“Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship” by Max Lane
Perhaps the only thing better than the Buru Quartet, is the story behind the making of the Buru Quartet.
On 30 September 1965, a coup occurred in Indonesia. All the military generals were rounded up and slaughtered, while the movements of Indonesia’s highly popular president Soekarno was restricted and he was practically stripped off his power. The killings of the generals were officially [falsely] blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) with a retaliative genocide took place not long after, towards the communist party members (killing estimated 1-2 million people), while the intellectual Left were all captured and exiled to a faraway island in Eastern Indonesia, the Buru Island. Including author Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
This book provides the life’s story of Pramoedya, his political views, his innermost thinking, and the reason why he was eventually imprisoned for 14 years by the regime that staged the coup, the Suharto regime. The book is also the story of two other incredible men: Hasjim Rachman, a fearless publisher that became the leader of morale inside his prison in Buru Island. And Joesoef Isak, an international journalist that risked his life for smuggling daily news into his own prison camp in Jakarta to keep the fellow prisoners well informed with the changes in the country.
These men’s stories are told in the most crystal clear context alongside the Indonesian history: The fight for independence, the turbulent 1950s, and the crucial roles the 3 men had in trying to build Soekarno’s vision of Indonesia from journalism and writing.
And perhaps most crucially it tells the little-known story of how the intellectual Soekarnoists (the intellectual Left) were treated and shunned from society after the 1965 coup, by the CIA-backed Suharto regime. The torture and hard labour in Buru island, the corruption of the officers, the injustice imprisonment without trial, all of which provides the rich context for Pramoedya’s idea for his book “Bumi Manusia” (or the “Earth of Mankind”) and its 3 sequels, which together are dubbed the “Buru Quartet.”
In the book, Pramoedya’s dark experiences were channeled into the simple enough beginning of the story. Story that grows immensely complicated, with a deep message of resistance against the colonial rulers, through the historical fiction of Indonesia in the 1890s when it was still the Dutch East Indies under the colonial rule of the Netherlands.
In Buru, Pramoedya was restricted from any access of pen and paper, so instead the entire story was created inside his head and recited to other prisoners in the barrack, in the veranda, and in the hut at night, which quickly became a hit on the island.
The incredible character of Nyai Ontosoroh, in particular, became the prisoners’ favourite. Because she defies the odds and able to rise up from a simple village girl sold to the Dutch master by her father to become a powerful lady in charge of a corporate empire that she has built. Before long, people would quote her dialogues, and the strong character that she has developed and earned along the years inspired the prisoners and raised their spirits.
A similar act of courage also seen in the real life of the 3 men, after they were released from prison. In the environment where Suharto’s presidency was increasingly dictatorial, with plenty of newspapers were censored and even shut down, the three men decided to create a publishing company – Hasta Mitra – to publish Pramoedya’s books that are filled with inspirations to defy a ruler.
It has an air of romanticism in it, where the original manuscripts of “Bumi Manusia” were first written in Buru Island after a compassionate move by one of Suharto’s visiting general finally gave Pramoedya access to a typewriter. The manuscripts were then copied by fellow prisoners in the Island and some were smuggled out with the help of a friendly priest, all of which then came back to Pramoedya’s hand once he returned to Jakarta.
It was with these manuscripts that Joesoef began to work his magic as the editor and publisher, as he set up shop in a tiny room inside his own house. And it was in this cigarette-smoke-filled room full of books that Hasta Mitra made an impact in the 1980s on Indonesian historical process. It answered, as the author Max Lane remarks, “the yearning for that dignified and developed national subjectivity evolving before 1965, through struggle and contestation, in many ways breaking from the past. It was stirring the yearning for a different Indonesia.”
Meanwhile, Hasjim Rachman, in his capacity as the publisher, mobilized all the capital he could find to produce the books, including selling some of his own stuff. And so at last, the books are being published.
