Tari Lang seemed to live in parallel universes. She was born to an English mother and an Indonesian father. Both of her parents enjoyed higher education, and they met in Prague, when the city was a magnet for leftist intellectuals pursuing their studies. Tari spent her childhood in the elite Menteng district, on Teuku Umar Street, in the heart of Jakarta. At least two Indonesian presidents once lived in that area. Besides Megawati Sukarnoputri, on the same street, Soeharto – the “dictator” in the title of this book – lived on Cendana Street, not far away.
More than intellectuals, Tari’s parents were also active in politics and were even involved in President Sukarno’s administration, her father having served as a deputy minister. They often hosted guests at their home, which accustomed Tari to political discussions. This made her realize that her parents were people who cared about the oppression of ordinary people. At the same time, a question lingered in her mind: how could conversations like those have taken place in an elite Menteng neighbourhood, amid dinner gatherings served by household staff and all the accompanying privileges?
Tari herself was active in political organizations. She joined IPPI (Ikatan Pemuda dan Pelajar Indonesia, or the Indonesian Youth and Students Association), a student organization for high schoolers, affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). These backgrounds made Tari’s life turbulent when, in one of the most infamous events in Indonesian history,a group of soldiers abducted several generals and an Army officer in the early hours of 1 October 1965. Afterwards, a coup and counter-coup against President Sukarno led to a search for scapegoats, with the PKI being blamed, resulting in mass killings and the imprisonment of PKI members, sympathizers, and even those who were only vaguely connected to them.
Like tens of thousands of families across Indonesia, Tari’s family was also bewildered by these historical events. Gradually, that confusion turned into fear as terror spread throughout the country. It began with the arrest of her father, Budiardjo, the Deputy Minister of Maritime Affairs. Tari was 14 years old when it happened, and at that age she was first introduced to prisons while delivering food to her father.
Tari spent one night in detention, only briefly but enough to reveal the cruelty of the military dictatorship. She was later involved in underground activities, helping to hide leaders of IPPI. Together with her comrades, she succeeded in preparing a safe house which happened to have a blue door (alluded to in the Indonesian translation title of this memoir). This then became a poetic symbol amid the newly emerging military dictatorship while also serving as a backdrop to Tari’s coming-of-age years, alongside stories of blossoming romance and the quotidian experiences of youth.
When both of her parents were eventually imprisoned, Tari had no choice but to become the breadwinner for the family, which consisted of herself and her younger brother, Anto. Tari made and sold yogurt, while Anto produced and sold ice lollies around the Menteng area.
That said, they still came from a prominent family in Indonesia. Even in such difficult circumstances, Tari’s connections within elite circles enabled her to organize a fashion show at Hotel Indonesia, the only luxury hotel in Jakarta at the time. This illustrates how those parallel lives continued to exist and remained an inseparable part of Tari Lang’s chronicle in this gripping memoir.
Tari describes these parallel lives as consisting of three universes. The first universe was the elites of Jakarta, whose world seemed unchanged despite the upheaval caused by those major historical events. People in this world remained preoccupied with luxury goods and jewellery, including visits to the gold shops at Pasar Cikini, Jakarta’s gold trading centre. The second universe was that of left-wing politicians and their circles, including Tari herself, who were forced to live underground amid mounting repression, holding onto the hope that justice would one day come for them.
The third universe was the world of the urban and rural poor, who were becoming increasingly impoverished and oppressed. Amid such pressures, Tari wondered where people like them would seek information if their family members were detained without explanation, as hers had been. Even more poignantly, she reflects: “Without the confidence of privilege, how can they campaign for their release?” (p. 158).
This rhetorical question becomes a key to understanding this memoir, as well as other memoirs connected to the events surrounding 1965. Here, Tari acknowledges her own position of privilege, which enabled her to pursue various efforts, including campaigning for the release of her parents from detention under the New Order regime.
Releasing her father, Budiardjo, proved difficult. He was imprisoned three times in different locations over a total period of twelve years. The campaign to free her mother, Carmel Budiardjo, was relatively more feasible, including through the argument that their marriage was not legally valid because it had never been officially registered in Indonesia, allowing Carmel to reclaim her British citizenship. This became the path to her release.
These efforts proved successful, enabling Carmel Budiardjo to be freed and reunited with her two children in London. There, she went on to establish TAPOL (Political Prisoners), a social organization dedicated to helping victims of the Soeharto regime’s brutality and broader political repression in Indonesia.
