Putu Oka Sukanta survived one of the greatest atrocities in Indonesia during the violence of 1965-1966. In the second article of a two-part series, Zoe Reynolds writes how the internationally recognized Balinese writer and other artists silenced under Soeharto fared in prison and after their release.

On Oct. 21, 1966; soldiers came to arrest Sukanta in Mangga Besar in Central Jakarta. He was interrogated, tortured and imprisoned, first at the local military district command, then at Salemba Penitentiary in East Jakarta.

There was no arrest warrant, no trial.

Since being brought here, I have spoken mostly to myself.

Conversations, even with other longtime prisoners, are cursory.

I have lost the will to talk.

My breaths are short and labored,

though I cough less frequently now

—Sukanta, “In my cell”

Although prisoners were denied pen and paper, Sukanta could not be silenced. “A writer struggling for human rights and dignity will never stop writing, even if he must write on the sky, clouds and wind - on light and darkness,” Sukanta said in an essay. “Writing became my personal medicine and self-therapy.”

There was little medicine, so Sukanta learned acupuncture from a fellow prisoner. It was a remedy for injuries suffered during torture and the ills that came with starvation.

“We ate cockroaches, anything around us — even rats,” said “Ketut” (not his real name), a Balinese singer and gamelan player, in an oral history titled Memecah Pembisuan (Ending the Silence) compiled by Sukanta. “We planted spinach fertilized with our own feces.”

Ketut said in an interview that he once led a troupe of 30 village artists and performers in singing Sukarno’s proclamations in the rice fields and village halls. He once led me across a road and pointed to the spot where two men were pursued by vigilantes and hacked to death during the Communist purge.

After 10 years of suffering and detention, Sukanta was among 1.9 million political prisoners released in 1976 as the result of international pressure. Out of prison, the freed political prisoners lived under a type of house arrest, reporting to local authorities, watched, shunned by society and struggling to make a living.

Soeharto’s Indonesia, meanwhile, remained a dictatorship behind a facade of democracy.

He built prisons large and small, some with bars,

but also one without limits, as wide as the sky.

- Sukanta, “Jailers of Humanity”

For better, for worse: Sukanta at his wedding to his second wife, Endah. “It took three days, baby in arms, to find where he was,” Endah recalls of when Sukanta was detained after returning from an overseas visit. (Courtesy Putu Oka Sukanta)
After he was freed, Sukanta married his first wife, Rasima, and earned a modest wage as an acupuncture practitioner. He, too, was lucky: Former political prisoners were barred from public service jobs or teaching. Papers and magazines feared employing them or printing their work.

Sukanta’s poetry became internationally renowned before he was widely read in his own country. His first anthology, Bali Strait, was published in 1982; his latest collection, Flower Letters from Ubud, in 2008.

Alongside poetry readings given in Hawaii and New York, Sukanta has been the guest of 18 nations, including Australia, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the UK.

I have no stamp to post my letter

I place a blossom on the envelope

in its place

Dear honorable world I have grown many colors

From the blood of murdered artists

My fragrance is that of their names

– Sukanta

I first met Sukanta in 1982 when working for a daily newspaper in Jakarta. In 2008 we were dining in Sukasari Restaurant in the hills of Bogor, an hour’s drive from Jakarta — the poet; Hanafi Rustandi, a union leader; and I. Although Rustandi had no associations with the PKI or Lekra, they had much in common. The men compared their experiences of torture over a meal of fish, sate and salad.

“What about the rats? Did they use rats?” one asked of the other.

It had been 10 years since the fall of Soeharto when we ate. However, until the end of the New Order, Sukanta had been periodically arrested, interrogated and tortured.

I am back again in my cell

Rubbish lit by candlelight

A nest for rats

The sound of the interrogator’s worn and broken billiard

in the next room, hitting the cue ball

against the window of my heart all night.

Mental torture.

And the sewer rats run back and forward across my body at will,

the drone of mosquitoes in my ear

And the electric shocks pierce my brain.

Challenging preparations of interrogation to come

Or repeated beatings

Again

And again,

- Sukanta, “Back Again”.

The abuse typically followed his return from overseas.

Sukanta’s second wife, Endah, a dancer originally from a family of the court of Surakarta, Central Java, now runs a herbal medicine business in Bogor. “Every time he left I did not know if he would return,” she says.

“Once after he came back from Germany, they came to our house and took him away. The neighbors slammed their shutters and doors in my face and refused to talk to me. I wept. It took three days, baby in arms, to find where he was.”

Sarsa, Daddy can’t take you for walks in the mornings, pushing the pram I bought at the market.

You are like the cry of a poem in the night,

because I, your father, carry the burden of the poetry of the oppressed,

— Sukanta, “Back Again”.

Killing fields: <)