Palash Biswas
--- Ambon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq05022006.html
>
> May 2, 2006
>
> Indonesia's Greatest Writer
> On the Death of Pramoedya Ananta Toer
>
> By TARIQ ALI
>
> The death of the writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who
> died in Jakarta on April 30, is an enormous loss to
> world literature. He was a leading intellectual of
> the Indonesian left and a brilliant writer of
> fiction, always in pursuit of a time that never
> came. Sometimes he would think he had glimpsed the
> future and this immediately became magnified and was
> reflected in his fiction. His passion for radical
> politics was never hidden. Author of the 'Buru
> Quartet', he spent 15 years in prison--first under
> the Dutch, then under Suharto.
>
> In "Diajang menjerah", "She Who Gave Up", a short
> story published in a 1952 collection (Tjerita dari
> Blora, "Stories from Blora"), he wrote:
>
> 'In such times too the rage for politics roared
> along like a tidal wave, out of control. Each person
> felt as though she, he could not be truly alive
> without being political, without debating political
> questions. In truth, it was as though they could
> stay alive even without rice. Even schoolteachers,
> who had all along lived "neutrally", were infected
> by the rage for politics--and, so far as they were
> able, they influenced their pupils with the politics
> to which they had attached themselves. Each
> struggled to claim new members for his party. And
> schools proved to be fertile battlefields for their
> struggles. Politics! Politics! No different from
> rice under the Japanese Occupation.'
>
> Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world,
> once contained the largest Communist Party outside
> the actual world of Communism. In 1965, the military
> seized the country and bathed it in blood: at least
> a million people, mainly Communists and their
> sympathisers, were massacred. [The CIA station
> supplied the killers with its own lists of
> Communists and leftists. AC/JSC ] In Bali and
> elsewhere, the pro-West military leaders worked with
> Islamist vigilantes to make sure that few were left
> alive. Twenty years later a writer from a younger
> generation, Pripit Rochijat Kartawidjaja, recalled
> the hellish night:
>
> 'Usually the corpses were no longer recognisable
> as human. Headless. Stomachs torn open. The smell
> was unimaginable. To make sure they didn't sink, the
> carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled
> upon, bamboo stakes. And the departure of the
> corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas
> achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked
> together on rafts over which the PKI [Indonesian
> Communist Party] banner grandly flew . . . Once the
> purge of Communist elements got under way, clients
> stopped coming for sexual satisfaction. The reason:
> most clients--and prostitutes--were too frightened,
> for, hanging up in front of the whorehouses, there
> were a lot of male Communist genitals--like bananas
> hung out for sale.'
>
> Toer, born in 1925 in Blora in central Java, was the
> country's most distinguished novelist and,
> significantly, published in the United States. His
> life was spared. The generals dared not execute him,
> but hoped that the conditions in which he was kept
> would take care of the problem.
>
> Arrested after the military coup in Jakarta in 1965,
> he was sent to Buru island, a tropical gulag where
> many died of exhaustion, hard labour or starvation.
> Toer survived. He would later recall how every
> night, for three thousand and one nights (eight
> years), he fought against cruelty, disease and
> creeping insanity by telling stories to his fellow
> prisoners. It kept hope alive for him and them. As
> they listened, the prisoners momentarily forgot
> where they were or who had sentenced them.
>
> He spent 12 years altogether on Buru. It was not his
> first prison journey and this led him to compare
> present-day conditions with the colonial past. There
> was no room for doubt. Conditions were qualitatively
> worse than they had been almost two decades ago when
> he was a prisoner from 1947 to 1949 at the forced
> labor camp of Bukitduri. Then he had been actively
> engaged in the revolutionary struggle against the
> Dutch after the Second World War.
>
> The Dutch, unlike their post-colonial mimics, had
> not deprived him of writing implements and this was
> where he wrote his first novel, Perburuan (1950),
> translated as The Fugitive (1975 and 1990), a
> 170-page masterpiece superior in composition and
> content to the fiction of Albert Camus with which
> Western critics sometimes compared it.
