Indonesian writer deserves to be read

I have an audio tape by Jeong Chae-Joon and Pak Eun-Ok, a Korean husband-and-wife singing duo. They remind me of Ian and Sylvia, if anyone else out there remembers them. The music is spare but gorgeous, and the voices blend exquisitely, although I know too little Korean to understand more than a word here and there. \nThe Korean friend who gave me the tape said when he was a boy, in the 1980s, you could be jailed for possessing it. Those days are gone now, but they aren't forgotten in Korea.\nI can't imagine what it would be like to live in a society where art is political in a life-and-death sense, where an artist can be jailed, or worse, for what he or she says (or what the government thinks was said) and where the audience shares the risk. \nIn the United States, political censorship usually takes place in the market. Publishers choose not to publish certain works, booksellers might not carry them -- but they are usually available if you look hard enough, without the danger of a jail sentence. This can be more effective than official banning, which advertises the forbidden fruit and leads people to seek it out. But hey, if it's not reviewed in the New York Times, if the author doesn't appear on "Entertainment Tonight," then it isn't cool and can safely be ignored, right?\nI want to tell you about an Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. A couple of years ago, I saw an advertisement for one of his novels, touting him as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize.\nEventually I picked up his short novel "The Fugitive," about a young Indonesian guerrilla fighter against the Japanese, who visits his family just as World War II is ending. From there, I waded into his "Buru Quartet," four long historical novels inspired by Tirto Adi Suryo, a turn-of-the-century Indonesian journalist who played a significant role in the development of Indonesian nationalism under Dutch colonialism.\nThese were amazing books: rich, swirling stories about Minke, an ambitious young man studying at a colonial school. Minke becomes the protege of a wealthy businesswoman, formerly a concubine to a Dutch planter, and the suitor of her beautiful daughter. His controversial articles make him well-known, not only to other Indonesians, but to the colonialists; he finds allies but also enemies. Minke is ambivalent about European culture: he knows colonialism's injustice and destructive effects -- it cost his wife's life, for example -- but he loves learning and embraces the European intellectual tradition along with the traditions of Indonesia.\nEven more remarkable is the situation in which the books were composed: Toer told them to his fellow prisoners on Buru Island, where he had been sent by the Suharto military regime that overthrew Sukarno, with U.S. collaboration, in 1965. Perhaps a million and a half Indonesians were jailed, and around half a million simply butchered as suspected communists in a few months. \nAlthough no charges were brought against him, for most of the fourteen years of Toer's imprisonment, he was denied writing materials and even permission to write. Somehow he still managed to write novels, a play and miscellaneous short works which sympathizers smuggled out.\nAfter his release, Toer remained under police surveillance, frequently under city arrest, and his work remained banned in Indonesia through the end of the Suharto regime and into Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie's.\nThat didn't stop many Indonesians from reading them, of course, but "possession and distribution of Pramoedya's books is still a punishable crime," wrote his translator Willem Samuels in 1999.\nBut Toer's major works are readily available in English in the United States. Read them. Think about what it means that your tax dollars supported, and continue to support, the regime that banned them at home.