A Prisoner's Paean: Memories from Suharto's Prison
VANCOUVER SUN
MAY 22, 1999
By Stan Persky
Pramoedya Ananta Toer spent decades imprisoned and under house arrest. His memoir, full of death, is a testament to life.
The question is not the old philosophical chestnut, If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it really exist? Rather, the question is, If a human being falls in the forest, and no one remembers him, did he really live? On Buru Island, where Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (he's known by his first name) was a political prisoner for more than a decade, lots of men fell in the snake-infested rattan thickets, hardpan savannah grasslands, and rice paddies of the island penal colony.
Pramoedya not only hasn't forgotten them, but at the end of his new book, The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir (Hyperion East, 375 pp., $37), he provides a 17-page list of 325 dead and missing prisoners, along with their identification numbers, other demographic details, and causes of death. "Crushed by a falling tree," "shot dead," "drowned in the Apo" river, "irreversible dehydration" and "suicide by hanging" are some of the causes listed, along with typhoid, dysentery and malaria, they give us an idea of the particular hell in which Pramoedya and some 12,000 fellow prisoners lived and died. Now 73, and in the midst of his first world literary tour, the internationally known author of the Buru Quartet of historical novels has lived one of those terrifyingly extraordinary lives that most of us can barely imagine.
Pramoedya will be reading in Vancouver on Tuesday, May 25, at 7:30, at the Choi Auditorium, 28 W. Pender. Admission is free, and it almost goes without saying that this is one of those rare cultural occasions not to be missed. In 1965, during the post-colonial Indonesian upheaval in which the 13,000- island nation's first president, Sukarno, was overthrown, the 41-year-old Pramoedya was summarily arrested. "My hands were tied behind my back and the rope that bound my wrists was then looped around my neck," he reports. "In the early days of the Indonesian revolution that kind of knot was a sure sign that the captive was to be killed." Indeed, many were, in the bloodbath that brought Sukarno's successor, Suharto, to power - a reign that was to last three decades, ending only last year. Never charged with any crime, but simply regarded as politically dangerous, Pramoedya spent the next 14 years in various prisons.
The fragments of memoir which make up Mute's Soliloquy, were, as Pramoedya modestly remarks, "hastily written under adverse conditions…They are personal notes, nothing more. There is no grand plan here." Along with the modesty, there's a sense of historical obligation and a streak of personal fortitude that led Pramoedya to rescue these nearly forgotten prison notes, essays, and unsent letters to his children. "Evil permits no witnesses, they say. But what am I to do? Destroy these notes? Forget my experience? 'Experience' is every person's right," Pramoedya recognizes, and as a result, a bamboo curtain is drawn aside: "The whistle blows and slowly the ship leaves…As one turns to the south, only open sea is visible, the Indian Ocean a limitless expanse…Don't listen, shut your ears to the laboured breath of this rusted and asthmatic vessel. Like our distant ancestors in the age of migration we are on a voyage of discovery," Pramoedya writes of this cargo of the damned headed for Buru Island. He sardonically quips, "There is at least one advantage to being an Indonesian citizen. With this country's expanse of land and even greater expanse of sea, it's not difficult finding space for one's grave."
Pramoedya's memoir includes the unaffected story of an Indonesian village boy making his way to Jakarta, and a rueful father's long-distance efforts to fulfil his duties to his children. The core of Mute's Soliloquy, however, is what might be called a Buru Book of the Dead. It's a story of hunger, road building, and clearing fields in the island wilderness, punctuated by bouts of arbitrary brutality. It's also a tale of a writer slowly re-teaching himself to be able to tell that story. "The basic fact is that for the person without civil rights, death is always present in the background, forever dancing, each second of the day, before his eyes," Pramoedya writes. "There is no need to beckon; the darkness that is death will soon come to you uninvited." When he looks into a bit of mirror found on a prison rubbish heap, "I am always struck by my hair - how white it is…My mirror is a pitiful thing, nothing more than a scratched shard, yet it can still hold an image - even if on its back side is death. And though all of us will one day make our way to the back side of the mirror, for now, there is still incentive to go on living, something that continues to goad me." Following his release from Buru prison, Pramoedya spent the following two decades under virtual house arrest. His works, though published in scores of countries, remain banned in Indonesia. Still, something continues to goad him before he arrives at "the back side of the mirror."