A Javanese Tragedy

Seen from the air the island of Buru resembles most of the other thousand or so islands that comprise Indonesia’s Maluku (or Moluccas) province. Coral reefs announce its approach, punctuating the azure translucence of the Banda Sea with bold parentheses of white foam. The narrow beaches look deserted, and an emerald baize of forest and elephant grass blankets the hilly interior to impenetrable effect. Almost circular and about the size of Bedfordshire, Buru appears uninhabited and possibly idyllic.

Its reputation is another matter. Planes can’t land on the island and inter-island ferries seldom call at its port. Fifteen hundred nautical miles east of Java (and so nearer Darwin than Jakarta), Buru was until recently a destination to be avoided. As the largest, most isolated and most dreaded of Indonesia’s state detention centres, it was somewhere you were sent in the hold of a rusting hulk with nothing to eat but the rats and geckos that scuttled about the ironwork. Conditions ashore were closer to those on the River Kwai than Yarl’s Wood. Here some 13,000 political prisoners laboured twelve hours a day in a tropical gulag for up to two decades. Few had been convicted of any crime; many died from torture, disease and malnutrition. Yet from this hellhole there came one of the most ambitious literary compositions of the twentieth century. Though the name Buru retains an air of menace, the place is today best known as the island where Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia’s foremost man of letters, composed the four-part saga now generally called the Buru Quartet. I first encountered ‘Pram’ (as he was affectionately known) and his great work in the 1980s. The BBC’s Radio 3, then under the enlightened direction of the late Ian McIntyre, had conjured up a rolling contract for a yearly series of documentary programmes about places not much featured in the rest of the corporation’s output. Cynics thought the assignment too good to be true. Shamefaced, the producer and I totted up the absent weeks and stressed the risks to health and domestic harmony. A riotous swing through Francophone West Africa, followed by a meticulous analysis of the Himalayan kingdoms, convinced no one. We didn’t care. By now we were game for anything. Taking a metaphorical pin, we plunged it into a map and skewered a chunk of ocean between Indonesia and the Philippines. So be it: the south-east Asian archipelagos would be next. To appeal to the Radio 3 audience we counted on gamelan and puppetry, on the problems of nation-building in pelagic states and on the contrasting legacies of Hispanic, American and Dutch colonialism. History, theatre, music and politics were covered. As primary producers, the economies of both countries looked worth a glance, and Manila had a film industry. But the literature of the region was a non-starter. Neither of us could speak any of the relevant languages, or name a single local author. I did, though, on someone’s recommendation, pick up an English translation of This Earth of Mankind (1980). The first volume in the Buru Quartet, it forms a necessary introduction to those that follow and is in many ways the most evocative. The book itself smelled faintly of cloves. The text told of bamboo rustling in the night breeze, of furtive encounters and noisy frogs and thick black coffee under the bougainvillaea. To someone ignorant of all save Bali’s beaches, it brought the land and its peoples alive. I read on. The story is set in Java under Dutch rule at the turn of the last century. Minke, a boy of distinguished Javanese birth, attains a coveted place in a Dutch-language school where he is exposed to the wonders of Western science and liberal thought and to the conventions of Dutch colonial society. He embraces them all, happily acknowledging their superiority to anything on offer in Indonesia’s culture and accepting the racist slurs and put-downs of his Dutch peers as par for the course. He adopts Western dress and writes in Dutch, becoming the first native journalist to do so. His father, a district official, is delighted. Within the constraints of colonial rule a brilliant career awaits. But the mild-mannered Minke is troubled. He feels compromised – compromised by what Indonesians see as the advantage of his birth and by what the ruling Dutch see as the disadvantage of his birth. Wrestling with these dilemmas he is drawn into the company of other marginalized characters who straddle the racial divide – the so-called ‘Indos’ of mixed race, the naturalized Europeans with unacceptably enlightened opinions, the native concubines attached to Dutch masters, the expatriate Chinese middlemen and the Japanese prostitutes. Some voice nationalist aspirations or represent agrarian, professional or mercantile discontent; all are portrayed with a precision and a deep understanding that are as much the author’s as Minke’s. The cast is large and challenging. Minke’s gradual disillusionment with even the progressive aspects of colonialism is matched by the story of Nyai Ontosoroh, the Javanese concubine of a demented Dutchman. Minke falls in love with their exquisite half-caste daughter and marries her, the tragedy and repercussions of this relationship forming a link to the volumes that follow. But it is Nyai Ontosoroh herself, now widowed, endowed with great business acumen and still with many suitors, who rivals Minke as the quartet’s main protagonist. She funds his career, provides him with solace and sanctuary, and combats colonialism on her own formidable terms. A personification of Java itself, she is eventually married to an endearing French artist with a peg leg, and departs the scene only when Minke’s die is cast. The Buru Quartet has often been compared with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Both are intricately structured and both deal with the pangs of national awakening, although in translation Pram’s work lacks the literary pyrotechnics of Rushdie’s. A better comparison might be with Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (The Jewel in the Crown etc). Scott, like Pramoedya, dresses history as narrative and presents the clash of ideas as dialogue. From opposite points of view – Scott from that of the rulers, Pram mainly from that of the ruled – each gently exposes the iniquities and distortions for which colonial rule was responsible. The impact is incremental and the message universal.

