100 YEARS OF PRAMOEDYA
On October 6, 1973, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was ordered by prison guards to run double-time across Buru Island. The writer had been arrested eight years before, taken into custody in the middle of the night. Detained without charges alongside thousands of other men and women, Toer was sent to Buru—a prison island far east of Java and Bali—and forced to toil under the scorching sun. He was desolate, not only because of the Sisyphean labor he was made to perform, the inability to write, and the gnawing feeling of injustice, but also because he was separated from his family. Before prison, he had been happily married to his beloved Maimoenah, his second wife and mother to five of his children. After several years of seclusion from the outside world, Toer was hopeful that the press junket he was being forced to attend could be an opportunity to petition for the freedoms that had been revoked when he was imprisoned, if not ensure his release. It would be the closest he would get to a trial, during which he could publicly question the validity of his arrest.
After crossing dense jungles and shallow rivers, he arrived at the prison camp’s headquarters, where journalists and psychologists were waiting. But this was no ordinary debriefing. All who were in attendance were collaborating with the dictatorship of General Suharto, who—like many Indonesians—used only one name. Suharto had come to power in a military coup that happened just before Toer was arrested, and now, thanks to the work of Amnesty International, Buru’s political prisoners had become a publicity problem for the regime. After eight years in prison, Toer saw this as his best chance to return to his home in Jakarta and to write. But the journalists didn’t appear to care about the injustice of his arrest. They interrupted to ask if, in fact, he might agree that his arrest had been necessary. A year earlier, he had undergone a similar ordeal. But during that prior junket, he had at least been able to curry favor with the journalists.
An old rival, a writer and editor named Mochtar Lubis, emerged among those asking questions. When Lubis—a staunch anticommunist whose views often aligned with the interests of both the regime and the CIA—repeatedly tried to goad him into talking about the events that had led to the military coup of 1965, of which Toer knew nothing, Toer directed the conversation toward more pressing matters, begging Lubis to help him get a dying friend off the island, and demanding measures to ensure he could write his novels again. “Isn’t it true you’re a Marxist?” the visitors asked, likely following a script the regime had given them. “Why write about remote history and not about the coup?” He was being cornered, which frustrated him.
“What I write about is my choice,” he shot back. “I decide what gives me personal satisfaction and… I don’t care whether anyone else likes it or not.” He launched into a bitter reflection on the lack of democracy in Buru and Indonesia. Yet he knew his infamous irritability could hamper his release, so he made a point of apologizing. During the junket the year before, his anger had spurred the guards to end the conversation.
After the junket, Toer met with the dictator’s second-in-command, General Sumitro, who explained that Toer’s imprisonment was not meant to last forever—though he would remain on the island for six more years. Arrested at age forty, Toer would ultimately spend a full decade on Buru as part of a fourteen-year ordeal initiated by Cold War allies of the United States to test a form of right-wing authoritarian reeducation. Toer was one of the regime’s most prominent guinea pigs.
And yet after his release from Buru in 1979, Toer’s fame would grow in tandem with the public’s recognition of what he underwent—and accomplished. He told interviewers about his struggle to write in what he called a “concentration camp” on a sweltering island, where, along with more than fourteen thousand other prisoners, he nearly starved while being forced to farm the infertile soil. Toer was prohibited even from writing letters to his wife and children, though he refused to submit to the ban. Knowing beatings awaited, and that his pages would be confiscated and destroyed, he disobeyed by writing in secret, pretending to adhere to the strict rules, while advocating publicly for his freedom to write. What he said little about, even after release, was how he kept writing.
In his first year on Buru, he watched friends get beaten or killed for possessing contraband, or, at other times, solely for the guards’ cruel pleasure. He worked building roads, felling trees, clearing fields, removing razor-like elephant grass with no gloves, tools, shoes, or hat, under an unforgiving tropical sun. He milled wood; tended livestock; harvested rice; built barracks, mosques, and churches, while he and his comrades were forced to survive by eating snakes, lizards, rats, and even a newborn baby’s placenta (which they promptly regurgitated). Amid all this, he found a creative solution for continuing to write in captivity—by reciting his novels aloud, crowdsourcing feedback on their composition, and finally, while removed to an empty attic with a desk and typewriter, putting them on the page.
As his centenary arrives in 2025 and the sixtieth anniversary of his imprisonment on Buru approaches, Toer remains the twentieth century’s preeminent—if unsung—persecuted literary hero. For the Buru Quartet, the four novels he wrote while imprisoned, Toer was nominated for the Nobel Prize and won several prestigious international literary prizes. His writing has been compared to that of Dickens, Camus, and Baldwin. But if you haven’t heard of him, it might be because of the side he found himself on during the Cold War. As Indonesia emerged from colonialism under the Dutch, President Sukarno kicked out the World Bank and sought to maintain Indonesia’s “nonaligned” solidarity with other poor nations, instead of siding with either of the major blocs. Refusing to align with the West was a clear sign to the United States and the Indonesian military’s anticommunists that Sukarno had to go, and Toer happened to be his most famous literary supporter.
