Twilight in Jakarta

Introduction Twilight in Jakarta: Fifty Years New Half a century ago in London when Mochtar Lubis’s Twilight in Jakarta originally appeared, it was the first Indonesian novel ever to be published in English translation. Its passage to print in 1963 remains one of the most fascinating in modern Indonesian literary history. That English edition, together with subsequent translations into Dutch, Spanish, Korean, and Italian, propelled its author—and Indonesian literature—onto the world stage. The Indonesian manuscript, with the original title, Yang Terinjak dan Melawan (Down-Trodden and Resisting), was written during the 1950s while Mochtar Lubis was being held under house arrest. Lubis was not only a highly regarded author, but also editor of one of the country’s most outspoken daily newspapers, Indonesia Raya, which had been highly critical of key government policies and political practices. The typescript of his novel was secreted out of the country during a visit by one of Denmark’s leading WWII resistance figures, Frode Jacobson, in November 1960. Jacobson was a prominent member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international coalition of writers, artists, and cultural figures which projected itself as broadly anti-authoritarian, supporting oppressed intellectuals around the globe. Lubis had joined the CCF in 1954, and the organization enthusiastically sponsored the translation and publication of Twilight in Jakarta as the first novel in its planned “New Voices in Translation” series. (Lubis felt betrayed on discovering, through public revelations in 1967, that the CCF had been bankrolled by the United States Central Intelligence Agency as part of America’s Cold War anticommunist strategy.1 Despite the international circulation of Twilight in Jakarta it was not until 1970—seven years after the publication of the English translation—that the original Indonesian novel appeared in print in the author’s homeland.2 Mochtar Lubis was an iconoclast and political maverick. He had established his literary reputation with a series of satirical short stories in the early years after Indonesia’s independence from the Dutch. His influential 1952 novel, Jalan Tak Ada Ujung (A Road with No End)3 was hailed by Indonesia’s leading literary critic, HB Jassin, as one of the three best works of the “Generation of 1945”, along with fiction by Idrus and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Lubis also attracted attention as a crusading journalist and editor of Indonesia Raya, founded in 1949. The paper had quickly become known for its frequent criticism of President Sukarno and the Indonesian Communist Party. Lubis himself, though close to the secular modernizing intellectuals around Indonesian Socialist Party leader Sutan Sjahrir, was never a member of any political party. Rather, he shared many of the critical views of civilian politicians held by army leaders in the early years after national independence, and maintained a lifelong opposition to communism. Lubis believed in the power and responsibility of the media to hold politicians to account for their actions. Indonesia Raya established a reputation for investigating corruption and abuse of power. After several cases ended up in the courts, Lubis was eventually detained without trial from December 21, 1956, and held under house arrest until released without explanation on April 29, 1961. Though arrested on the instruction of the Army Chief of Staff General AH Nasution, and accused of having links with regional military officers then taking up arms against Jakarta, Lubis himself maintained that communist influence upon President Sukarno lay behind his arrest. On his release in April 1961, Lubis was invited to Tel Aviv to address the General Assembly of the International Press Institute (IPI), delivering a rousing critique of what he saw as a global clash between democracy and totalitarianism in the Third World. Traveling on to Europe, he spent several days in Paris editing Claire Holt’s draft translation of Twilight in Jakarta. When he returned to Indonesia he was detained again, on July 14, 1961, questioned about his IPI speech, and then held for a further five years, mainly in a military prison in Madiun, East Java. Following the rise to power of Major-General Soeharto after October 1965, Lubis was eventually released on May 17, 1966, ending virtually a decade in detention under President Sukarno. An outspoken critic by nature, Lubis was returned to jail by President Soeharto for two and half months in 1975, under suspicion of involvement in anti-Soeharto demonstrations the previous year. Although unable to publish a newspaper after this arrest, he remained a passionate public intellectual and political critic until his death in 2004. In the diary he kept during his house arrest in the 1950s, Mochtar Lubis was explicit about his motivation for writing Twilight in Jakarta. He wrote in December 1958: I wanted to depict in a novel the social and political conditions in our country. How the thirst for power, greed for possessions, and the power to use party positions have wrought such great damage upon our society. I have written it effortlessly and with great ease, although I realize that it may well be a long time before this book can be published in Indonesia. Yet I feel, in writing it, I have compiled a report our society needs to know about in the future.4 One Western reviewer regarded it as “a superb journalistic indictment” of Indonesia’s leadership.5 Twilight in Jakarta depicts social and political events in the capital between May to January of an unspecified year.6 The novel moves between stories of the very rich and politically powerful, Western-oriented urban intelligentsia, middle-ranking public servants, political party organizers and activists, and, beneath them on the social and economic pyramid, the urban poor. The lives of these rich and poor collide in the streets of the capital. The novel attributes the moral decay of Indonesian society to the nature of its political leadership. The party system is depicted in universally negative terms, as essentially unworkable, endemically corrupt, and corrupting. It serves the politically powerful, and is unjust to, and unconcerned with the fate of, the destitute. For readers familiar with Indonesian politics of the 1950s, several of the novel’s characters appear as thinly disguised allusions to known figures.7 The rapacious editor Halim is modeled on BM Diah, editor of the