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From apakabar@clark.net Tue Apr 14 16:43:48 1998
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 14:41:13 -0600 (MDT)
Message-Id: <199804142041.OAA06002@indopubs.com>
To: indonesia-l@indopubs.com
From: apakabar@clark.net
Subject: [INDONESIA-L] TIME - Novel Cause
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TIME ASIA April 20, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 15
NOVEL CAUSE
Jailed and then censored, Indonesia's Pramoedya Ananta Toer never quit
calling for political change
By TERRY McCARTHY Jakarta
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was perhaps the only writer in Indonesia who got the
joke. Last month the Jakarta Arts Council announced the results of a
nationwide writing competition: the 94 entries were so uniformly bad that
the judges had refused to award anyone the first prize. (Second prize went
to a composition entitled Stomach-ache Opera.) The daily Indonesian Observer
summed up the sorry debacle: "Indonesia has never produced world famous
writers, and looks set to retain that status."
Pramoedya, of course, just happens to be world famous, author of four
important novels known as the Buru Quartet and some 26 other books that have
been translated into 24 languages, winner of several international awards
and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His memoirs
are due to be published in the U.S. later this year. But don't mention any
of that in polite circles in Jakarta, where Pramoedya is officially regarded
as a subversive leftist. His books are all banned in his home country.
Jailed for nearly two years by the Dutch as a dangerous nationalist, he
spent an additional 14 years in prison after independence. Released in 1979,
he is still kept under police surveillance and forbidden from traveling
overseas. Editors have been warned against even using Pramoedya's name in
magazines or newspapers. He is effectively a non-person in Indonesia.
"I am happy to talk to foreigners," he says as he leads the way into his
house on a narrow street in Jakarta. "Because I cannot talk to anyone here."
And his 73-year-old face breaks into a mischievous smile.
Life is spiced with many little ironies in Indonesia these days, signs that
President Suharto's hallowed New Order, under which the country has been
governed for three decades, is looking perilously old, verging on the
senile. Wry smiles, for example, greeted the straight-faced announcement by
Suharto's daughter Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, known as Tutut, that nepotism
played no role in the government. She said this less than a week after she
had been appointed to the cabinet post of Minister for Social Affairs by her
father. For Pramoedya, however, such ironies go deep, right into the heart
of the cultural anorexia that has afflicted the Indonesian archipelago, so
rich in unrealized artistic potential.
"For all these years there has been a contradiction between the truth and
the lies of the New Order," says Pramoedya, lighting up another of a series
of clove cigarettes. "Because of this contradiction people have lost
themselves, have become followers without personality. How can you create
good literature--something with individual integrity--under such a system?
It has created a cultural ceiling, and no one can rise above this ceiling,
because thinking itself has been limited."
In a 1991 essay entitled "My Apologies," Pramoedya devised an
Orwellian-sounding formula to describe the manipulation of truth by the
government: "What is stated as 'x' is 'minus x.'" Today he says the system
is finally coming apart: "It is a power that rots from the middle, a moral
collapse. Even without the economic crisis ultimately it would have been
like this; it just might have taken a little longer. I hope I will live to
see the end of it."
Pramoedya's words may not be reported in Indonesia, but his views echo those
of many in academia, business and even the military who sense that the
entire structure of government is creaking. But precisely because of the
tight control over political and intellectual dissent that has been
maintained over the last 32 years, open discussion on how to bring change to
the country is almost non-existent.
Blocking this change, Pramoedya says, is one man, and his antiquated notion
of power under which 'x' can become 'minus x' at the wave of a hand.
"Suharto is a Javanese," he says. "He hasn't yet become an Indonesian. You
can study the concept of power in Javanese culture: once you become No. 1
you can do no wrong, because you have been anointed from above."
Born in the village of Blora near Surabaya, Pramoedya himself was brought up
speaking Javanese, a complex language with many levels of politeness. But at
17 the young writer went to Jakarta and started using the Malay language
that nationalists were promoting as a universal tongue to unify all
Indonesians. "In Javanese I felt I was being lied to constantly: by the
cultural atmosphere, the wayang (puppet theater based on Indian mythology),
stories that made no sense, everything." Before he left home he remembers
his father calling in a dukun, or magical healer, to expel a Muslim spirit
from the premises. "To do that," he recalls, "they buried pieces of pork at
each corner of the house--things like that. I preferred to go over to the
rational side."
Javanese poets, he says, just consolidated the culture of tepo
seliro--knowing one's place in a feudal hierarchy of power. Switching to
Malay--or Bahasa Indonesia as it is called in Indonesia--"was for me a
liberation. I think Indonesia needs to be freed from Javanese. There is
nothing wrong with the actual people of Java, but spare us the
'Javanese-ism.' There is a romanticizing of Javanese mysticism. Let's be
rational instead."
Pramoedya's own literary journey--away from traditional Javanese literature
toward a more modern, liberating world view--is not without its ironies. In
his search for the rational he acquired a political agenda on top of his
writing. Although he did not join the Communist Party, which became powerful
under Sukarno's rule up to 1965, he was closely linked with left-wing
politics, and in 1962 he wrote a series about artists for the literary
supplement Lentera under the rubric, "Those who are to be cut down and those
who are to be encouraged." Even today other Indonesian writers such as
Mochtar Lubis point out how intolerant Pramoedya himself once was of writing
that he dismissed as bourgeois and anti-revolutionary.
After the 1965 coup and the bloody crackdown on suspected communists that
followed, Pramoedya found himself in the infamous Buru island prison camp,
where he had plenty of time to rethink his ideas about the dignity of the
individual and to compose his masterpiece, the Buru Quartet. It is the
colorful and compelling tale of the coming of age of Javanese journalist
Minke and, at the same time, of the nation of Indonesia, struggling for
freedom from its Dutch colonizers. Although the novels are banned in
Indonesia, photocopies circulate covertly, while in neighboring Malaysia
they have been required reading in high school and university literature
courses.
"There are lots of ironies in this part of the world," says Krishen Jit, a
Kuala Lumpur theater director and critic who is currently producing a
musical based on the first book of the Buru Quartet, This Earth of Mankind.
"This kind of material is very potent. His writing just comes at you, almost
attacks you. I was stunned by the language."
Pramoedya no longer writes--his time these days is taken up mostly with his
grandchildren--but he says he is modestly optimistic about the future. "We
have to raise the cultural ceiling. Otherwise any political system will end
up like this. The ceiling should be raised by philosophers, artists,
writers. You cannot have any real debate in the system we have now. The New
Order is a power that has refused to grow up. It must be thrown out and
replaced with new people."
Pramoedya himself is proud just to have survived. "Nothing the New Order has
done to me has succeeded. They banned my books with the intention of
destroying my life, but it didn't work. I'm still alive. Every banning that
I have had under the New Order I view as a medal of honor."
With reporting by David Liebhold/Jakarta