from Minding the Darkness

21 August 1998

In the Bishop's Palace in Oporto          overlooking the old port      on the river Douro with its huge advertisements for port         Graham Dow the same Scots     families as in India and Montreal where we all spoke on East Timor         including the leader     of a Muslim student group from Indonesia facing possible imprisonment          when he went back home     George Aditjondro (already banished from his country         his passport invalidated      for defending East Timor and showing how Indonesia's wealth          was not so much Chinese     as concentrated in the hands of a tiny clique         surrounding Soeharto)     the Argentinian lawyer who in the time of the generals            spoke for the mothers of the desaparacidos      and most dramatically X the East Timorese          whose own risk on her return      was not arrest but disappearance and who against the advice          of her friend Professor Barbedo      told the group how she had been raped I finally met Max Lane          the translator of Pramoedya      Indonesia's greatest living writer often mentioned as a candidate          for the Nobel Prize for literature      and I said to him Pramoedya is so original          even the reviewers who praise him      are too Western in their outlook to follow what he has done          for the genre of the novel      at the end of the Buru Quartet and Max explained He will never          be given a Nobel      all of the current writers flourishing under Soeharto          are dead set against it      Of course I thought you cannot be powerful in a state          and unlike it in character      Thus Pramoedya was thrown in prison first by the Dutch          for championing independence      then by Sukarno's army for challenging the treatment of Chinese          and then for fourteen years without trial     by Soeharto's New Order while until recently          students were tortured and imprisoned      for sharing his books When asked to apologize          Pramoedya      a meditator      (the sound of your breath a form of samadhi)          wrote the following      I myself am Javanese I was educated to Javanese ideals          guided by the Mahabharata      at whose climax they bathe in the blood of their own brothers          while other peoples who      have managed to slip their shackles are the nations that rule the world          Even in the belly of Dutch power      Java still glorified its narrow world culture          they bathed in the blood of their brothers      right up through 1966 And because Java was no longer          in the belly of European power      the slaughter reached an unlimited scale without colonization my country          would have ceaselessly spilled      the blood of its sons and daughters cultural integrity     a bogey          for the countries stuffed with capital      by which free peoples are enslaved the unemployed become murderers          with uniforms and badges of rank      vast forests are torn apart It is necessary that I emphasize          the problem of power      that tends to turn people into bandits above all if they have held it for decades          and without ever knowing Verlichting      Aufklaerung      remain in thrall everything that has happened          will live on for centuries      Once more--my apologies But now the IMF          (having learnt from the massacres      which followed its exactments in Yugoslavia and Rwanda)                  has allowed Indonesia      to continue heavy subsidies on food and fuel          and the most powerful voices      denouncing the recent murders and rapes of the Chinese          are the top Muslim leaders      like Abdurrahman Wahid third-generation          leader of NU      the largest nongovernmental Islamic organization in the world          not even in Saudi Arabia      do they have a mass Muslim organization such as the NU          The government there will not allow it      who in May in Surabaya organized a meeting of one million          from all over East Java      all dressed in white against the reactionary          clerics in his own NU      who had preached against the Chinese from the pesantren          some of whose youth in '65      were brought in by army trucks to kill the secular teachers          and send their corpses      down the river Brantas but which Sulak now praises          for wanting development      from the...