The common sense of a young political prisoner

Dari Celah Bui: Tidurlah Akal Sehat (Behind Bars: Take a Sleep, Common Sense) By Danang Kukuh Wardoyo Association of Independent Journalists, 1997 205 pages Rp 12,000

JAKARTA (JP): A prison is in fact a store house of oddities. One example is that it is common practice for wardens to ask inmates to prepare instant noodles or sweet tea for them. At other times, however, the same wardens will conduct a raid around the prison cells confiscating the very stoves on which the inmates usually prepare instant noodles or tea.

Then there is a cooperative shop which sells foodstuffs such as instant noodles, sardines and eggs, inmates usually buy these foodstuffs to prepare their meals in their own cells. If one plays by the book, an inmate is not actually allowed to cook in his cell because there is a rice ration for him. Strangely enough, the wardens, not infrequently those who conduct the stove raids, will help the inmates to buy these foodstuffs.

Danang Kukuh Wardoyo recounts all these oddities in prison life. He was put behind bars because he worked as an office boy at the office of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI). He jotted down what he saw and heard in the course of his jail term. These notes have now seen the light of day in book form entitled Dari Celah Bui: Tidurlah Akal Sehat (Behind Bars: Take a Sleep, Common Sense).

It is interesting to note that what Danang referred to in his notes as oddities were common practices known to most inmates.

"The double standards of the wardens -- asking inmates to prepare noodles for them and conducting stove raids -- do not seem to disturb the long-dormant common sense of the community of inmates," he writes, aware of all these queer things.

Danang also found the injustice with which prison wardens treated the inmates surprising. He found it strange to find that some fat-pocketed inmates received special treatment in terms of bedding, meals, and sexual needs, for example.

Arrest

Danang worked as an office boy at the AJI office. He took the job after flunking the 1994 entrance test for state universities. His wish was to help his parents economically. Fortune didn't favor him and he was arrested one day. He was accused of sowing enmity against the government because he allegedly helped distribute the Independen bulletin. He was indicted under the haatzaai artikelen, an article that has been controversial since Dutch colonial times.

The Central Jakarta District Court sentenced him to 20 months in jail on Aug. 26, 1995.

Making sense of the fact that as an office boy expecting a monthly salary of Rp 100,000 (less than US$30) he had been accused of attempts to split the nation was beyond him.

So Danang went to prison and became the youngest political prisoner at that time. He had just celebrated his 19th birthday. It is understandable, therefore, that he had his own sensitivity when coming into contact with prison reality. This shines through clearly in his jottings in the book under review.

In comparison with other books which also dwell on prison life, such as those written by Mochtar Lubis and Arswendo Atmowiloto, Danang's has its own distinctions, which may also be seen as its superiority.

In Lubis' Catatan Subversif (Subversive Notes), written while in prison during the Old Order regime in 1956, for example, Lubis focused his attention on the current political scenes. Of course, he jotted down how he had been arrested and tried, but everything was within the larger framework of the national political scene, which was then in crisis.

As chief editor of Indonesia Raya when he was thrown behind bars, Lubis was inseparable from the country's influential figures and parties, such as President Soekarno, the Indonesian Communist Party and its supporters, the army, and the anti- communist group. A man of his caliber would not be interested in the trifles which drew Danang's attention.

In the meantime the four books on prison life by Arswendo Atmowiloto, former editor of Monitor who was jailed for blasphemy, do not make much of the strange happenings in prison life noticed by Danang.

In Abal-Abal, a term usually used in referring to the majority of inmates who constitute the low caste in prison community, Atmowiloto dwells at length on these people. Likewise, in another of his books, Kisah Para Ratib (Stories of Prayer Chanters), he tells more of the criminal world of brengos, a term used for the block leaders in prisons.

Danang's superiority lies in his sensitivity or, perhaps, his innocence, in evaluating trivial every day occurrences in a prison community. It is this aspect that is absent in the books written by Lubis or Atmowiloto.

Lubis and Atmowiloto were put behind bars as the people responsible for their mass media publications. Lubis understood the risk of prison at that time of crisis.

Atmowiloto was not too shocked when put into prison. He was not much disturbed when witnessing irregularities in the prison. As an adult, he was ready to take a compromising attitude towards these irregularities or even to benefit from them.

For Danang, prison was alien, he had never had the slightest inkling that he would be living in one. Therefore he was restless witnessing all the irregularities.

Trivial things prompted him to find the reasons behind them. Atmowiloto may be correct in saying that Danang is a lucky young man, one that other people may envy.

"Other people need scores of years and must have high ideals. Other people must formulate concepts and strategies. For Danang, a simple indictment that he sold illegal magazines was enough to make him a political prisoner," Atmowiloto writes in the foreword to this book.

This book is a good introduction for those wishing to be knowledgeable about prison life in Indonesia. Danang describes it in great detail.

His notes are pleasant reading owing to his humoristic storytelling and parodies, which at times tease the common sense of the reader as if saying "who knows, outside prison walls maybe our common sense is also fast asleep?"

Who knows...

-- Asip Agus H.