THE MUTE'S SOLILOQUY

A distinguished novelist’s (The Buru Quartet: House of Glass, 1996, etc.) painful remembrances of the 14 years he spent in an Indonesian prison work camp. Toer acknowledges the somewhat fragmented nature of his memoir—much of it was pieced together from surviving notes that had been smuggled out of the labor camp at great personal risk. For four years, he was forbidden from writing at all, and even when permission was officially granted, the penalty for offending any prison official would certainly have been severe. Toer was arrested along with tens of thousands of other Indonesian citizens after the military takeover which ousted President Sukarno in 1965. As a category B political prisoner (too dangerous to be freed, but not threat enough for immediate execution), he was exiled to a prison work camp on Buru, an undeveloped island in the Moluccas. His story describes the difficulties faced by himself and his fellow prisoners: they were forced to clear roads to the interior of the island using only their hands, to till the hard-packed arid soil of the fields with hand hoes, to build rice paddies in sweltering swamps without proper clothing. Prisoners were punished frequently for unclear infractions—beaten with rifle butts and bamboo canes. They suffered starvation and malnutrition, and were reduced to eating snakes, rats, and lizards for survival. Corrupt guards and officials stole the prisoners— food or demanded tribute in the form of precious chickens and eggs. In addition to serving as witness to the fate of his fellow prisoners, Toer describes the process by which one writes oneself back from the incoherence of nearly total oppression. He describes his writing as a way of using narrative to restore his integrity as a human being—he then attempts to extend this benefit to his fellow victims. The chilling true story behind much of the acclaimed fiction of Toer.