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