Afrizal Malna: Encountering poet

Afrizal Malna’s phrasing in his poems is often obtuse. But, arguably, they are also simple and clear statements of encounters between an author’s fragmented consciousness with an equally fragmented urban environment. The title he has given to a recent collection of his poems, Aku Setelah Aku, (Myself After Myself or, ‘I After I’, or ‘Me After Me’) is a typical example of “afrizalian” style. The self is written of as being subject to changes in time; time makes us become someone different. ‘Myself after myself’ suggests the self is both different and the same. It’s an afrizalian conundrum and in order to get into Afrizal’s poems one has to be willing to grapple and accept such simple yet assertive statements.