Sunrise with Seamonsters by Paul Theroux Page B

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