Sunrise with Seamonsters (10 page)

Cheroots are handy in such a situation. Around me in the compartment smailing Burmese puffed away on thick green cheroots and didn't seem to notice the stink of the growing yellow pool just outside. At the Shwe Dagon Pagoda I saw a very old lady, hands clasped in prayer. She knelt near a begging leper whose disease had withered his feet and abraded his body and given him a bat's face. He had a terrible smell, but the granny prayed with a Churchillian-sized cheroot in her mouth. On Mandalay Hill, doorless outhouses stand beside the rising steps, and next to the outhouses are fruit stalls. The stink of piss is powerful, but the fruitseller, who squats all day in that stink, is wreathed in smoke from his cheroot.

A shortage of cheroots might provoke an uprising; no other shortages have yet done so. Food is cheap and seems to be plentiful; and inexplicably in the Dry Zone, four hundred miles long and seventy-five broad, where it had not rained for over five months, one sees Burmese pouring pailfuls of water over their heads to cool themselves (I tried it: one shivers with cold for a minute and then dries and continues to gasp and perspire in the heat). In Mandalay the source of water is the moat which surrounds what used to be the Golden City: the moat is a bright
putrescent green, and I was advised by a Burmese doctor not to touch it but to go on drinking Super Soda.

There are shortages of everything else: spare parts, electrical equipment, anything made of metal or rubber, and worse, cotton cloth. In the YMCA in Rangoon one is given a room; the fan is broken, cockroaches scuttle in the adjoining shower stall, and on the bed is a dirty mattress. The mattress cover is torn; there are no sheets, no pillowcases. The manager is helpful; he says, "Sleep downstairs in the dormitory. There are no sheets there either, but it only costs two
kyats
." I demanded sheets. "Expensive," he says. But the room is expensive! He demurs: "All the sheets are at the laundry."

And the sheets are at the laundry again in Mandalay, at Maymyo, at Nyaungu, and Pagan. But on the lines of wash in these towns there are no sheets.

There are Germans here, a Burman told me, studying ways of increasing textile production. In the meantime, I said, you could import cloth. "No, no! Burmese socialism! We import nothing!" And yet, in the Rangoon Airport, while I was waiting for my suitcase, I saw four large wooden crates. The stickers showed that these had just arrived, airfreight from Japan, and each contained 1,200 yards of blue poplin. For whom? And why airfreight? No one knew. And the tourists' buses and tourists' cornflakes and the brand-new bull-nosed Dodge army trucks that one sees Burmese army officers using for ferrying their families to the temples: made in Burma?

I was in Rangoon at the suffocating height of the Burmese summer, which may account for my impression of the city being one of lassitude and exhaustion. But Richard Curie used those same words when he visited in 1923. In
Into the East
(preface by Joseph Conrad) he speaks of the city over which hovers "so queerly the breath of stagnation". The rats and pariah dogs wait for the cool of the evening to scavenge; during the day only the crows are active, soaring in the blazing sun, in a perfectly cloudless sky. It must have been a bustling place in the 'twenties, as those dates on the medallions show and as Curie maintains ("'Boy, give me a chit,' resounds here and there..."); but the medallions have been painted out, and the green signs of the Revolutionary Government have begun to fade and peel. The city is moribund, flanked by a coffee-colored river on which there is not a shadow of a ripple; and most of the buildings in Rangoon are demonstrably more decrepit than the eleventh-century temples at Pagan.

But the people—generous, hospitable, curious, so alert and quick to smile, neatly dressed in a place where all cloth is at a premium—they are in such contrast to the dead city that it is as if they have, all of them, just arrived and are padding down those sidewalks for the first time. Their
appreciation of the city's few beauties is acute: the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, the several lovely cathedrals, the Scott Market, the flowering trees in Maha Bandoola Park—clusters of heavy yellow blossoms hanging in bunches on the laburnum trees like grapes on a vine. In Maha Bandoola Park there is an obelisk, the Independence Monument. "Look at it closely," said my Burmese friend.

I looked. "Very pretty."

"Look again," he said. "You see? It's not straight. It bends."

