SOURCE: Tong, Sebastian. “Unexpected Convergences: Bakhtin's Novelistic Discourse and Pramoedya Ananta Toer's ‘Epic’ Novels.” World Literature Today 73, no. 3 (summer 1999): 481-84.

In the following essay, Tong links Mikhail Bakhtin's theories on literary forms with Pramoedya's Buru Quartet, asserting that the series functions as “the locus of a Bakhtinian convergence between esthetic form and political power.”

Yes, Ma, we fought back … even though only with our mouths.

—Minke to Nyai Ontosoroh¹

As prominent opponent and victim of his country's former New Order regime, the literary work of Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer has been inevitably entangled with his politics. His fourteen-year political imprisonment and his outspoken resistance to the Suharto government have made him a symbol of democratic struggle, with student activists risking jail sentences to defy the ban on his books, particularly the novels of his best-known work, the Buru Quartet.²

Composed orally in the absence of pen and...