Micro-post #5: An longform piece about an imprisoned Indonesian writer

"The Making of the Buru Quartet" by Joel Whitney (The Believer)

An interesting longform piece I found several days ago through Arts & Letters Daily - it's related in a roundabout way to a Something Interesting post I'm releasing later this week.

"On October 6, 1973, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was ordered by prison guards to run double-time across Buru Island. The writer had been arrested eight years before, taken into custody in the middle of the night. Detained without charges alongside thousands of other men and women, Toer was sent to Buru—a prison island far east of Java and Bali—and forced to toil under the scorching sun. He was desolate, not only because of the Sisyphean labor he was made to perform, the inability to write, and the gnawing feeling of injustice, but also because he was separated from his family. Before prison, he had been happily married to his beloved Maimoenah, his second wife and mother to five of his children. After several years of seclusion from the outside world, Toer was hopeful that the press junket he was being forced to attend could be an opportunity to petition for the freedoms that had been revoked when he was imprisoned, if not ensure his release. It would be the closest he would get to a trial, during which he could publicly question the validity of his arrest." - opening paragraph to Joel Whitney's "The Making of the Buru Quartet"

Photo by Hugo Matilla (Unsplash)