Prison years haven't slowed writer

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

May 16, 1999

Pg. 18

By GEETA SHARMA-JENSEN

Journal Sentinel Book Editor

Aging Promoedya Ananta Toer, widely known as one of Indonesia's greatest writers, has spent 14 years at hard labor and several years beyond that under house arrest for his left-leaning views.

But that hasn't made him look over his shoulder, he says.

"No, I'm not more careful," he said, shaking his head during a recent visit to Madison. "I write what I want to write."

Ananta Toer's voice seemed to have fallen silent between 1965 and 1979 while he served time in various jails in Jakarta and eventually at a penal colony on barren Buru Island.

But as long as he could find something to write with -- and even when he had nothing to write with -- Ananta Toer composed letters, essays, notes and novels during those years. When he was sometimes allowed to put pen to paper, he wrote down his oral novels, the Buru Quartet containing "This Earth of Mankind", "Child of All Nations," "Footsteps," and "House of Glass." All of those were published later and remain in print in the U.S. in paperback.

Now, Ananta Toer recounts his prison years in his first non-fiction work, "The Mute's Soliloquy," (Hyperion. 375 pages. $27.50) a memoir he explains as "personal notes, nothing more."

Ananta Toer is 74 now, a thin man with an almost silent laugh who speaks to Westerners through an interpreter. His work remains officially banned in Indonesia, but leading bookstores continue to sell him. He never stopped writing, no matter how much he was beaten, no matter how despairing his life.

"The Mute's Soliloquy" is based on fragments of notes, essays and letters that his captors did not find or destroy or that he did not destroy to safeguard himself or others, he said during his book promotion stop in Wisconsin.

Sometimes, he would find paper and pen that he would hide. Other times, he would write in his head. He hid or smuggled out his work, but it wasn't always possible.

He kept on writing, he had to, because it kept him going. "If people want to live they have to stand up to injustice and oppression," he said. "The will to resist oppression, to keep on writing, not to give in, gave me spirit."

Ananta Toer was first imprisoned by the Dutch for two years during the independence revolution that followed World War II. But in 1965, after the Indonesian military with Suharto as its commander took over the government, he was jailed for his communist-style support of the common people.

"Anti-communism in America produced just one McCarthy," Ananta Toer observed, "but in Indonesia, it produced many McCarthys."

Ananta Toer, the son of a nationalist revolutionary and a determined mother, said he was educated to lean to the left. He turned to writing at around age 10. His memoir is both a tribute to his family's determination and to his unquenchable spirit and voice.