Watermelons drained
of tears
From above Buru looks a charmer, a fairytale isle washed by
the Banda and Seram
Seas.
At ground level the third largest island in the Maluku
archipelago 2,230 kilometers northeast of Jakarta,
supports the aerial image. Settlements
are small, roads uncrowded, a lush landscape dominated by Mount Kapalatmada
(2,428 meters).
Surely this should be on President Joko Widodo’s Ten New Balis list to lure resort
developers?
Sadly no, for the wounds of a vile past still ooze pus, though
much has been bandaged.
What the government can’t cover are memories, like those of
Hersri Setiawan, 83. The Yogyakarta
writer spent seven years on Buru as a victim
of the Soeharto regime. He and his 12,000
colleagues known as tapol or TP (tahanan politik – political prisoners) were
never charged.
His crime was to be an intellectual, a poet and chairman of
a branch of Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan
Rakyat, the Institute
of People’s Culture). The
literary and social movement was linked to the Indonesian Communist Party
during the Soekarno era.
For four years before the 30 September 1965 coup Setiawan
was in Sri Lanka with the
Asia-Africa Writers’ Bureau, far from Jakarta
politics.
Such details were ignored by Soeharto’s purge of all real or
imagined Communists. An estimated half
million died in six months. The genocide remains a ghastly specter haunting the
nation’s soul.
We’re fortunate that with Buru Island – A Prison Memoir Setiawan didn’t let his writing skills
be corrupted by his dreadful experiences.
Others went mad, suicided, died from malnutrition and disease, or were
murdered by guards.
It’s difficult to imagine how the author and his fellow detainees
found the spiritual strength to continue when told they’d perish on the island.
The book recounts his time explicitly: ‘The Buru ‘humanitarian project’ … was no more nor less than a
bloodless murder of prisoners.’
Prison slang for ‘disappearing’ was mangkubumi, ‘a pun on the name of one of Java’s cruelest tyrants in
history, Mangkubumi, and also the word itself, namely being ‘embraced’ (mangku) by the earth (bumi).’
In their isolation the inmates were ‘like the proverbial
frogs under the coconut shell, knowing nothing of the world outside’.
Yet Setiawan found the will to store his memories so one day
he might tell the world of Soeharto’s monstrous injustices, yet applauded by
some Western governments. That day is
now.
It’s tempting from afar to assume the prisoners were united,
drawing strength by facing a common threat. Australian Jennifer Lindsay who
translated Setiawan’s book dismisses that simplistic notion:
‘They are never one block. There are divisions between them,
ideological, cultural and generational, big and small … Hersri’s memory for
details of events and voices is phenomenal. He is not only able to remember
voices, but he uses them to show the diversity of the political prisoners.’
In a forward the author’s academic daughter Dr Ken Setiawan
(based at Melbourne
University) writes of her
father’s sense of ‘responsibility of history and justice’. It’s ‘not a call for pity (but) acceptance
through the Javanese term sumèlèh
which does not mean to surrender to fate, but to be aware and calm.
‘My father’s imprisonment became a symbol of injustice and
inhumanity. In sharing his experiences with his family, Hersri defied New Order
propaganda and history-writing, denying the regime further control over his
life.’
Before Buru Setiawan spent 18 months in Jakarta jails including eight in solitary. Around ten men died every day from illness or
injury. Prisoner 438 recalled being moved in a van:
‘Our tears had run out long ago. Our source of tears was
dead, burnt by the sting of electric shocks, or crushed by the kick of a boot,
or destroyed by the blows of a barbed whip or one of General Soeharto’s
soldier’s holsters. No. There were none among us with tears.’
Setiawan has the courage to tell of a reality most
Indonesian authors avoid: ‘Homosexuality among political prisoners is nothing
disgraceful that has to be covered up and handled with violence. Quite the
contrary! It is a sincere statement and deserves to be defended. Nor should
those concerned be branded as ‘bourgeois’. Or, worse still, ‘criminal’.
 |
| Recalling the brutal times: Hersi with wife Ita Nadia |
He includes his poems and has a penetrating eye for detail
of the environment and his fellow inmates’ flaws and virtues. After clambering off the Tokala into the surf after the journey from Java (apparently on 17
August 1971) they found drums of tea and cassava prepared by earlier arrivals:
‘It is this sense of solidarity that arises from sincerity …
and becomes the capital of conviction and resolve … We should be like the
watermelon. Outside green, but still red
on the inside.’
Many prisoners were far smarter than the guards, adding
tensions. The lags had been teachers, lawyers, artists, academics and writers
like Setiawan so built a testy community of philosophers. This kept their minds sharp:
‘As the famous Javanese poem, Wulangreh says, we had to train our spiritual and physical skills (ngelmu and laku) … you can only gain spiritual control once you have mastered
the physical.’
The sadistic guards devised a special torture – putting a
cricket inside his ear and tying his hands.
He’s now partly deaf.
Ken Setiawan writes: ‘Hersri’s life and actions show that he
deeply recognizes the relevance of personal history to our understanding of
political change and power structures.’
Unfortunately the narrative wanders and at times the reader flounders.
Translator Lindsay said she dropped some chapters to keep the book manageable;
maybe this has damaged continuity.
This annoyance aside, the tenacity and bravery of Setiawan
and his mates reveals much of human nature. Here it becomes a page turner, recommended
for every student of Indonesian history who wants to know the truth, not the
manufactured New Order version.
Buru Island – A Prison
Memoir by Hersri Setiawan, translated by Jennifer
Lindsay Monash University Publishing,
2020
368 pages
 |
| Hersri with daughter Dr Ken Setiawan and wife Ita Nadia |
Telling the real
story
Let
us learn from the stupidity of the past, then overcome it together, so that the
tragedy does not happen again. Hersri
Setiawan
Family and supporters of Hersri
Setiawan and other tapol are planning
a museum outside Yogyakarta to remember the men of Buru
Island and the blood that stains Indonesia’s
history.
Setiawan’s wife, author and women’s rights activist Ita
Nadia, said the land and buildings had already been bought and artifacts
collected from former Buru prisoners. These would be displayed along with their
stories.
She said it would complement
journalist and former tapol Oei Him
Hwie’s collection of books and memorabilia of Buru in a suburban Surabaya house known as Yayasan
Medayu Agung.
The idea is that the Setiawan display will offset the
government’s version of events shown in another museum in Yogyakarta. This is dedicated to the life, policies and
actions of the nation’s second president.
Opened in 2013 in the village of Kemusuk where Soeharto was born, it’s promoted as ‘an inspiration for the younger generation.’
Staff say it’s popular with teachers who take bus loads of
students to see the giant statues and learn the government-approved account of
the fall of the Soekarno presidency.
The displays don’t tell of the men who never appeared in a
court of law, had never thieved or committed violence but were jailed in Java
then deported to Buru.
First published in The Jakarta Post 10 Feb 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment