Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

• Author: ROTHSCHILD, MATTHEW
• Position: Indonesial author and political prisoner - Includes interview - Interview

Pramoedya Ananta Toer is the preeminent novelist of Indonesia and is frequently mentioned as a candidate for a Nobel Prize. Born on February 1, 1925, on the island of Java, Pramoedya was brought up to be an Indonesian nationalist. From 1947 to 1949, he was imprisoned by the Dutch for possessing anti-colonial materials. A supporter of Indonesia's first president, the nationalist and nonaligned leader Sukarno, Pramoedya was a marked man when General Suharto seized power in September 1965. On the evening of October 13, 1965, Pramoedya was at home editing a collection of Sukarno's short stories when the military came for him. He spent most of the Suharto era behind bars without trial, including fourteen years at the Buru Island Prison Colony. For the first few years there, he was held with sixteen other prisoners in isolation from the other inmates.

During Suharto's thirty-three-year reign, Pramoedya's works were banned in Indonesia. Today he is most famous for his Buru Quartet, which he wrote from 1969 to 1979 while imprisoned there. The quartet consists of This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass (all republished in English by Penguin). The hero of the anti-colonial quartet is a journalist named Minke, who gradually becomes a leading voice for Indonesian independence. Minke narrates the first three installments of the quartet. But in the last one, a new narrator takes over, Minke's captor--Jacques Pangemanann, who arrested him for publishing an attack on the Dutch rulers. While guarding Minke, Pangemanann comes to admire him and sympathize with the nationalist movement though he still treats him with cruelty.

Toward the end of the quartet, Pangemanann and a couple of police officers present Minke with a release form to sign. It demands that he not get involved in politics or organizations. Minke spurns the request:

"What do you gentlemen mean by politics? And by organization? And what do you mean by `involved'? Do you mean that I have to go and live by myself on top of a mountain? Everything is political! Everything needs organization. Do you gentlemen think that the illiterate farmers who spend their lives hoeing the ground are not involved in politics? The moment they surrender a part of their little crop to the village authorities as tax, they are carrying out a political act because they are acknowledging and accepting the authority of the government. Or do you mean by politics just those things that make the government unhappy? While those things that make the government happy are not political? And tell me, who is it that can free themselves from involvement in organization? As soon as you have more than two people together, you already have organization .... Even those who become hermits, who take themselves away into the middle of the forest or the ocean, still take with them something of the influence of their fellow human beings. And while there are those who rule and those who are ruled, those who exercise power and those who are the objects of that exercise of power, people will be involved in politics. While people live in society, no matter how small that society, people will be organizing."

Pangemanann releases Minke anyway but heaps further humiliations upon him. A few months later, Minke dies in obscurity.

This year, Pramoedya has come out with a new book, The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir (Hyperion). In it, he provides sketches of what life was like in prison.

"For the first few months, torture...