Upon Toer’s death in 2006, Pakistani British political activist and writer Tariq Ali remarked, “Had Pramoedya Ananta Toer been a Soviet dissident he would have received the Nobel Prize.” Today, new work about his life has begun to trickle out, including Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship, a compelling 2022 memoir by his translator Max Lane, and This Earth of Mankind (2019), the first in what the screenwriter hopes will be a franchise of Netflix feature films produced in Indonesia adapting the Buru Quartet. Despite these few exceptions, Toer remains little known in the US, the land that, he knew, collaborated in his torment—a torment that would have silenced many others. Through sheer will, an unfed, embittered, and desperate prisoner, who had made a literary vow long before, somehow ensured that his ideas about freedom and history would be read and that he would have the last word over the enemies who belittled, stole, blocked, banned, and destroyed his work.
“TAKE OFF YOUR MASKS”
On October 1, 1965, Indonesians awoke to news of an overnight coup. Sukarno, the popular independence hero and president, was under house arrest. The anticommunist Suharto, a lackluster general who had previously been disciplined for corruption, took the reins of the world’s fifth most populous nation, while in Jakarta, where he and his wife lived in a house they had built together seven years before, Pramoedya Ananta Toer listened to radio accounts of mass arrests. Rumors of mass killings followed. Friends warned him that, as the nation’s most famous and outspoken writer, he should consider fleeing. A friend offered his house outside Jakarta, but the radio reported arrests there too. Days later, Toer sent his wife and children to stay with his mother-in-law. Maimoenah had just given birth to a boy, Yudistira. (Toer had three children from his first marriage and five with his second wife—eight altogether.)
Two weeks after the coup, on October 13 around 10:30 p.m., while at home writing, Toer was jarred from his work. Outside, a crowd had gathered at his gate, wielding knives, wearing masks. Piling boulders from a nearby construction site as ammunition and demanding he come out, they used a sarong to catapult a rock against his door, breaking it. Filled with a courage that was perhaps honed during his two previous stints in prison (his first arrest was under the occupying Dutch, for possessing anti-Dutch correspondence; his second was for writing a book defending Chinese immigrants), Toer grabbed a souvenir sword and headed to the gate, determined to face the thugs of the New Order, as the newly ascendant military dictatorship would call itself.
Toer shouted above their voices, “Take off your masks. Then I’ll talk to you.” Jeers poured out, threats. Some thrusted their wide-blade parangs through the hot air. His heart was racing; he was sweating. Suddenly a burst of automatic gunfire quieted the mob. Toer and the crowd turned to see four or five police officers and soldiers coming down the lane, and the crowd parted to let them through the gate. They were here to take him to safety, a soldier said, though he knew he would be detained. This would be a typical scene in Indonesia, as the aftermath of the coup unraveled.
Relenting, Toer opened the gate and let the soldiers inside. They waited in the front room while he packed for what he hoped would be a short imprisonment, collecting novels he had been writing, his typewriter, some clothes, toiletries, and money for his wife. His brother had been staying there, and he also prepared for prison. With their items packed, Toer and his brother were led to the front gate by two guards. Toer’s hands were tied, and a noose was placed around his neck. Still, he begged the guards to protect his library, offering it to the government’s care. He was in no position to bargain. Ignoring him, they led him to a military truck parked on the road beyond his gate.
There he watched a soldier let the thugs into the house—it turned out they were in cahoots—and the men who had threatened him from his gate threw his library of documents, books, and research papers, accumulated over many years, into a pile in the yard and lit them on fire. Out at the truck, he protested. But when he begged a soldier a second time to protect his papers, the soldier smashed the butt of his gun into Toer’s face. Turning away from the blow, Toer took it on the side of his head. The blow, and others that followed, his translator John McGlynn recalled later, made Toer nearly deaf in his left ear and impaired his hearing in his right.
The unrest had started two weeks earlier, on September 30. Acting against rumors of a Western-backed coup to overthrow the socialist President Sukarno, his colonels had preemptively arrested several generals they believed to be plotting with the US. They planned to drag these traitors before Sukarno, who was briefed the following morning about what had transpired, and was, by all accounts, not involved. For more than a decade, the US had grown alarmed at the size of Indonesia’s Communist Party, or PKI, in its Indonesian abbreviation. Apart from China and the USSR, it was the world’s largest, with twenty million supporters. Several US-backed operations to overthrow Sukarno, including multiple assassination attempts and a covert CIA bomber whose pilot had crash-landed in the Molucca islands, had ended in failure.
Though the colonels’ nighttime arrests on September 30 were meant to protect the president from another such attempt, they backfired, triggering a military coup led by Suharto the following morning. This coup not only targeted those colonels who had committed the nighttime raids, but also expanded to decimate Suharto’s enemy, the PKI. Days in, they went as far as placing Sukarno himself under house arrest. Some said General Suharto, who maneuvered adeptly and assumed total power, had been briefed in advance of the colonels’ plans on September 30. But if the details remain murky, it is because Suharto’s coup stoked chaos and shut down all but the friendliest media outlets, which were then used to hurl blame at an unarmed socialist party. Only later would what actually happened come to light.
Meanwhile, so many people were being arrested—the tally would reach over seven hundred and fifty thousand, according to Amnesty International; one and a half million, according to Toer—that there was a backlog. Trials were mooted; cases took too long to build, paralyzing the judiciary. Thugs like those at Toer’s gate—ad hoc militias coordinating with the military—acted at night or in broad daylight. Targeting left-wing intellectuals and activists, they burned down the PKI headquarters and went after those, like Toer, who merely supported President Sukarno. They killed Indonesians of Chinese descent. They killed students. They even arrested or killed religious leaders and nationalists. The US State Department contributed by providing lists of names. The military and Suharto’s new official party, Golkar, wiped out the vestiges of Sukarno’s most adamant supporters and any opposition to Suharto’s factions in the military—the coup was merciless and total in its scope. “The rivers were red with blood,” Toer recalled, “but people didn’t understand why! The river Brantas was clogged with dead bodies, but… I didn’t see it personally, being already in prison.” Between two and three million people were killed in the six months that followed the coup, Toer estimated. In Blora, the small city where he was born, Suharto’s forces killed three thousand.