The remark was, I decided, profoundly political. He had said that he drank beer once a year, one bottle. I asked whether he had had this year's bottle yet, and when he said no, we went to the Strand Hotel—both of us for the first time (but he had lived several blocks away for thirty-five years)—and squandered three dollars on two small bottles of pale ale. A few hours later the palm court violins were playing a melody from "Bittersweet" and down Strand Road clattered a 1938 Nash.

The guest lecturer has at least two things in common with a condemned man, the experience of enormous meals and the knowledge that whatever outrageous thing he says cannot matter much to his fate: he'll be gone in the morning. A lecture-tour through Indonesia by an American professor of literature preceded my own by several months. But the professor was not forgotten; he had, it seemed, a standard spiel which made a profound impression on Indonesian students and writers who repeated it to me on many occasions in Sumatra and Java. After my own talk had ended, skinny brown arms shot up, and the signalling questioners usually asked the same thing.

"Sir," one would begin, "I have enjoyed very much the talk you have given us today about novels. But I am confused. Don't you think the novel is dead?"

Fighting down "Don't be ridiculous!" I said, "Not exactly" and explained in a hasty summary of the lecture I had just given why I thought it wasn't, ending, "What gave you
that
idea?"

"Professor E said the novel is dead." This inspired nods and murmurs and many beatific smiles, of the sort that accompany the ejaculation, "Allah be praised!"

The first time I heard this I had a feeling Professor E might be in the audience, an expatriate lecturer whose judgement had run amuck (Indonesia is the home of that word) in the stifling heat. I was patient and conceded that while the novel was far from dead, the form was certainly changing; and I waffled on about Sterne and Joyce and the dazed Frenchman whose novels, with unglued bindings, can be shuffled like a pack of cards. When I learned that Professor E had been a visitor—indeed, was now back in the States—and that I needn't worry about demoralizing his students, I denounced him. Still, the professor's academic rope-trick, his vanishing (to the applause of simple folk) along a feeble strand of literary argument that defied all logic, was a hard act to follow.

And God help the person who follows me. During one of the first lectures I gave I confessed that I knew very little about Indonesian writing; afterward, a friendly Javanese lady put a book into my hands and
said I should read it. It was titled
Six Indonesian Short Stories
(New Haven, 1968), and that night before going to sleep I read all six. Five were undistinguished, but a sixth, called "Inem", by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, had many virtues. At the lectures which followed this discovery I mentioned the writer's name, praised his vision and—because my mention of the man provoked only silence—recounted his story. I thought it was strange that such a good writer should be neglected. One evening I found out the reason. I had been enthusing about him and urging the students in the audience to read him; then I asked, "Is Pramoedya still alive?"

There was an uncomfortable silence. I asked the question again. A man in the front row said, "Yes, he is alive. But—"

"But he is in prison," another added joylessly. "He has been there since 1966."

Not just behind bars I read later, but on the remote prison island of Buru, east of Celebes, in the Banda Sea. He had been jailed by General Suharto; in 1947 he had been jailed by the Dutch.

The writers who are not in prison are doing other jobs, anything but writing. A man is introduced as a poet. I ask him how his poems are coming along. "Not so well," is the reply. "I haven't written a poem since 1962." He smiles and adds, "But I signed the Culture Manifesto—you know the Culture Manifesto? Against Sukarno. All the writers signed it."

In Djakarta there is a cultural center of modern construction, the Taman Ismail Marzuki, which an American compared—appropriately—to the Lincoln Center in New York. The design is similar, it is as new and huge, and it may have cost nearly as much. Here, in the floodlit courtyard, before the shimmering buildings, the three theaters and the reflecting pools, it was explained to me why there were few writers in Indonesia. "Before the
coup
in 1965," said one of the center's officials, "there were so many writers! They were suppressed by the communist regime, but still they wrote—plays, poems, novels, everything! If you will come here six years ago you will meet them and talk to them. Then the
coup.
The communists were kicked out. But," he said, raising a finger, "now there were so many jobs in the government. The writers and intellectuals took those jobs. Now, no one writes. When they were suppressing us we had time and we felt like doing it. These days we have no time for writing."

