I visited Putu Oka shortly after his eightieth birthday to ask the author for reflections on his literary career. He gave me a firm handshake when I sat down across from him.
“So what is it that you need from me?” His question, straightforward and gentle, could almost have been an inquiry about a health issue rather than the beginning of my interview.
It may have been a little bit of both. Prolific but under-recognized, Putu Oka writes so as to heal his nation’s collective trauma. His representations of personal experiences as a political prisoner address painful histories that Indonesia has too long kept quiet. And for foreign readers, his texts have the potential to act as a multifaceted diagnosis of the country’s complex past and present.
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If we zoom out from this little home in East Jakarta to look holistically at the writer’s life, readers might find it remarkable that Putu Oka Sukanta is not more of a household name beyond the Indonesian archipelago. Born in Bali in 1939, Putu Oka started writing in his teens even though neither of his parents was literate. He moved to Java for university in the early sixties, where he mixed with members of leftist cultural organizations and published his texts in a range of magazines, many of them with left-leaning ideologies. Always preoccupied with Indonesia’s harsh history of feudalism and colonialism, Putu’s early texts centered on the lives of everyday people surviving in a tremendously unequal system.
In 1965, when the systematic mass murder of leftists followed Suharto’s coup d’état, Putu Oka’s literary engagement with issues of oppression and class was enough to make him a communist in the eyes of the state. For ten years, Putu Oka was imprisoned without trial, tortured, and even deprived of the use of pen and paper—an experience that he describes as the worst kind of torment for a writer. When he was finally released in 1976, he could at last resume writing. And he did so, withstanding periods of exile, censorship, social stigma, and other myriad forms of oppression that wracked former political prisoners during the remainder of Suharto’s authoritarian rule. Putu even expanded his activities beyond the written word, engaging in HIV/AIDS activism and starting an acupuncture practice using skills he learned secretly from a fellow detainee during his years of extrajudicial arrest.
After Suharto fell in 1998, Putu could finally circulate his writing more widely and begin to produce work in the public eye. The result is a literary oeuvre that spans a remarkable range of genres and styles: Putu has published books of poetry and collaborated on collections of witness testimony from survivors of the 1965 mass killings; he writes short stories about working class life as well as literary reporting on issues like sex trafficking and HIV/AIDS in Indonesia; he even developed a series of novels loosely based on his life experiences and produced documentary films. The only type of material Putu Oka claims he has no interest in writing is autobiography. Fortunately, Indonesian writer Okky Tirto has taken upon himself to comprehensively collect the author’s experiences in the book Jejak Sunyi Si Jalak Bali (Quiet Footsteps of the Balinese Starling).
His life and work can only be described as extraordinary. And it has, fortunately, received some international acclaim. In 2012, Human Rights Watch granted Putu Oka the Hellman/Hammett Award for writers under political persecution, and in 2016 the author received the Human Rights Education Award from Australia’s Herb Feith Foundation. The efforts of a small circle of publishers and translators have brought one collection of poetry, one book of short stories, and a few experimental novels by the author into English translation. However, Putu Oka Sukanta’s work has never even neared the global notoriety of his contemporary, the great Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was politically persecuted by the Indonesian state during the same period and whose work is widely available in English.
Perhaps the modest availability of Putu Oka Sukanta’s work in English begs the question of why he deserves to be highlighted—or translated further—when so many Indonesian authors have not found their way into the English language at all. Putu Oka’s life in a strict sense, politically important and dramatic as it may be, should not be the sole motive. Instead, a more interesting answer lies in certain unusual qualities in the writer’s approach to poetry and prose that demand further attention—qualities that point to broader issues in the translation and circulation of Indonesian literature.
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Putu Oka settled back in his desk chair and I asked him what I needed to know: looking back over such a long literary career, how did the author feel his literary work has developed?
His response surprised me: it hasn’t.
“Basically, nothing has changed in my work. Since the beginning, the poverty that exists in society has motivated my writing. I reflect on that poverty wherever I am.”
The answer was not a witty response to a broad question, but in fact a strange truth. Putu Oka’s literary subjects have indeed remained the farmers, laborers, and other workers that defined his early work (with a few foreign tourists and visiting journalists interrupting this social context, sometimes benignly, sometimes not). These are the same everyday Indonesian people deeply affected by the mass state violence that struck Putu’s own life—and so that period also takes center stage in the majority of the author’s recent texts. Just as he rejects the structures that Indonesia inherited from Dutch colonialism and earlier Javanese feudalism, Putu Oka pushes back against the Indonesian government’s narrative that celebrates and justifies the violence of Suharto’s New Order.
“I have never been in the position of the winner,” he tells me, explaining why he chooses to represent this particular part of society. “I have always been defeated. But that does not mean people like me are cockroaches. I always say, writing is a struggle to be human again. Writing is a struggle against the process of dehumanization.”
Intriguingly, when we take a closer look at the language of Putu Oka’s texts, it grows apparent that a continuous cast of characters isn’t the only thing to appear repeatedly across his collected works. A set of images and themes are also subjects of long-term, repeated contemplation. In the poem “diam” (“silent”), available in Keith Foulcher’s English translation, silence becomes a dominating presence that drowns out speech:
how busily peopleThis same kind of silence also appears in the author’s prose: in the 2004 story “Rindu Terluka” a commander tells a man he is on the death list, and the man merely blinks and bows his head. His wife, upon hearing the same news, feels tears fall quietly down her face and covers the mouth of her baby, who cries out. That silence echoes back to 1979, in the story “Pan Blayag,” in which the government takes land from a family to build a road, without giving just compensation. In the last line, the protagonist screams “Robbers!” as his voice is drowned out by the roar of a passing truck.
go back and forth, getting in each other’s way
climbing on top of each other, pushing each other down,
chewing each other up
the silence is that movement
in secret.
