Mute's Soliloquy

Is a collection of letters by Pramoedya, a writer and long-term political prisoner in Indonesia. In this one, he is writing his daughter from a ship headed to Buru, a prison camp island. I love this passage:

"I am sure there are those who pray that a gale-force easterly will sink this ship and transform its human cargo to shark bait. I'm sure those same people also feel that the dead have no voice. Theirs is a stone-age sensibility with a criminal blush. They rob us of our civil rights, they steal our very lives. They give us inadequate sustenance, yet time and again we prove ourselves capable of slipping through the eye of the needle of death.

"We are refugees who carry on our shoulders a bag of provisions that we shall not discard till death, one chock-full of spiritual and sensory experience, a crystallization of undying energy, something more lasting than flesh and bones and even unscissored ivory...."

(and, "Yes, the dead do speak, but in their own way and at their own time. Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, Dachau, Auschwitz, and all the other human slaughterhouses, even those in Indonesia, cannot silence the dead.")

His works were banned. My professor used to sell them illegally on her campus, hiding them under the used book table and slipping them across to interested students. It was the students who eventually brought down Indonesia's long-time, corrupt ruler, Suharto. He died Sunday at 86.