SOURCE: Bahari, Razif. “Remembering History, W/Righting History: Piecing the Past in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Tetralogy.” Indonesia 75 (April 2003): 61-90.

In the following essay, Bahari discusses fiction from the Orde Baru period of Indonesian history and examines how Pramoedya's Buru Tetralogy demythologizes literary interpretations of the period.

The narration of time is a crucial determinant in the writing of both fiction and history in—the now old—Orde Baru Indonesia.¹ It not only impinges on the way the present is bound to the past within the scheme of cause and effect, but serves as well to show how truth and meaning relate to a discourse that urges the reader always to discern the temporal landscape beyond the text's internal configurations. For the writing of history in the former New Order Indonesia, the contingencies of truth and meaning are profoundly unsettling.² I do not mean this in a positive...