Om Aji and Tante Retno have been true saviors for me. They’re like my fairy godparents and they treat me like their own child, the same way they treat Alam and Bimo. You are so lucky to have a brother as kind as Om Aji.
During my time here so far, Alam, Bimo, and Andini have
been of great help to me. I regret not having ever met them before. If I had known them since childhood, how very different my life might have been. They are such wonderful cousins to have; they fill my life here with friendship and color. It’s only their language I sometimes find difficult to understand. I’ve been writing down all their favorite swear words. They are very aesthetically challenging.
Please tell Om Nug that I delivered his packet of things for Bimo: the letter, some recent photographs, and the book,
Men without Women
, by Hemingway. Bimo was very happy to receive them.
My meeting with Tante Rukmini and her husband, the general, was strange and cold. It will take more time than I have now to describe the atmosphere in their home but, suffice it to say, it was so oppressive as to make me feel weary.
If I successfully finish my work here, I will owe it all to the friends I’ve made at Satu Bangsa, who have been especially accommodating and have helped me to secure interviews with numerous sources. They also let me use their desktop computer to edit the footage from my interviews. Mita, who heads the documentation section, is very good at operating the equipment and has given me a lot of help. Because of all their help, by the time I return home, most of my recordings will have already been neatly indexed and catalogued. I’ve been trying my best to keep up with my note-keeping, as well, writing up my notes as soon as possible after each interview, because often, outside of the actual interview, my respondents provide me with interesting information and observations that I might be able to use in voice-over narration.
My interviews have, in a sense, taken the form of sporadic
conversations: the first with Om Aji at his home, followed by others at the Museum of the Treachery of the Indonesian Communist Party. After that I filmed one session with Bimo, and the other day I spent almost an entire day interviewing Tante Surti at her home in Jalan Percetakan Negara. Before the interview, we feasted on
ikan pindang serani
that Kenanga made. She is, I must say, the strongest young woman I have ever met in my life.
Interviewing Tante Surti was the most troubling one for me, because I’ve known of her and her family ever since I was a kid. Someday I’ll show you my filmed interview with her — after it’s been edited, of course.
I finally managed to get an interview with Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose works I had read in English translation. Now Alam has lent me the original Indonesian versions to read. I went to a discussion of the Buru Quartet with Alam, Bimo, and Gilang (the head of Satu Bangsa). In the end, the discussion got around to his autobiographical work,
The Mute’s Soliloquy
, which made me very happy indeed. I’m extremely pleased with the footage I captured of Pramoedya that day. He is so very much alive that I’m sure viewers will find the material interesting. He didn’t just answer previously scripted questions. He was spontaneous. It was a standing-room-only crowd, and questions were fired at him from all directions. There were good questions, clever questions, clichéd questions, questions from fans, critical questions, blow-mouth questions (a term I got from Alam meaning talking just to hear oneself speak). It was a very thorough discussion and I was able to record everything.
After the question-answer session, I got the chance to
interview Pramoedya, though not for very long. He briefly told me about his imprisonment, his exile on Buru Island, how he was able to write, and about his family as well. Most of the information he gave me I already knew from books and interviews with him I’d read in the press, but it’s always different hearing something for yourself.
I think I might have come up with a title for my film: in Indonesian, “Mendengar Suara dari Seberang” and, in English, “Voices from the Other Side.” (Professor Dupont has insisted that besides French, I also give the film English subtitles).
Just as we were leaving the site of the discussion on Jalan Proklamasi, Alam and Bimo suddenly told me to get into Gilang’s jeep, fast. After getting in, Gilang took off from the place like a bat out of hell. Turns out, he had spotted a number of “flies” at the discussion, that being the term activists use for undercover military intelligence agents. I myself hadn’t noticed anyone out of the ordinary, because all my attention had been on Pram.
Things are heating up here. After the government raised the price of fuel, all other prices rose as well, bringing people out to the street to demonstrate in ever greater numbers. The military has attempted to engage in “dialogue” the student activists who are coordinating the demonstration, but the students have continued to demonstrate. Student demands are not confined to the price of fuel and the Rp. 100 trillion the government has provided in subsidies for certain banks (many of them owned by the president’s cronies); they are demanding sweeping governmental reform, including that President Soeharto step down. Even with all of this going on, the president has decided to attend the upcoming High Level G-15 Conference, in
Cairo — as if the problems affecting this country are minor and will soon blow over and go away.
Alam and Bimo are up to their necks in work, determining strategy, supervising the students, and helping them to unite in a coordinated mass movement. According to Gilang, this is one student movement that both political activists and the mass media are happy to support because their demand is also the same: Reform!
Rama, an alumnus of Trisakti University, found it hard to believe when Alam told him that a free-speech platform had been set up on the campus, where anyone was free to speak, even to criticize the New Order government.
All because of me, I’m afraid to say, Rama was called in by his superiors for an “interview” and subjected to intensive questioning. How was it, his superiors wanted to know, that a person like him from a “tainted background” could get by undiscovered and find a job at a state-owned enterprise? I feel very guilty for what happened, even though Om Aji insists that incident that night was a blessing in disguise.
With Alam and Bimo busy setting up free-speech platforms at campuses and elsewhere, I’ve had to go to interviews on my own. One was with Djoko Sri Moeljono — a former political prisoner who was exiled to Buru Island because of, he guessed, his activities with SBBT, the Trikora Steel Workers Union. Before being sent to Buru, Pak Djoko was first imprisoned in Serang in 1965. After that, he was held at the Nusakambangan penal island and only after that was he sent to Buru, where he remained until his release in 1978.
Pak Djoko described for me in great detail life on Buru Island, where he served as head of the barracks in which he and
other prisoners lived. Until the day of his release, he said, neither the government nor the military authorities ever informed him of his alleged crimes. What I have found to be most tragic — both for him and the other political prisoners I’ve come in contact with — is the difficulty all of them had had in finding gainful employment after their release because of the stigma of having been a political prisoner.