The Voice of Pramoedya Ananta Toer: Passages, Interviews, and Reflections from The Mute's Soliloquy and Pramoedya's North American Tour

Abstract

P ramoedya Ananta Toer has long been recognized as Indone- sia's most signiWcant literary voice. During the Wrst two decades of Indonesian independence from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, Pramoedya became established as the country's leading prose writer, the celebrated voice of revolutionary nationalism in literature and culture. Things changed drastically following his arrest during the events of 1965, in which the persecution, arrest, and massacre of countless communists and communist sympathizers marked the fall of Sukarno's power and the rise of the Soeharto regime. As a political prisoner, exiled to the remote Buru Island prison colony, his books banned, Pramoedya continued to write—composing the Buru quartet of historical novels on which his international reputation is largely based. Since his release from Buru in 1979 until the crumbling of Soeharto's regime in the late 1990s, Pramoedya remained a writer ofWcially silenced at home, the internationally recognized voice of dissidence in New Order Indonesia. Following the events of 1965, I lost everything or, to be more accurate, all the illusions I had ever owned. I was a newborn child, outWtted with the only instrument a newly born babe Wnds necessary for life: a voice. Thus like a child my only means of communication was my voice: my screams, cries, whimpers, and yelps. What would happen to me if my voice, my sole means of communication, were to be taken from me? Is it possible to take from a man his right to speak to himself?