rengo camp near Rantauprapat in August 1945 during the liberation from the Japanese, the first thing he saw was the blue mountains of the Bukit Barisan, which he looked out every day, and thought: I forget those my whole life no more. [7]
Kousbroek described the stories and poems of Sitor Situmorang as subtle, tender, longing, resigned, described with great purity, a highlight in Indonesian literature. Then there were the personal factors, because Situmorang’s stories are set in the Lake Toba region, in the Batak countries, where Kousbroek himself spent holidays as a child and where he kept so many memories. [8]
That the appreciation was mutual was apparent from the poem about the Sibayak, the volcano that Rudy Kousbroek looked out for for years from his boarding school in Brastagi. Sitor Situmorang dedicated this poem to Rudy Kousbroek in 2000.
Poem about the volcano Sibayak
Gift for Rudy Kousbroek’s 70th birthday
Stones of memory / your top rises / above the clouds
clothed in the light / of the first morning on earth /
memories of your childhood / primary school
in the highlands / of the Karoland /
The Sibayak volcano / defends / captured / unconscious
saved as a monument / forever /
symbol of desire / for all your life
memories in memories / too beautiful to see /
too close to / in a row of volcanoes
transparent jewelry / along the equator /
on the island of Sumatra. [9]
This article has been published in Dutch titled “De Blauwe Bergen van de Bukit Barisan” in Moesson Magazine, January 2022. A longer version of this article has been published in English in two parts at April 18 and April 30, 2021, in Latitudes, titled “In Search of a Lost Fatherland”.
Dirk A. Buiskool PhD, is a Dutch historian based in Medan.
References
[1] Kees Snoek Sitor Situmorang in: De Tweede Ronde. Jaargang 9 · dbnl
[2] Kompas 26–9–2004.
[3] Situmorang S. De Oude Tijger, De Geus, 1996:14, 15.
[4] Anton Kurnia Blogger in: https://www.dw.com/id/mengenang-sitor-menerjemahkan-sang-penyair/a-37706034.
[5] Buiskool, D.A. De reis van Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, Verloren, 1999: 9.
[6] Kousbroek, R. Morgen spelen wij verder Meulenhoff 1993: 215.
[7] Kousbroek, R. ‘Het moeras in de bergen; De Indische nostalgie van Sitor Situmorang;, NRC Handelsblad, 20–2–1998.
[8] Kousbroek, R. ‘Door geen omzien gekweld’. NRC Handelsblad, 31–1–1997.
[9] Situmorang S.in: Pesan Danau Toba, juli 2000. Vertaling D.A. Buiskool.
