Requiem for Aceh

DEATH is scattered. Death is everywhere. We know that the weeping of relatives and friends, those who have lost their loved ones, is the most universal requiem. This magazine presents a number of poems, the spontaneous reflections of contemporary Acehnese poets, in its attempt to capture how Aceh, a place both modern and traditional, responds to death and sorrow, their odor so thick in its battered coastal cities. How literature and music bear witness to this unexpected, uncompromising, chain of farewells. Requiem for Aceh: to life that is now a pile of ruins.

Tempo

January 18, 2005

Allah hai do do da idi/Boh gadong biye boh kaye uteun/Rayeuk si nyak hana peu ma bri/Aib ngon keji ureung donya keun. (Do do da idi)

THE woman’s voice is like a gentle breeze: a slow blowing and waning. On the glass screen we see bodies of children laying in a row, their eyes and jaws snapped shut. Bodies so small, no longer in motion, frozen. Yet Cut Aja Rizka, the lead singer of the Nyawoung Group, keeps intoning this lullaby, Do do da idi

...

More Articles