“We Build Our Own Stories”: The 19th-century Figure and 21st-century Myth of the Acehnese Poet Dôkarim

Abstract

Few primary sources other than Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje tell us about the traveling bard Abdul Karim, popularly known as Dokarim, who composed the Hikayat Prang Gompeuni (Song of the Dutch War). Composed orally in Acehnese verse, the Hikayat borrows generously from the themes and narratives of the famous epic poems that preceded it while also recounting specific details of warrior bravery, political negotiations, and community devastation brought by the war. The Hikayat Prang Gompeuni was not only a work in progress with Dokarim adding new verses as the war unfolded, it was also a performance piece tailored to meet the expectations of every patron that commissioned Dokarim’s recitals. Among Dokarim’s patrons were Snouck Hurgronje himself, who commissioned the only complete transcription of the Hikayat and the Acehnese war hero Teuku Umar, who later went on to execute Dokarim before the war’s end for his supposed defection to the Dutch. This article shows how the ambiguous figure of Dokarim in Aceh’s 19th century serves as a productive metaphor and cautionary tale for Aceh’s culture producers in the 21st. The Tikar Pandan Community in particular has leveraged the figure of Dokarim and elevated his partial legacy to the status of a myth, assuming his poetic license to claim a space for building new tales that espouse a critical wariness toward all figures of authority.