Utuy Tatang Sontani: A tragic end for a literary great

Di Bawah Langit Tak Berbintang (Under the Starless Sky); By Utuy Tatang Sontani; Pustaka Jaya, Jakarta, 2001; 150 pp

If you mention the name Pramoedya Ananta Toer, his Buru Quartet and several other great novels quickly come to mind.

Speak of Sitor Situmorang, and you can easily remember his Surat Kertas Hijau (Letter on Green Paper) collection of poems or his individual poems such as Lagu Gadis Itali (Song of an Italian Girl) and Malam Lebaran (Lebaran Eve).

Both authors were persecuted during the New Order era and were imprisoned or, in Pramoedya's case, banished to the distant island of Buru without trial for alleged involvement in the coup blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) on Sept. 30, 1965.

Mention Utuy Tatang Sontani, however, and perhaps your memory will have to be jogged to remember something about this man. In fact, he was at one time on a literary par with such greats as Pram or Sitor.

Before 1965, Utuy was famous as one of, if not the greatest, Indonesian modern playwright. His works include Bunga Rumah Makan (Flower of a Restaurant) and Awal and Mira. He wrote other works such as Suling (Flute), Sayang Ada Orang Lain (Pity There's Another Man), Sangkuriang (the legendary figure from Sundanese mythology) and Di Langit Ada Bintang (There Are Stars in the Sky).

Utuy's works were heavily influenced by French existentialism, especially in Sangkuriang.

But Utuy seemed to slip into oblivion after the abortive coup of 1965. In fact, when the coup broke out, he was in China, as part of a delegation of the Indonesian Communist Party. In the 1960s Utuy was courted by the PKI through its cultural wing, the Institute of People's Culture (Lekra).

Utuy, an honest man, found himself in agreement with the ideals of communism, for a society free from all kinds of oppression, and could not resist the urging to join Lekra.

Di Bawah Langit Tak Berbintang (Under the Starless Sky), his posthumously published autobiography, deals with his early years as a writer and, more interestingly, his life as a political exile in China and later in the then Soviet Union.

The first part of the book deals with Utuy's early years as a writer. He writes about how he became fond of writing and how he was successful with his first full-length romance, Tambera.

Officially, Utuy was in China as a member of the PKI delegation. Actually he joined the delegation for another purpose, to seek medical treatment. As the New Order regime stood silently by amid the massacre of Indonesians allegedly involved in the PKI and threw hundreds of thousands into jail, Utuy could consider himself lucky to be safe and sound in a faraway land, China.

But he was not to enjoy peace for long. In 1966 the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was waged throughout China, purportedly to weed out the "poisonous grasses" of the bourgeois.

It also had its impact on the Indonesian Communist Party delegation. Some members were accused of being pro-Soviet, hence revisionists. Utuy writes cynically about how some other Indonesians in the delegation acted in a more aggressive manner than their Chinese hosts during the rabid days of the revolution in order to show their allegiance.

He also gives a graphic description of the moral degradation of some members, who always touted themselves as true communists. To save their skin, these people had no qualms about causing the downfall of their fellow delegates. In clear terms, Utuy describes some members of the delegation as selfish individuals concerned only about their own safety despite the revolutionary heroism they always professed to.

It is particularly interesting to read the second part of this autobiography because it tells us about how some people usually declaring themselves ready to sacrifice their lives for the people turned out to be simply cowards.

As China could no longer accommodate Indonesian political exiles, Utuy left the country. On the way to the Netherlands, where he hoped for medical treatment, he stopped over in the then Soviet Union and decided to stay there. He spent seven years in Russia, teaching at the Institute of Oriental Languages.

He died in 1979 and was buried in the Islamic cemetery in Moscow. His works remained banned in Indonesia although his greatness has been recognized in other countries (some of his books are required reading in Malaysian curriculums).

Utuy, with this posthumously released autobiography, opens the eyes of young Indonesians to the fact that far away in Russia, a great Indonesian playwright lies in a grave all alone, shouting out loud his words: Memoir? Autobiography? Novel? What matters is that something must be told, to sparkle in a dark and lonely night.