On the death of Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Tariq Ali | COUNTERPUNCH | May 2, 2006
www.counterpunch.com
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 more.'
Tariq Ali is author of the recently released Street Fighting Years
(new edition) and, with David Barsamian, Speaking of Empires &
Resistance. He can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*********************************************************************
Pramoedya Ananta Toer: Indonesia's best known novelist, he survived persecution, imprisonment and censorship
John Aglionby | The Guardian | May 3, 2006
In October 1965, two weeks after an alleged abortive coup by the
Indonesian Communist party, which led to the rise to power of the
Suharto dictatorship, the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who has died
aged 81 of diabetes complications and heart disease, was arrested in a
nationwide purge of leftists. His pleas for his extensive library to
be saved went unheeded, his books were burned and his house was
confiscated. After initially being detained on the island of Nusa
Kembangan, off the south Java coast, he was moved, along with
thousands of other political prisoners, to the remote,
malaria-infested island of Buru, in Indonesia 's eastern spice
islands.
If the dictatorship of General Suharto thought that 14 years'
incarceration without trial would silence Pramoedya, they
miscalculated badly. For it was during that time that this literary
icon created the tetralogy of novels for which he is best known.
Initially denied any writing materials, he composed This Earth of
Mankind by repeating it over and over again to his fellow inmates.
Child of All Nations, Footsteps and House of Broken Glass - the last
two were written down following the relaxation of prison rules -
completed the Buru quartet. "Is it possible," Pramoedya asked later,
"to take from a man his right to speak to himself?"
The books recount Indonesia 's fight for freedom against its Dutch
colonial masters and the struggle to build an independent nation
through the personality of Minke, an aristocratic Javanese woman who
joins the nationalist movement. The level of Suharto's hatred of
Pramoedya was demonstrated by the fact that he not only banned the
quartet but that he also engineered the removal of the Australian
diplomat, Max Lane, who had translated the first two parts into
English. Such resistance proved futile: by the time Suharto fell in
1998, Pramoedya's several dozen works had been translated into more
than 30 languages - despite being banned in Indonesia.
Pramoedya was born in Blora, central Java, the eldest son of a local
headmaster and activist. His third name was originally Mastoer, but he
dropped the Mas because it was the lowest title in the Javanese
nobility and he thought it sounded too aristocratic. He did not
replace it even after learning 40 years later that toer meant "shit"
in Polish.
Pramoedya, or Pram as he was more usually known, had just completed
his education at the Radio Vocational school in Indonesia 's second
city, Surabaya, in 1942 when the Japanese invaded. Like many
Indonesian nationalists, he initially supported the occupation -
arguing that the Japanese were a lesser evil than the Dutch - and
worked for the Japanese news agency Domei in Jakarta.
His attitude changed, however, as Japanese brutality and austerity
intensified, and he became increasingly nationalist. After the war, as
the Dutch tried to reassert control over their former empire,
Pramoedya joined the resistance movement; he was detained for the
first time in 1947, the year he wrote his first novel, The Fugitive.
Release came with the Dutch withdrawal in 1949 and he spent much of
the 1950s travelling abroad, first in the Netherlands and then in the
Soviet Union and China. As a result he became both more leftist and
anti-Javanese in his newspaper and other writing. He edited a section
of a leftwing newspaper and lectured at journalism school in Jakarta.
By 1960 he had fallen out with the government of Indonesia's founding
President Sukarno to such an extent that he was jailed for nine
months. Five years later came the abortive coup and further
imprisonment.
The scale of the suffering on Buru island eventually came to light
through The Mute's Soliloquy, an autobiographical work published
decades later - and in English in 1999 - with numerous incidents
recorded on scraps of paper that were smuggled out by a sympathetic
Catholic priest. Most of the prisoners, including Pramoedya, were
moved from Buru in 1979, but the writer was only released as a result
of intensive lobbying by numerous foreign diplomats. He was confined
to Jakarta until 1992 and declined to leave Indonesia until after
Suharto had been toppled because he feared he would be blocked from
returning. Indonesia's transition to democracy did not diminish his
ardour for defending the downtrodden and dispossessed or castigating
those in power - whom he regularly dismissed as "clowns".
In recent years, Pramoedya's uncompromising and contrarian views have
fallen out of favour with Indonesia's younger literary circle. Despite
this, even most of those who disagreed with him continued to equate
him with such icons such as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. He was showered
with awards by international institutions, though despite frequent
nominations he never received the Nobel prize for literature.
While Pramoedya could survive dictators and detention, he could not
overcome the illnesses triggered by a lifetime of devotion to
Indonesia's famous clove cigarettes. His health began to deteriorate
several years ago, and after being rushed to hospital last week and
briefly falling into a coma, he insisted on going home.
He is survived by his second wife, Maemunah, with whom he had five
children. He had three children from his first marriage, and there
were 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
ยท Pramoedya Ananta Toer, writer and social critic, born February 6
1925; died April 30 2006
--
"There is nothing more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its
success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things
- because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under
the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under
the new."
"The Prince"
Nicolo Machiavelli
--
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