The Construction of House and Body Spaces in Modern Indonesian Poetry

Abstract

House and body are two postcolonial spaces that poets often write in their poems. This study aims to analyze the construction of house and body spaces in three modern Indonesian poems. There is a semiotic and symbolic relationship between the spaces and the social facts in postcolonial Indonesia. Upstone's postcolonial space theory is applied in this research to reveal how the spaces represent the poets' view of postcolonial Indonesia. The data sources are poetry written by Chairil Anwar, Rendra, and Goenawan Mohamad. This qualitative descriptive research analyzes the poems' lines or stanzas containing house and body spaces. The data were collected through a literature study, namely, reading the selected poetry texts seriously and deeply. The results show that the house and body spaces in the poetry represent Indonesia in the postcolonial space that was suffered, depressed, and lonely due to migration, hybridity, and multiple identities.