Ink and Blood: The Birth of Horison (Jakarta, 1966)

Here’s the thing about 1966 Jakarta: it wasn’t just a city on the edge of change, it was a pressure cooker about to blow its lid clean off. The kind of place where shadows seemed to breathe and every footstep on the cracked pavement might be your last. The kind of place where a young hotshot named Arief Budiman—Jesus, he was only twenty-five, but in those days, twenty-five felt like fifty—was about to walk straight into the belly of the beast.

(And maybe, just maybe, that’s where our story really begins.)

The house on Jalan Kemuliaan wasn’t much to look at. Hell, most folks hurrying past probably didn’t give it a second glance. But Arief knew better. Behind those walls, political prisoners rotted like forgotten fruit, and among them was Mochtar Lubis, the kind of journalist who’d stare the devil in the eye and tell him his breath stank.

Arief had this crazy idea burning a hole in his brain, see? A literary magazine. Not just any rag you’d use to wrap fish, mind you, but something that’d make people think. Something that’d make them remember they were human beings, not just pawns in Sukarno’s grand chess game.

(Later, much later, people would say it was either the bravest or dumbest thing anyone could’ve done. Maybe both. Funny how often those two things go hand in hand.)

The money came trickling in like water from a rusty tap. Ten thousand rupiahs here from a businessman named Sukada (who’d wake up some nights years later, sweating, wondering if he’d backed the right horse), discounted printing there from A.H. Shahab (whose press would groan like a dying man with each issue), and sixty reams of paper from Hazil Tanzil’s outfit (paper that sometimes felt warm to the touch, as if it knew the weight of the words it would carry).

But here’s where it gets sticky, where the plot thickens like congealing blood: The government—Suharto’s bunch now, not that it made much difference to the average Joe—wanted their pound of flesh. Every editor had to swear allegiance to something called the Manipol-Usdek doctrine. Might as well have asked them to sign in their own blood.

Mochtar Lubis, that stubborn old coot, wouldn’t do it. No sir, not even if you held a gun to his head (and some folks probably wanted to). They tried reasoning with him—“It’s just words on paper, Mochtar, just ink and air”—but he knew better. He’d seen what happened when you gave the devil your signature.

(Sometimes standing your ground means standing alone. But sometimes, just sometimes, the ground rises up to meet you.)

That first issue hit the streets in July ‘66 like a brick through a window. Fifteen thousand copies, each one a small revolution. They had poetry, essays, stories—including one that’d come back to bite them harder than a rabid dog. Bertha Pantouw’s “Doa Seorang Ibu” turned out to be about as original as a xeroxed dollar bill, and the shit hit the fan faster than you could say “plagiarism.”

But it was the political stuff that really stirred the pot. See, in those days, being anti-communist was like breathing—you did it to stay alive. But some folks, like Arief, started thinking dangerous thoughts. Like maybe art should be about art, not which side of the political fence you pissed on.

Then there were the stories—God, the stories. Martin Aleida, fresh out of prison with eyes that had seen too much, writing about a woman and her dog like it was the last story he’d ever tell. Umar Kayam spinning yarns about intellectuals getting their tickets punched in the great purge. These weren’t just stories, they were survival notes passed between prisoners, written in a code only the damned could read.

(And isn’t that what literature really is? A message in a bottle, thrown into an ocean of blood and ink, hoping someone on some distant shore will understand?)

The critics would come later, with their fancy words and their accusations. But by then, Horison had already done what it set out to do: it had opened a window in a house of horrors, letting in just enough light for people to see their own reflections. And sometimes, that’s all the revolution you need.