Meanwhile, authorities refused to feed the prisoners. Families who visited their loved ones imprisoned on Java, the most crowded of the archipelago’s islands, were told to bring food. But the regime’s thrift collided with its abuses. Families carrying food to the prisoners on Indonesia’s most populous island also meant that the prisons were swarmed with media; the interrogations and torture that were rampant on Java and elsewhere were at risk of being exposed. The new regime needed to get the prisoners out of sight, far from crowded Jakarta. Turning to history, someone remembered the Moluccas.
Occupying the archipelago for nearly four centuries, the Dutch had used the Moluccas—a string of legendary “spice islands” of which Buru Island was a part—to house prisoners, including the nation’s future leaders during the fight for independence. Among Indonesia’s 17,500 islands, these islands were what lured Europeans, who coveted cloves, nutmeg, mace, and tea tree oil, commodities that could be sold for a 2,500 percent profit. Like its European colonizer had, the Suharto military regime decided it would send its prisoners to one of these remote islands in the archipelago’s east. The camp was named the Buru Island Humanitarian Project, an irony that was lost on none but themselves and their patrons abroad.
A CORPSE IN THE RIVER
On August 17, 1969, Toer and eight hundred other prisoners were squeezed onto a decrepit cargo ship named the Adri XV, bound for the island of Buru. Over the course of ten days, during which they suffered from seasickness and starvation rations, the ship sputtered across the Java Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Banda Sea. Before boarding the ship, Toer had promised his daughter Astuti that he would hoist her in his arms upon his release. He had told his wife she could remarry, but he regretted saying this after hearing that she had done so. Arriving in Namlea, the main town on Buru’s east coast, Toer watched a clutch of prisoners ordered off the ship, beaten, and told to serve as mess workers to feed the rest. It was a sign of the regime’s unpreparedness. With only five of ten barracks built, the men of Unit 3 were forced to sleep in uncomfortably close quarters. Toer’s unit comprised largely dissident intellectuals, including Dr. Suprapto, a human rights lawyer; Oei Hiem Hwie, a journalist and advocate for Chinese Indonesians; as well as Tumiso, a primary school teacher in a small village—three men Toer befriended during his time there.
The unit’s informal surveys during the first days suggested that the island was a bad choice. Buru’s soil was rocky and shallow, there were no roads, the forest was dense but had limited fruit and seed stocks, and for half the year, during the time of dry winds, the river was too low to send food or supplies by boat. As the nation’s foremost writer, Toer was spared some of the physical torture his fellow prisoners underwent. But the guards treated him with as much inhumanity as any detainee. His fame also ensured he was surveilled relentlessly. Even a short walk found him closely watched.
Miles inland from the coast, lying between a nexus of small rivers and an imposing montane wilderness, Unit 3 held at least one old friend, Hasjim Rachman, the publisher and editor of the daily newspaper Eastern Star. As a newspaperman working in the newly established Indonesian language, Rachman provided a daily reminder of the institution-building that the young nation had so quickly achieved. In the daily’s culture section, Toer had written a sometimes combative column on history, politics, and postindependence corruption. The military’s anticommunist network had veered right in the 1950s, as a result of being flooded with Western cash, and Toer had used his column in Eastern Star to defend the president and remind Indonesians of the rampant corruption inherited from the Dutch, the army’s covert alliance with the West, and the need to rebuild institutions that had been hobbled by colonialism and Western meddling.
It was during this time of nation-building that Toer had detailed Indonesia’s literary tradition of social realism—works depicting the problems of colonial occupation—as key to its independence, earning him a reputation as a firebrand in the service of President Sukarno. From this work emerged a personal vow to tell the story of Indonesian independence in a series of novels. And this had become, creatively speaking, his white whale. It was so ambitious that, by the time he was arrested, he had only begun to research it.
In his early days on Buru, this project was never far from his mind, even as he witnessed countless instances of abuse, large and small. One day he stumbled across a piece of paper, a work contract between the Buru command and the dictatorship that regulated the prisoners’ housing. Like so much of what was put on paper to protect them, it had gone ignored. Barracks that should have been built from strong wooden beams on a concrete base were instead made of flimsy leaves of sago palms over a hard dirt floor and encircled by barbed wire. The soldiers pocketed the savings on construction materials. But even the cheap sago palms, a reminder of neglect verging on cruelty by the guards, would eventually play a role in Toer’s literary plans.
The prisoners were worked from dawn to dusk. The unit’s tasks included building infrastructure and sowing the rice fields that supplied the prisoners with their food. Clearing elephant grass and rattan vines proved to be his least favorite task, and he complained about it in his memoir, The Mute’s Soliloquy. When he cleared rattan, knots of yellow snakes unspooled near his bare feet like balls of yarn. As he felled trees, the sky filled with fruit bats and flying foxes. And when the sharp grasses cut into his skin, the wounds were easily infected. As rice rations were padded with bulgur before the fields could be sown, Toer’s weight plummeted, even lower than it had been under the cruel Japanese occupation during World War II. The bulgur gave him chronic diarrhea. “I became so weak that whenever I had to go to the toilet, and I had to squat… I wouldn’t be able to get up again, [and] I had to pull myself up with my hands.”
