Book on life as lived by the majority

Book on life as lived by the majority

It's Not An All Night Fair; Pramoedya Ananta Toer;
Equinox Publishing, Jakarta-Singapore, 2001; xv+103 pp

JAKARTA (JP): When Bill Watson first came to Indonesia in 1969
to teach English here, he recalls everyone suggesting to him that
he should read Pramoedya Ananta Toer. He would have loved to do
so except there was no way of finding anything written by
Pramoedya at that time.

Watson was on a British volunteer program and was eager to
know more about this country and its people. One way of doing
this, he thought, was to read local authors writing about
themselves and their society. He searched high and low for books
by Pramoedya but the sales staff at bookstores turned away when
he told them what he was looking for.

Finally he came across the owner of a little bookstore in
Bandung who took him into a corner and handed him a copy of Bukan
Pasar Malam (It's Not An All Night Fair), but under the
table.

The book was published in 1951, in Bahasa Indonesia. Watson
was so happy to have a copy that he learnt the local language and
as soon as he could he started to read the book. The story of a
25-year-old son who has returned to his village in Central Java
to face the illness and death of his father touched him in such a
way that he was inspired to share it with all his friends in
England.

The following year he began to translate the novella from his
little house on the slopes of the Tangkuban Prahu in Bandung. Set
away from the main road and looking out at the water buffalo
plowing the fields, it was easy, recalls Watson, to be
transported by the story's narrator as he makes his way home by
train from Jakarta to Blora, Central Java, to be at the bedside
of his dying father.

When Watson returned home he enrolled for a masters degree in
the sociology of the Indonesian novel, concentrating on
literature between 1900 and 1955. As he put the last full stop to
the manuscript he felt an intense desire to take it first to
Pramoedya, the most famous of all Indonesian writers.

But again all inquiries about Pramoedya's whereabouts were met
with blank stares and an embarrassed silence. Nobody would tell
Watson where to find Pramoedya. It was only much later that the
world realized how the author, along with tens of thousands of
others, was detained in 1965, and without trial or a formal
accusation sent into internal exile to the remote island of Buru.

The next 11 years were spent by Pramoedya and the others
clearing jungles to find food and shelter on the abandoned
island. Most of them died of starvation, disease or brutality at
the hands of the prison authorities. In the meantime, Watson's
translation of Bukan Pasar Malam was published in the journal
Indonesia in 1973.

When the translation came out Watson was of course very
pleased but there was a sense of regret that he could not get it
to Pramoedya himself and, second, that it would not have a larger
circulation beyond the circle of specialist readers of the
journal. Both problems are now resolved as in the early 1980s
after Pramoedya returned to Jakarta from Buru, Watson visited him
with his daughter and personally gave him a copy of the
translation.

Besides, the story has now been reissued by Equinox as part of
its Pramoedya signature series which is an effort to search out
the prolific author's earlier works and make them more
accessible to the English-speaking community.

The book was recently released in Jakarta in the presence of
Pramoedya who pointed out that presidents have come and gone but
the ban slapped on his writings has still not been lifted even
though the 32-year rule of dictator-president Soeharto ended in
May 1998,

Pramoedya is now able to travel abroad and his books are
available in the country. Pramoedya already has had 30 of his
works translated into over 30 languages.

The first in the Equinox series is Tales from Djakarta, a
collection of 13 stories written between 1948 and 1956, a period
of bitter transition from the revolutionary era to the beginnings
of military rule in Indonesia.

Translated by the Nusantara Group of graduate students
specializing in Malay and Indonesian languages and literature at
the University of California, Berkeley, the stories were written
nearly four decades ago but reading them now makes one wonder if
time has not stood still all this while? All the human frailties
and problems, especially of the poor, that were talked about then
remain the same to this day.

Not An All Night Fair is the second book in the series and
continues to document life as it is lived by the majority of
people. It also highlights the shattered hopes of the older
generation that dreamt of a more just existence after the
departure of the colonialists.

Instead the house is falling apart in the narration, the head
of the family is on his death bed and the protagonist, who is
also the eldest of the next generation, is still unemployed. But
before going the sick father says that he has led a hard life,
perhaps by choice, as he did not want to become a clown,
jockeying for political power after independence.

"I didn't want to be an ulama. I wanted to be a nationalist.
That's why I became a teacher. To open the door for the hearts of
children to go into the garden ... of patriotism. Are you
listening?"

Hopefully, many more are listening as well. For it is never
too late to start right now, to try and make that difference.

-- Mehru Jaffer