Pram In My Perspective

Ask anyone who knows, and they’ll tell you that Indonesia’s greatest author was a man named Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Pram, they will tell you, was Southeast Asia’s leading contender for a Nobel Prize in literature until his death in 2006. Then they will tell you the story of how Pram’s greatest work came to be, which story explains why he can be called “great.”

Pram was a prolific writer, and it is not only the contemporary lens, pushed in his direction by post-facto understanding of his importance, that traces back his history and overstates what he had to say before he became the man whose work is inescapable as epigrams in books about Indonesia. He was one of the leading young writers of the nationalist generation, coming of age in the 1940s and achieving imprisonment by the Dutch at age 22. In a pattern that would be repeated, he authored his first novel while incarcerated. Pram’s writings were full of social critique and, in the early years, nationalist fervor. He was a political writer in the sense that his books addressed social issues in ways that aligned him with the political forces of his day. Importantly, by the years of his writerly maturity, he had transcended the need to write political books in which the characters took a back seat to the polemic. Think of Dostoevsky’s arc—from polemicist-through-fiction to imprisonment to novels about people that contain polemic—and you have a rough sketch of Pram’s.

In 1969, Pram went to jail for the second time. Gaoled by the newly installed Suharto government for his ties to leftist groups, Pram was sent to the barren island of Buru, where pen and paper were banned. It was on Buru that Pram began in earnest what would become the project of his life. Starting in 1973, Pram awoke each morning before roll call and recited aloud to fellow prisoners the saga of a boy from Blora, Pram’s hometown on Java. In 1975, the restrictions on writing materials were lifted for some prisoners (though not for Pram), and the prisoners began taking notes on the recited story. Assembled and refined into a manuscript, the notes became four books published upon Pram’s release in 1979.

The Buru Quartet, as the books came to be known, are fascinating social novels that put on display the sickening consequences of a racialized colonial state. Within them is a critique of the Suharto government, but it is so subtle that I suspect the two-year delay between the books’ release and their banning was not because the censors had belatedly detected them, but rather because they decided that, if his previous work had been banned in 1966, it made no sense to permit access to his contemporary work.

This Earth of Mankind

Book One of the Buru Quartet, This Earth of Mankind (in Indonesian: Bumi Manusia), is the story of the adolescent Minke, a full-blooded noble Javanese finishing his education at an elite Dutch school in Surabaya. Minke occupies an unusual place in the racialized colonial hierarchy: descended from a regent, he holds forum privilegium, the right to be tried in a European court; as a full-blooded Indonesian, a Native, he falls into the lowest racial stratum, beneath Europeans, Indos (people of mixed race with a European parent), and non-Indonesians. But it would be better to say that Minke holds no place in the hierarchy, that he is exceptional, and the book becomes the story of how not holding a place in the hierarchy can be both empowering and terrible.

Minke is the first of the liminal people at the heart of This Earth of Mankind, which includes as principals a European drunk’s educated concubine, their daughter, her Madurese-immigrant protector, a disabled French veteran of the Aceh war, his Indo daughter, and the residents of a Chinese-owned brothel. It is through these people for whom the caste system has provided no caste that Pram brings the racial colonial state into focus. That picture becomes clear only gradually, largely through Minke’s growing disillusionment with a culture he had been taught to love. The Minke of the opening pages is young Dutchman, a lover of equality besotted by the triumphal science of the day. He openly professes contempt for the superstitions of the Javanese culture into which he was born—and to which, in the eyes of Europeans, he will always belong; if indeed he belongs to any caste at all. As one jealous European classmate explains:

“The person in question…is not even an Indo. He is lower than an Indo, than someone whose father refused to acknowledge him. He is an Inlander, a Native who has smuggled himself in through the cracks of European civilization.” (213)

Pram spares few in his critiques, and the co-opted Javanese aristocracy does not come off any better than the Dutch. Minke is disgusted when, in the presence of a Dutch-installed regent, he must crawl on his knees and stare downwards, as one traditionally did in the presence of a Javanese king. It is here that his sense of himself as a European begins to fall apart. Pram uses the moment to document his own mistrust of Javanese tradition while showing that Minke’s Europhilism has made him unable to function in the Javanese noble stratum that enabled his education:

“You’re indeed no longer Javanese. Educated by the Dutch, you’ve become Dutch, a brown Dutchman, acting this way. Perhaps you’ve become a Christian.”

