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Jakarta Post

Indonesia is entering new time with books

Over the last decade or more, many former Indonesian prisoners have made that decade a time with books by writing their memoirs. 

Max Lane (The Jakarta Post)
Yogyakarta
Sat, January 23, 2021

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Indonesia is entering new time with books

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uring December 2020, Indonesian playwright and theatre producer and director, Faiza Mardzoeki, produced five different film-theatre productions of a contemporary Norwegian play, Time Without Books (TWB).

The productions were directed by five women theatre directors based in Banda Aceh, Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta and Makassar. Faiza also translated the play (from the English), published in Indonesian in December as Waktu Tanpa Buku (Time Without Books), which was written by Lene Therese Teigen. The translation was supported by the Norwegian Literature Abroad.

This is a Norwegian play, but about Uruguayans, presented to Indonesians. There are many aspects of the human condition or of history that can be appreciated across borders and historical periods. In this case, it is clear what is shared by both Urugauy and Indonesia is the catastrophe of military dictatorship and the suffering it generated. And not just that, but also the issue of memory – what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten.

For Faiza, this was not a new issue. She had written, directed and produced a play, Silent Song of the Genjer Flowers (Nyanyi Sunyi Kembang-Kembang Genjer), performed in Jakarta in 2014. A stage to screen version of the play is available on YouTube, with English subtitling.  

Faiza’s play, like Waktu Tanpa Buku, deals with what should be remembered of such dark experiences – oppression, death, disappearance, rape, imprisonment – and, crucially, the why and how of remembrance

Teigen’s Time Without Books realism is not of the naturalist kind. There are hints of that Brechtian style of making the audience conscious of their role as thinkers about the play at the moment they are watching. The narrative is not driven by the logic of drama but by a logic of questioning.

In some respects, the play is a long series of questioning embodied in a juxtaposition of scenes. Not surprisingly the phenomenon of being questioned, in a scene built around the interrogation of prisoners, carries a powerful punch.

Teigen’s play deals with this issue both in terms of all the sufferings of the individual victims as well as that of the consequences for society, although the personal is at the forefront. Indeed sometimes, there is a hint that the personal is standing in for the nation, presented in a way that is also very relevant to Indonesia.

At one level, the experience of personal suffering is simply described often in the most vividly harrowing away: the remembrance of a glimpse through an open prison cell door to the horrors inside. At another level, it is taken deeper than this.  

Speaking to her father, the daughter Rita, demands she wants to know more than the dates and facts of the crimes committed (against her father and his generation). She wants to know what is it that has made him who he is and who she is. He answers not fully understanding: “Why are you who you are? “

This question resonates so strongly for Indonesia. Can Indonesia ever come to understand why it is what it has become today, without being told fully and listening intently, about what happened to the millions of people oppressed in and after 1965?

Faiza’s Silent Song of the Genjer Flowers answers this question by contributing to the remembering, bringing forth the stories of women who experienced that oppression. While Teigen’s play challenges people to think about the nature of and need for the questions, Faiza’s play challenges people to face the reality of remembering. Both plays cannot and do not avoid actual descriptions of the horror, and both do it in a harrowingly brilliant way, but they have different central thrusts.

One of the Teigen’s characters, Enrique, describes how for a while, he was allowed to read books in his cell, but then they were taken away and there was a time without books. After that there arose a consciousness among the prisoners of the importance of recording as much information as they could.

Writing was the tool of memory. This too echoes Indonesia. On Buru Island prison camp in Indonesia all reading material (except for the religious holy books) was banned. On Buru, oral story telling took their place until a few jailed authors were allowed to write. Buru’s time without books then produced Indonesia’s memory of itself in the novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

Over the last decade or more, many former Indonesian prisoners have made that decade a time with books by writing their memoirs. Younger Indonesians, the generations after 1965, have also started to write about what they have learned from those who have been telling their memories.  Faiza was one of these – she is in her 40s.

She interviewed scores of women survivors of imprisonment and of torture. All of the issues touched upon in TWB are there also in Silent Song. Faiza’s play, coming from within Indonesia about Indonesia, is driven to challenge and smash the most powerful of all Indonesia’s taboos.

Faiza’s play brought the audience to tears, almost everybody. Even the young left-wing activists who actually thought such a play should rather have the audience standing with raised fists also cried. Why? Faiza had smashed a fundamental taboo: don’t think of members or supporters of the Communist Party as humans or fellow Indonesians! The tears dissolved this taboo, a huge step forward.

Other literature seeks to gain sympathy for these victims as portraying them as not knowing what they were doing or of being involuntarily dragged into the communist orbit. The characters in Faiza’s play do not disguise their loyalties at all.

Teigen, like Faiza, is also uninterested in disguises. Her characters sum up how they saw why they were oppressed: “We believed in something different: fair wages and justice.”

The publication of both Waktu Tanpa Buku and Nyanyi Sunyi Kembang-Kembang Genjer are just two of many pointers that Indonesia is now entering its “time with books” – a time of remembering and learning from its memories.

There is, of course, a danger that lurks everywhere. This danger is expressed by Teigen’s character Enrique when, frustrated with a young person’s vacillation about wanting to know what had happened to him and his generation, says: “Go down to the shopping centre then, to consumer prison ….” No, I think books will win.

 ***

The author of Indonesia Tidak Hadir di Bumi Manusia (Indonesia is not present in Earth of Mankind) and Unfinished Nation: Indonesia Before and After Suharto, and translator of the works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and WS Rendra

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