Courtesy of Monash University Publishing

From above, Buru Island: A Prison Memoir looks like a fairy tale isle washed by the Banda and Seram seas.

At ground level, the third-largest island in the Maluku archipelago located 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 “Jokowi” Widodo’s 10 New Bali’s 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, short for tahanan politik (political prisoners), were never charged.

His crime was being an intellectual, a poet and chairman of a branch of the People's Cultural Institute (Lekra). The literary and social movement was linked to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) during the Sukarno era.

For four years before the Sept. 30, 1965 coup, Hersri 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 Hersri 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 Hersri 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 Hersri’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 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 10 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.”

Hersri 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’.”

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 Aug. 17, 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 tension. The lags had been teachers, lawyers, artists, academics and writers like Hersri 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 […] You can only gain spiritual control once you have mastered the physical.”

The sadistic guards devised a special form of torture: putting a cricket inside his ear and tying his hands. He’s now partially deaf.

Ken 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 Hersri and his mates reveal 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. (ste)

____________

'Buru Island: A Prison Memoir'

by Hersri Setiawan
Translated by Jennifer Lindsay
Monash University Publishing, 2020
368 pages

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