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| REWARDING COURAGE | |
 November 25, 1998 
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The Committee to Protect Journalists, a non-profit organization dedicated to monitoring abuses against the press and promoting press freedom, recently awarded five journalists with its International Press Freedom Award. Robert Pinsky reads a poem by one of the winners, Goenawan Mohamad, founder and Editor of Indonesia's most widely circulated weekly.
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Goenawan Mohamad |
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About That Man Killed Sometime Around Election Day. "Dear God, give me your voice." The silence was the silence that followed the dog's howl when the watchman found the corpse behind the dike. Face down, as if seeking the paddy's fragrant warmth. But beneath the moonlight the acrid smell and the man's cold cheeks were strange. Then others came - with flashlights, torches and fireflies - but no one recognized him. 'He's not from around here,' the watchman said. "Give to me your voice." Beneath the lantern in the ward office they discovered the gaping wounds. Shadows swayed rapidly, the verandah was flush with whispers. The man had no identity card. He had no name. No party affiliation. No party symbol. He had no one to cry for him because we could not cry. What might his religion be? "Noble Cartographer, where is my homeland?"
"Dear God, give to me your voice." |
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JIM
LEHRER: Another winner of the International Press Freedom Award this
year was Goenawan Mohamad, founder and Editor of Tempo Magazine,
Indonesia's most widely circulated weekly. His magazine was officially
banned in 1994, but reopened in October, following the ouster of Indonesian
President Suharto. Mr. Mohamad is also a poet. And we asked NewsHour
contributor Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States, to read
one of his poems.
ROBERT
PINSKY, Poet Laureate: Goenawan Mohamad has related poetry to political
life by saying that for him poetry resists the totalitarian political
regimes' program of transforming the individual into a new kind of person,
according to an ideology. Poetry, he says, by providing a sane, private
space of integrity, resists totalitarian power. Possibly that idea is
related to why Goenawan Mohamad's poem about an election-time murder
ends with a paper hat, a kite, and a description of birds against an
evening sky. Here is the poem, as translated by John McGlynn: 
The
day after the next they read about it on the front page of the paper.
And there was a person who cried with no one knowing why. And a person
who didn't cry, no one knowing why. And a tired boy who fashioned a
hat from the morning paper, that was later stolen by the wind. Look!
See the kites pasted to the sky, resting on the breeze. And the flock
of evening birds alighting on the wires, as the cranes flee toward twilight's
end, crossing the barren field and long streaks of color like dissipating
smoke.