With The Mute's Soliloquy , an account of suffering under Suharto's oppression, Pramoedya Ananta Toer has been hailed as Indonesia's Solzhenitsyn. Closer home, Indonesia under Mr Suharto had its string of penal colony islands. This shameful side of Indonesia was rarely seen, or talked about, while the country was prospering under the former President's New Order government. Among those who suffered incarceration under Mr Suharto was Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of the most gifted writers Indonesia has produced this century. His latest offering to be translated into English is The Mute's Soliloquy, a loose autobiography woven from essays and letters written during his years of exile on the remote barren island of Buru, off Sulawesi and a stone's throw from riot-torn Ambon.
Soliloquy is a raw remembrance of repression.
It is stark testimony to the Indonesian military's mutilation of flesh and soul in the name of nation-building. The writings were smuggled out of the colony by a Catholic priest, and the Bahasa Indonesia version of the book was banned in Indonesia until the fall of Mr Suharto in May last year. The author was among the first inhabitants of Buru Island, spending a decade there in grinding labour, but not before being tortured in other prisons in Jakarta for four miserable years. He was arrested at his house in East Jakarta in October, just a month after the failed coup in 1965, which led to the ouster of Sukarno, Indonesia's first president. That night of what was actually plain kidnapping was a harrowing experience recalled several times in the book.