Patricio Guzman

Reflections on Indonesia’s collective amnesia

Last month, at the Makassar Writers’ Festival, I had the great privilege of meeting one of the giants of modern Indonesian literature, Ahmad Tohari. His triolgy Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk, was for years censored by its Indonesian publishers Gramedia: they removed a large chunk of writing about the killings of suspected Communist sympathisers by government troups in the mid-1960s. It was only after the book was translated in full as The Dancer by the fabulous Lontar Foundation that Gramedia dared to…