On Joesoef Isak
by
Max Lane
On
April 20 this year in a gala ceremony in New York
the American PEN Center Indonesia Indonesia
Joesoef Isak
was one of three men who founded a publishing company in 1980 called Hasta
Mitra. All three had been political prisoners for at least ten years under the
Suharto dictatorship and all three had been prominent intellectuals, publishers
and journalists before they were arrested. I got to know all three while they
were preparing to publish their first books, the novels of Indonesia ’s great writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer
– novels he had written while on the prison island
of Buru , in eastern Indonesia Indonesia
The establishment of Hasta Mitra, Sanskrit for “hands of
friendship”, and the publication of Pramoedya’s novels was an act of bravery
and defiance that is perhaps hard for people to grasp today. Joesoef, Pramoedya
and the third man, Hasyim Rachman, had all been arrested, without warrant or
process, in 1965. They were three of hundreds of thousands detained during the
period between October, 1965 and October, 1966. One of the Army’s generals,
Suharto, had seized the political initiative in the wake of a mutiny by
pro-Left colonels and was waging a terroristic purge of the Indonesian Left.
There were more than 25 million members of left-wing organisations at the time,
more than half of all registered voters, and Suharto decided the terror had to
be total. Between 500,000 and 2 million people were slaughtered, depending on
which report one believes. One key general later claimed that three million
were killed. Joesoef, Pramoedya and Hasyim were among the fifteen thousand
“survivors” who were kept in prison for between ten and fourteen years without
ever being charged or put on trial.
By 1979 the fourteen thousand were out of prison but there had
been no let up in the propaganda against the Left or in the restrictions they
all faced. The Suharto regime controlled the press and the schools and through
both these institutions, the Left were demonised. The regime’s propaganda
associated the Left with, among many other similar alleged deeds, the
mutilation of some assassinated generals genitals by women from the communist
women’s organisation – allegations which had long been disproved by the Army’s
own autopsy report, which was hushed up within Indonesia
They were the devils of Indonesian history and the official
line was that the hundreds of thousands of Leftists that had died during 1965
and 1966 were killed at the hands of an enraged population who had come to hate
these devils. Of course, nothing was further from the truth. The mass killings
had been carried out by the Army in a systematic programme of cooperation with
right-wing Islamic militia.
In 1980 after ten or more years in prison, kept away from the
new society created by Soeharto’s totalitarianism, Joesoef, Pramoedya and
Hasyim found themselves pariahs, vilified as hated by the people and
degenerate. As with all political prisoners they had I.D. cards marked with the
letters E.T., standing for “political prisoner”. They were banned from many
areas of work, including writing and publishing.
The establishment of Hasta Mitra and the publication of
Pramoedya’s first novel, This Earth of
Mankind, in 1981 was not just the first but also the only act of open
defiance of the regime and the atmosphere it had created by former political
prisoners. Joesoef, Pramoedya and Hasyim were true vanguard fighters and they
remained the vanguard in this fight from among the former political prisoners
until Suharto was ousted by Indonesian students in 1998.
Pramoedya was the writer whose workers made up the major
component of Hasta Mitra’s publishing programme in the 1980s and during most of
the 1990s, although Hasta Mitra published other works as well. That was his
role. Hasyim, who had been the publisher of the biggest selling daily paper
from before 1965, the Eastern Star, was the effective business manager of Hasta
Mitra. A handsome, flamboyant man, Hasyim had been an entrepreneurial
adventurer for the revolution since his youth. In 1945 he had been despatched
by the new republican government to India Singapore and asked to help smuggle arms from Singapore to the republican guerrillas in Sumatra fighting the Dutch. Hasyim died in July, 1999
when Pramoedya and Joeseof were on a
tour in the United States
Joesoef was editor of Pramoedya’s manuscripts and also the
manager of Hasta Mitra’s political response to the regime’s actions against their
publishing efforts. Before being arrested Joesoef’s career had been that of a
journalist. He had been educated in the Dutch school system before independence
and did not even speak Indonesian. It was only in 1942 after the Japanese
invaded the Netherlands Indies, that he had no choice but to enter a junior
highs school that used Indonesian as the teaching language. He was still not
really familiar with the language when he watched Soekarno speak at a huge mass
rally in 1943, while the Japanese were still occupiers, and had been deeply
frustrated at not understanding how it was that Sukarno was so able to move so
deeply tens of thousands of ordinary Indonesians. He is now one of the masters
of the Indonesian language.
