Word: pram
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...deserved - lived with his new wife and her family after being released from prison in December 1949, just weeks before Dutch authorities recognized Indonesia's independence. After 2½ years in jail (for being caught with anti-Dutch paraphernalia), you'd think anything would be a welcome change. But Pram, as he's popularly known, found the place foul and unlivable. The gutters were full of human ordure and the air stale from the smell of "cheap death," he recalled in the story "My Kampung," from his early collection Tales from Djakarta. Its mordant stories revolve around what...
Visitors today to the Indonesian capital might find Pram's take extreme. True, men and boys still relieve themselves in Kebon Jahé Kober's sewers. But the small neighborhood, in the middle of Jakarta's bustle, is an oasis of quiet lanes with socks drying on bamboo poles and friendly bakso (meatball) vendors sucking on spicy, crackling kretek. They'll smilingly guide you to the still standing, ramshackle house of its most famous onetime resident, at No. 8, Gang (Lane) III - although Pram didn't really do much to deserve local affection. Not only did he quickly tire...
...melancholic tones of the story's namesake instrument, his future "tattered and full of holes." It's an equally apt description of Indonesia, which had recently emerged a sovereign but brittle country after centuries of Dutch rule, Japanese occupation and four years of revolution. Reflected in each of Pram's protagonists from the fringe - illiterate wash maids, scabietic houseboys, night watchmen, guttersweeps - are the growing pains of a tentative new nation...
...square popular with "shadows of the night" like Aminah, a prostitute from the lurid tale "News from Kebajoran." She dies in a fit of delirium on a cold concrete bench nearby. How ironic, then, that a statue of Raden Kartini, the women's-rights advocate whose biographer Pram would later become, now stands in the square...
...town of joy, booming with steel, glass and shining retail spaces. But Tales of Djakarta, in which the poor bathe in the canal's toxic "yellowish water" and Japanese officers fill Menteng's villas with comfort women, obstructs those pretty views. Though not void of hope, Jakarta for Pram was a town of tough and busy griefs. The bakso sellers in and around Merdeka Square might still agree...