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Subject: [INDONESIA-U] NYTRB - Review: This Earth of Mankind
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Subject: [INDONESIA-U] NYTRB - Review: This Earth of Mankind
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------------------------------------------
Banned in Jakarta
Date: January 19, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Barbara Crossette;
Lead:
THIS EARTH OF MANKIND By Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
Translated by Max Lane. 367 pp. New York: William Morrow
& Company. $20.
Text:
THE culture of Indonesia remains remote to many of us in
the West in part because the literature of this
intensely civilized, ethnically kaleidoscopic island
nation is rarely available in easily readable
translation, especially in the United States. A colony
of the Netherlands until 1949 and the victim of harsh
Japanese occupation in World War II, modern Indonesia
was born of struggles for liberation against the
Japanese and the Dutch in the 1940's. Those traumatic
but inspiring days were the setting for "The Fugitive,"
the first novel of Pramoedya Ananta Toer to be published
in English in this country.
Now comes a book of far greater scope and depth from
independent Indonesia's greatest but still most
controversial fiction writer, whose career spans more
than 40 years. "This Earth of Mankind," the first in a
cycle of four novels, is the tale of a bittersweet
coming of age in Java, Indonesia's dominant island,
almost a century ago. Through it, we are taken back to
the days of nascent Indonesian nationalism. But the
author is a humanist, not a propagandist, and so his
novel is also a wonderful example of the best
storytelling tradition of his country. It was, in fact,
first told orally to inmates on Buru Island, where
Pramoedya (as he is known in Indonesia, since Javanese
do not often use family names) was imprisoned for his
political views following an abortive coup in 1965 and
the subsequent rise to power of the tenacious strong man
Gen. Suharto. The story was written down in the early
1970's and published in Jakarta in 1980, where it was
promptly banned by President Suharto's censors, though
there was nothing in it even remotely related to current
events. The first English translation, by Max Lane, then
an Australian diplomat, resulted in Mr. Lane's recall in
1981. His translation has been widely read in Asia and
Europe and has now been revised for this American
edition.
"This Earth of Mankind" centers on Minke, a young man of
18 with an engaging sensitivity to the many worlds
around him. He is the only "Native" in a Dutch high
school in the port city of Surabaya, and he can move
confidently in the colonizers' culture, whether they
like it or not. He is also the son of a Javanese
aristocrat, the friend of a French mercenary wounded
fighting rebels in Sumatra and the lover of the
exquisite Annelies Mellema, a girl half Dutch, half
Javanese. Annelies's mother, a concubine, emerges as the
strongest character in the book as she endures Dutch and
Javanese prejudices while struggling to run her
dissolute Dutch companion's business and raise their two
children.
Minke's mother is another strong character, loving her
son more fiercely when his father rejects him, but
always urging him to be Javanese. When Minke becomes a
writer for a Dutch-language journal, she pleads in a
letter: "Why do you compose in a language that your
mother cannot understand? Write the story of your love
in the poetry of your ancestors so that your mother and
the whole country may sing them."
The web of relationships Mr. Toer has woven affords a
lesson in the complex psychology of colonial life -- of
both the colonizers and the colonized. There are few
one-dimensional "good" or "bad" characters here.
Instead, people grope for an understanding of themselves
and the complex society in which they live. In his
fluidly rendered translation, Mr. Lane has not burdened
us with intrusive explanations, although he does provide
a useful glossary. Rather than being educated about
Minke's world, we are immersed in it.
WESTERN readers may, however, find it helpful to have a
little background on the novelist himself, to explain
why the Suharto regime has been hounding him for a
quarter of a century. Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born in
Java in 1925, in time to come of age with his country.
Always at odds with authority, Mr. Toer was imprisoned
for the first time by the Dutch in the late 1940's when
the Netherlands made an abortive attempt to reassert
itself in Indonesia. Freed on the eve of independence,
he soon established himself as a writer and began to
drift toward the political left, more rapidly after a
trip to China in 1956. In those years, the Communist
Party of Indonesia, like its counterpart in Malaya, was
attracting support from the resident overseas Chinese, a
prosperous community whose relationship with other
Indonesians has been marked by tragedy. Mr. Toer wrote a
sympathetic book on the Indonesian Chinese that was
banned by the country's founding president, Sukarno.
The roots of Mr. Toer's problems with Sukarno's
successor, President Suharto (and with a significant
number of other Indonesians who are not admirers of the
Government) stem from the author's involvement in the
1950's and 60's in the uncompromisingly left-wing
Institute of People's Culture. Many Indonesian
intellectuals saw this as a Stalinist-style organization
determined to enforce a "correct" state of culture. To
President Suharto, a tough anti-Communist, it was
subversive.
After 14 years in prison and under house arrest, Mr.
Toer is now technically under "municipal confinement" in
Jakarta, where he lives with his extended family. In the
last few years, he has begun to meet foreigners and is
now occasionally seen in public. But he has not
published anything for a decade, and he does not want to
risk traveling abroad, fearing that the Government would
not allow him to return.
Mr. Toer, though Javanese, has always written in the
national Malay language, Bahasa Indonesia. But it is in
the universal language of fine storytelling that he
speaks most persuasively. Thanks to translations like
Mr. Lane's, Mr. Toer's eloquence and insight can now be
shared by readers far from his homeland.