Among the Believers (63 page)

“Most of the Ph.D.’s are Chinese. They are like a cancer cell, ever growing and powerful, and they will destroy their surroundings, and we cannot stop it. If these people enter
any
system they always outdo and outsmart.”

“But you need gifted people.”

“These people”—and he was talking now not only about the local Chinese, but also about people from the multinationals and all foreigners—“are actually like electric current with 220 volts. However, the existing wiring of the society is capable only of 110, so any direct contact with the 220 will spoil the 110. You need a transformer. The transformer is supposed to be the government sector and the young intellectuals. However, due to impatience to attain material goods, this sector most of the time affiliates with the 220 volts instead of with the 110. Because these young technocrats, if they’re starting to drive, they want Rolls-Royce or, if not that, Volvo.”

So it all had to go. “The fight that’s coming will be between the people in the universities and the people in the
pesantren
. One day the students from the
pesantren
will come to Jakarta and burn down this nice hotel. Islam can become a cocaine. It makes you high. You go to that mosque and you get high. And when you get high, everything that happens becomes Allah’s will.”

It had happened before in Indonesia, this mass slaughter. In 1965 the communists had been wiped out. A million people had been killed, he said, not half a million, as was now given out. And more should have been killed: there were two and a half million communists at the time. So a million and a half had escaped killing, and many of them were still around.

I said, “If the killing starts, you may go yourself.”

“I might. I hope not. But I might.”

“I was told that in 1965 some people took out the gamelan when they went killing.”

“Of course. To add to the beauty.”

It was after tea, and the Brasserie of the Borobudur Intercontinental—gardens behind the glass—was full of the people he was talking against: local Chinese, well-to-do Indonesian businessmen, the middle-aged men from the multinationals. He was speaking loudly, and in English.

I said “Do you talk like this when you talk to the government people?”

“No. I talk to them of facts and figures, plans and studies.”

“Why do you talk to me like this, then?”

“You are not a scientist. You want to find out about me. You are playing a game of chess with me. So I talk to you of the other side.”

I was playing no game of chess with him. He had been told before he came what my purpose was. Perhaps he didn’t believe. He was unusually small, with a slight but noticeable facial disfigurement. It would have worried him; in Indonesia they loved beauty. He wished in the Brasserie to draw attention to himself. He had the Indonesian feeling for drama. But his rage was real enough; and his fantasy of violence could become reality. Nineteen sixty-five had occurred.

I
talked one day with Gunawan Mohammed, editor of
Tempo
, the leading weekly magazine of Indonesia, about the 1965 killings. Gunawan was twenty-five at the time. (Indonesians have lived through so much: it was only later that I remembered that on another occasion Gunawan had told me that in 1946, during the revolution, when Gunawan was six, his father had been executed by the Dutch. But Gunawan had no ill-feeling towards the Dutch. He said, “It was a war.”)

Gunawan’s explanation of the killings of 1965 was simple. “Fear. I cannot tell you how frightened people were of the communists. They were so strong, and nobody knew what they were going to do.” The communist youth building was not far from Gunawan’s house, and during those days of fear Gunawan sat with a gun in his house. “I believe
I
would have killed, if I had to.”

A
N
Indonesian book preceding those days of fear came my way. It was
Contemporary Progressive Indonesian Poetry
, an anthology of Indonesian communist poetry in English translation, and it was published in 1962 by the League of People’s Culture. Old history, it might have seemed; but everything issued by the league was still banned. And it was only in December 1979, while I was in Indonesia, that the most famous writer connected with the league, Pramoedra Ananta Toer, was released from confinement, together with the last of the twenty thousand (the official figure given) who had been detained since 1965 as communists—the Indonesian government, it was said, yielding to pressure from President Carter.

Pramoedra’s later life scarcely bears contemplating: imprisoned at forty-one, returned to the world at fifty-four, his early books banned, the years of his maturity wasted. He was like Sitor Situmorang, whom I had met only a few days after I had arrived in Indonesia, whose history I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time, and whose intellectual and social graces I had taken too much for granted.

In 1962 Sitor was a man of power in Indonesia. He had made his name with his early lyrical poems. He was now more political, general secretary of the League for National Culture; and he was represented in the anthology by three poems he wrote after a visit to China.

It was sad, and scarcely believable, that simplicity like that could have led to such pain for Sitor and his country. But Sitor was not to be reproached now: as someone had said, he had suffered too much. And I was willing to look for other things in these political poems of his.

He had said to me one day, “The people here have lost their religion.” He was speaking as a man who had been cut off from his tribal
past, snatched from his village at the age of six and sent to a Dutch boarding school. He had felt the need to reconstruct or understand this past only when he had come out of jail and was trying to write his autobiography; without knowing what he had come from, he hadn’t been able to make sense of his life. And it seemed to me that in 1962 socialism or communism had given him—a man without a past or a community—a substitute wholeness. In China he had visited a commune.

The bread of the commune; social life, solidarity and hope: the theme wasn’t Sitor’s alone. It was the Indonesian theme, now more than ever. It was the theme of the Muslim
pesantren
. And that was the surprise of this communist anthology of 1962: many of its themes and moods were Muslim and Indonesian, still.

The Indonesian and Muslim lament about the loss of simplicity and brotherhood:

Rage and revenge:

Political pain turning to a religious wound:

The saviour:

Revenge, with the promise of restored “union”:

And, finally, the complete faith:

In the
pesantren
at Pabelan I had been given a copy of an interview, perhaps from a Christian magazine in the Philippines, with an Indonesian
kiyai
, a
pesantren
leader. “Now how can a
kiyai
help in the changing of this kind of society? How can he make the landlords and the rich give up their properties which, according to Islam, belong to Allah and must be given back to the people who are creatures of Allah? How can the
kiyai
make the farmers see their importance as human beings who must be given justice?”

The creatures of Allah in 1979, the creatures of the earth in one of the poems of 1962. And point by point the similarities could be seen: the true faith, injustice at home, the uncritical journeys to the lands of the achieved faith.

Imaduddin had said he couldn’t be a socialist because he could find the good ideas of socialism in the Koran. He said more than he knew.
The Islam of protest was a religion that had been brushed by the ideas of the late twentieth century. Men no longer simply found union in a common submission to Allah. Men were the creatures of Allah; and the late twentieth century extended the meaning of the words: these creatures of Allah had “their importance as human beings who must be given justice.” The land and its wealth belonged to Allah and not to men: the late twentieth century made that a political rather than a religious idea.

After a generation of peace, the revolutionary current of 1965 flowed again. It was Islamic now, but it was like what had gone before: as though rage and the wish for revenge were always to be tapped in this overcrowded, once-feudal land, where many men were squeezed out, the old balance was broken, where every step forward took men further away from safety, where the new world brought new gifts but made difficult demands, and all men, whether at the top or at the bottom, lived in fear of personality loss.

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