The Negative Genesis of Carmel Budiardjo: A Poetics of Resistance
When death arrived, it did not find Carmel Budiardjo as a poet would imagine it: listless between lilies, or curled beneath oak leaves like the tail of a question. Born Carmel Brickman in London in 1925, Budiardjo was a political activist and human rights campaigner known for her work documenting abuses in Indonesia. But buried in the engine room of her advocacy lay a trove of prose and poetic fragments—jagged, unresolved, and brimming with incantatory defiance. These remain largely obscured by the political historiography that frames her narrative. The loss is ours, for Budiardjo’s literary voice not only addresses tyranny, it also dissects the psychic gears of injustice.
Her transformation from academic economist to exiled truth-worker reads like a Kafkaesque novella. After marrying Indonesian official Suwondo Budiardjo, she moved to Indonesia in the post-colonial 1950s, only to be imprisoned under Suharto’s regime without trial from 1968 to 1971. Following her deportation to the United Kingdom, she founded TAPOL, a watchdog organization named after the Indonesian acronym for political prisoners. It is from within these iron circumstances that her textual soul emerges. It manifests in pamphlets, unsent letters, and lesser-known bilingual publications that interlace the forensic with the lyrical.
A close reading of her pamphlet “The Prison Years” (TAPOL Bulletin No. 12, 1973) reveals syntax cracked with condensation—bespeaking both suppression and urgency. In one fragment, she writes, “I learned how to create silence, how to generate a vacuum so deafening that it would ricochet in the craniums of the guards.” The line is not metaphor alone, but operational surrealism. It transfigures pain into a communicative silence, a principle one might call *hermeneutics of negation*—understanding the system not by its claims, but by its mufflings.
It is time, perhaps, for literary scholarship to claim Budiardjo not only as an activist but as a writer—one operating in a genre yet properly named, somewhere between poetic witness, political thriller, and metaphysical nihilism. That she published no conventional volume of poetry is irrelevant in such an inquiry. If Primo Levi forged poems in carbon, Budiardjo forged them in policy reports, where the refrains are made of digits and disappearances.
One especially affecting line occurs in her 1980 open letter to the Human Rights Committee of the UN: “There are people who have learned to walk without gravity—not because of faith, but because of terror” (TAPOL Archive, Letter No. HRC/11/1980, p.3). This sentence lurches on the page. It suggests that the very physics of experience change under repression, producing its own physics of the spirit. Here, language is metaphors not as adornment but due to the inadequacy of forensic terminology to handle evil. We are reminded at this juncture of Walter Benjamin’s thesis that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”¹ Budiardjo is the town-crier of this double truth, but cries through taut, clinically administered symbols.
It is worth pointing out her lesser-referenced Chinese-influenced prose notebooks from 1972–1975, preserved in facsimile in TAPOL’s private library. In these, aphoristic entries appear in English, interspersed with Bahasa and classical Chinese characters. One entire page is occupied by the ideogram 靜—“quietude.” Below it is scribbled: “Let the frequencies of jail teach you new grammars.”² The poetics here resemble those of exilic Chinese poets Du Fu or Liu Tsung-Yüan, but more fractured, more twisted into the zero-gravity substrates of the twentieth century.
That line, “Let the frequencies of jail teach you new grammars,” drew me into a circular meditation: is poetry always born of constraint, whether metrical or carceral? Budiardjo seemed to articulate what the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich intuited when he wrote of “the incapacitation by systems that pretend to humanize”—that is, institutions that claim to administer justice while internally killing the logic that defines it.³ When Budiardjo invokes the plurals “grammars” instead of a singular “grammar,” she offers plurality as defiance. Her prison was not simply concrete, but ontological.
Her thinking vibrates most intensely in the pseudo-diary entry from her 1971 post-incarceration document, “The Measured Collapse”:
“Even the insects are political here. Red ants raid the breadbox as if tracing ideological fault-lines. Little commissars of nourishment. The ordinary is not innocent. Nothing is.” (TAPOL Circular Note #6, p.7)
Here is where language, politics, and metaphysics blend into one. “The ordinary is not innocent”—the line steals time from Benjamin’s angel of history and adds Kafka’s bureaucratic insectoid nightmares. The universe responds to repression not merely with outcry but with recursive adjustments in the smallest nodes of life. The poet sees this; the activist organizes it. In Budiardjo, both functions are laminated into one.
It is tempting to ask: Could Carmel Budiardjo have been a poet in another life, one unmolested by political despotism, exile, and bureaucratic hostage situations? Perhaps. But it is more arresting to think that despotism and exile *generated* her poetic expression in a dialectical gesture. Not unlike Paul Celan’s language born from silence, or Simone Weil’s metaphysics born from hunger strikes, Budiardjo crafts something I call *tropes of necessity*. Language congealed *because* it had no right not to.
In one of her most haunting rhetorical questions, from her address to Amnesty International in 1979, she asks, “When we recover, will we recognize our own faces?”⁴
Here hangs the whole poetics: recognition delayed until it becomes unrecognition. The poem is the prism through which damaged reality refracts itself until it becomes intelligible again, albeit shattered. Budiardjo’s entire oeuvre, scattered through bulletins, transcripts, and annotated testimonies, plays a dirge in infinite keys, each forged from injustice, each sounding out into unknown readerships.
We, the readers, are like inheritors of a ritual incomplete. To read Budiardjo attentively is not simply to study history, but to become momentarily responsible for the continuation of her rebellion against forgetfulness—a rebellion committed not through fire and banners, but through subversive syntax.
In the end, what does it mean to cite Budiardjo? A gesture, perhaps, that risks becoming complicit in the literary mummification she herself feared:
“I do not want to be footnoted. I want to be heard.” (Notebook entry, May 1973)
Yet here we are. Perhaps every footnote to Budiardjo must accept its own insufficiency, its own stylus drawn too late on the stone.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, exile, poetics
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¹ Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in *Illuminations*, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 256.
² Unpublished Notebooks of Carmel Budiardjo, TAPOL Archive, Folder #17, “Chinese Intertext Notebook Mahogany A4,” entry dated February 3, 1973.
³ Ivan Illich, *Deschooling Society* (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 15.
⁴ Carmel Budiardjo, “Speech to Amnesty International Annual Conference,” April 1979, TAPOL Archive, Speech Transcripts Series, File 6.