It was not only from Europe that so much could be learned [muses Minke in the second volume, Child of All Nations]. This modern age had provided many breasts to suckle me – from among the Natives themselves, from Japan, China, America, India, Arabia, and from all the peoples on the face of this earth. They were the mother wolves that gave me life to become a builder of Rome! Is it true you will build a Rome? Yes, I answered myself. How? I don’t know. In humility I realized I am a child of all nations, of all ages, past and present. Place and time of birth, parents, all are coincidence: such things are not sacred.

The scope of the narrative is vast and demanding, but whereas Scott and Rushdie enjoyed the writer’s luxuries of paper, typewriter and books, the extraordinary feature of Pram’s work is that it was composed without any of these. The Buru Quartet was first disseminated by word of mouth to his fellow prisoners on Buru. His library and papers had been burned when he was arrested by the Suharto regime in 1969 and for much of his decade-long detention he was forbidden even a pencil; the four books existed only in his head. ‘Serialized’ in instalments that he related to his companions, they were then relayed to other inmates across the island. He wanted to give them something to live for, he later explained, something to relieve the horrors of incarceration and to counteract the relentless re-education. His audience grew. Mostly left-leaning activists and intellectuals who had survived the 1965 pogrom in which Suharto’s supporters had butchered over a million supposed communists, these fellow prisoners shouldered some of his labouring duties so that he could concentrate on Minke’s story. They also leaked details of it to the wider world where Pram, already the author and translator of numerous other works, was a minor celebrity. Günter Grass led the international campaign on his behalf; and when, after four paperless years, he was permitted to write the story down, Jean-Paul Sartre sent him a typewriter. Release from Buru came six years later, but it was conditional. The whole typescript had to be surrendered and burned. He would have to begin all over again. When Radio 3 came calling in 1986, Pram had been back in Java for seven years but was still under a form of detention. Forbidden to travel and closely watched, he had seen all his books banned, a first printing of the Buru Quartet recalled and its publishers gaoled. He had hit back by fortifying himself behind ramparts of literature in a first-floor apartment in a Jakarta suburb. He was then in his sixties, not as small as I’d expected nor as guarded in what he said despite the marks of ill-usage. Several teeth were missing, he wore thick glasses and his hearing had never recovered from the rifle-butt to the head that had felled him at the time of his arrest in 1969. That was actually his third arrest, the Dutch having detained him from 1947 to 1949 and his idol President Sukarno having locked him up briefly in the early ’60s. His crime on the latter occasion had been to champion the rights of Indonesia’s Chinese community. Pram’s repertoire of worthwhile causes included something to antagonize almost every conceivable regime. ‘Here we hardly know anything about the world,’ he said, ‘and the world knows nothing about Indonesia.’ It knew a bit more by the time of Pram’s death in 2006, thanks in no small part to the international popularity of the Buru Quartet. Though still banned in Indonesia, the work was translated into dozens of languages and Pram was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Attention was guaranteed by the unlikely genesis of the books, by their historical indictment of colonial rule and by their importance as cleverly disguised social and political commentaries on the regime that had so mistreated him. But to my mind they are much more than that. When I first read them I was captivated by their sheer narrative power, by Pram’s deeply sympathetic characterizations and by their insights into one of the world’s richest cultures. I read them again before writing this piece, and once again I was spellbound.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © John Keay 2015