The Library Man

 

Listen—if you want to understand what happened to Indonesian literature in those early years, the years before the war came and changed everything, you need to understand about Soeman Hasiboean. And to understand Soeman, you need to picture Bengkalis in 1904: a port town where the Riau coast met the sea like two old friends shaking hands, where the air tasted of salt and spice and something else, something darker that came in with the tide at night.

Soeman’s father, Wahid, was what they called a lebai—a religious teacher—and if you think that made for a quiet household, you don’t know much about how stories work. Because it wasn’t just holy verses filling young Soeman’s ears after the sun went down. It was the merchants, too. Always the merchants, showing up at the door with their bundles and their tales, speaking in low voices about Singapore, about Malaya, about things that happened in shadows and alleyways where a man’s life could be bought and sold for the right price.

Those stories worked on Soeman’s imagination the way water works on stone—slow and steady and impossible to stop. Gangsters. Tough guys. The underworld. All of it lodging in his brain like splinters you can’t quite reach.

“Through those stories, I got inspiration about life there,” he’d say years later, but that word—inspiration—didn’t quite capture it. It was more like infection. A good infection, maybe, but an infection just the same.

The Reader

Here’s the thing about Soeman: he was hungry.

Not for food, though God knows there wasn’t always enough of that in those days. He was hungry for words. Starting in first grade in 1912, he haunted the Taman Pustaka library like some kind of bookish ghost, paying two cents a week for the privilege. Two cents. Think about that. He’d have given blood if they’d asked for it.

What hooked him wasn’t the traditional stuff, the drawn-out syair poetry that went on forever like Sunday sermons. No sir. It was the detective novels from England and the Netherlands, translated into Malay but still carrying that sharp Western edge. Those books changed him, rewired something fundamental in his brain.

By the time he hit Normaal Cursus in Medan in 1918—that’s roughly junior high, if you’re keeping track—he’d already started becoming the writer he’d be. That’s where he met Muhammad Kasim, a teacher who wrote funny stories and didn’t take anything too seriously. Kasim showed him that writing didn’t have to be all fire and brimstone. It could be sharp. Quick. It could make people laugh.

The Detective

Now we get to the good part.

In 1932, Soeman published Mentjahari Pentjoeri Anak Perawan—that’s “Searching for the Kidnapper of the Virgin Daughter” if your Indonesian’s rusty—and brother, that book was something else entirely. He created this character, Sir Joon, an amateur detective trying to figure out what happened to a Peranakan Chinese girl named Nona who was supposed to marry a guy named Tairoo but disappeared right before the wedding.

Was she kidnapped? Did her adoptive father spirit her away for money? Soeman never quite tells you straight, and that ambiguity—that not knowing—is what makes it work.

“If this is a detective story,” writer Goenawan Mohamad would say decades later, “it’s one without crime.”

But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Because the real crime was what always lurked beneath these stories: parents treating their children like property, tradition crushing throats, old ways refusing to die even when they should have been buried deep.

The book made Soeman seventy-five guilders. Enough to buy three and a half big buffalo, if you were in the buffalo-buying business. He wasn’t, but the point stood: the man could write, and people wanted to read what he wrote.

The Rebel

Here’s where things get dangerous.

Picture this: the 1930s, and Soeman’s meeting secretly with other teachers in a rented house in Siak. One of them plays violin while they sing “Indonesia Raya” in hushed voices—that song by Wage Rudolf Supratman that the Dutch had banned like it was poison gas.

But somebody’s listening. There’s always somebody listening.

A local spy—and you can imagine the type, can’t you? Probably someone who smiled at them in the street—is crouched under the house, catching every word. He reports them to the Dutch Controller, and just like that, Soeman’s summoned for interrogation.

The punishment? Transfer to Pasir Pengaraian. For Dutch East Indies civil servants, that was like being sent to the basement of the universe. It was where they put troublemakers to rot.

Except Soeman didn’t rot.

They made him head of the village school there, and he saw colonialism up close: local kings being used like puppets, people crushed under forced labor, the whole rotten system on display. And still he wrote. Still he corresponded with Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, with HB Jassin, with Balai Pustaka. The words kept coming.

The Fighter

When the revolution came, Soeman had to make a choice.

He was a teacher. A writer. The closest he’d come to violence was crafting murder mysteries on paper. But in 1948, during the second Dutch Military Aggression, he found himself chairman of the regional KNIP and commander of a guerrilla base.

Once—and this part kills me—he ordered his men to burn down school buildings so the Dutch couldn’t use them. Scorched earth tactics. Seemed smart at the time.

Turned out the Dutch troops preferred emergency tents anyway.

“So we ended up losing out,” he said later, and you could hear the regret in it like old ghosts rattling chains. “We burned the schools because we didn’t know war tactics.”

After independence, something changed in Soeman. According to cultural figure Hasan Junus, he couldn’t keep up with the younger writers anymore, felt they knew more than he did. So he mostly stopped writing and threw himself into administration, rebuilding the schools he’d helped destroy, fighting with Education Minister Muhammad Yamin over Riau’s lack of high schools.

“We in Riau don’t have a single high school,” he told Yamin to his face in 1956. “Why are we being neglected?”

Yamin sent him a harsh reprimand, but the protest worked. They got their high school.

The End

Soeman Hasiboean died on May 8, 1999, at ninety-five years old. Six children. Twenty-one grandchildren. Twenty-eight great-grandchildren. A whole clan carrying his blood forward.

Today there’s a library in Pekanbaru with his name on it: the Soeman Hs Library. And if you walk past it on certain nights—maybe when the moon’s thin and the air tastes like rain—you might feel something. A presence. The ghost of an old teacher who understood that the strongest weapons for changing a nation’s fate weren’t guns or bombs.

They were pens. Books. Stories.

The kind that get under your skin and never quite leave.

Alkisah, the old tales used to begin. Once upon a time.

But Soeman Hasiboean? He wanted none of that.

“We from Pujangga Baru don’t use it anymore,” he’d said.

He was writing something new. Something that still echoes.

Something that refuses to die.