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My Days with Golok Betawi "Seliwa"

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Antara:
Don’t take this as professional account about the style, I only joined with the Seliwa for about three months now, so I wouldn’t dare to claim any presentable knowledge about this unique style. And if any of you thought that I am saying this out of humility as many Indonesians would intuitively do, please ask people who know me about how humble I was.

They would definitely ask if you were talking about the same person ::).

I am caught by cold and have legal reason to leave work for a day… obeying medical advice to stay on bed, I took my laptop to bed and type in several things to unload whatever lurking in my mind. This is one of them (doctor actually asked me to do nothing but sleeping, hence you may consider this as masterpiece of my sleepwalking, or better, sleeptyping :w).

Antara:
Everything I write here are based on my own interpretation of what is being taught, or told during practice by various people. Other people may have different interpretation, or even learn different naming or categorization. I believe you are well aware that in traditional school, we don’t do much standardization. :-X

I intent to make this a life account of my Seliwa study. There could be corrections, omission, and update along the way. People use to do such thing in Blog… but due to my limitation (all right, I can be humble too sometime :-P), allow me to put it here (somebody say about this forum being stagnant?). Of course, I highly appreciate input from other Seliwa members.

Antara:
The first thing I learn about Seliwa, is that it is very much like what Don F. Draeger wrote in his book about silat, you don’t do warm-ups. Get onto the field and do the jurus (form) immediately. According to Draeger, silat practitioners assume that fight could occur anytime and anywhere, there won’t be any time to do warm up or stretching, so always be prepared.

However, in case of Seliwa, I think the reason is more practical; nobody in Betawi ever invented warm-up. :w

Antara:
My observation after three months, the forms in Seliwa can be divided into three categories. The first one called “Pu’un”, that is Betawi dialect for “Pohon”, or tree. Forms that fall into this category are relatively simple and direct, aimed to introduce new practitioner into reality of combat at its simplest model. Hence the naming –I believe- signify the process to grow knowledge, or develop a strong foundation. More about this later.

The second categories, if I am not mistaken (haven’t got there, I am still struggling with my stubborn tiny trees >:() called “kembang”, or flower. However, unlike the consensus in most silat styles, kembang here doesn’t refer to flowery movements that only good for show but useless in combat, in contrary, kembang in seliwa symbolize the stage where students learn variations and explore larger possibility in realistic fight. When the tree grows big enough, the flower bloom.

The third categories called buah, or fruit. It doesn’t take a genius to see the pattern, a tree grows, generate flowers, and then produce fruits. Unfortunately I haven’t reached that far to be able to make educated interpretation. My assumption, this is the stage where students learn the distilled hence deadly products of the previous stage, judging from the form played by my seniors.

Antara:
The Pu’un,

There are six pu’un altogether, from the simplest grab-and-strike of the first pu’un, to the not-too-simple dance-like-scooping motion of the sixth pu’un. All pu’uns employ large and strong hip turning, creating upper torso waving movement typical to Betawi silat (at least to my observation). One can quickly recognize that in this stage students learn how to absorb and deliver power using hip movements.

In Pu’un students also learn rapid muscle controls, that is contracting muscles for maximum impact and relaxing them immediately. This skill will be very useful in close combat where tactile sensitivity and speed play important role, together with strong penetrating force. This is done by combining rapid striking with tapping movements in such a way that students are forced to contract and relax their muscles successively.

Something worth written here about pu’un, is the upper torso waving movement that –at first- I thought to be overly-applied. In my first weeks, I was wondering if I have been doing it right since the waving (we called “goyang”, what is it in English?) are too large to fit into close quarter combat. Some of the other students already doing the more linear form, apparently arriving into the same conclusion. However, since my master, Bang Husin, always do the large wave version, I obediently follow. It feels more suitable to my artistic taste, anyway.

Only later after I was allowed to practice with golok, I realized that the waves help in maneuvering edged weapon, more than the rigid linear version. I should have remembered that like many other silat styles, Seliwa was developed around the use of edged weapon.

Oh, did I mention that pu’uns (and likely, all Seliwa form) are performed while holding your breath? Simple but effective way to simulate the tension of real fight. However, I wonder if it has adverse effect of shortening our stamina, being anaerobic exercise? I haven’t got the answer now, but for time being, I balance it by doing aerobic.

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