For those who violated the rules, a torture hut on Namlea loomed. Some of Toer’s friends who were sent there never returned. Once, he watched a prisoner being chased by a horse-driven cart. After two kilometers, the prisoner grew exhausted and fell, only to be crushed by the cart. In interviews and notes folded into his memoir, he describes much of the abuse as the result of the guards stealing and reselling for profit the fruits of prisoners’ labor, food they needed to live and were ordered to grow. There were communal fields for rice and vegetables, but also private gardens and henhouses for smaller groups of prisoners. If they grumbled over a soldier’s intrusions, they might be punished.
After mandatory work in the fields, the prisoners also fished for tilapia or hunted wild boars. One prisoner established a fish hatchery to help survive during those first difficult years, and noticed that the fish were disappearing. The guards had been stealing them. When he confronted them, he was shot and killed. Prisoners were shot for other petty offenses. Apart from the Koran and the Bible, all reading materials were banned. After being caught with newspapers, a friend was tied and dragged to headquarters. Two days later, Toer and some others found his corpse bobbing in the river.
In 1971, his second full year on Buru, he witnessed eleven prisoners murdered by guards. The killings continued each year. When guards disapproved of his shabby clothes, Toer, too, was nearly shot and killed. His clothes had unraveled with constant wear, and he had improvised a pair of shorts from plastic sacks. “When the military saw me,” he told an interviewer later, “they screamed that I was insulting Eastern culture by wearing such stuff. They were really going to shoot me.” But a friend stealthily nudged the butt of the rifle. Toer was sure that “if [he] hadn’t been monitored by the international community, [he’d] be dead.” Prisoners also died from malnutrition, malaria, and suicide. Witnessing so many deaths made him all the more anxious to complete his series of novels, which had been delayed by his arrest all those years before; the series would ultimately take the prison island’s name.
THE CONCUBINE EMERGES
One day in early 1972, Toer was ordered to attend a press junket held at Command Headquarters near Unit 1—the first of his two junkets as a prisoner. The regime had hoped to calm the grumblings of human rights groups by inviting journalists to meet Buru’s two most famous prisoners, Toer and the lawyer Suprapto, who were content on Buru, the regime told the visitors. But Toer, unwilling to be used as a puppet, refused to follow the regime’s script. Even with his life in the balance, he decided to hijack the junket by reminding the journalists from India, Australia, and the Netherlands—many of whom had not been vetted—how he “used to be free in everything, thinking and talking and doing, but now I am a prisoner.” One journalist repeated false reports that the men had been communists when they were arrested in 1965. Had this changed?
“Everything changes,” Toer fired back, uncowed. He had hoped to pivot the conversation to forced labor and the ban on his writing. But with soldiers watching, the junket turned out to be merely the latest in a saga of interrogations that repeated the regime’s false claims of arresting only violent, insurgent communists. Toer had never been a member of the PKI and liked to describe himself as a nonjoiner. But he had had to defend himself against the charge of communism many times, partly because he had briefly joined Lekra, a cultural organization that put on plays and literary discussions around the archipelago, and some thought it was linked to the PKI. In 1965, as part of a first interrogation he witnessed on Java, pencils had been placed between a young man’s fingers, perpendicular to his hands, and were squeezed together if he gave an unsuitable answer.
Now his public cross-examination on Buru, and the throb of injustice from years of such grilling, provoked his indignation, of the kind that had infused his newspaper columns in Eastern Star. “If I could write,” he told the journalists in response to a question about his life on Buru, “I would write my memoirs. Now it is very hard for me. I lost my freedom, I lost my family, I lost my work. I am a writer. That’s all. I want to write. One day I will write. That is my work and my dedication.”
His outburst goaded the guards to drag him back to the isolation unit for violations that remained unknown to him. Just as he and Suprapto were being forced to leave, a journalist asked what message he could carry outside on their behalf. Recalling almost being shot over his shabby work clothes, he muttered, “Clothes. We need clothes.” As the junket ended, journalists handed him a pen and a notebook, believing he would be able to keep them. That night, after a guard told him that what he’d said to the journalists was dangerous, he burned the writings he’d hidden in his barracks. (He offers this with little context in his memoir, suggesting that even as he complained of the ban on his writing, he sometimes wrote in secret in hidden notebooks. But the fear of punishment briefly overtook his promise to put words down on the page.)
While he waited for the world’s response to his plea, he pursued another form of secret novel-writing: oral storytelling. Its advantage was that it left no evidence for which he might be beaten, or worse. One evening, after a long day of forced labor, Toer began to tell his friends a story on the barracks porch of his isolation unit as he chain-smoked clove cigarettes, which the prisoners bartered for eggs in Namlea. The story, a history recounted by his parents, centered on a nyai, or a concubine, a symbol of Dutch enslavement. Under the Dutch, a girl abandoned by her husband or lost in a wager by her destitute father might be sold and forced to serve a Dutch colonial lord. Such was the story of Nyai Ontosoroh. The prisoners considered this a fate worse than theirs. This Earth of Mankind, the first novel in the Buru Quartet, unfolds around Nyai Ontosoroh’s misfortunes, which begin when her parents sell her to a Dutch sugar plantation owner named Herman Mellema.
