Remapping the Polarities

Abstract

This article analyses forms of lyric subjectivity in the works of the generation of Indonesian poets that emerged in the 1980s, situating them in the debate between ‘universal humanism’ and ‘socialist realism’ as it played out from the 1950s to the 1980s. The article closely reads poems by Acep Zamzam Noor, Kriapur, Dorothea Rosa Herliany, and Afrizal Malna, analysing each poem’s forms of lyric subjectivity and corresponding imagination of the social function of poetry to argue that the generative destabilization of certainty—experiments in imaginatively refiguring the given categories for aesthetic practice and social relation—was a primary concern of young poets in the 1980s, who were anxious to produce work that could both express individual experience and provide social instruction, or instigate the preliminary conditions for a communal, democratic version of social instruction. These poets spoke to the mercurial social dynamics of their time by borrowing from both conflicting proposals for the social function of poetry and attempting to rise to the demand to mimetically render the thoughts and feelings of their times.