Michael Vatikiotis is currently blogging from the 10th Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. Here he writes about some of the featured Indonesian authors.
Politics is a prominent and enduring theme
of Indonesian art and literature.
Perhaps the easiest explanation for this is that Indonesia is a
relatively new country, under 70 years old.
Most Indonesians have living relatives who were born before independence
and they, together with subsequent generations, have experienced the highs and
the lows of what Indonesia’s doyen of journalism and modern letters, Goenawan Muhammad, defines as a country still under construction. “Indonesia is a
process; it is not a finished idea,” he declared at at the Festival.
Goenawan’s rather moving response to the
challenge of defining “My Indonesia”, was to propose that his Indonesia is the
Indonesia of his parents – a country worth dying for. His father was executed
by the Dutch colonial authorities in North Java during the later stages of the
armed struggle for independence.
Throughout this year’s Festival,
Indonesian writers have aired concerns about the state of the nation through
the prism of literature, in performance, and in conversation. Much of the questioning is about the buried
past. Leila Chudori launched Home, her
novel about exiled Indonesian leftists washed up in Paris in the wake of the
violent anti-communist crackdown. Soon to be available in an English translation,
Leila’s powerful prose reveals the stark brutality of the period, when people
accused of communist sympathies were cleansed “like lice and germs...The army
was the disinfectant. We, the lice and
germs had been eradicated from the face of the earth, with no trace left.”
Laksmi Pamuntjak’s poetic epic Amba,
newly published in English as The Question of Red, deals with the same era
only transposed as a modern version of the story of Amba
and Bhisma from the Mahabharata epic.
Both Home and Amba have already been
re-printed several times in the months since they were published, indicating a
public thirst for stories about the political past as Indonesia heads into an
uncertain political future.
Another Indonesian author featured at
the Festival this year was journalist Solahudin, whose new book, starkly
titled, The Roots of Terrorism in Indonesia, traces the jihadist movement
responsible for the Bali bombings of 2002 back as far as Darul Islam movement
that made a violent bid to transform Indonesia into an Islamic state from the
1950s until its defeat in 1962.
Solahudin’s detailed research establishes a clear link with the failed
revolt and chronicles the Islamic movement’s efforts to revive through the
1970s and 80s, which provided the launch pad for the modern generation of
terrorists.
Whilst the momentum of Indonesia’s
transition to democracy seems reassuring and offers grounds for optimism,
strikingly many Indonesian writers are not taking things for granted. Rather, they have used their relatively
new-found freedom to explore the country’s troubled past, perhaps in the hope
that it will help secure a better future.
Michael Vatikiotis
Michael Vatikiotis
