Room

That poem presented a room. The breadth was only 3x4 m, “too narrow to breathe a
soul”. There were only seven occupants. The room feels impoverish and dwarfed by connected
through the window the magnificent world.
In that poem too, Chairil Anwar painted the sorrows and restlessness of the room using a
list of imagism which are getting more and more dramatic along the way. The mother, “slept
sobbingly”. The father, “lied in boredom”. The old man’s eye stared at something that might be
the incarnation of helplessness: the image of “man crucified on a stone”. In that night the moon
light shed of to take a peek and look “five souls of children”.
Repressive atmosphere like crowded yet silent jail cells. “The presents crowd of the jail
stilled in silent”.
Chairil wrote the lines in about a half decade ago in Jakarta which the people hadn’t even
reach four millions. Now this city which recently just celebrated its 482 birthday occupied by
twelve millions people, and by reading this makes us contemplate: what is the meaning of a space
(perhaps a house) in a city like this? Later, in 2025, when accounted for almost 70 percent of
Indonesians live in cities? What are we witnessing: a progression of density and anxiety?

Concerns regarding overcrowded cities are not limited to the Third World. In the middle
of the twentieth century, there was a complaint about Paris: "In Paris, there is no home." It wrote
Gaston Bachelard, the French philosophist, in La politique de l'espace. "The inhabitants of big
cities live in stacked boxes." Finally, the house only awakens horizontally; he lost his "cosmicity".
He is no longer connected to the cosmic, as he loses his space, and apart from the magnificent
mystery.

Bachelard's grievance implies nostalgia, a longing to return to the comfortably inhabited

place of many years in the countryside and a small town in the interior-something that of course
cannot be applied in the socio-economic history of Indonesia.

In Indonesia, especially in Java, the density of the inhabitants has long stolen the
countryside from the cool, serene atmosphere that had been idealized by Dazentje. Poor farmers
can no longer afford to have a home that deserves to be missed. The increasingly narrow land is
processed and exploited by the growing number of occupants. An "agricultural involution" (in the
famous term Clifford Geertz) occurs: not wealth and breadth divided, but poverty and narrowness.
The chamber depicted by Chairil could also apply as space in the village houses.

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 Things have indeed changed now, after two decades of the growth control program that
had been successful. The current growth is at 1.3 percent. However, if you look at Jakarta,
density is still a reality that causes the lack of imprint on the relationship between humans and
their home. We experience and witness a kind of Nomadism: people who move from one
location to another. “Home” is not an important factor of stability.

People live from one contract home to another. They no longer recognize a place as a
Dunung, a Javanese word that not only means a physical site, but also affection, a positively
touching affection, a room that fits just for you. A place has become a commodity. It is no longer
part of my experience that cannot be replaced. It is not also a form that suits my own; it is not
born from a burrowing process, the process in which a rat builds its room by making a hole that
suits them. The new nomads don’t build their hole; they enter a geography that is prepared for
anyone. In there, they are just guests.

The Neo-Nomadism was also born from a distance; in Jakarta, where home and work are
often far from one another, the crowded traffic, and the people who live on the streets instead of
their own room. They go at six in the morning, and head home by seven at night to sit and watch
a television showing a faraway world, and before bed, there might be dreams. By five o’clock.

Sometimes a nomad is not a nomad he supposed to be. By ever chance, man will try to
build his own Dunung, even in Jakarta. There are places where we can build and live in with
comfort, even beyond what is generally called “home”. There is a room, and a part of it is hidden
in the heart, which we do not want and cannot sell: a corner of a garden, a corner of city that
keeping memories, a market that bewitch the heart, a tavern, a bus station, a rendezvous…

In rooms that we called Dunung, there is a fprce that pulls us in, creating a central point,
building a world like we dug the ground ourselves. However in this era, there is a force that pulls
us outwards, because no matter what the place is, it is only a transit room by the end of the day.
Even if those what remain are only a cellphone number or an email address, we won’t call
ourselves “homeless”

Today and perhaps later, Jakarta is a current where the “homeless” are no longer relevant.
What is there are only camps and life that cannot be stagnant. There is something missing in that

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density. Despite it, humans keep walking, keep getting old, and try to live in crowded noiseless
cells, in “the presents crowd of the jail stilled in silent.”