The notion of lonely, endless wandering—a search with no clear aim—also runs through the author’s work. The narrator of the short story “Pulang” wakes up with a jolt one morning; he wants intensely to go to his childhood home in Bali. He returns to his village only to find stories of murder, friends’ bones scattered across his homeland. In the final scene, the character boards the plane to go back to where the story began. In “Masa Lalu di Meja Makan,” a group of Indonesians in Germany sits at a dinner table and feasts on bottomless tales of their past. In their minds, they wander across Indonesia as their bodies remain suspended in the limbo of exile.
The writer’s most recent autofiction novel, Celah (2018), is the ultimate culmination of the aimless search. The text begins with the writer at a seminar on human rights violations. Between his presentation and questions from journalists, the narrator thinks of a poem from the 1960s but can only remember a few lines. As he tries to recall the poem, he embarks on the first of a series of searches through memories, of fragmented journeys through the past by means of wandering about the present.
Indeed, Celah itself is structured on the bones of previously published work: Putu Oka splices the novel with reprints of his old poems, short stories, and essays, sewing the clippings into a new plot that fictionalizes his life. In its essence, what constitutes Putu’s literature is an extensive repetition—or recuperation—of images and themes.
Putu Oka Sukanta does not fit the western image of a celebrated author: not because of his skills in acupuncture or other wide-ranging interests beyond the written word, but because his literary work develops cyclically and subtly, renewing and revisiting the past in a decades-long meditation. This approach, in fact, structurally encapsulates the idea of continuities in state violence in Indonesia, from colonialism through the present. Simultaneously, it represents total rejection of presumed stylistic and thematic development in an author’s career, defined as linear by the west.
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Simply measured against western expectations without nuanced reading, Putu Oka Sukanta’s work is unlikely to rise to global fame. Based as they are on previously elaborated issues and themes, Putu’s recent publications will not seem “fresh” to western eyes. But ironically, it is that very same quality that makes Puku Oka’s work so unique and new: the author’s many books function as one complex, ever-shifting entity. In order to deeply understand a new text the author releases, the reader must have access to what the writer has already done.
Not only does the unified nature of the author’s work make circulation difficult, it also makes extensive translation of the texts all the more important. To truly understand Putu Oka Sukanta’s ideas, one must have access to the majority of the writer’s books. With just a portion of them available in English, reading Putu Oka is like wading into an ocean of Indonesian collective memory—and then trying to collect the water with a leaky bucket. And that poses a problem for the global literary market, where only the most famed authors from countries like Indonesia come close to having their complete works disseminated in the English language.
The challenge of making Putu Oka Sukanta known in the English-speaking world is an important one, and not only because of the unique qualities of the writer’s body of work. Only through notoriety in English will Putu Oka be subsequently translated into other languages, and ultimately reach regions of the world affected by histories similar to Indonesia’s.
When Indonesia suffered its 1965 coup d’état, supported by the United States, Brazil had already withstood one year of a U.S.-backed, anti-communist dictatorship. A decade later, Pinochet would seize control over Chile with the help of the CIA, and a military junta would take Argentina with sadistic violence. Uruguay, Paraguay, and other states shared a similar fate. As in Indonesia under Suharto, these regimes would go on to ruthlessly persecute anyone perceived to have leftist ideas through extrajudicial kidnappings, tortures, and killings. The differences between these South American countries and Indonesia are many, but in recent history we find similar stories of survivors and exile in the shared trauma of the Cold War, as well as continued battles over historical memory. And yet Putu Oka Sukanta, the political and historical content of whose work is so deeply relevant to audiences of the Southern Cone, has yet to be translated into Spanish or Portuguese.
The irony should not be lost on readers that Putu Oka Sukanta’s literature must first pass through the United States before it reaches audiences in Latin America. The same imperialism that resulted in Cold War dictatorships structures the contemporary circulation of literary texts. But translators are actors with the potential to shift this unequal flow of information, creating new readership and solidarity across the southern hemisphere. Imagine if the fragmented reflections on memory, both personal and political, in Putu Oka Sukanta’s Celah were read in tandem with the same themes that course through Ricardo Piglia’s The Diaries of Emilio Renzi. Or if his powerful, poetic witnessing was placed in the same collection as verse by Juan Gelman; his novels describing state violence shelved next to Luisa Valenzuela’s and Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s; his short stories that focus on everyday lives against the backdrop of anti-communist extermination taught alongside Liliana Heker’s.
When I came upon the opening stanza of “aku ingin membacakan puisi” (“I want to read my poetry”) and the speaker announces his desire to recite his poetry in front of a court of law, my mind conjures up the image of novelist Rodolfo Walsh, standing firm in his futile presentation of evidence of state violence to an Argentinian judge. And then, when the hot Jakarta sun reached the highest point in the sky, humid heat settled over the crowded corridors of the city, and the writer facing me wanted to read one of his poems:
I gaze at the Statue of LibertyI listen to these gentle lyrics of dignified defeat and think of Hélio Oiticica in exile, wandering the midnight streets of Manhattan.
And think of poetry composed in jail
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Before I leave Putu Oka’s home, I ask the author what he hopes foreign readers might gain from his writing in translation.
“First, I hope that readers will understand the reality I express in my writing,” he states in a clear, declarative tone. “Second, politically, I hope that foreigners will join me to encourage our government to be more democratic.”
It is with that prescription—as well as a little bag of butter biscuits—that this unusual writer sends me off into the throngs of Jakarta traffic. If translated across languages, his words are a message that might indeed begin to heal the open wounds of historical trauma, both in Indonesia and abroad.
