Voices of Freedom
Fordham Celebrates an Indonesian Writer's Triumph Over Oppression in His Homeland
By Denise DiFulco and Tom Golden
Originally published in the fall 1999 issue of FORDHAM magazine
During his first visit to the United States this past April, 74-year-old Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer received and dutifully donned a new baseball cap at each landmark he visited. Just like any other sightseer, he smiled, a clove cigarette never far from his lips, and posed for pictures with his wife and friends in front of places like the United Nations building and the White House.
But this was no ordinary visit. Pramoedya (pronounced pram-OOH-dee-ah), a political dissident, had spent most of his adult life imprisoned, confined or otherwise isolated by the Indonesian government. His crime: speaking out against the oppressive military regime of his nation’s president, Suharto, who held power from 1965 to 1998. His punishment included beatings, forced labor, and the destruction of his personal papers and family history.
This past spring, however, with the help of Fordham University’s Chris GoGwilt, associate professor of literature, Pramoedya was able to travel abroad for the first time since 1959. One of his first stops was Fordham University.
GoGwilt and Pramoedya first met in 1995, when the professor interviewed the exiled writer in Indonesia. After the visit, GoGwilt began organizing an academic conference to celebrate Pramoedya’s importance in history and world literature. He never dreamed Pramoedya would be able to attend, given that he was still under surveillance and was unwilling to ask Suharto officials for permission to leave the country. But a three-day seminar at Fordham was just the catalyst needed to persuade Pramoedya to travel and to convince government officials to grant him a visa.
“I’ve organized a lot of talks and lectures,” GoGwilt says, “but I’ve never felt quite so strongly about having a university enable something like this—to bring in a figure so important, not just in literary terms but in political terms, in terms of questions of basic justice.”
The conference coincided with the publication of Pramoedya’s book, The Mute’s Soliloquy (New York: Hyperion Press), a harrowing account of his life on the infamous Buru Island penal colony, where he spent nearly 14 years. Scholars and literary critics alike consider the memoir testimony to the human spirit’s power to endure. Pramoedya describes it as merely “personal notes, nothing more.”
At the Fordham conference, surrounded by more than 150 scholars, students, and friends and collaborators from Indonesia, Holland and the United States, Pramoedya recounted his story with a mix of irony and humor.
The account begins in the early 20th century, when Indonesia was under Dutch colonial rule. Mounting Indonesian nationalist movements led to the rise of a man named Sukarno, who proclaimed the country an independent republic and became its first president when the Dutch granted its independence in 1949.
A general named Suharto emerged as the president’s chief critic, blaming Sukarno’s dictatorial, anti-Western regime and extravagant spending for damaging the Indonesian economy. In 1965, Suharto led a military takeover that ousted Sukarno and his government.
By that time, Pramoedya was one of Indonesia’s premier writers and an outspoken proponent of Indonesian nationalism. He had been imprisoned twice: by the Dutch from 1947 to 1950, during the struggle for independence; and by Sukarno’s military from 1960 to 1961.
Pramoedya also was a known leftist, and his critics accused him of being involved in a Communist movement. Such suspicions led Suharto’s police to Pramoedya’s home in October 1965, where they forced their way in and destroyed his personal belongings.
“We’re here to take you to safety,” Pramoedya recalls being told by an officer who led him through a mob outside his home. Police then tied his hands behind his back, put a noose around his neck and shoved him into a military truck. He watched a mob set his books, manuscripts and family history ablaze. And when he asked police to save his precious papers, an officer struck him full in the face with a rifle butt, leaving him permanently deaf in his right ear.
Many people were killed by police and mobs that year. Pramoedya and tens of thousands of others were imprisoned and eventually exiled to Buru Island. Life on the island, which Pramoedya describes as “a tropical Gulag,” included long days of forced labor producing rice and lumber. He lived on a diet of “gutter rats; the moldy outgrowth on papaya trees and banana plants; leeches skewered on palm-leaf ribs; and fat, cream-colored worms about the size of a thumb.”
Pramoedya told the Fordham audience, “When I was in jail and isolated, all I encountered was myself. The opportunities I found to write very much depended on my intuition for safety.”
Pramoedya was barred from writing until 1973, when the Indonesian Section of Amnesty International intervened on his behalf. Fellow inmates took over his field chores and supplied him with food, cigarettes, clothing, sugar, soap and two reams of onionskin paper each month. He settled into a life that began early each morning with exercise and a two-mile run before he sat down to write on a battered old typewriter.
All the while, Pramoedya wondered, “Who’s going to read me, anyway? Who’s going to publish what I write?”
This Earth of Mankind and Child of All Nations, the first two novels of what today is known as the “Buru Quartet,” were published in 1979, following Pramoedya’s release from the island. The manuscripts, along with notes for what would become The Mute’s Soliloquy, were among papers smuggled out of the prison by missionaries and visitors.
The novels of the Buru Quartet are perhaps Pramoedya’s best-known and most influential works. Almost as quickly as Suharto’s government could ban them as Marxist, the books were translated into most widely read languages. Their threat was the way in which Pramoedya reconstructed the history of Indonesian independence from colonial control—a system that had provided a model for Suharto’s regime.
