On a balmy June day in 2012, the writer Michael Ondaatje delivered his Lectio Magistralis speech in Florence. From the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, he reflected on our epoch, and spoke of Mongrel Art. Ondaatje described his work belonging to Art that reaches across the divide, art that draws inspiration over the waters, art that communes freely with literary co-conspirators, past and present, and draws associations beyond one’s culture. He mapped out how this Art moves between forms—from literature into film, from music to writing—with such a fearless sweep that it is not bound by culture, mindsets or tradition. To create such work, a 360-degree inter-connected vision is needed. And inspiration. While leaving the halls painted by Florentine masters, I thought, is this the profile of a “Renaissance man” in our brave new world?

Goenawan Mohamad, activist, journalist, editor, essayist, poet, commentator, theatre director and playwright, has been doing just that for 40 years in his weekly column for Tempo, the Indonesian weekly magazine that he founded in 1971. His output of essays is staggering. His vision is uniquely Indonesian, yet breathtakingly universal, setting his work apart from his contemporary South- Asian writers. He too is a purveyor of Mongrel Art.

As much at home in Paris as in Java, Goenawan is the leading political thinker in Indonesia. But his reach is far deeper than mere politics. His writing is stirring and original – a sledgehammer of thought. Just as Orhan Pamuk offers his cosmopolitan view from Istanbul, Goenawan offers the same from his window in Jakarta.

His writing is lucid, illuminating, urgent, timeless. Critics have called him the “Borges of Southeast Asia” and compared his bestessays to Italo Calvino (whose Invisible Cities, he often cites). Goenawan is as much at home drawing lessons from Indonesia’s complex history as he is reflecting on world cultural figures, events and places (Martin Luther King, 9/11, or the Ka’aba). He enjoys engaging with philosophers (Aristotle, Kant or Confucius), writers (Goethe, Garcia Marquez or Camus), and psychoanalysts (Jung, Freud, or Lacan). He delights in exploring the ancient myths of the Mahabharata, the Arabian Nights, Exodus, or the thoughts of Laozi, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas, or even the mystic revelations of al-Hallaj, Meister Eckhart, and Rumi.

Who else would insert in an essay on Jerusalem, a quote of the poet William Blake, and then draw parallels with Oedipus, Hamlet, and Arjuna of the Bhagavad Gita, before ending with the words of the guitarist John Lennon, ‘God is a concept by which we measure pain’?

Who would begin an essay entitled Tso Wang, by comparing fundamentalism to digital technology and then suggest ‘both are virtual. They don’t touch the soil,’ before citing the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a 10th century Javanese mystical poem described as ‘sepi, sepah, samun’ (silent, vacant, secret), and ending with the 4th century Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi, of the Daoist School who said ‘the highest stage of knowledge is stillness without movement within what cannot be known absolutely with reason, a state called tso wang?

Who else would describe a forest in north Bali with such an arresting poetry: ‘At that moment, in that green half-light, the everlasting appeared. Eternity moved. Each second seemed to slip and fuse into the chlorophyll of the trees. Centuries seemed to tremble in the forks of the tree trunks.’?

Or capture this solar eclipse over Borobudur: ‘It was as though the Buddha statues in their stupas had suddenly gone mute. These stones had been standing for centuries at Borobudur without movement. But when the eclipse happened and the strange filtered light fell even to the distant hills, the sensation of silence was sudden. Astonishing.’?  Few contemporary writers possess such dexterity and immediacy. Or cut so cleanly with their samurai pen.

The essay is an important literary form in Indonesia, where much significant writing is first published in newspapers and journals (and now blogs and other web-based forms). Goenawan Mohamad has developed the essay as no other Indonesian writer. Far from being merely a journalistic column commenting on recent events, Goenawan’s essays speak to the universal, drawing deep insights from the commonplace and far afield, always linking Indonesia to the wider world.