As his fellow prisoners rested on the barracks porch, Toer began to weave a historical saga, telling stories the way his mother had before his bedtime. When Toer was a boy, his mother would read him a story each night. But sometimes the tired, overworked matriarch fell asleep before he did, prompting him to pick up the book and read it aloud to himself. The stories he told on the barracks porch were hardly his first stab at fiction, let alone writing fiction in prison. He had begun publishing fiction before age twenty and had honed his work during the two years he was imprisoned by the Dutch. Early novels like The Girl from the Coast and The Fugitive, which he wrote while he was incarcerated for his part in the independence movement, had won him awards and critical acclaim. Yet here on Buru Island, if he could not write the way he had before, he would do the writing aloud. Later, he would insist that these storytelling sessions were not just about his need to write; they were a way to survive the horrors of his imprisonment. As he told an interviewer later, he “needed to do this in order to encourage the other prisoners to survive, to motivate them with heroic stories about the nyai.”
The sessions took place in secret, in an isolation unit where Toer was sent in 1971, two years after arriving on Buru. There, close to Namlea, the prison’s commanders could keep a closer eye on him. Among the listeners were his friend and editor Hasjim Rachman, the lawyer Suprapto, and a shadow puppet master—a dalang, in Indonesian—whose name has been lost to history. In addition to Nyai Ontosoroh, the stories center around Minke, a student in a Dutch school who initially approves of Dutch and European values. The character of Minke was inspired by Tirto Adhi Soerjo, the first Indonesian to start an anticolonial newspaper in which he advocated for the use of Bahasa Indonesian as the national language. This language, he believed, would promote the cohesion necessary to achieve independence. Here in Buru’s isolation unit, Toer dramatized the stories of independence pioneers like Tirto and the feminist writer Kartini—stories he had first heard from his parents. “I don’t write to give joy to readers,” he once quipped, “but to give them a conscience.”
“Occasionally,” Rachman recalled in an interview with Toer’s translator Max Lane decades later, “people would ask this or that question about what would happen next, but mostly, we all listened in silence, rapt in the story.” The nyai story spread across the prison, through Buru’s twenty units. Lines of dialogue he invented for his protagonist were repeated verbatim. “Because all of us were suffering,” Rachman recalled, “Ontosoroh’s words touched us… And the stories did raise our spirits.” If Nyai Ontosoroh could endure the Dutch, they thought, they could endure Suharto and Buru.
Nyai Ontosoroh was not the prisoners’ only inspiration. They also admired Minke, the privileged native schoolboy who narrates the first three novels of the Quartet. In This Earth of Mankind, Minke, who has been raised under the tenets of European culture, falls in love with an Indo-European girl, Annelies, and marries her. Annelies is the daughter of Mellema and Nyai Ontosoroh, who has become his concubine. A vicious drunkard, Mellema spends his time carousing in a brothel, where, one day, a feud breaks out and he is killed. In the trial that follows his death, the nyai learns that under Dutch colonial law, she doesn’t hold the right even to guardianship of her daughter. The plantation is given to Mellema’s Dutch son in Europe who has never been to the Indies, and Annelies is taken into custody to be sent to Europe. On the day of her departure, Minke watches desolately as his wife is stolen from him, just as she was from her mother. The schoolboy who had once been regaled with stories of European humanism is confronted with the cruelties of Dutch colonial law, and Minke finds himself bitterly disillusioned as he is forcibly separated from his wife. “Only then did I realize how evil the law was,” Nyai Ontosoroh tells him. Whispering on the veranda, Toer recounted the story of the courageous concubine who fought the injustice of the theft of her daughter, inspiring Minke to seek out other colonial injustices to fight.
When one Buru prisoner escaped into the canopy and was captured and beaten by the guards, he declared his escape a tribute to Minke. Another prisoner, Muhni, retold the stories of Minke, as did a talented dalang. A prisoner named Eko, Rachman recalled, “went from unit to unit retelling the stories,” like a disciple repeating the words of a prophet. These incidents underline the degree to which his fellow prisoners saw themselves in Minke, having struggled against the same European appropriation in the fight for their country’s independence just twenty years before. In the prisoners’ responses, Toer could see that his stories comforted them amid Buru’s heat and misery. But they were also for himself—for he, as much as anyone, also needed the escape, the comic relief. In fact, when asked why he told the stories, he said to Rachman, “Who knows, I might not survive long in Buru. If I die, at least I’ve told these stories to you.”
Another reason for the oration was to invite collaboration. Fellow prisoners gave notes on the impact of his narrative and on its accuracy. In their sighs, laughter, and silences, Toer could hear what rang true and what riled his comrades. Among the items burned on the night of his arrest was a handwritten copy of Tirto’s diary; he’d read it only briefly. Recalling it in the prison camp required an act of collective remembering. The writers, lawyers, and historians around Toer helped to fill in the blanks of Tirto’s biography and times. Suprapto corrected errors in colonial law. Tumiso, who had become knowledgeable about agrarian law while organizing with farmers in his village, revised the agricultural and labor details. Rachman listened for overall clarity. But this collaboration sometimes made Toer wary. Because of how widely these stories spread, prisoners claimed the narrative as their common heritage, as a morale-boosting collective history. Anticipating that others might claim ownership for what he believed he had authored, he insisted emphatically that the stories were his alone.
