Celebrating Pramoedya Ananta Toer

At the end of April, we marked the 10th anniversary of the death of one of our region’s most important political novelists, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006).

Amidst the build-up to the empty media circus associated with a federal election, there was virtually no chance that this would be noticed by Australia’s inward-looking bourgeois media, but even in Pramoedya’s home country of Indonesia, the anniversary passed relatively quietly. This is despite the fact that his books continue to sell well, and he continues to be popular with readers of all ages.

But the context of the anniversary makes remembering his works even more important than usual. Since the end of 2014, powerful figures in Indonesia have been working to crack down on left wing politics. Recently, the head of the national police announced that he had the president’s support to prosecute criminally “all forms of communism”, including the teaching, “spreading or development of communism, Leninism or Marxism”.

His version of history – a history of resistance, activism and liberation – is still as inspiring as it was almost four decades ago when his greatest books first began to be published.

This has followed attacks on a variety of alternative public events, ranging from a women’s punk workshop, to book launches, film showings and a broad left ideas festival, among many others. This month it even included the arrest of a T-shirt stall owner for selling T-shirts reproducing a DVD cover of the German death metal band Kreator, which happened to include a hammer and sickle symbol. The attacks have been carried out by fascist militias, such as the Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) and the Indonesian Anti-Communist Front (FAKI), as well as by the police, often in clear collaboration.

The goal of these attacks is to close down the democratic space that was opened up by the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, and the subsequent liberalisation that has resulted in Indonesia emerging as the world’s third largest parliamentary democracy. It has also explicitly been the goal of both the police and the militia (and the public figures who have supported them) to protect the version of Indonesian history created by the Suharto regime to justify its birth in 1965-66 among the mass murder of up to a million leftists, and the torture and detention of hundreds of thousands of others, including Pramoedya.

Under that regime, Pramoedya was exiled to the Indonesian gulag on the island of Buru in the east of the archipelago until his release in December 1979. He remained under various forms of house arrest and police control right up until the regime fell 18 years ago. But that did not stop him being a constant thorn in the side of the regime, providing human evidence that the regime’s collective character assassination of the Indonesian left was a fabrication.

While imprisoned, he wrote books in his head when he had nothing to write with (and told his stories to his fellow prisoners). When he did have something, he wrote on what he could, with whatever he could access, starting with school exercise books. When he was released, he worked with some other former prisoners to publish his books, which were then banned by the government. But they still passed from hand to hand, and students (and many others) risked arrest and prison to read them.

His books told Indonesians about history in a way that was far more captivating than the sterile school textbook fabrications of the regime, and his continued resistance was an inspiration to a new generation of activists, who were eventually able to overthrow the regime.

His version of history – a history of resistance, activism and liberation – is still as inspiring as it was almost four decades ago, when his greatest books, the Buru tetralogy, first began to be published. They stand as a challenge to those who are trying to stifle discussion of alternative ideas or attacking grassroots organisations, or, for that matter, trying to distract us with stories of Bill Shorten’s “man-boobs”.

Further reading

The “Buru” Tetralogy: This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps and House of Glass (the first two volumes sometimes available as Awakenings) tells the story of the emergence of the modern anti-colonial movement in Indonesia (and much else). These books are often available in public libraries or second-hand bookstores.

The Mute’s Soliloquy: a collection of autobiographical and political essays written as letters home to his children.

The Girl from the Coast: Written in the years before his arrest in 1965, this is the story of Pramoedya’s grandmother, who was a “practice wife” to a colonial era aristocrat. Actually the first volume of a trilogy, the original manuscript of this work (and many other books in Pramoedya’s irreplaceable collection of historical works) was destroyed by a military-backed mob in 1965. We have this much of the trilogy only because Pramoedya published a draft of almost all of the first volume in the newspaper Bintang Timur (“Eastern Star”).

Max Lane’s introductions to the volumes of the Buru Tetralogy and chapter four of his Unfinished Nation tell some of the story of Pramoedya’s Buru works, and of the political role they have played.