Pramoedya, too, remained a threat in the government’s eyes, and he was put under house arrest following his release from Buru. The second half of the Buru Quartet—Footsteps and House of Glass—was published in the 1980s, but the Indonesian government also banned it. He remained a captive in his home until Human Rights Day in 1992, when he freed himself by walking out onto the street. Still, he did not feel safe.
Half a world away, GoGwilt had chosen a path in life that seemed unlikely ever to cross Pramoedya’s. A native of Scotland, GoGwilt had studied German literature and philosophy before receiving his bachelor’s degree at Swarthmore College. He went on to Princeton University to finish his master’s and doctoral studies in Englishliterature, completing his dissertation on the ideological concept of Western civilization as reflected in Joseph Conrad’s works.
GoGwilt’s marriage to a woman of Indonesian descent heightened his awareness of Indonesia and the country’s influence on Conrad’s writing. He read Pramoedya’s House of Glass, and his life suddenly was changed.
“I knew that no one had written about Indonesian history in this kind of way and certainly not within the framework of a fictional perspective,” GoGwilt now says. “I began to realize the importance of this voice.”
A few years after reading the book, GoGwilt traveled to Indonesia with his wife’s family. GoGwilt’s father-in-law was school friends with Oei Ju That, a Chinese member of Sukarno’s cabinet, and Pramoedya happened to be editing Oei’s memoirs at the time.
“Because of the connection, I was able to set up an interview with Pramoedya,” GoGwilt says. “I was lucky to have that moment. I remember feeling that in some ways, I was not the right person because I was not a specialist, but in that sense also just the right person. There are scholars who are Indonesian specialists who have written about Pramoedya, but they are writing from a specialist’s perspective. What’s interesting to me is just what Pramoedya means, and how he is heard outside of Indonesia.”
After the interview, GoGwilt invited Pramoedya to the United States, but Pramoedya refused, explaining that he was too afraid of being kidnapped if he left his home. Still, GoGwilt stayed in touch with others interested in Pramoedya’s writing and started using This Earth of Mankind in his undergraduate 20th-century literature classes at Fordham.
GoGwilt decided to plan a conference about Pramoedya to coincide with the American release of The Mute’s Soliloquy. The book’s English-language editor, John H. McGlynn, suggested that GoGwilt invite Pramoedya. Though it seemed unlikely the writer would attend, GoGwilt asked Pramoedya, his wife, Maemunah Thamrin, and his Indonesian editor, Joesoef Isak, to come to America.
Pramoedya wouldn’t apply to the Indonesian government for a visa himself, not wanting to have anything to do with a regime he considered criminal and illegitimate. So GoGwilt, together with friends of Pramoedya in Jakarta, helped navigate the government bureaucracy in Indonesia and worked with the U.S. Embassy to push through the necessary applications. Despite the risks, Pramoedya made it to New York City.
“Pram has always been one to test limits,” GoGwilt says, “and coming to the United States was his way of testing his freedom. He’s lived his life with the conviction that basic human rights are not a gift that the government or any other power can bestow on its citizens. The very fact that one is born a human being makes those rights one’s own.”
GoGwilt guided Pramoedya through the first several days of his stay in New York, the beginning of what developed into a three-month tour that included rounds of interviews, festive dinner parties, and visits to the United Nations and the White House.
“I’ve been very moved by the experience of seeing America,” Pramoedya said through an interpreter at the conference. “I have knowledge of the treatment of Native Americans and slaves, but I see people with many different ethnic backgrounds, different colors of skin, living side-by-side, in peace. And I see police who don’t see themselves as loftier than the ordinary person. I’m truly moved to the point where tears form in my eyes.”
There is hope that someday Indonesia can be a similar place—or, at the very least, a democracy. And Pramoedya already is playing a role in that transformation, says Deborah Sklar, the Indonesia specialist for Amnesty International USA. Pramoedya’s visit to the United States signaled that Suharto’s regime has lost some of its luster and prominence, she says.
Pramoedya’s writings also play a significant part. Sklar, who interviewed Pramoedya for Amnesty International’s magazine Amnesty Now during his recent visit to the United States , says many young Indonesians see him as a mentor and are drawn to the hope he inspires.
“In spite of living under this extreme, authoritarian regime, he was determined to keep telling his stories and using his imagination,” she says. “He transcended bodily and physical suffering, and was able to produce a body of work that showed that Indonesians—despite their oppression—were vibrant and creative.”
Pramoedya has said he intends to continue his life as a literary figure. He told those gathered at the Fordham conference of his plans to release two previously unpublished novels and a play soon after his return home. He also said he wanted to resume writing in earnest.
Meanwhile, GoGwilt says he will continue to write about Pramoedya and use his novels to teach 20th-century literature. He has no immediate plans to return to Indonesia.
Even if the two men’s paths never cross again, GoGwilt says he hopes to maintain a connection to Pramoedya through his writing. But with visitors near and far flocking to Pramoedya now that he is a recognized figure, writing may be more difficult.
“Pram has kept a journal of his experiences in the United States, and he seems interested in working on that, if people let him,” GoGwilt says. “I hope he writes, but he easily could occupy all his time with visitors.”
