 Thank you for inviting me to the band books reading. This gives me an opportunity to share a wonderful distinguished writer with you, Pramudya Ananta Thur, who was exiled many years under Suharto regime in Indonesia and placed in the remote islands of Bulu for 11 years and then subsequently imprisoned another several years, a total of 14 years of his writing career, imprisoned and many of his books banned, not only banned but destroyed while he was an arrest in the Bulu Islands. A little bit of background. In 1960s, Suharto staged a coup and took over the government of Indonesia. At that time, they were struggling for independence from the Dutch. The coup was backed by the United States who didn't like Sukarno's alliance with China. And following the example of the US, Suharto began an all out purge of communists and anyone alleged to be communist. Suharto ordered mass executions and repression. And at least people say over a million people were killed. But we were ensconced in our own war with Vietnam, in Vietnam. So a lot of this information was never published in the US. And although Pramudya was never a member of the Communist Party, he was imprisoned for 15 years because he was in support of Sukarno and because of his criticism of the peace Suharto army. We recently experienced another mass killings and rapes and murders of many students in Indonesia and May 15 that culminated in 1998 of a lot of the rapes and murders of over 120 Chinese women and somewhere young girls. But this work, The House of Glass, is one of the books that was written. It's called the Buru Quartet, one of four novels that were smuggled out with the help of fellow prisoners in the Buru Islands. When the Portuguese arrived in the Maluccas, the people all rushed to become Christians without the slightest resistance. Yes, there were social historical reasons for this. All throughout their history, they have been a colonized, defeated people. They have never experienced national freedom. And all this was because of their country, because their country was rich in spices. They have mixed with many peoples from nearby and far away and never have been able to draw any benefits from these contacts with more advanced civilizations. Then, when in the second decade of the 17th century, John Pirtirskun pushed the Portuguese out of the Maluccas. They all gave up Catholicism and became Protestants. Again, without any resistance. They accommodated once again, even though the sources were different from Prabangka and Tantular. They adjusted themselves, accommodating to the power that came and conquered them. His explanation gave rise to a strange irritation inside me. If he could speak that way about the Maluccas, then he might start saying the same things about Menado, from Catholic to Protestant, I got in first. Can you prove what you're saying, Menir? Is it just a hypothesis? Yes, of course. I can't put forward all the evidence in a casual conversation like this. Perhaps one day I can write a full-scale study on this. Don't think that is only the peoples of the Indias if the Indies who have developed this trait of accommodating, adjusting, compromising, no Menir. It is the trait of all peoples who throw away their principles when they come into contact with more principled peoples. The opposite happened in the Americas. The Indian peoples, when they came into contact with the more advanced and stronger Spanish, were destroyed because they weren't able to find a way to compromise and accommodate. They went from defeat to defeat. From being meat eaters, they ended up living on wheat gruel, defeated and pushed into reservations where they were destroyed by the cruel treatments they received and by tuberculosis because they could no longer keep themselves alive. In other words, there are two choices for a weak nation when it comes into contact with a strong one. Such a people must accommodate or flee into the jungles where their culture and civilization then degenerate until they fall as low as the sheep in the fields. The archivist himself didn't seem satisfied with his explanation. Perhaps he didn't feel that his argument measured up to the scientific criteria he himself held to, so he added, yes, all this has to be investigated further. And then from his book of essays, The Mute Soliloquy, I just came back from Bali yesterday, a matter of fact, so it's still a little bit jet lag, but all the luxury hotels were completely empty and tourism has plummeted to about 75% and following the Kuta bombing last August and then that was October, actually, and then the Jakarta bombing of the Marriott in August, the island is really suffering extreme poverty. This is called When the Gods Came Down to Earth. When I was young, I was taught that man's position is higher than that of angels. Man is made of earth while angels are beings of fire and that the devil himself is an angel who betrayed God. In my study of old Javanese, I learned that man's position is higher than even that of the gods, that the gods are only messengers. Nonetheless, in tales of the shadow theater, the gods frequently go beyond the limits of the duties prescribed for them. Not only do they sometimes choose sides in order to enable a person to vanquish his foes, at times they even dirty their own hands by interfering in worldly affairs. In their role as messengers, the gods often come down to earth from Kambanyang, their heavenly home, to make contact with mortals, but that's only in shadow plays. Only there do the gods peregrinate between heaven and earth. In my entire life, I, a man of the 20th century, had never heard of a mortal being called on by the gods. One day I went into one of the large swamps near the camp to look for fish. Around the swamp's perimeter was a stand of wild sugar cane several yards deep. For lack of rain, the swamp water had receded and its gray mud bottom was visible in shallower sections. This muddy ribbon was fairly wide and in one of the pools of standing water, I spotted scores of muria. The large variety of eel that inhabit the waters of the Wai'apo plain. As I prepared to fish, I suddenly caught sight of something large, something very large in one of the stagnant pools. A huge muria with teeth the color of gold. Being on kitchen duty with the responsibility of cooking for my mates, I immediately imagined the ample meal and eel this size would provide. Not about to concern myself with where such eel might have come from. I opened its mouth, attached a line and dragged it back to camp. But when arriving at the cookhouse, do you know what happened? I woke up. It had all been a dream. For some time that night I sat alone on my sleeping platform mulling over my dream of the gold tooth monster. The next day one of my mates told me that in dreams the color gold is a symbol of death. The man's information made the dream seem even more strange to me. But as strange as the dream might have seemed, I was soon to learn that reality can be even stranger than that even now. In the 20th century, there are instances when the gods do come down to earth. At 11 o'clock in the morning of August 19, 1969, what seemed to be an unending line of political prisoners came to occupy the interior of Buru Island. Empty island or frontier territory, as it was deemed, where the island's low land plain begins to meld into hills and mountains. 500 prisoners marched slowly forward to settle on the savanna, an area about 2,200 acres bordered on both the east and west by rivers, the Wailemon and the Wa'apo, and on the north and south by the broad stretches of elephant grass and jungle. But the Buru interior was not empty. There were native people living off that piece of earth long before the arrival of the political prisoners forced them to leave their land and huts behind. Then, as the prisoners converted the savanna into fields, the native people watched their hunting ground shrink in size, even the area's original place names were stolen from them, and they too were calling the area Unit 10. With 10 large barracks planted in their soil and 500 prisoners settled on their land, what other choice did they have? But the strangest thing of all was when the prisoners began to build fences, erecting borders where no boundaries had ever been. The native people had no word for fence. The concept was completely foreign to their culture. They didn't recognize such manmade limitations on land use rights. The political prisoners, the native people, two separate communities separated by language, race, religion, and culture. Yet somehow, beneath the island's blue sky and in the midst of the upheaval that the prisoners' arrival caused for the native people of Buru, there came to be interaction between the two communities. Only six months after the prisoners' arrival, relations between the two communities could even be described as cordial. During their first half year at Unit 10, the prisoners had suffered extreme hunger for the simple reason that the food rations provided by the government were far from adequate and fulfilling dietary needs. And though the military officials strictly forbade free association between the two communities, the prisoners' hunger pangs exercised for far more influence over their actions. I think that's all the time I have. Thank you. Thank you.