bhekti
04-30-2006, 12:23 PM
He died today. I have my tears again.
***
On an October night in 1965, soldiers took acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer from his home, bound his hands behind his back, tied a noose around his neck and threw him into the back of a truck. When he asked them to save his vast archive of historical materials from the angry mob that was burning his books, a soldier struck him on the head with a rifle. The blow left him almost completely deaf.
It was the first of many brutal acts against the novelist, historian and tireless critic of Indonesia's rulers. He was to spend the next 14 years in jail or on the penal colony on Buru Island, a grim camp for political prisoners under the New Order regime of President Suharto. After his release, his books were banned, and he remained restricted to the city of Jakarta until Suharto fell in May 1998. This spring, for the first time in 40 years, the 74-year-old writer left Indonesia to promote his new book, "The Mute's Soliloquy" (Hyperion).
"The Mute's Soliloquy" is a loose autobiography woven together from letters and essays Pramoedya wrote secretly on Buru; he never expected them to survive, but a Catholic priest smuggled them out. The book is an extraordinary mixture of advice to his children, wrenching self-examination and testimony of his time on Buru, a place of shifting, petty rules, grinding labor and indifference to life. "I saw my friends killed by soldiers just for fun," Pramoedya told me in Jakarta earlier this year.
Once he was allowed to write, however, "It was like a flood being released." He turned out a steady stream of books and plays, including his masterwork, "The Buru Quartet," which began as a tale narrated in daily installments to his fellow prisoners. The four books it comprises are extraordinary meditations on culture, colonialism and national identity, but they are also pungent, melodramatic novels filled with turmoil and romance. Their challenge to Suharto lay in their withering examination of both the Javanese feudalism and the colonial structures of surveillance and control that had provided models for his rule. Published after Pramoedya's release from Buru in 1979, they were banned as Marxist, their editor jailed and the Australian diplomat who translated them into English thrown out of the country.
On Monday, Indonesia holds its first real elections since 1955, with 48 parties fighting for seats in a parliament that will choose the next president. While the press is once again free and political activity is legal, the nation has been struck by ethnic and religious violence that has left hundreds dead. Mobs have burned mosques and churches, and ethnic Chinese, the main victims of the May riots, continue to flee the country.
***
And Indonesia will always continue to flee, like these tears on my cheek.
I will remember.
***
On an October night in 1965, soldiers took acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer from his home, bound his hands behind his back, tied a noose around his neck and threw him into the back of a truck. When he asked them to save his vast archive of historical materials from the angry mob that was burning his books, a soldier struck him on the head with a rifle. The blow left him almost completely deaf.
It was the first of many brutal acts against the novelist, historian and tireless critic of Indonesia's rulers. He was to spend the next 14 years in jail or on the penal colony on Buru Island, a grim camp for political prisoners under the New Order regime of President Suharto. After his release, his books were banned, and he remained restricted to the city of Jakarta until Suharto fell in May 1998. This spring, for the first time in 40 years, the 74-year-old writer left Indonesia to promote his new book, "The Mute's Soliloquy" (Hyperion).
"The Mute's Soliloquy" is a loose autobiography woven together from letters and essays Pramoedya wrote secretly on Buru; he never expected them to survive, but a Catholic priest smuggled them out. The book is an extraordinary mixture of advice to his children, wrenching self-examination and testimony of his time on Buru, a place of shifting, petty rules, grinding labor and indifference to life. "I saw my friends killed by soldiers just for fun," Pramoedya told me in Jakarta earlier this year.
Once he was allowed to write, however, "It was like a flood being released." He turned out a steady stream of books and plays, including his masterwork, "The Buru Quartet," which began as a tale narrated in daily installments to his fellow prisoners. The four books it comprises are extraordinary meditations on culture, colonialism and national identity, but they are also pungent, melodramatic novels filled with turmoil and romance. Their challenge to Suharto lay in their withering examination of both the Javanese feudalism and the colonial structures of surveillance and control that had provided models for his rule. Published after Pramoedya's release from Buru in 1979, they were banned as Marxist, their editor jailed and the Australian diplomat who translated them into English thrown out of the country.
On Monday, Indonesia holds its first real elections since 1955, with 48 parties fighting for seats in a parliament that will choose the next president. While the press is once again free and political activity is legal, the nation has been struck by ethnic and religious violence that has left hundreds dead. Mobs have burned mosques and churches, and ethnic Chinese, the main victims of the May riots, continue to flee the country.
***
And Indonesia will always continue to flee, like these tears on my cheek.
I will remember.