As a journalist he began writing reviews of classical European
music specialising in commentaries the romantics, from Bach to Beethoven. He
mixed with the Dutch educated crowd, especially those associated with the
intellectual based, pro-Western Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI). He was well read
in Western literature, urbane and articulate. He rose in journalistic ranks and
soon became editor of one of Jakarta
In 1959 he was quickly elected by his journalist colleagues
from both left and right, almost unanimously, to the Presidency of the Jakarta Indonesia U.S.
Joesoef avoided torture during his ten years in prison after he
was finally more permanently detained in 1968. He was kept in Salemba prison in
Jakarta Buru
prison island, probably because he was not considered a member of the communist
party. I have spoken also to his friends who were imprison with him as well as
heard his own stories of life in Salemba and I am sure the reason he escaped
torture was because of his intelligent keluwesan.
Luwes means both flexibility and
charm and requires an acute judge of character to employ it properly. He is
still like that today and there is hardly a foreign journalist or academic
visiting Jakarta
At one time during his imprisonment in Salemba, his charm
earned him a weekly conversation session with one of the more intellectually
pretentious guards. After their conversation, the officer would leave the room
leaving some newspapers on the desk, which Joesoef would avidly read. Reading
matter was banned in the prison. Joesoef would then have the task of retelling
the information among prisoners. Later, with the aid of his wife and prisoners
sent outside prison to throw out rubbish, magazines, such as Time, would be smuggled into the prison
and into his cell. He read them through then might. Prisoners were made to
sleep night after night with the lights always on, so the guards could see nobody
was escaping! So that problem of light for reading was solved – although the
prisoners’ families had to supply the light bulbs. In the morning, his
cellmates turned the magazines into papier-mâché destroying the evidence. He
would write out in tiny script a summary of what he read on cigarette paper
which would then be circulated from cell to cell. Even in prison, he was editor
and journalist reporting the momentous events outside that would have been
otherwise unknown to the prisoners: China ’s
turn to the U.S. ; the
American defeat in Vietnam ;
the anti-war movement around the world; women’s liberation; and the
consolidation of the Suharto dictatorship, as well as the defeated student
protest movements that shook Jakarta
Joesoef was released in 1977, two years before Pramoedya and
Hasyim returned to Jakarta from Buru Island Buru . They asked him to join the
enterprise.
This Earth of Mankind was published in 1981. It
is difficult to convey the impact its appearance had. I cannot think of any
other case in any country of how a historical novel, set decades before the
time of its publication, could have such an impact. Everything about the
publication: who had published it, what they were publishing and how it was
received by most readers crystallised down to a kind of pure defiance and rejection
of everything that Suharto and the New Order represented.
This Earth of Mankind was set at the end of the
19th and beginning of the 20th century on Java in the Netherlands Indies .
One on level it told the story of a teenage Javanese boy, from an elite
aristocratic background, and how his romance with a young Eurasian girl was
violated by racist colonial laws. On another level, it explained how one of the
very first Indonesians, a completely new type of person coming into existence
at this time, was created out of the contradiction between Western ideas of
humanity and equality and colonial racism and repression. There was no obvious
satire of the Suharto regime or hidden comment on contemporary Indonesia
This story of the creation of the new Indonesian personality
received immediate critical praise. Review after review lauded the book,
hailing the return of Pramoedya to the published world. For Joesoef and Hasyim,
a whirlwind was let loose. Hasta Mitra’s office was based in Joesoef’s home, a
modest two bedroom home in central Jakarta
Out the back of the house, as is the case with many such modest
middle class homes in Jakarta Indonesia
Today, in 2004, the old typesetting machine has gone. Now there
are two old Apple Mac’s and one PC. The room is the same narrow space, but now
with a tiled instead of concrete floor, a stronger light bulb and an air
conditioner. In that tiny room, about 2.5 meters by 5 meters, Joesoef and one
aide, Subowo, have typed out, laid out, edited and sub-edited more than 25 of
the major works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer as well as that of scores and scores
of other books, both for Hasta Mitra and other publishers. This included many
volumes of Dutch scholarly works that were translated into Indonesian. Joesoef,
now 76, still works out of the same office today, and still publishes books
every year. There are no pensions for former political prisoners and the
repeated banning of Hasta Mitra’s books always meant that there was never any
real profit for Hasta Mitra either.
