Dewi said she used to have a panic button installed under the cash register at the Kalam bookstore in Utan Kayu, East Jakarta. Just in case.
“Sometimes we’d get suspicious characters in here, and with the button I could alert friends out front if I felt something was up.”
For 17 years, Kalam has been Jakarta’s one-stop-shop for left-of-center literature, particularly of the homegrown variety. From 1994-1998, that meant standing up to Suharto, whose distaste for works like Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet was well known. And feared.
If the 1998 protests that toppled Suharto’s regime had a nerve center, Kalam and its patrons, the Komunitas Utan Kayu (KUH) — a loose network of students, artists and journalists formed in 1994 by literary giant Goenawan Mohamad – were it.
Dewi has been at Kalam since the start, selling books you couldn’t get anywhere else in the city.
Last week, she was also there at the end, closing up the shop for good.
“It’s sad, but we have to move on,” she told Coconuts Jakarta. “Students have always been our biggest buyers, but they just aren’t coming like they used to. Maybe they aren’t as interested in learning history anymore. Also. now you can get a lot of the books we sell online as e-books.”
In its genesis, Kalam was part of a plan to create a salon-style hub of activism (it also contained a café, radio station and art gallery) that could nudge Indonesian society forward.
By focusing on works of literature and philosophy, however, especially in its early years, Kalam and KUH tried to avoid selling the kind of overtly political works that got one branded a crackdown-worthy communist – the New Order regime’s catch-all term for its political adversaries.
According to Dewi, spies regularly visited the store to hang around and gather “intel” for the government.
“They’d show up and you could usually tell who they were because they’d ask to see Goenawan straightaway. We had to be careful,” Dewi remembers.
Spies were especially interested in Goenawan because he was suspected of ring-leading a guerrilla network of writers publishing critical work from unknown, underground locations.
Though the government couldn’t prove it, they were right; through the Society for the Free Flow of Information (ISAI), Goenawan and his band of gutsy compadres were releasing material printed in safe houses peppered throughout the city, places that were nearly impossible to track down and thus safe from the censors.
The irony of Kalam’s demise, however, is that another of the ways the KUH and the ISAI evaded government censure, pre-1998, was to publish on what was, at the time, an obscure computer network called the Internet – foreshadowing the shift to digital consumption that ultimately drove down Kalam’s sales.
Another irony is that many of the political ideas dear to KUH in the 1990’s – things like power sharing, people’s welfare, transparency – seem to have finally won political currency (think president-elect Jokowi, Surabaya Mayor Risma, etc) just as Kalam, the KUH’s most public outpost, found itself bleeding cash.
Dewi says it’s been like this for a few years, though, and that the time had come to rethink the space.
No solid plans exist for what what the space Kalam sits in will house next
When asked what she’ll miss most about the store, Dewi said it wasn’t the books or the business, but the liveliness and sense of purpose that Kalam helped generate.
The shop wrapped up its closing sale late last week, but hundreds of books at discount prices, including Indonesian language versions of “Das Kapital” and Danarto’s internationally acclaimed novel, “Abracadabra,” still sit on the shelves.
Though officially closed, Dewi says she’ll be around this week to open the shop for any last-minute patrons. Just in case.
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