May 2, 2005

Pramoedya Ananta Toer 1925-2006
 

Indonesia's greatest writer should have won a Nobel prize, writes Eric Ellis

Pramoedya Ananta Toer embodied Indonesia. More than former President Sukarno, who feared him, and certainly more than the next presidential strongman, Suharto, who imprisoned him. Pramoedya’s 81-year life, which ended on the weekend in a cloud of his trademark and beloved kretek (clove) cigarettes – "the taste of Indonesia" – embraced the full experience of what it is to be Indonesian.

A fervent anti-colonialist, the Dutch jailed this middle-class teacher’s son from the Javanese heartland, then celebrated him after they left the archipelago. "Pram" flirted with the occupying Japanese of WWII - trying anything to win merdeka (freedom) - but when it was won by Sukarno without Tokyo, he applied his subtle but stinging pen to documenting the administrative ills and personal foibles of the new President Sukarno.

In his mid-1950s novel Korupsi, he wrote of an otherwise blameless public servant in Sukarno's government who succumbed to graft. Bung Karno wasn’t amused, nor at Pram’s observations that the Indonesia he’d gone to jail for was turning into a Javanese empire. The generals weren’t amused either at the writer's championing of Indonesia’s Chinese community, seeing it as anti-Indonesian, a suspicion that was helped by his flirtations with the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. So they too locked him up.

But the worst abuse visited upon him was at the hands of Suharto. He became a tapol (political prisoner), his books banned and he was jailed without trial, mostly on the eastern island of Buru. He was banned from writing but that did not stop him composing his most famous series The Buru Quartet, which he narrated word by word to his fellow prisoners. After release he wrote them down, a remarkable achievement which won him numerous nominations for a Noble Prize for literature.

His death deprives Indonesia of a towering figure, and South-East Asia of its most celebrated writer. The only thing that eluded him was the Nobel. That he was never awarded it is a Scandinavian travesty.