daily newspaper Merdeka, with whom Lubis had numerous editorial polemics and occasional courtroom clashes over their long careers. The idealistic intellectual Pranoto is regarded as something of a composite of the Indonesian Socialist Party figures Soedjatmoko and Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana. The poet Yasrin, who is wooed by the communists, has been likened to both Rivai Apin and Utuy Tatang Sontani. Raden Kaslan is reminiscent of former Economics Minister, Iskaq Tjokroadisurjo. Husin Limbara, head of the fictional Indonesia Party, resembles Djody Gondokusumo of the Indonesian Nationalist Party. The “Movement for People’s Culture” described in the novel is a swipe at the Communist-backed Institute of People’s Culture. That such parallels were so readily recognized gave the tale an immediacy and realism. The novel depicts a society adrift, failing to live up to the aspirations of the independence struggle against the Dutch (1945–49). In a novel written during the nation’s transition from liberal parliamentary democracy to Sukarno’s so-called “Guided Democracy” (1959–65), it is noteworthy that Sukarno, though never named, is constantly present through allusion, in the numerous criticisms of the national political leadership. Lubis’s characters present a grim vision of society. The politicians lack redeeming qualities. The intellectuals appear impotent and out of touch with their own society. The journalists are unprincipled opportunists. Artists and trade union officials are seduced by inducements from political parties. The leftists are manipulative, and more concerned with building party power than genuinely serving the interests of the people. The Muslims are ineffectual, impetuous, and unable to counter the Communists. Interestingly, given that the author was detained for his presumed sympathies for officers launching a regional military rebellion, military figures are absent from the novel, and are thus absolved from any responsibility for Jakarta’s gloomy twilight. On the other hand, from the vignette opening the novel, Lubis depicts the lives of the poor with sympathy—at least until they lash out in collective action near the end of the novel. Lubis had previously published several of these vignettes as short stories, and stylistically they reflect his experience as a working journalist, evident in the “City Beat” sections which punctuate the novel. The publication of Twilight in Jakarta was a major achievement for Lubis, establishing his reputation as an international author, and strengthening his political and moral stance against the Indonesian government. As he expressed it, he felt that in this novel he had been able to speak to the world. His pre-eminence as Indonesia’s best-known novelist abroad was surpassed only by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, two decades later, whose most celebrated works were also produced during political detention.8 In Twilight in Jakarta, Lubis was condemning political practices in Indonesia in the mid-1950s. Yet international reviewers and readers recognized in it problems common across the Third World. Similarly, readers familiar with Indonesian politics today will find much in this novel that resonates still. It is re-published here at a time when, after three decades of authoritarianism and more than a decade of post-authoritarian transition, Indonesia once again has a boisterous multi-party system of competing and collaborating political parties. Parties are often personality-driven. They face a mass media which often both serves particular political interests and thrives on sensationalist stories of corruption and malfeasance. Mochtar Lubis’s surgical dissection of social conflict and political self-interest may be as evocative for today’s reader as it was when originally secreted out of Sukarno’s Indonesia more than half a century ago. David T Hill 9 References 1.Mochtar Lubis’s complex association with CCF is discussed by the author of this introduction in Journalism and Politics in Indonesia: A Critical biography of Mochtar Lubis (1922-2004) as Editor and Author (Routledge, London, 2010). 2.There was a Malaysian edition, Senja di Jakarta, (Pustaka Antara, Kuala Lumpur, 1964) but the first Indonesian imprint was not until 1970 (Sendja di Djakarta, PT Badan Penerbit Indonesia Raya, [Jakarta], 1970). 3.An English translation of Jalan Tak Ada Ujung (A Road with No End)— translated and edited by Anthony H Johns—was published by Graham Brash, Singapore, 1982 (first ed. 1968). 4.Mochtar Lubis, Catatan Subversif, Sinar Harapan, Jakarta, 1980, p.144, entry dated December 1958. Although the 1970 Indonesian text concludes with a modern colophon “completed/jakarta, 7 march 1957” (p.280), evidence in Lubis’s diary, Catatan Subversif, suggests the manuscript was actually completed more than three and a half years later. In the entry dated December 1958 he wrote that he had “begun my novel given the name Yang Terinjak dan Melawan [Down-Trodden and Resisting]” after which the published diary added the footnote, “[this] book was later published in English in London with the title Twilight in Jakarta” (p.144). In the entry for November 22, 1960 he wrote he had “completed writing the novel Yang Terinjak dan Melawan several days ago” (p.149). 5.Rohan Rivett (1963) “Corruption Denounced—from a Prison Cell”, IPI Report, Vol. 12, No. 2, June, p.16. 6.Internal references in the text relate to various historical incidents (suggesting a setting between about May 1954 to January 1957), but there is no direct congruence between the fiction and history. 7.This is Mochtar Lubis’s only novel which (in the Indonesian) includes a prefatory disclaimer stating that all characters and events are fictional—which may alert the reader to historical allusions, yet circumvent libel. Mochtar Lubis discussed some of these similarities in an interview with me at his home in Jakarta on March 11, 1981. Others are mentioned in Henri Chambert-Loir, Mochtar Lubis: Une Vision de l’Indonésie Contemporaine, (Paris: Publication de l’Ecole Française D’Extrême-Orient, 1974, p.154). 8.For one account of Pramoedya’s impact internationally, see Chris GoGwilt, “Writing to the World: Pramoedya as an All-Round Revolutionary Writer” in Inside Indonesia (No. 88, Oct-Dec 2006, h***:://www.insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/writing-to-the-world). 9.David T Hill is professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Murdoch University in Western Australia.