Eka Kurniawan

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia’s grand novelist, composer of stunning short stories and memorable critical essays, spent fourteen years on the remote island prison of Buru without trial

One of the tasks of the Jogjakarta PRD was stealthily to circulate Pramoedya’s gigantic Buru Tetralogy, composed in the gulag, on the origins and development of nationalism and socialism in Indonesia during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Much later, when Eka wrote a short reply to a question about which Indonesian writers impressed him the most, he said he had a melancholy three. The first was Amir Hamzah, Indonesia’s finest poet and a pro-independence aristocrat in Northern Sumatra, executed during the Revolution of 1945–49 by gangsters masquerading as revolutionaries. Second came Pramoedya, and third Widji Tukul, a brave new kind of radical Javanese poet, who was disappeared, probably by the seasoned killers commanded by Lt. General Prabowo, once Suharto’s son-in-law, with maniacal ambitions to become the country’s president. (Fortunately, he was defeated in the national election of 2014 by Djoko Widodo, the much-loved young governor of Jakarta, and the first presidential candidate unsullied by the brutal and corrupt Suharto regime.)

In 2000 Eka published his first collection of short stories, cheekily titled Graffiti in the Toilet, and two years later the huge novel Beauty Is a Wound. The pair, utterly different in many ways, immediately made him a literary star in Indonesia. The short-story collection showed his skill as a black humorist and satirist of his own generation (including PRD leaders who soon became power-hungry opportunists), and his technical mastery of the conjunction of the oral tales of his childhood village and the bourgeois culture of the post-Suharto big cities. At the other extreme, Beauty Is a Wound is a quasi-historical novel stretching from the late colonial period, through the Japanese Occupation, the Revolution of 1945–49, the long extremist Islamic rebellion of the 1950s, the rise and bloody downfall of the Indonesian Communist Party, and the early Suharto dictatorship. But the setting is not national or even regional: it is an unnamed little town close to the Indian Ocean. Nothing is documented, and everything is suffused with magic, traditional and newly created legends, and confusing oral histories.

Then in 2004 came Lelaki Harimau, translated here with the slightly awkward title Man Tiger. As in Beauty Is a Wound, the setting is an unnamed township near the Indian Ocean and its rural environs. But this time the novel is relatively short and is tightly and elegantly constructed. The story largely focuses on the tragedy of two interlinked and tormented families over two generations. The hero Margio is an ordinary half-urban, half-village youngster, who nonetheless is possessed by a supernatural female white tiger, inherited from his much-loved grandfather. In many parts of Indonesia there are ancient tales about magical male tigers who protect good villages or families. But they are external and reside in jungles. Eka borrowed from these old stories, but his tiger is female and is inside Margio and only sometimes under his control. I will not here describe the content of Man Tiger, allowing the reader the privilege of suspense.