PRAMOEDYA: A LITMUS TEST OF 'REFORMASI'
Roving Insight, September-October 1999
by Loreen Neville and James Blackburn
Blora is a small, unprepossessing town in north-central Java. It seems on the face of it an unlikely place of origin for a man widely, if controversially, believed to be Indonesia's greatest living writer. That man is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was born in Blora on February 6, 1825, son of the headmaster of a local school.
Pramoedya has become one of Indonesia's most enduringly controversial figures, a novelist and essayist with a great international reputation who is still spurned by many in his own country. Controversy is a constant spectre at the writer's shoulder and yet again his name is being touted for the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award that would put him in the august company of people as various as Sir Winston Churchill, Britain's most famous Prime Minister, Nadine Gordimer, chronicler of South Africa's hated apartheid system and the Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, among many others. Should the Nobel committee decide in his favour Pramoedya would be cast into the Indonesian spotlight in much the same way as Nobel Peace laureates Jose Ramos-Harto and Bishop Belo were, a pariah to his own government, a hero to dissidents.
It is not of course difficult to identify the source of his current controversial status. Pramoedya is an ex-TAPOL, that is a former political prisoner who spent years in prison under the New Order for associations, real or imagined, with the banned Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). The writer, who with many others spent many years incarcerated on the 'gulag' island of Buru, where the Dutch had sent such luminaries as Indonesia's nationalist founding fathers, was particularly singled out for his activities with the PKI cultural front, LEKRA, which in the eyes of Soeharto's New Order was a compact with the devil. As editor of the left-wing "Lentera' he reprinted works about fin-de- siecle Indonesian history as well as those of the forerunners of Indonesian fiction and journalism.
As an ex-TAPOL Pramoedya, who had been badly beaten in his Buru exile and who has long suffered badly impaired hearing because of this, was subjected to systematic discrimination. This discrimination was even, perhaps especially, extended to members of his family, persecution that exactly mirrored the excesses of Stalinist regimes that the New Order so publicly opposed. Years of city arrest, constant surveillance and continued travel bans, which prevented him from accepting the Philippines prestigious Magsaysay Prize, were his lot even after leaving prison. Draconian publishing bans on his books were to land not only Pramoedya himself in further trouble but some of the small number of Indonesians brave enough to read them and circulate them.
In January of 1995 Pramoedya gave an interview in which he described how his brothers and his children had been discriminated against. "One brother," he said, "was working in West Germany when Adam Malik, then RI's Vice-President, visited and made a speech in which he appealed to Indonesian graduates to return home as their skills were greatly needed. My brother returned...and when he arrived at Kemayoran airport, he was immediately arrested and detained. Another brother was incarcerated on Buru."
Pramoedya had, like many other Indonesians of his generation, begun adult life under the Japanese occupation and had found early employment in the service of the Japanese, in his case the 'Domei' press agency. When the Japanese surrendered, again like many compatriots, he threw himself into the anti-colonial struggle for which he then spent two years as a Dutch prisoner.
None of this early part of his career makes him particularly exceptional. Indonesian nationalists of both Right and Left had bided their time under the Japanese before opposing the returning Dutch colonialists in various ways. (There is an interesting if not precise analogy with Aung San, Burma's national heo and leader of the so-called Thirty Comrades who first collaborated with the Japanese and then opposed them.)
It was perhaps only after he went to Holland in the wake of the Dutch withdrawal from Indonesia that his political ideas begun to gell fully and he committed himself to the Left. In the Netherlands he was influenced by the leading Dutch Indonesianist W.F. Wertheim who was arguing that Indonesian literature was confused and the root of confusion was "the failure of the Indonesian revolution as a social revolution". This, at least, is the view of the scholar Hong Liu.
There is clear evidence that Pramoedya took an active interest in Mao's Chinese Revolution, as indeed did many intellectuals around the world, and he translated the works of pro-revolution writers such as Ding Ling.
What does this prove? Nothing singular in itself and certainly at bottom no more than a commitment to the wider world of ideas and their exchange. Ding Ling was putting forward arguments about what a writer interested in social change should do and as Pramoedya was alienated by the post-independence corruption he perceived on his return to Indonesia--remember that it was in the mid-50s that Suharto and other Army commanders were establishing their links with the likes of Bob Hasan and Lim Sioe Liong--he was interested in how he might--or might not--use them in his own work.
Pramoedya became in the 1950s more and more an 'engage' rather than an 'enrage' writer, one interested in the historical process.
What is exactly that so alarms the New Order and its holdovers about his literature? The Indonesian government alleges that it contains hidden Marxist-Leninist teachings. But how would a people denied access to any and all Marxist and Leninist literature even begin to perceive them in, say, a novel like 'This Earth of Mankind', which is set in tur of the century Java and which is an anti-colonialist work before it is = anything else?
The censors provide us with an example; "How happy European children are. They are free to criticize, to declare their disbelief in a policy, and without being punished, let alone exiled. Those who are criticized lose nothing, let alone their freedom. Rather, they advance by correcting each other.... Try to criticize your Kings. You would have been killed by the sword before uttering your final words."
It would probably astonish the average Literature student to be told that this is Marxism-Leninism. He or she might say that this is no different to P.B. Shelley's 'Queen Mab' in which the poet lampoons the reigning British royal as "Swellfoot the Tyrant". And Shelley was long dead before the world had even heard of Karl Marx and Lenin.
So what upset the New Order censors? This passage was said 'to disparage national values'. Pramoedya himself had an answer to this kind of thing when on the occasion of Human Rights Day, 1992 he told The New York Times , "It is out of date to continuously rationalize in order to convince the world that human rights in Indonesia 'are respected in accordance with the special traits of national culture'..."
In a recent interview on a lecture tour to the USA Pramoedya stated quite clearly that it was impossible to separate literature from politics because politics is about power. That power is manifested in many ways that touch our lives and it is the task of the writer to probe and analyze these relationships. In addition he insists that Indonesia should "be managed as a maritime nation" and not one beholden to its rice-centric Java-dominated past.
Should his name become once more a focus for intense controversy through his nomination for the Nobel it will be a test of the sincerity of Indonesia's 'reformasi' that Indonesians are allowed to judge for themselves Pramoedya's literary merits.