THE WRITING ON THE CONCRETE BAGS
In October of 1973, the day before he was ordered to the press junket, Toer dreamed he caught a large fish. As he dragged it to his barracks to share with his unit, he saw that its teeth were made of gold. Dreaming of gold, according to a comrade, was an omen of death. Toer later wondered if this explained what followed, as he would be sent on a several-day ordeal, which involved the harsh junket with journalists like Mochtar Lubis, and written tests that ultimately ended in a forced confession. Designed by psychologists, the tests were intended to gauge his and his comrades’ politics, the answers were fed through computers, and each prisoner was ranked according to his willingness to accept the tenets of the dictatorship. Labeled a “die-hard” follower of Sukarno, Toer wound up in the worst group, according to the regime (and its American allies who had helped design the tests).
After the test, Toer was returned to his isolation unit and left in limbo for a few weeks. But with rights groups still grumbling about untried prisoners across the archipelago, he was summoned back to headquarters in early November to read an important letter. Sent by the dictator, the letter vaguely referenced Toer’s “mistakes” and suggested that forgiveness, both divine and legal, could be granted if he confessed to his errors. Toer was then ordered to respond. On the page set before him, he wrote that he agreed that forgiveness was key to moving forward—although, stubborn as ever, he did not ask for it explicitly. Still, the letter was a compromise, a confession that would allow the dictatorship to save face in the outside world. After all, they could claim, he confessed, never mentioning that he was forced to do so.
What followed this second junket, in which his journalist peers mocked him and shrinks talked down to him, was a turning point: Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s permission to write was restored. (It is unclear whether this happened because of the confession.) In fact, all the prisoners were newly ordered to perform their vocations: writers began to write again, farmers farmed, singers sang—all work, of course, was meant to be in service of the New Order. The new phase was dubbed Utilization. Others called it propaganda. Toer’s life changed drastically.
His new space comprised two rooms on the small upper floor of a cozy administrative house near the Command Headquarters. In contrast to Unit 3 or the isolation barracks in Namlea, his attic office was commodious and peaceful. In a photograph of the exterior taken in the years after the prisoners left, the house appears to be a simple clapboard structure, painted blue and green. A bicycle leans against the front. The grass in the yard is close-cropped, and a eucalyptus tree shades the windows. In an earlier, undated photograph taken while he lived there, the gaunt, long-necked Toer of the first few years has filled out, like a professional fighter training to make weight. His glasses are sturdy, his biceps bulging. Seated at an unkempt desk covered with papers and a typewriter that was rumored to be a gift from Jean-Paul Sartre, he smiles placidly, his hands poised to type. In this space, at last, the first two books of the Buru Quartet found their way from their oral form onto paper. Apart from a typewriter, however, the austere prison certainly did not supply the materials Toer needed to write.
Instead, throughout his imprisonment, a solidarity blossomed between the prisoners. Many who admired Toer joined the project of making his books. Among his informal copy assistants was Oei Hiem Hwie, an acquaintance of Toer’s from before their imprisonment, and whose support included manufacturing writing materials, binding the books, and proofing and reproducing his copy. Oei and two other comrades made up a wider solidarity network that brought him food, medicine, and his habitual clove cigarettes.
One day, upon hastening to write down a draft before permission could be rescinded, Toer complained that he had no more paper. Improvising a solution, Oei fetched used concrete-mix bags, which he cut along the seams and sliced into book-sized pages. To obtain a writing instrument, Toer sent a fellow prisoner to Namlea under the guise of selling eggs. This friend left with eggs and returned with a pen for notes and corrections. Toer finally had what he needed to transcribe the novels he had spoken aloud on a tropical porch just two years earlier.
But despite their new “freedom,” prisoners still had to perform forced labor—they called it corvée. Under the new arrangement, Toer had to write comic-book propaganda for the regime, as well as development reports based on research they gave him. Cleverly, using this hack work to disguise his real writing—“playing with two books,” his friends called it—he worked on his long-dreamed-of Quartet, talking day and night with his invented characters, Minke and Nyai Ontosoroh. It was a tenuous situation: though he could officially write under Utilization, he knew that the guards or their spies could read, confiscate, or destroy his work at any time.
Still, he persisted. His assistants read and retyped each of the pages in septuplicate. Copies were returned with notes from other prisoners. Toer’s fact-check was an early form of crowdsourcing, not unlike university peer review. The prisoners’ notes commented on all aspects of the story. Poet Banda Harahap wrote in the margins of one page, in awe: “Your narrative and imaginative power is extraordinary, especially because you had to rely on what you remember about the… sources.” Toer’s imprisonment had morphed into a publishing cooperative.
Though it took months, the saga of how Indonesia fought for its independence came out in a swift, deliberate stream. In early 1975, after less than two years of writing, he completed a draft of This Earth of Mankind, or Bumi Manusia in Indonesian. The corrections accumulated and the final page landed on the pile. To keep the pages from scattering in Buru’s typhoon winds, he bound them into a manuscript using sago palm—which Buru natives ate when food was scarce—as glue. Oei stole a chunk of concrete from a construction site and placed it atop the book to hold the pages together while the sago dried. Finally, Toer wrapped the freshly glued book in banana leaves—the same material used by prisoners to dispose of their shit, so that no one would touch it. But before he did so, he dated the last page:
Buru Island Prison Camp
Spoken, 1973
Written, 1975
5,180 NIGHTS CAPTIVE
On the night of December 14, 1977, Toer woke to someone knocking. Lighting his lamp, he opened the door and found a prison worker, out of breath. “Your name is on the release list,” he said. “You should be ready in case you have to leave tomorrow.” Toer received this message with caution, recalling past rumors of release that had gone unfulfilled. It had been painful to indulge in false hope. But in the days that followed, journalists visited more freely, an auspicious sign. One young journalist, Sindhunata, let slip that he had visited Toer’s family before coming to Buru. He confirmed for Toer that Maimoenah was still beautiful, and had been selling ice snacks and cakes to make money, and that the children were doing well; his daughter Astuti would go to university soon.
