The death of an unreconstructed Marxist
By Michael Vatikiotis
SINGAPORE - Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who died in Jakarta on Sunday at the age of 81, never won the Nobel Prize for Literature that he was nominated for more than once toward the end of his life. Perhaps this was because he did not write any new work for the last decade of his life; perhaps also because the country he was born in, and was so critical of in his writing, Indonesia, is not well regarded by the liberal-leaning Nobel Committee.
If he had won the Prize, Pramoedya would no doubt have reacted with characteristic earthiness. The million-US-dollar check would "go a long way toward getting my children and in-laws off my back", he might have quipped with a broad grin. Here was a man supremely modest about his literary accomplishments, which included nearly 40 books translated into almost 40 languages.
Pramoedya would certainly have risen to the occasion and probably used the acceptance speech as a platform to declare the political activism that runs through his writing like searing-hot lava. Almost half a century ago, Albert Camus accepted his Nobel Prize giving this definition of his art: "It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings."
Pramoedya knew a great deal about suffering. Persecuted and jailed first by the colonial Dutch then the Indonesian authorities, he saw his library and works destroyed, he was sent to a prison camp on a remote island, deprived of pen and paper for 14 years and, after his release, placed under city arrest until 1998. His books were banned in Indonesia beyond the fall of Suharto in 1998 and the end of authoritarian rule, and some even remain blacklisted today.
Although he was an Indonesian patriot and a nationalist to the core, his Indonesian peers shunned him for many years. Critics never forgave Pramoedya for his alleged communist sympathies. In the 1950s, Pramoedya had been a literary commissar who is said to have lorded it over those deemed ideologically impure. To be sure, there was rancor, and perhaps a great deal of professional rivalry. As an obituary in the Jakarta Post so aptly put it: "Many Indonesians could not see beyond his politics, and thus failed to appreciate his work." Pramoedya the prodigal son of the soil lived almost entirely off the royalties and fees he earned overseas.
His politics were hard to the left. In media interviews, which he gave frequently after 1998, he would rail against modern Indonesian government. His last interview was featured last month on the cover of the debut edition of Playboy magazine in Indonesia, which has stirred a hornets' nest of violent fundamentalist reaction. He saw Indonesia as a nation of coolies, its promise as a new democracy unfulfilled; the young generation he placed so much faith in, cheated of their freedom to play a role in nation-building. Toward the end of his life he joined the small cadre-based radical People's Democratic Party (PRD).
Yet he was also a very conservative historian. He worried that too many Indonesians were ignorant of their history. Pramoedya compiled a detailed chronicle of the Indonesian revolution, revealing that it took several weeks for the declaration of independence in August 1945 to reach the extremities of the archipelago. When he died, he was working with his daughter on a new encyclopedia of Indonesia.
This compulsive compiling betrays Pramoedya's great sense of loss after soldiers burned down his library upon arresting him in 1965. It also speaks to an old-fashioned fastidiousness, perhaps instilled by his stern schoolteacher of a father.
His last published book, The Great Post Road, is a powerful polemic on Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule. It concerns a major highway that stretched 1,000 kilometers across the north coast of Java and was built by governor general Herman Willem Daendels in the early 19th century. Although the project is long lost in the mists of history, Pramoedya conservatively estimated that the construction of Daendel's "Great Post Road" cost the lives of more than 12,000 who toiled as forced laborers in indescribable conditions to build a 7-meter-wide road so that the wheels of commerce fueling Dutch wealth in the East Indies could grind more efficiently.
Pramoedya followed the Great Post Road in this small, tightly written volume using every town and district along the way as a marker of colonial excess and corruption. In his writing Pramoedya has consistently argued that the ordinary people of Indonesia were never fully liberated. Independence offered the promise of liberty that was snatched away by selfish and corrupt native rulers who borrowed techniques of exploitation from the Dutch.
For Pramoedya, the old unreconstructed Marxist, Indonesia's history was a long continuous tragedy dominated by injustice and corruption. Using characteristically sparse prose, yet still managing to convey a deep sense of emotion, Pramoedya related the historical memory of colonial infamy and his own vivid experience growing up in a time of war and revolution.
Interwoven with long-forgotten vignettes drawn from the little-known history of early resistance to Dutch rule are snippets from his own past time spent in jail, memories of a long-banned and long-forgotten artist. There are Dutch infamy and injustice mirrored with his own sufferings at the hands of the modern colonial regime he sees represented by president Suharto's New Order.
Pramoedya is best known overseas for his Buru Quartet, a majestic story spanning the dawn of Indonesian nationalism through to the dying days of colonial rule. Pramoedya composed the epic while exiled on a remote island in eastern Indonesia and recited it orally to his fellow inmates. Eventually published in the late 1970s, the books were banned in Indonesia. Alongside the great Filipino writer Jose Rizal's Noli me Tangere, the Buru Quartet ranks as one of the most important works chronicling Southeast Asia's nationalist struggle against colonial rule.
In earlier, shorter stories, Pramoedya captured the stifling poverty of Indonesia's early years as an independent republic. One of these stories, "Gambir", is a simple tale about two coolies living along the railway tracks outside Jakarta's Gambir Station. They sleep in the open, catching chills and forever dealing with runny noses and stomach ailments. They awake "scratching the crust from their eyes, coughing, spewing out the phlegm that had risen in their throats again and from time to time scratching themselves from their asses to their necks". These Tales from Djakarta were written in the 1950s, but the same people can be seen along the streets of Jakarta today. They suffer the same ailments and have no recourse to modern health facilities.
Pramoedya's dark vision of his homeland, even in the later reform period, was at odds with more optimistic assessments of Indonesia. For his ability to represent the common Indonesian and give voice to the disappointment and despair of more than a half-century of unrealized national aspiration in one of the largest nations on Earth, Pramoedya certainly ranks as one of the great literary figures of our age. Sadly, he died without the world, and too many of his Indonesian compatriots, fully recognizing this.
Michael Vatikiotis is former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is currently a visiting research fellow at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
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