Novel
Threads of Dignity
Merajut Harkat
Putu Oka Sukanta · 1999
Synopsis
After the events of 1965, Mawa is arrested and thrown into prison without trial, as a political suspect. Interrogated under torture, deprived of everything, transferred from one prison to another, he does not know when or how his detention will end. The novel follows ten years of captivity in Jakarta, among other political prisoners, and the way in which this man, at first weakened and dependent on others to survive, gradually undertakes a physical and spiritual quest to keep his dignity.
Context
The novel appeared in 1999 in Yogyakarta, from Pustaka Pelajar with Jendela Budaya; the author drew there on his ten years of detention. It opens a trilogy on the violence of 1965 and 1966, continued by Istana Jiwa in 2012 and closed by Celah in 2018. A 2010 reissue runs to nearly six hundred pages. Keith Foulcher translated it into English for the Lontar Foundation, under the title Threads of Dignity, in 2022.
Who it is for
A novel of more than five hundred pages, translated into English; the torture and hunger of detention are told without evasion.
Prizes and reception
It has been the subject of academic work, including a study in literary sociology defended in Surakarta in 2010 on its political conflicts.
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