But it was of course, never meant to be easy. Soon after “Bumi Manusia” was published in August 1980, not long after it was sold out after just 2 days, the Attorney General informally told them not to distribute the book. But they decided to still go ahead publishing the book, and distribute them in 3 days from Friday to Sunday, before, as dictated by the rules, they had to submit two copies of the book 48 hours of working days to the Attorney General office for “inspection.” And when they were indeed prohibited to publish the book, they already sold 10,000 copies within 2 weeks and 60,000 copies in 10 months. Something unread of back then.
This book then took a great length showing just how exactly “Bumi Manusia” was unofficially prohibited, through ridiculous process of summoning and accusing the book of having a communist theme (it doesn’t) which evidently shows that the government officials who wanted to ban the book haven’t even read the book. Or in other case, the government is pressuring Joesoef to burn all copies of the book (but off record, the government official said he loved the book and even had the audacity to ask to spare 1 copy for his wife to read). Indeed, the men endured harassments, intimidations, and a sudden turnaround from incredible reviews to a government-engineered bad reviews at the press.
And then 9 months after its publication, on 29 May 1981 “Bumi Manusia” was officially banned, along with its subsequent sequels in the upcoming months: “Anak Semua Bangsa” was published in December 1980, banned in May 1981. “Jejak Langkah” was published on 1985, banned in May 1986. And its forth and last sequel “Rumah Kaca” was banned in 1988. Moreover, in 1983 “Bumi Manusia” appeared in English language as “This Earth of Mankind”, published by Penguin, distributed in Australia, Singapore, and United Kingdom, and translated by none other than this book’s author, Max Lane. This was also seen as an act of defiance against the government, which got Lane into trouble, where he consequently got deported for it.
But the books never really disappeared. Despite thousands of copies were confiscated and burned they re-appeared in photocopied version and circulated widely in secret. Indeed, the publishing of the books then went guerilla underground. That is, until the fall of Suharto in 1998 – another traumatic event in Indonesian history akin to 1965 that is told extensively in this book – when the books are finally free to be published for the public, and once again became the voice of reason during the post-Suharto Reformation era.
Chapter 12 of the book is an extensive analysis on this voice of reason, that dive deep into the philosophy behind the “Buru Quartet.” They raise an important issue that have been discussed throughout this book: the question of the identity of the nation. Which, according to Pramoedya, Hasjim, Joesoef, and indeed the 4th member Max Lane himself always said, the Indonesian identity is not yet fully developed, that we still in the process of finding out the true colour, finding out our national identity.
As Pramoedya remarks, “The era of Sukarno and the Trisakti doctrine was nothing but a sort of thesis. The New Order, an antithesis. Therefore, for me, it is something that in fact cannot be written about yet, a process that cannot yet be written as literature, that does not yet constitute a national process in its totality, because it is in fact still heading for its synthesis. While I was still at Buru, an Indonesian.”
Today, the three men have long passed away, with Hasjim died in 1999, Pramoedya in 2006, and Joesoef in 2009. And it is perhaps the greatest literary tragedy that the “Buru Quartet” is still not commonly read in Indonesia, except for a brief period of time at the beginning of the Reformation and by the niche few today. It is not even widely distributed, as we cannot find them readily available at the usual chain bookstores. And once I can get my hands on them, they were the photocopied version from a used book store, because Hasta Mitra closed down not long after Hasjim passed away and its successor publisher Lentera Dipantara (founded by Pramoedya’s family) has recently stopped printing Pramoedya’s books.
It is such a pity that the greatest Indonesian literature ever written, and indeed the greatest books I’ve ever read, are buried under the pile of broken idealism for Indonesia. That over time history could possibly forget about these men and their ideas for the country. And that Indonesians won’t even know what they are missing.
Especially considering that after publication its English translation was immediately listed as Top Ten Bestsellers in the Sydney Morning Herald for several weeks, in Singapore they needed to print extra batches of copy to meet the exploding demand, in the US a book review at The Washington Post called the book “the Indonesian Iliad”, while Pramoedya himself has won more than a dozen international awards thanks to the books. But yet, appallingly, he has not won a single award in his own country Indonesia.
But then again, the official ban on these books has never been formally lifted.
THE CHAOS THEORY 