"This is a poor country," another says, shaking his head and tapping a clove cigarette on a pudgy knuckle. "Writing takes money. We do not have enough money to buy even a few sheets of paper! I used to write short stories, I had a few
rupiahs.
Now when I get home from work—I've got three jobs—I'm too tired."

It is a common argument: we are too poor to write, too busy to read. I repeated what I had been told about the spate of writing in the early 'sixties, when the country was poorer and there was heavy censorship. Well, it was explained, there was a necessity for it then: it was political. Then, they had a subject; now, there is no subject. And yet no writer—or rather, former writer, since they have all gone into early retirement—could explain why there had been no novel or story concerned with the massacres (perhaps half a million throats cut). Surely
that
was a subject? One teacher said, "It is too early to write about that. Maybe ... sometime." The massacres took place at the end of '65 and in early '66.

The non-writing argument was contradicted by one lady who told me: "There are
many
writers in Indonesia. We have
many
novelists. Go to the publishers and there you will see big piles of manuscripts—this high! But they don't want to publish them because no one will buy them. No one reads in this country."

Some people read. I spoke to many students who had read
Love Story
("The English is easy enough for us to understand");
The Godfather,
in Indonesian translation, is being serialized in the largest newspaper in the country,
Indonesia Raya
("This government is controlled by the business
mafia,
" a Djakarta journalist said at a party, and everyone in the room who heard, laughed out loud: the word was well-known). At another level, the Indian epic,
The Ramayana,
appears as a comic book. The newspaper industry is flourishing: there are scores of daily newspapers in all the cities, and even Surabaya is said to have about forty-five morning newspapers. There are so many newspapers, in fact, that there is a shortage of certain letters of type, and one often comes across the Indonesian remedy for this in a sentence like: "President Nixon reileraled lhis morning his delerminalion lo slop lhe war in Vielnam..."Occasionally the lack of a critical letter and the substitution of another makes an unfortunate word.

Some Indonesians appear to be widely read. In Bogor I had a lively discussion with a young man who was doing a dissertation on Eugene O'Neill; another in Surabaya said he was influenced by Albert Camus. In Medan, in North Sumatra, a short-story writer said his reason for writing was "to promote Islam" (one of his stories: a Muslim entering a brothel hears the call for prayer from the local mosque; he decides not to enter the brothel and instead goes to pray). He told me that Saki and O. Henry "are not
authors
—they are
story-tellers!
" At the Taman Ismail Marzuki, an ex-novelist asked me: "One of your most famous writers is Margaret Mitchell. Author of
Gone With The Wind.
I have read this book. Also I have read a lot of literary criticism from America. Why is it that I never see the name of Margaret Mitchell?"

This question was followed by: "Why are all American novels written by Jews?"

One of the unexpected bonuses of travelling in Indonesia and irrigating oneself with many bottles of Bintang Beer, is that one forgets one's replies to these questions. For example, I noted the following students' comments in my diary, but none of my replies: "Poem cannot be discuss. If you like poem, okay. If you don't like, okay. But not necessary to discuss." And: "Is conflict necessary to story? If so, internal or external?" And: "Before I can tell you about this poem" (one of Roethke's) "I must know who is this poet? Where does he live? What is his life like? I must have some information, then I will tell you my opinion of this poem."

The novel is very much of the West; so is the activity of reading for pleasure. The Indonesian response to literacy is to translate
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
into colloquial Indonesian and stage them at their multi-million dollar cultural center—I believe they were paying an elaborate compliment to the American donors; it is to stock the library of the University of Indonesia in Djakarta with thirteen copies of
Don't Forget To Write,
by Art Buchwald, and moldering sets of Thackeray, Dickens and Scott. For many, literacy is a skill which, once mastered, needs never to be proven again. The man who wrote an anti-communist poem in 1962, is a poet; his role is indisputable: he will recite his poem for you. The 'fifties novelist, now a civil servant, is still regarded as' a novelist: there is his sixty-page novel, affectionately dedicated to you. Only the writer in jail has ceased to be a writer, because he has ceased to be a person.