Eka Kurniawan

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia’s grand novelist, composer of stunning short stories and memorable critical essays, spent fourteen years on the remote island prison of Buru without trial

One of the tasks of the Jogjakarta PRD was stealthily to circulate Pramoedya’s gigantic Buru Tetralogy, composed in the gulag, on the origins and development of nationalism and socialism in Indonesia during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Much later, when Eka wrote a short reply to a question about which Indonesian writers impressed him the most, he said he had a melancholy three. The first was Amir Hamzah, Indonesia’s finest poet and a pro-independence aristocrat in Northern Sumatra, executed during the Revolution of 1945–49 by gangsters masquerading as revolutionaries. Second came Pramoedya, and third Widji Tukul, a brave new kind of radical Javanese poet, who was disappeared, probably by the seasoned killers commanded by Lt. General Prabowo, once Suharto’s son-in-law, with maniacal ambitions to become the country’s president. (Fortunately, he was defeated in the national election of 2014 by Djoko Widodo, the much-loved young governor of Jakarta, and the first presidential candidate unsullied by the brutal and corrupt Suharto regime.)