In Part 1, Goenawan fearlessly narrates the contradictions of Indonesian identity, questioning colonial ancestors, Javanese spirits and origins. He plunges deep into Hindu epics and myth. He meditates on the contrasting faces of Islam and grapples with his country’s struggle with modernism and its discontents. Always curious, always probing, he peels off the layers of nationalist myths, from the god-king Sukarno to the dreaded year when a nightmare of massacres swept across the country. His essay, 1965, may be the best explanation why. Reacting to the recent film The Act of Killing, he deftly compares Anwar Congo to an infamous Khmer Rouge mass-murderer known as Douch described in The Gate by Francois Bizot to widen our vision as witnesses.

In Part 2, he packs his pen and bags. Although he writes mostly in Jakarta, he is also well-worn traveler. His essays drift in from Borobudur, North Bali, Ambon, East Timor and far Papua. He surfaces in Amsterdam and walks the streets of Mecca and Shanghai. He witnesses the twin towers fall in Manhattan, and the oil fires burn in Baku. He meditates on architecture in Damascus, Granada and Amalfi, and stands witness in cursed conflict-zones of Srebrenica, Troy, Ayodhya and Baghdad. The journalist in him will not shy away. And from each new city, he offers his fresh take.

In Part 3, he wields his sledge-hammer of thought, leading the reader into shadowed realms, grappling with giants, prophets, and legends – Tolstoy, Shiva, Mohammad, Jesus, Siddharta, Marx, Euclid, Moses, Marlene Dietrich, Khomeini, Akhenaten, Yeats, Spinoza, Agamemnon, Saladin, Jackie Chan, Plato, Hammurabi, Rembrandt, Naipal, Krishna, Noel Coward, Hegel, Kafka, Zhivago, Tagore, Keats, Vonnegut, Kierkegaard, Sophocles, and the red-headed Tintin to name a few.

Foreign readers who hope to understand the complex cultural tapestry that shapes the vast Malay Archipelago and broader Southeast Asia are well served. This collection draws his finest essays from the Indonesian originals of which there are now ten volumes.

His comrade-in-arms, Jennifer Lindsay, has been translating Goenawan’s columns since 1992 and she has ingeniously captured Goenawan’s broad sweep of themes and extraordinary dexterity in Indonesian prose with her own striking clarity. Jennifer’s literary choices are always to the point. They carry weight and gravitas. She too writes with a sharp pen.

In closing, it is important to remind Western readers of a perspective shared by Mircea Eliade. As an exile from Romania, he noted the importance of the work of intellectuals in societies that lived under dictatorships or police states, as Indonesia was for thirty years. To this day, Indonesia remains a country in transition. Precariously. The military stands poised to protect its fiefdoms, wealth and powers. For them, Goenawan is only a witness. Alone. And exposed. But they still have yet to grasp, his voice will outlive them all as Eliade explains in Labyrinth by Ordeal:

I do think that the presence of the intellectual in the true sense
of the word – great poets, great novelists, great philosophers –
I think that their very presence is terribly disturbing for a police state
or a dictatorship, whether of the left or the right. The intellectual, as
enemy number 1, is entrusted by history with a political mission.
In the war of religions, in which we are presently engaged, the enemy
is embarrassed solely by ‘elites,’ which a well-organized police force
can easily suppress. In consequence, ‘making culture’ is today the
only efficacious form of politics open to writers. And one must go
on ‘creating culture’. The traditional positions are reversed: it is no
longer the politicians who stand at the concrete center of history
but the great minds, the ‘intellectual elites’.

In his poem, The Keeper of the Books, Jorge Luis Borges describes the aftermath of the Mongol invasion, ‘…cut throats and sent up pyramids of fire, slaughtering the wicked and the just, …the slave chained to his master’s door, using the women and casting them off. And on to the South they rode.’ No, he does not condemn the Mongols. He simply sees them as ‘innocent as animals of prey, cruel as knives.’ But when he turns to the keeper of the books, we learn the most precarious duty in such sharp times.

In the faltering dawn
my father’s father saved the books.
Here they are in this tower where I lie
calling back days that belonged to others,
distant days, the days of the past.

Goenawan has indeed been a keeper of the books, in good times and bad. As a writer, he narrates his nation’s memory, and in ‘creating culture’ he ensures that the past will be interlinked to Indonesia’s future and reach lands beyond the horizon, in times beyond our own.