“But do you think my wife and children really want me to come home?” asked Toer.
“Of course they do. They really love you,” answered the journalist, his voice breaking. Sindhunata also refuted the idea that Toer’s wife had remarried, a lie Toer had been told. In fact, she was waiting for him, he said. “I hope we will not be disappointed again,” she wrote in a letter Sindhunata had promised to deliver to Toer. Though officials had initially suggested that Toer would leave with the first group to go home, the reality was that Maimoenah would have to wait two more years for her husband’s release. When Toer watched the first fifteen hundred newly freed prisoners sail away, he was happy for them, but disconsolate for himself.
Finally, in 1979, thanks to pressure from Amnesty International and US president Jimmy Carter, who would soon campaign for a second “human rights” presidency, Toer and his cohort of die-hard “Marxist” prisoners were told to pack. But before he—or anyone else, for that matter—could rejoin their families, they were forced to sign two documents. The first included promises never to “spread or propagate Marxist-Leninist communism… upset security, order and political stability… betray the [Indonesian] people and the state… initiate litigation proceedings against nor demand redress from the Indonesian government.” The second pledge was an acknowledgment “that they were never tortured and never had to undertake forced labor.” With no other choice, Toer signed both.
However, leaving Buru did not mean total and unrestricted freedom. Before his release, Toer learned that he would be subjected to indefinite house arrest under the watchful eye of the regional police. His ID would be marked “ET,” for “ex-tapol”—tapol being the Indonesian abbreviation for “political prisoner”—and he would not be allowed to publish his writing. Upon arriving in Jakarta, though, he would break each of the conditions of his release.
On November 12, 1979, during the island’s seasonal rains, Toer boarded the Tanjung Pandan, a decrepit troop ship. After three days at sea, Toer, the schoolteacher Tumiso, and some forty other “die-hards”—who had all failed tests that were supposed to demonstrate their willingness to live happily under authoritarianism—were separated from hundreds of their comrades and sent aboard a small landing craft to Surabaya in East Java. From there they were bused west to the largest military base in Central Java and checked for contraband.
Like others, Toer carried his clothes in a sack, along with his exercise mat and prayer mat. He was searched—his manuscripts had already been confiscated by Buru’s prison guards before he left—and he made it through. As the line crawled forward, Tumiso collapsed. Upon reaching the guard post, he told the guards he was sick, and they called him a filthy communist coward. At the next checkpoint, the affable farmer fell again, until he reached Semarang, where, again, he faltered. In fact, Tumiso was being strategic and intentional: Each time he stumbled, the guards, distracted by the ensuing chaos, would fail to check his rucksack, which contained the manuscripts that would become the Buru Quartet. Tumiso’s sickness was a ploy to protect the famous Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s writings.
Six weeks after leaving Buru, both Tumiso and Toer were released. When Toer’s family came to escort him home, he was confused by their faces, having spent 5,180 nights as a captive. Merely an image in Toer’s mind for the past fourteen years, Maimoenah finally stood before him in the flesh. It was just as the young journalist Sindhunata had said: she was still beautiful, and he was relieved to see the old love in her face, a love he’d feared was gone. Beside her was a young woman he did not recognize, who shouted, “Papa, papa!” He remained mute and unable to move. Again, she shouted, “Father!” He gasped, realizing at last who was calling him: Astuti! When he had been taken away to Buru, Astuti, his fourth child, had been twelve years old. Now she was twenty-three. The faces of his children, which had been frozen in time on the island, had morphed into those of young adults.
Still dazed, he hugged them. Long ago, he had promised Astuti he would lift her upon his release. She was much bigger now. But he was in good shape. “Feeling strong?” she asked him. He nodded and stepped toward her.
A BANNED BOOKSELLER
In early 1980, weeks after his release, Tumiso traveled to Jakarta and handed Toer the contents of his rucksack: one of six copies of This Earth of Mankind and its sequel, Child of All Nations, the documents he had feigned an illness to protect. In case Tumiso’s copies were apprehended, though, five other prisoners and a priest had also smuggled out copies. Among them was the editor Hasjim Rachman and a Catholic priest on Buru named Roovink. Just months after their release, Rachman, Toer, and another former prisoner, named Joesoef Isak, decided to launch a publishing house called Hands of Friendship. Their first book would be This Earth of Mankind, which, along with its sequel, had been fully drafted and edited on Buru before Toer and Rachman’s December 1979 release. (The third and fourth books had been conceived and outlined on Buru but were finished during the years of Toer’s house arrest.)
