Veronika Kusumaryati

Journalists like John Martinkus have risked their lives by reporting from West Papua. What they bring to readers are, to borrow Susan Sontag’s words, ‘full frontal views of the dead and dying’. For me, at the centre of The Road is the litany of a witness burdened by the gravity of knowing and seeing the dead in full frontal view. But the book shows that while writing has its virtue, it is not nearly enough. Sontag suggests that we should not take the ‘we’ for granted when ‘the subject is looking at other people’s pain,’ but what is clear is that the ‘they,’ the Papuans who are the living dead, dying under Indonesian persecution, also see and demand a response, an action. John Martinkus’s The Road: Uprising in West Papua magnifies their stories so that we not only see but act.