The Language of Our Dreams

Ming Di: I was very fortunate to have met you and the other Asian poets while in South Africa and Zimbabwe, two amazing countries. It was my first exposure to Indonesian poetry then. So I googled Indonesia after the long trip and I’m googling it again now. You have 300 ethnic groups, 700 languages and over 13000 islands. What’s the first language you learned to speak and what’s the language you use for writing poetry? Saut Situmorang: I was very happy joining you guys too, fellow poets from around the world, doing the poetry trip in South Africa and Zimbabwe a few years ago. My first ever visit to Africa! I remember telling Vonani our South African host-poet on our bus trip to his hometown near the Zimbabwean border that “even the rivers left Africa like humans do (after seeing no rivers along the trip) but the sunflowers in the sunflower farms by the road bowed when the minibuses taking us poets passed them.” Hahaha… Vonani smiled. He had been to Java (Indonesia) on the previous “What’s Poetry” event and saw how different Indonesia was from Africa.