Poetry and pain among headlines

Poet Amol Titus' new book, released in Jakarta last month, explores the pain and violence of newspaper headlines

The Jakarta Post
Tuesday, July 17, 2007

By Cameron Broadhurst

"If I read your paper every day," a visitor to Jakarta once said to this paper's editor after a week of perusing the morning edition, "it seems like the world is coming to an end."

Indeed. You don't need to be an avid consumer of the media to notice the ongoing sense of crisis that fills the headlines, whether it is environmental, social or economic.

With the expansion of global information there has been a corresponding increase in artists and writers dealing with global issues. The popularity of non-fiction books and documentaries has grown dramatically, and a new range of authors are dealing with all corners of the world for international, not just local, audiences.

Writers' responses to world issues -- whether they be journalists, poets or authors -- is the concern of local poet Amol Titus, who released a new volume of poems, Modern Traumas, in Jakarta last month.

Accompanying the poems are collages of headlines, gathered together in thematic groups such as opposites and pairs, consumerism and violence. Titus explains the collages as an investigation of what journalists are writing in common with himself.

"I found validation in some of the themes I was exploring in the headlines.

"In journalistic writing the latitude is quite limited. You have to look at your audience and relate the context. In literary writing you're not so restricted."

A long history of authors engaged in social problems offers many rich sources, but do these sources offer inspiration or despair?

Titus quoted a number of authors. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said: "The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all."

It is a powerful statement, but one free of judgment on the human condition, unlike John Steinbeck's: "The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, of dredging up to the light our darkness."

Titus, who has spent his life between India and Indonesia, reads a wide range of materials, from 'boring financial journalism' and environmental articles to the canon of English literature. He said the shortened attention span of the public today and an increasingly visual world meant a novel such as Moby Dick could never be published now.

This is one reason he has turned to sketches and collages to augment his work, focusing on themes like disparities between rich and poor, violence, lack of leadership and environmental destruction in the world.

His earlier work, Darkness at Bamiyan, used poetic license in an original way to deal with an actual event -- creating a dialogue on the two giant Buddha statues that were destroyed in Afghanistan in 2001.

But with a few exceptions, the poems in Modern Traumas seem fixated on an endlessly corrupt world, to the extent that reading the work is almost like being assaulted.

There is an overwhelming sense of disappointment, and even the few sparks of light in the world that Titus sees, like Nelson Mandela, are apparently being betrayed:

"In the chill of character vacuum By modern misleaders of men Swigging toasts of spin doctors Rigging presents, digging futures Far removed from a lonely Mandela Unaccompanied in his dying glow."

Newspapers' daily litany of tragedies and conflict may leave others feeling a sense of hopelessness too, yet the media does not often aim to evoke fear and despair. At the launch, chief editor of The Jakarta Post, Endy Bayuni, said compassion for the marginalized was a key value amongst journalists.

"A more humane civil society -- that's our concern and objective when we select the news," he said. He admitted concentrating on the downsides of the system could be viewed as overtly negative, but believed strongly in a community of readers bound by a similar outlook.

"Our readers have the shared values and shared concerns of those who know about Indonesia."

Endy said despite the concept of objectivity in journalism, "your work reflects your values", which is exactly where the worlds of the journalist and author converge.

Titus and Endy may look to develop the discussion into a lecture format for communications students.

Date Posted: 7/17/2007