>
> In Nyanyi sunyi seorang bisu (1995: The Mute's
> Soliloquy, 1999)--an affecting account of his life
> in prison--Toer describes, in spare, contained
> prose, the institutionalized brutality of Suharto's
> New Order. The old cargo vessel on which he and 800
> prisoners are being transported to Buru island
> reminds him of the coolies on Captain Bontekoe's
> ship, the kidnapped Chinese on Michener's ship bound
> for Hawaii . . . the four million Africans loaded on
> to British and American ships for transport across
> the Atlantic.
>
> In extreme moments during the colonial period, the
> threatened, insecure Dutch administrators, aware of
> the Javanese obsession with cleanliness, used to
> hurl excrement at the natives, to humiliate and
> debase them. The New Order prison ship went one
> better. The prisoners' hold was adjacent to the
> latrine and during stormy weather the two locations
> became inseparable. The prisoners were regularly
> mistreated and starved so that only the fittest
> would survive. Toer describes a desperate menu:
>
> 'Imagine a diet of gutter rats, the mouldy
> outgrowth on papaya trees and banana plants, and
> leeches, skewered on palm-leaf ribs prior to eating.
> Even J.P., one of our most well-educated prisoners,
> found himself reduced to eating cicak, though he
> always broke off the lizard's toe pads first. He'd
> become quite an expert at catching them. After
> amputating the lizard's toes, he would squeeze the
> unfortunate creature between his thumb and
> forefinger, shove it to the back of his throat, and
> swallow it whole. The man's will to defend himself
> against hunger was a victory in itself.
>
> And all the while the regime sent in preachers and
> Islamist journalists to inspect the minds of the
> inmates and urge them to become Believers:
>
> 'I have no doubt that this year, just as in
> previous years, at the beginning of the fasting
> month my mates and I will be treated to a lecture by
> a religious official specially brought in from the
> free world, on the importance of fasting and
> controlling one's hunger and desires. Imagine the
> humour of that!'
>
> After 15 years in his country's prisons, a campaign
> by Amnesty and other groups in the West helped, in
> 1979, to secure Toer's release, but it was
> conditional: until 1992 he was confined to house
> arrest in Jakarta and forced to report regularly to
> the police. But his time was his own and he could
> write again.
>
> The allegories he had tried out on the political
> prisoners during desperate times became a
> much-acclaimed quartet of novels known as "Minke's
> Story" or the "Buru Quartet". The first of these,
> Bumi manusia (translated as This Earth of Mankind,
> 1982), was published in 1980 and topped the
> best-seller list for 10 months. The second, too,
> Anak semua bangsa (1980: A Child of All Nations,
> 1984), became a best-seller. Thus thousands of
> Indonesian citizens chose to welcome "Pram", their
> most celebrated dissident, back to literary life.
>
> The novels--part realist, part historical (the
> succeeding volumes were translated as Footsteps,
> 1990, and House of Glass, 1992)--were set in the
> colonial period. The inspiration was provided by the
> legendary figure of Tirto Adi Surya, the father of
> Indonesian nationalist journalism. The scale and
> depth of the work was such that, for most Indonesian
> readers forced by the political climate to stifle
> their own thoughts, the effect was dramatic. Toer
> was writing about the past, but much of what he
> wrote resonated with the present. Were Suharto and
> the New Order a continuation of the colonial regime?
> In 1981 the books were banned. The publishers were
> forced to close down. One of them was imprisoned for
> three months.
>
> Had Pramoedya Ananta Toer been a Soviet dissident he
> would have received the Nobel Prize, but his status
> as a literary master is secure and, unlike some
> Latin American contemporaries, he remained
> unapologetic throughout his life:
>
> 'Just as politics cannot be separated from life,
> life cannot be separated from politics. People who
> consider themselves to be non-political are no
> different; they've already been assimilated by the
> dominant political culture--they just don't feel it
> any
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