Hilmar Farid – Of everything raised at Teater Utan Kayu last night, discussing Max Lane's Unfinished Nation with Fransisca Ria Susanti, Usman Hamid, and Max himself, the point I keep returning to is the least remarked upon in most commentary on the book: the relationship between history and memory on one side and literature and politics on the other.

Most political analyses of Indonesia do not go near literature at all. When people notice that Max does, they tend to explain it away with a single fact: he is Pramoedya Ananta Toer's translator, so of course Pramoedya turns up in his work. That is true, and it matters, but it is not the whole reason. Rereading the book to prepare for the discussion, I understood the fuller reason more clearly than I had before.

Why Pramoedya is not incidental

Pramoedya wrote the Buru tetralogy with Minke as its central figure, a pseudonym for the historical Tirto Adhisoerjo. But what Pramoedya did was not simply to turn a historical figure into a fictional character. In the early 1960s, before he was imprisoned, he brought Tirto back into public consciousness after the colonial administration had spent decades erasing him.

Tirto belonged to the first generation of the modern nationalist movement, the generation that articulated the people's suffering and resistance through genuinely new instruments: newspapers, public speeches, and legal advocacy. These were the things that, in the phrase I keep coming back to, set the world in motion (dunia bergerak). National consciousness did not grow out of abstract ideas about unity. It grew out of concrete, lived experiences of suffering and out of new forms found to name that suffering publicly.

The tetralogy keeps this concrete quality throughout. Trunodongso takes up a machete. Surati infects her master with smallpox. Sanikem, who becomes Ontosoroh, builds a commercial power that comes to exceed her master's. And Minke records all of it, in both journalism and fiction, developing as a writer within a network of Indo-European and Peranakan Chinese contemporaries.

The nation, in this account, first emerged as an entity built to fight for justice, equality, and an end to suffering, meant to carry everyone who belonged to it, and I mean everyone, toward a better shared life.

Repression met this on its own terrain

The colonial authorities understood exactly what was being built and answered it in kind. Press offenses proliferated during this period. The colonial state prosecuted writers and publishers with some regularity. It also created something less obvious but more effective: the Commission for People's Reading, which later evolved into the state-owned publishing house, Balai Pustaka.

This institution has generally been remembered as an "enlightenment" institution, a publisher that brought literacy and modern literature to the colonized population. In fact, it played a substantial political role, shaping what could be written and read, competing directly with the independent press and publishing networks that Tirto's generation had built.

I wrote about exactly this topic more than forty years ago, in an undergraduate thesis later published by Komunitas Bambu under the title Perang Suara, "The War of Words." Rereading Max's book, I recognized my own younger argument inside his, from a considerable distance and by a different route.

Pramoedya revived Tirto's voice and actions in the early 1960s, and that revival mattered because the nation, from its very beginning, had not been formed by shared bloodline, shared language, or the accident of living on the same land. It was formed by a shared historical experience: a people who had been oppressed, who resisted, and who fought for freedom.

The 1965 rupture crushed that endeavor along with everything else. Pramoedya was imprisoned, and with him the whole project of reviving the nation as a liberating entity was buried a second time. The regime did not simply suppress the movement; it rewrote its history, stripping out everything radical, progressive, and liberating about it.

In the New Order's account, the early movement was the work of an educated elite seeking to free the nation from ignorance and poverty through education, a version the regime was perfectly happy to celebrate, because it asked nothing structural of anyone.

Written from inside a prison cell

Pramoedya, in Buru, devised a way to keep the real narrative alive. He revived Tirto once more, this time as Minke, a fictional character rather than a historical footnote. The story itself is genuinely gripping: an eighteen-year-old, falling in love, shaped and reshaped by circumstance, gradually becoming the pioneer of a modern political movement.

It is precisely because Minke starts out naive, even innocent, that his transformation lands so hard, and it is exactly that transformation that made him so compelling to the activists of the 1990s. Seen historically rather than narratively, the tetralogy also shows something else: that power, whether colonial or national, has consistently answered the struggle for liberation with extraordinary repression. This is where Max's book picks up the thread directly.

And the tetralogy did not stay confined to the page. Its production and distribution became, in a very literal sense, a network of resistance. The New Order banned the books, arrested distributors, and sentenced them to prison. Students at the time, myself among them, kept reading anyway, and the network of readers widened, pulling in people from different backgrounds and different corners of the movement.

The activists Max writes about in his book were, to a significant degree, readers of Pramoedya's work first. This moment is exactly where the connection between history, memory, literature, and contemporary politics stops being an abstraction and becomes something you can trace, person to person, book in hand.

Why this matters now

People need to understand that the present situation has a history. That structures of power are not natural, still less eternal. That those structures have been resisted before. That another world has already been imagined and fought for more than once.

This is the ground on which Max's formula rests: memory, imagination, organization, action. Memory opens the possibility of imagining a different world. Imagination gives direction to discontent, which, without it, stays only discontent. Organization turns dissatisfaction into something capable of acting as a force. Action is what finally brings that force into history, where it can be recorded, contested, and in turn remembered.

Seen this way, the line from Tirto Adhisoerjo to Pramoedya to the activist generation of the 1990s is much shorter and much more direct than it first appears. And that is exactly why it is worth insisting on: when that connection is cut, the movement itself narrows as well.

We may today have more expertise, more institutions, and more professionalized ways of talking about politics than that earlier generation did. What we risk having less of is imagination. That, more than anything else discussed that night at Utan Kayu, felt like the warning worth carrying out of the room.

Source: https://hilmarfarid.substack.com/p/the-novel-that-would-not-di