Obdurate, resolute, unflinching — Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer pieced together his fledgling nation’s history in pursuit of ‘eternal freedom’. On the centenary of his birth, the world remembers
“You could possess an intelligence that is as high as the sky, but as long as you do not write, it will all be lost in the rumblings of society, set quite apart from history. The act of writing is an act towards the eternal.” — Pramoedya Ananta Toer
“People call me Minke…”
This is the opening line of This Earth of Mankind — a book that would become the first of a quartet of novels. Later, there would be Child of All Nations, Footsteps and House of Glass. The effort was nothing less than a grand Melvillian sweep of Indonesian history, myth and storytelling: a Moby Dick, several times over.
The method of storytelling, however, would prove painstaking and arduous — digging into the traditional methods of the Javanese cycle of tales, assembled orally, later put together within the linear structures of the novel.
The Buru Quartet, now hailed as one of the grand achievements of modern literature, was told, then “recorded” in the heads of inmates — political prisoners — on the island of Buru, and committed to memory.
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Deprived of any writing material — ink, pencil or paper — Pramoedya relied on the memory of friends and comrades as vessels for storytelling. Each day, they gathered to receive a part of the tale, and returned to their separate spaces to recall the episodes. Upon release from imprisonment decades later, the friends converged and, over a period of time, recalled, recited and retold, before This Earth of Mankind was first published in 1980. The publisher was Hasta Mitra, set up by the renowned Indonesian journalist and fellow Tapol (short for “tahanan politik”, or political detainee) Joesoef Isak.
The novel was summarily banned by the Suharto New Order regime.
This and subsequent novels found life across the Straits of Melaka in Malaysia, where they were published by his close friend, Jomo Kwame Sundaram. From here, copies were smuggled into Indonesia, disseminated widely underground, especially among students and a burgeoning opposition movement in Indonesia.
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The book became an object of lore among dissidents, some of whom recalled reading it with a flashlight under the blanket, for the act of reading any of Pramoedya’s writings would be met with a period of extended imprisonment.
In a strange twist of irony, it was in Malaysia — whose formation Pramoedya had opposed during the Konfrontasi period, following in the steps of President Sukarno — that one of his major novels, Keluarga Gerilya (The Guerrilla Family), was prescribed as a principal text for Malay literature students in secondary school.
It came upon the recommendation of the then-minister of education, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who contributed a citation for the book, extolling its qualities of courage and its anti-colonial stance.
Sixty years ago, in September 1965 — with an Indonesia at near economic collapse, internal political tensions between the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia), parties of the right and religious parties at breaking point and an increasingly enfeebled Sukarno — a coup, which notable historians describe as orchestrated, led to an eruption of violence and mass killings.
On the night of that implosion, Pramoedya, then heavily involved in the left-leaning organisation of writers, Lekra, was assembling a collection of short stories by Sukarno. Soldiers raided his home and, in one of the more dramatic incidents of that episode, razed his library.
In an effort to stop the burning, a pleading Pramoedya lurched at the soldiers, one of whom bore down the brunt of his rifle upon the left side of the writer’s head, bursting an eardrum and leaving him deaf for life in that ear.
In one of those instances of putting disaster to good use, Pramoedya was known to turn the left side of his head to an interlocutor upon hearing a question he either disliked or did not wish to answer.
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Fear, or the fending off of it, would become a principal Pramoedya Ananta Toer stance: that, and the act of recording history and protecting collective memory. Cruel detention was already familiar to a young Pramoedya.
Detained for anti-Dutch activities even before he became a writer, in characteristically Javanese mystical terms, his first act of overcoming fear took the form of a spiritual confrontation:
“From the age of 24, I have been ready to face death, wherever that may be. I was detained in Bukit Duri, a Dutch prison. At that time, I refused forced labour and was placed in solitary confinement. The cell was by the kitchen, where smoke would constantly stream. I was told I would get the worst food. Food would be passed under the cell door, and I would kick it out. For four days and four nights, I refrained from putting anything into my stomach. Then, I resolved to bersamadhi (meditate) facing the wall. One day, from this wall emerged a tiger. It wanted to tear me apart. I said to the beast, ‘I am not afraid of you. Kill me if you wish.’ With that, it vanished. Perhaps it was hungry. Then I heard a voice, ‘Who are you, really?’ ‘What do you want, really?’ It is a question I have not been able to answer to this very day.”
The stirrings of a new Indonesia, brought about by the resignation of president Suharto and the fall of the New Order regime, did not allay the zeal and stubbornness for justice to be returned to the people of Indonesia. Pramoedya would become embroiled in a series of intellectual recriminations involving “justice seekers” such as himself and those who extended a call for reconciliation in Indonesian society.
Even as he emerged from the shadows of long imprisonment, traversing the world at least once, and being seriously reckoned for the Nobel Prize for Literature, supported by such literary stalwarts as Nobel laureate Gunter Grass, he remained firm in his stance of individual liberty, heralding the fight for lost causes and breaking the bonds of colonial enslavement.
At the centenary of his birth and as Indonesia approaches 60 years of the incident that shook the very foundations of its history — the massacre of 1965 — explorations of that have ranged from the contemplative (in voluminous writings and considerations) to the near-operatic. For example, in the award-winning documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing, the voice of Pramoedya continues to be set apart, in his interrogations of “justice” and what it means for a people to be “set free”.
“I’ll do as I please,” he once declared. “My mind is not to be imprisoned.”
It is a resolute testament from a writer who overcame the ultimate creative struggle: fear, wrestled in the form of a tiger.
