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Wednesday, July 21, 2004 Pramoedya Ananta Toer
In Jakarta I met Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's great dissident novelist. Pram was arrested in 1965 during the anti-Communist hysteria that swept Suharto to power. In those days Pram was a left-wing agitator, not a Communist -- a populist who championed farmers against rich colonialists and translated Steinbeck and Tolstoy. He spent 14 years on the prison island of Buru. His life is so wrapped up in the history of modern Indonesia that you can't even detail his biography without explaining how the independence movement became Suharto's New Order. (You could almost do it backwards -- re-tell the history without mentioning Pram -- but that would be boring.) On Buru he composed a cycle of novels about a writer named Minke, who stands at the center of his own time, about a generation earlier. Minke promotes the idea of Indonesia as an independent (and democratic!) nation by writing and organizing against the Dutch. He's based on a journalist, Tirto Adi Suryo, who would be obscure except for Pram's novels. The same pattern: You could re-tell the history without mentioning Tirto, but you can't tell about Tirto without explaining the history. Like Solzhenitsyn, Pram had nothing to write with in jail. He memorized most of his material by telling stories to other prisoners. "Usually, during a break in forced labor," he told me, "the inmates and I were gathered and they would listen to my stories. When they worked somewhere else, they retold the stories to their friends. One day, there was an inmate who escaped. The guards looked after him all over the place. A week later, they found him in the forest [on Buru]. The guard asked him why did he run away? He said, 'I want to be Minke!'" I took this snapshot of him with my translator, Aji Ramyakim. As you can see she got along with with Pram. She called him "Bapak," an honorific like "sir" which happens to mean, and sound like, "papa." The affection she had for him as a forefather of the new Indonesia is pretty widespread. In spite of his serious novels and harrowing past he's a hilarious, mischievous guy. He has no religion; he's a stubborn individualist; he chain-smokes clove cigarettes. He's still waiting for a Nobel Prize. "It seems that I might get it," he said. "Now, I have no competitor. I'm 80 years old, there aren't so many people my age around." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:16 PM
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