“Ah, Mother, don’t go on so. I’m still the same son as before.”

“My son of the past wasn’t a rebel like this.”

“Your son didn’t know right and wrong then. I only rebel against that which is wrong, Mother.”

“That is the sign you’re no longer Javanese, not paying heed to those older, those with greater right to your respect, those who have more power…. This is a way to achieve nobility of character. People must have the courage to surrender. Perhaps you no longer know that song either?”

“I still remember, Mother. I still read the Javanese books. But those are the misguided songs of misguided Javanese. Those who have the courage to surrender are stamped and trodden upon.” (130)

In Minke’s Europeanized mind, Javanese tradition is inimical to the morality of equality to which he is deeply committed, but more disgracefully, it is also the root of Java’s total subjugation. In that final line are the seeds of Minke’s nationalism, still unformed at the end of This Earth. In that line, too, is a hint at Pram’s view of the world in which he lived as he recited Minke’s story.

If Javanese culture was part of the problem, for Pram and Minke another Indonesian culture provides the model worth emulating. Through the stories of the French veteran, Aceh emerges as the example of native resistance and nationalist struggle. Just as Acehnese rebellion recurs in Indonesia’s history, the image of Aceh as the model of struggle recurs in This Earth. If Javanese tradition teaches “the courage to surrender,” Aceh teaches that fighting unwinnable wars for the sake of resistance alone is the more courageous path. As Minke comes to understand that the whole power of the colonial state will be deployed against him, he takes Aceh as his model.

I understood at that moment: we would be defeated and our only duty now was to fight back, to defend our rights, until we were not able to fight back any longer—like the Acehnese. (331)

The nature of Minke’s defeat cannot be explained without ruining the story, but it can be analyzed. This Earth of Mankind is, in the end, a book about the rule of law. In the Dutch colonial state, law was intimately tied to the racial caste system, such that different court systems existed to try Europeans, Indos, and Natives. For the liminal people at the heart of the story, the legal playing field is not only uneven, its contours and rules can be redrawn at a moment’s notice to suit the powers that be. For the sympathetic Dutch, the Radicals who advocate racial equality and the liberals who to some degree agree, the last argument in favor of the colonial state is that it is better than kingly rule. Kings ruled arbitrarily; they took the people’s wives. As an open-minded Dutch magazine editor points out, “under the Native kings, your people were never secure, never at peace; there was no legal protection, because indeed there was no law. What hasn’t the Netherlands Indies government done for the people?” (295).

By the book’s end, it is clear that law in a colonial state is only a mask for arbitrariness. The goal of such a state is oppression, and within a framework of “law” and “protection” even that worst excess of the old Javanese kings can be repeated. It is as awful as what it replaced; perhaps worse for claiming to be better.

Pramoedya was a social critic, and This Earth of Mankind is a novel of social criticism. The book’s subject is without a doubt the pre-nationalist colonial period in which it is set. But a book about the rule of law written by a political prisoner denied access even to pen and paper must also be about the time in which it was written. Part of what makes This Earth so impressive is the way this aspect the novel is entirely subtext—at no point does it surface—and yet by the end, the fundamental wrongness of the Suharto regime has been made clear for all those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Undermining the claim of difference, the claim that colonial rule was at least less arbitrary, raises the question, “what about today?” If you know where Pram wrote This Earth of Mankind, you know the answer.

The English edition couples the closing words with a simple postscript that makes that connection just a little easier. Ending with an implicit evocation of Aceh, come these words in a moment of profound loss:

“We have been defeated, Mama,” I whispered.

“We fought back, child, Nyo, as well and honorably as possible.”

Buru Island Prison Camp

Spoken, 1973

Written, 1975

  What a book.