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The title My Neighbour, the Dictator does not necessarily suggest that Tari or her family had any personal relationship with Soeharto. Their privilege was also not so great that the dictator paid them any special attention, although it was sufficient to support the campaign for Carmel Budiardjo’s release and secure several minor concessions.
In the Bahasa Indonesia translation of this book, the title has been changed to House with a Blue Door (Rumah dengan Pintu Biru). This title might be a poetic way of highlighting the blossoming moment of Tari Lang as a teenager falling in love during the underground resistance against the emerging dictatorship. However, it is tame compared to its English version My Neighbour the Dictator.
The Indonesian publisher, Gramedia, seems to want to avoid being politically confrontational since ‘the dictator’ here refers to the late former President Soeharto who has recently been officiated as a national hero by Prabowo’s administration. Prabowo, Soeharto former son in law, has brought back an array of oppressive policies akin to Soeharto’s era, including the militarisation of politics, blatant cronyism, and (indirect) censorship. Putting a title that directly accuses Soeharto as a dictator in today’s Indonesia might bring some risks to the book, its writer and publisher, indicating the severe shrinkage of Indonesian democratic space.
The fact that Tari’s family home was located near Soeharto highlights Tari’s position within the Jakarta elite, the Indonesian elite, of that time. Therefore, it is not surprising that this book is filled with parallel universes, each seemingly disconnected from the rest of the people of that time. Imagine: while both of her parents were in prison, Tari was organizing a fashion show.
This illustrates how life continues, even in the most apocalyptic political situations, following the most feasible means for those living it. This book thus offers something unique: a glimpse into an elite lifestyle intertwined with the violence of military dictatorship, almost like it could be the raw materials for an epic film on the scale of The House of the Spirits or Indochine.
Within the series of memoirs about 1965, Tari’s position is relatively similar to, for example, Tedjabayu who published his memoir Mutiara di Padang Ilalang: Cerita Seorang Penyintas1 (Komunitas Bambu, 2020). Tedjabayu’s parents were also important figures in the left-wing political movement and were arrested and imprisoned. The difference is that Tedjabayu himself was also imprisoned for his activity in CGMI (Central Indonesian Student Movement), a university student organisation affiliated with PKI, whereas Tari was never detained for long, and her involvement in IPPI did not lead to her direct arrest.
In comparison with Tedjabayu’s memoir, Tari’s fills an important gap about those who occupied an in-between world: between long-term imprisonment without trial on the one hand, and the life of the impacted people in the outside world on the other, even when it was within the elite circle. This memoir bridges the gap between the reality of terror inside the prisons of a military dictatorship and a world that had been forced to function as if nothing had changed.
Thus, this memoir presents a kind of imposed “normality” created by environments that drastically changed. Small details become visible and amplified under the weight of this oppressive situation. For example, in prison, when she visited her mother, Tari learned that her mother actually enjoyed small talk. Until then, she had known her mother as a political activist who always spoke seriously about major issues. It is precisely these small details that form the strength of this memoir, making the emerging military dictatorship’s repression imaginable as part of everyday life.
Both Carmel Budiardjo’s memoir Surviving Indonesia’s Gulag: A Western Woman Tells Her Story (Cassell, 1996) or Tedjabayu’s Mutiara di Padang Ilalang) focuses on survival amid the deadly circumstances of prison, including tortures and endless interrogrations.
Meanwhile, Tari’s memoir portrays an effort to endure a daily life that was forced to continue as normalwhile carrying on through a situation that could have broken a person completely. Enduring here is not an act of normalization, but rather an awareness of overwhelming pressure and an attempt to adapt, to manoeuvre with whatever was available in order to continue living within such conditions.
This memoir becomes a bridge between the first generation – people such as Budiardjo and Carmel, or Mia Bustam and Sudjojono (Tedjabayu’s parents) – and their children, who also directly experienced the events (such as Tari), in documenting the 1965 events and the transition toward the New Order dictatorship.
This is important because the impact of those historical upheavals was not limited to the first generation alone, but also extended to the second generation, who experienced the consequences both directly and indirectly, as well as to the third generation and beyond, who inherited the stories and the prolonged trauma of living under the repression of the New Order military dictatorship. In this sense, My Neighbour, The Dictator records the dictatorship in the process of being formed – a regime that, for decades and even to this day, has left enduring trauma and shaped the way Indonesians think about themselves and their politics. The fact that this dictatorship is somehow being resurrected by the administration of Soeharto’s former son in law has made this book very timely, as a reminder that such endurance do not belong to the past, but as the foundation for the possibility of yet another underground resistance that might be needed in the immediate future.***
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