Report on Acep Zamzam Noor’s Visit to UPI

On February 20, 2009, our University was lucky enough to be able to invite Mr. Acep Zamzam Noor, an Indonesian Poet whose poems already got international recognition, over to some kind of seminar which was held by English Department of UPI.
The Seminar was opened by Mrs. Safrina as the MC, right after Mr. Acep entered the room. But before we got to the main theme of the Seminar, Mr. Abu announced that they were going to give out some award and certifications to some students, to which lecturers come forward to the front of the room to give the aforementioned award to the students, one different lecturer for each of the categories available. After all the awards were already given out, the main theme was started with Mr. Acep’s company, a man with unruly hair and a weird sense of fashion who was a part of Sundanese Department of UPI, read out the basic biography of Mr. Acep, such as his full name, date and place of birth, the schools he went to, etc. After that, the man also read out a few of Mr. Acep’s recent poems, before finally gave the microphone to Mr. Acep and let him have the floor.

After that, Mr. Acep basically talked about his poems, what inspired him to write, how did he get such inspiration, and some other information regarding poetry-writing. He also mentioned a bit about his background, and how it affected him so in his writings. In this session, Mr. Acep told us to just ask if there was something we didn’t understand or perhaps if we felt like sharing our own opinion. I was really surprised by the number of students who raised their hands in order to be able to ask something to Mr. Acep directly. From the many questions arise, most of them were about Mr. Acep’s pesantren background and how that seemed to clash or kind of weird, given that there were many sexual implications using a woman’s body as a media in his poems. Mr. Acep then explained that he was merely using a woman’s body as a media in order to describe how Mighty the Lord is, and nothing more, as womanly body is mighty in itself as it is beautiful, and its beauty is also the proof of how great Allah the Almighty is. That was at least what he intended. He also addressed the issue on how people typical’s thoughts regarding pesantren was that it is a religious institution where talks about sex or just women in general are such a taboo, when in fact, according to him, such talks are actually quite freely often being a topic of open discussion in traditional pesantrens, such as the one where he grew up in. He also mentioned how he was one of the people who opposed the idea about plan of the rights of Anti-pornography in Indonesia, the reason being that if such rights were really realized, then many Ulama and Kyai (Islamic religious leaders) were going to be the first ones to go to prison, since they often explained in great details about women body and intercourse – especially to married couples and spouses – during Fiqih course. Another reason was because sometimes we didn’t realize, but there were some traditional sweet, confectionaries, or just general traditional food that using such vulgar terms for their names in local language like sundanese. He argues that if the rights of anti-pornography were realized for real, then he was afraid that these traditional sweets were going to be banished because of their names, and people who said the names of these sweets are also going to prison because the names of the sweets happen to be vulgar in meaning.

Other than that, Mr. Acep also said in his opinion, poetry is another voice or alternative voice from the reality of this world (suara lain dari kenyataan dunia ini), and that the meaning in a poem is way deeper than it usually looks, as what important in a poem is how the message is delivered, and not what the message itself. According to him, in order to be able to write something, we need to observe our surrounding as often as possible, as our writing really shows the way we look at our surrounding and this world.