Roaming
WHAT does ‘roaming’ mean? In this time of pandemic isolation, ‘roaming’—which is always interesting, always full of problems, and thus constantly mentioned in literary imagination—is to leave a place and the past. Sometimes radically.
Goenawan Mohamad
September 28, 2020
Chairil Anwar proposed it in a startling poem: to roam is to
probe the deserts, meeting nothing, landing nowhere
—the only possible non-stop flight
No arriving
In other words, there is no final destination. One who roams is prepared to ‘not arrive’, and dares to produce nothing. The wanderer is no docile walker.
So the true wanderer will find no model in the romantic tale of Panji. In this story, popular in many places in Sout
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