Upon This Earth of Mankind’s release in 1981, the novel shattered national sales records, and within a short time, it was banned. The ban was toothless—at first a mere letter from the government asking Hands of Friendship to halt the book’s publication. Rachman and Toer refused to acknowledge the demand. But with the release of the second novel, Child of All Nations, the dictator’s cohort of uniformed apparatchiks enforced the ban. They raided Java’s booksellers, confiscating the novels, and Isak was hauled before the authorities and berated. Their efforts were not entirely effective, as novelist Richard Oh pointed out in an interview. Oh was one of many Indonesians who read the novels in xeroxed samizdat. It thrilled him to read books that had to be tracked down through word of mouth and acquired illicitly. The ban had the opposite of its intended effect: instead of suppressing Toer’s tale of collective action to end colonialism, it amplified the Quartet’s mysterious power.
Though it was still banned in Indonesia, This Earth of Mankind appeared in English in 1992, in Max Lane’s translation. Barbara Crossette, who reviewed the novel in The New York Times, called it “a lesson in the complex psychology of colonial life—of both the colonizers and the colonized. There are few one-dimensional ‘good’ or ‘bad’ characters here.” When the book started winning awards, Toer had to send emissaries to accept them. “Every award for me is important because it means a slap against militarism and fascism in Indonesia,” he told an interviewer. He was first nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1986, and though he received several subsequent nominations, he ultimately never won. The most prestigious prizes awarded to him were the Fukuoka Prize from Japan, the Ramon Magsaysay Award from the Philippines, and two PEN Awards from London and New York, including the PEN Freedom to Write Award of 1988.
Awards meant that the Quartet’s politics could not be sidestepped. When he won the Magsaysay, his old rival Mochtar Lubis wrote an open letter protesting the choice of a tapol, a former Buru political prisoner, as its recipient. The late president Sukarno’s daughter Sukmawati was one of several hundred who signed a letter in support of Toer. Widji Thukul, a poet who would lead protests to topple Suharto as a part of the movement called the Reformasi (the Indonesian word for “reform”), also signed. Like Thukul, many of the Reformasi’s leaders, who demonstrated to end Suharto’s dictatorship and usher in democracy, were inspired by the Buru Quartet.
Reformasi activist Budiman Sudjatmiko credits the great saga written in the labor camp for “opening our eyes” and helping activists imagine how a “global perspective was planted in the youth at that time.” Especially important to the student activists was the portrayal in the final novel, House of Glass, of the secret police agent who arrests Minke and drags him off to the Moluccas. The Quartet’s depiction of the fissures that could weaken democratic movements showed the activists that they needed to band together in a broader coalition. This was vital in the months leading to the birth of a new party, the Indonesian Democratic Party, or PRD, Sudjatmiko recalled in a 2022 interview. They would often visit Toer at his house, where they spoke with him about Indonesian historical events before and after independence. “We discussed history, war, culture—and it influenced our oratory.” They even took quotes directly from his books.
Of course, some, like Minke, wouldn’t live to see the fruit of their labor. Thukul was disappeared by the regime as it clung desperately to power. With Suharto’s fall in 1998, the Quartet’s significance only grew, even as the ban continued in Indonesia. As Toer struggled to write through his trauma, editing his prison memoir in the mid-1990s, he was simultaneously besieged by a throng of admirers from around the world, including Swedish embassy staffers (whose presence fueled rumors of further Nobel Prize nominations).
In 1999, after his memoir, The Mute’s Soliloquy, was published in English, Toer was finally free to travel to the United States for a book tour. He arrived at New Jersey’s Newark airport wearing a baseball cap, with his wife beside him, and irritable, as his trip overlapped with a short-lived attempt to quit smoking. While in the Empire State, he appeared at the Asia Society and walked out of a performance of Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare at the Met. His trip coincided with a New York Times review of The Mute’s Soliloquy by Jonathan Rosen, who praised Toer as “remarkable for his ability to give brutal realism a mythic dimension.”
Returning to Indonesia, he joined a new political party, the People’s Democratic Party, founded in anticipation of Suharto’s fall, with the purpose of rebuilding Indonesia’s democracy from scratch. But publicly, he deferred to the judgments of the younger generation who’d founded the party, indicating that his membership was largely symbolic. When pressured to write about his own era—the Quartet ends in the 1920s, when Toer was born—he told friends that the present moment could not yet be expressed as literature. Perhaps he was baffled by the present, which encompassed his confusing release, his house arrest, the fall and aftermath of the dictatorship. The prehistory could be carefully studied and written out much more convincingly than the stifling present.
In early 2006, at eighty-one, he died at home from diabetes and heart disease, smoking clove cigarettes until his final breath. To his muted contentment, he lived to see the Quartet’s ban rescinded and Sukarno’s daughter Megawati elected president. This Earth of Mankind, the first of four films adapted from the Quartet, was released in Indonesia in late 2019. Toer’s daughter Astuti was there with his grandchildren to celebrate a film that had been born as stories on a jungle porch, then written down and smuggled out of a labor camp. Still, Americans watching the film on Netflix may remain unaware of what its author had to do to ensure its release. In an interview the year before he died, Toer acknowledged that the United States had played a role not only in Indonesia’s coup and thus in the murder of possibly millions of innocent people, but also in his own cruel imprisonment. And yet in other late interviews—between his attacks of bitterness—he admitted that, in the end, prison had fostered his writing; and that between forced labor, hardship, and confinement, he “considered all the oppression to be a game. And I took the challenge.”
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Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the timeline of the People’s Democratic Party. It was founded shortly before Suharto’s fall, not after.