In 1981 Joesoef had not only to face the task of getting the
manuscripts edited and ready for the printer. The little ex-bathroom became the
secretariat also for answering Suharto’s political attacks. The dictatorship
had to wait for the first wave of praise and support to die down. Not only had
literary critics, intellectuals and students all heaped praise on the book, but
even Suharto’s own Vice-President, Adam Malik, invited Joesoef, Hasyim and
Pramoedya to visit him in the Vice-President’s palace. Photos of the meeting
appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers the next day quoting Malik as
urging every school child to read the book. Malik had a different history than
Suharto. Malik, as a youth, had fought the Dutch from high school days. Suharto,
in his youth, had volunteered to join the Royal Dutch Netherlands Army, used
mainly as an instrument to repress fellow Indonesians. Suharto was a late
convert to freedom. For Malik, This Earth
of Mankind was a reminder to the youth of where their country had come
from.
Suharto had to wait a week or so but then the black propaganda
began. A newspaper published a petition signed by a 17 mainly unknown
intellectuals and writers claiming that This
Earth of Mankind was communist. Then others, mostly intellectuals who had
supported Suharto since 1965, joined in. The campaign continued for several
months and at each twist and turn Joesoef took the main responsibility for
replying on Hasta Mitra’s behalf. Both Hasyim and Joesoef were summonsed by the
Attorney General’s department.
Joesoef bore the brunt of the interrogations having to report
to the Attorney general every day, from early morning till knock-off time, for
a month. An attorney interrogated him for hours on end about the contents of
the books and about Pramoedya. “What has Pramoedya written?” he was asked,
exasperating Joesoef with the level of ignorance that the New Order created.
Pramoedya was one of the country’s most well-known writers during the 40s, 50s
and 60s. After explaining, Joesoef also suggested the attorney check in an
encyclopaedia: “What is an encyclopaedia?” Suharto’s legal man replied, “Can
you spell it for me, please”. (Later though, at the end of the interrogations
when he told Joesoef that the book would be banned, he slipped a piece of paper
under the table saying he would like a copy – a free copy of course – because
his wife wanted to read it.)
Joesoef escaped torture in prison, but he has often told me and
the many young people who come to see him, that seeing the impact on Indonesia Indonesia
When asked what exactly is this error of thought, the essence
of this de-education and spreading of imbecility, Joesoef points to the
inability to distinguish between what have been the pure inventions of some
people’s minds during the last decades and reality. “It is this invented reality that is used by
the politicians and intelligentsia for their calculations on how to bring change. This kind of stupidity, he repeats, is the
twin brother of violence.
In October, 1980 about two months after This Earth of Mankind was published, a formal ban was issued.
Joesoef tells of how he first heard about the ban from an announcement on radio
and TV. There was no order sent to the publishers. So Hasta Mitra just kept on
publishing. They ignored phone calls from the Attorney-general’s department
telling them to withdraw the book. Phone calls have no legal authority, said
Joesoef. Finally on October 23, a
banning order did arrive stating that the book was being banned for conveying
Marxist-Leninist teachings. These specific teachings were not identified, it
had been explained, as Pramoedya’s great writing skills meant the Marxist ideas
had been successfully disguised.
This Earth of Mankind had been reprinted five
times during the four months since
it was released. A sixth printing
was not possible. But Hasta Mitra did not end its struggle then. Over the next
five years, after Hasyim would scrape up some capital somewhere, they would
publish another volume, which would be banned soon after. And then another, and
then another. By the late 80s, the publishing programme was forced to slow
down. The repeated banning was financially exhausting the company. During the
late 80s and early 90s, Hasta Mitra published more books, including selections
of short stories from the early 20th century, edited by Pramoedya. They too
were banned.
During this period too, Joesoef became, as far as I have ever
heard, the only political prisoner from his generation to be re-detained after
release. His son Verdi Yusuf, named after the Italian opera composer, a student
at the University
of Indonesia
So an award like the PEN Jeri Laber Award has been a long time
coming. But it is not at all too late. Hasta Mitra, still working out of the
bathroom, remains one of Indonesia Indonesia Indonesia
Hasta Mitra has been a groundbreaker in this area over the last
few years. Joesoef published the best ever selection of American, Australian,
Dutch and Indonesian essays on Sukarno on the century anniversary of his birth
in 2001. There have been other biographies of other forgotten historical
figures. He organised the mammoth translation of 800 pages of US state
department and CIA papers concerning the US
Joesoef Isak has been a friend now for 24 years. I cannot write
about him except as a friend, and also as a pupil. There is nothing better than
a talk with him over sate at a street
stall or with a glass of red wine in appropriate venue or jammed in at the back
of his house in the Hasta Mitra office. His story, which still needs telling in
the full, is part of a much bigger untold story, the story of the other
Indonesia, the one Suharto literally buried, and which people like Joesoef Isak
and the younger generation for whom Hasta Mitra has become an icon of
ressitance to authoritianism, are now trying to recover.
**