Books are Weapons
Photo book activists discuss the topic "Narration and Ideas in Photo Books" at the Kompas Photography Festival in Bentara Budaya, Jakarta, Sunday (12/2). Over the last several years, photo books have been becoming increasingly popular and many people are making and publishing them.
If a nation is a body, then knowledge -- in the broadest sense -- is the oxygen that sustains its health and integrity.
The books in circulation, and the music (not only the music of Bob Dylan,who last year received the Nobel Prize for Literature), canbe seen as the hemoglobin that binds the oxygen of knowledge. A moving library hunting for readers can be seen as the red blood cells that try to circulate oxygen to all body parts, including those most distant from the heart.
Likening library volunteers to red blood cells may be oversimplifying things and therefore may be misleading, but that is understandable, since the analogy comes from a medical student who failed to continue his studies after being diagnosed as colorblind. However, even people who are colorblind, or totally blind, like Helen Keller, can see clearly that new knowledge can be like the oxygen that enables the production of energy and is essential for life.
Hunting for readers
About 2,000 meters from the Noken Pustaka Papua library in Pasirputih, Manokwari, there is a kampung of tribal migrants from Mount Arfak. When I arrived in Manokwari, the kampung was still called Kampung Vietnam. The settlement and its residents seem to have been left behind by its neighbors located just 1,000 meters away.
Even though there are free schools in the area, girls of Kampung Vietnam were banned from attending school. Noken Pustaka volunteers visit the settlement to bring books in the hope they will help the girls improve their literacy. The children have become increasingly eager to learn, because they know that once they are able to read, they will be able to persuade or even urge their parents to allow them to attend school. In the hands of these girls, a book becomes a weapon to break free from family confinement.
Dozens of kilometers from Kampung Vietnam, there was a school headmaster from the family of the chief of the tribe, who was a bit annoyed when an entourage of the West Papua Moving Library arrived without notice. He regretted not being able to serve the best to the entourage, which consisted of "Si Belang Kuda Pustaka", Agus Mandowen who was the bearer of noken, and Anand Yunanto, the rider of "Motor 3 Roda Noken". If only the headmaster had been informed in advance, he would have happily invited his neighbors to hunt for deer and lobsters to entertain the entourage of the moving library.
Indeed what was brought was not all new books, but for the headmaster, the books are extremely rare items that can help improve the lives of his citizens. The headmaster, who has enjoyed formal education himself, can talk at length about how books changed his life, and he wants to see a better life for his citizens as well.
Meanwhile for Asnan Khaerul and the volunteers of the Kandayan Library, who move along the border between Indonesia and Malaysia, the donated books are weapons to protect and improve the lives of indigenous people and migrants working at plantations. The temptation to move across the border is in front of their eyes every day. However, the volunteers and the citizens they help, apparently still have a strong emotional attachment to their homeland of Indonesia, and what they rely on to keep temptation at bay and maintain the emotional attachment is only the donated books, the hemoglobin that binds the oxygen. Iswan Kinsank, a volunteer of Kandayan Library, North Kalimantan, said, "Send books, so as to help the homeland remain united."
To these people, knowledge, which is tied up in the text, or in tone, is quite similar to oxygen, which is bound in hemoglobin: a source of strength for the metabolism, stimulating the vitality to cope with the world. If books and the various works that bind fresh knowledge are not widely circulated, a nation might seem like a body suffering from anemia. Metabolic sluggishness that is sometimes felt in the body of our nation is caused not only by the number of red blood cells, but also by the poor quality of the arteries. Many of our regions have not been penetrated with road access, which is why the volunteers become red blood cells of sorts that have to be able to grow their own feet and not merely rely on the impulse of the heart to reach readers that are barely reachable.
Blood and marrow
The development of an extensive and smooth network of arteries is a source of great hope also for the moving library, because at the moment the cost of shipping books from Jakarta to Intan Jaya, Papua, for example, can exceed the price of the books.
In addition to dealing with the distribution system, building pathways and breaking obstacles in the artery network, we also have the challenge to produce good hemoglobin. If the moving library is appreciated for its mobility in reaching out to readers, permanent libraries are appreciated for their capability to build a great and unique collection. If the volunteers of Moving Library can be seen as red blood cells transporting hemoglobin, workers of permanent libraries who consciously build a fresh and rich collection, collect bits of knowledge that almost disappeared, like Jassin, Pramoedya or their friends at Indonesia Buku (I-Boekoe), for example, can be seen as marrow cells that produce the hemoglobin.
The performance of libraries on campuses and at knowledge institutions must be gauged not only by their capability to collect books, but also their ability to produce good books, produce hemoglobin to bind oxygen, which can be circulated by the red blood cells to the whole body.
Fresh oxygen, superior knowledge, always contains excellent paradigms that can explain in greater detail and unify a lot of things. It is unfortunate that many of our books still only reproduce old paradigms that have already lost their strength. Books like that do not contain adequate fresh oxygen but rather carbon dioxide, the remnants of metabolism, products of old world views, which, if accumulated in large amounts, will damage the health of the body.
The freshest oxygen, i.e. the most potent knowledge that forms the reality of the current world, comes from the critical reasoning empowering scientific and technological progress. Indeed, there are people who worry about science and technology today. Some types of critical reasoning seem to be dismantling anything that used to be seen as glorious and is therefore seen as little more than an algorithm.
Dance of the universe
I used to, more than 10 years ago, consider university with all of its content a kind of algorithm, a "labyrinth with a single end," the purpose of which was self-perpetuation and improvement of the system. This assumption has survived until today, but rather than seeing all of reality as an algorithm of cold data of the universe, there is an element of "fire" that makes the whole reality of the universe a kind of great literature that continues to be in process, a half-finished work longing for the creator to help it surpass itself.
Assisted by nuclear detection devices, cutting-edge life sciences have changed the entire body of the organism, including humans, into a literary draft that is rich and challenging. Inferior sentences in the text genes inherited from our ancestors can be cut up and disposed of. Better sentences can be incorporated in the draft.
Natural sciences, such as cosmology and nuclear physics, which are guided by mathematics, slowly also work and dream to summarize the universe in a row of formulas, a line of poetry. The poetry of the universe may also need to be edited, or maybe not. But it is pretty clear that the poetry of the universe waits and at the same time gives way to the creation of another poetry of the universe.
Understanding the literature of the universe, of course, also includes understanding the nature of literature, which is linked very closely with music, as seen with the history of poetry that comes from songs or lyrics derived from the lyre. Such an understanding not only transforms anxiety into amazement, but also invites us to dance together the dance of the universe.
NIRWAN AHMAD ARSUKA
Founder of Mobile Library
