Child of All Nations

311 Pages·1996·1.21 MB·English

by  Pramoedya Ananta Toer

PENGUIN BOOKS
CHILD OF ALL NATIONS
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born on the island of Java in 1925. He was
imprisoned first by the Dutch from 1947 to 1949 for his role in the Indonesian
revolution, then by the Indonesian government as a political prisoner. Many of
his works have been written while in prison, including the Buru Quartet (This
Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass) which
was conceived in stories the author told to other prisoners during his
confinement on Buru Island from 1969 to 1979.
Pramoedya is the author of thirty works of fiction and nonfiction. His novels
have been translated into twenty languages. He received the PEN Freedom-to-
write Award in 1988 and the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1995. He is currently
under city arrest in Jakarta where his books are banned and selling them a crime
punishable by imprisonment.
Max Lane was second secretary in the Australian embassy in Jakarta until
recalled in 1981 because of his translation of Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet.
CHILD
OF ALL
NATIONS
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Translated from the
Indonesian by Max Lane
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2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Australia by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 1984
First published in the United States of America by William Morrow and
Company, Inc. 1993
Reprinted by arrangement with William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 1996
23 25 27 31 30 28 26 24 22
Copyright © Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 1979
English translation copyright © Max Lane, 1991
All rights reserved
Originally published in Indonesian by Hasta Mitra Publishing House, Jakarta,
1980.
Toer, Pramoedya
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:
Ananta, 1925– [Anak semua bangsa. English]
Child of all nations/Pramoedya Ananta Toer; translated from the Indonesian by
Max Lane.
p. cm.
Translation of: Anak semua bangsa.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61532-4
1. Indonesia—History—1798–1942—Fiction. I. Title.
PL5089.T8A25 1993
899’.22132—dc20 93–3516
Printed in the United States of America Set in Bembo
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding
or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
T
o preserve something of the rich
texture of cultures, languages, forms of address, dialects, beliefs, and milieus of
the Indies, I have retained numerous Malay, Javanese, and Dutch terms.
These are italicized the first time they appear. If explanations or translations
are required, they can be found in the Glossary at the back of this book. The
Glossary also contains some English words or acronyms and certain
identifications that may not be familiar to the English-speaking reader. The
explanations given have been kept to the minimum. A richly rewarding project
that awaits scholars of Indonesian history is the preparation of a detailed guide to
all the historical and cultural material contained in Pramoedya’s tetralogy.
The production of such a complex translation is not easy. The contributions
made by Susanna Rodell and Jackie Yowell at Penguin Australia to the editing
of this manuscript have been very important.
I am grateful to Professor A. H. Johns of the Australian National University
for providing facilities, including an office, while I was working on this
translation.
I would like to thank, once again, Anna Nurfia for her tolerance of the time
taken up by this project. I must also thank those concerned in Indonesia for their
continuing friendship, which has been a cable that has kept the energy of my
commitment to Indonesia flowing here in Australia.
INTRODUCTION
“We fought back, Child, as well and as
honorably as possible.”
T
hese were the words that ended
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel This Earth of Mankind, the first in a quartet of
which Child of All Nations is the second. This Earth of Mankind was indeed a
story of people fighting back, of resisting the worst of colonial oppression and
greed.
It was also a gripping story of remarkable characters caught in the cultural
whirlpool that was the Dutch East Indies of the 1890s. Because Pramoedya’s
vision extends far beyond parochial politics to reach for more universal human
concerns, it is a bitter irony that, in 1965, he was arrested by Suharto’s junta, and
his entire library, including research and notes assembled over many years, were
burned to ashes. He was jailed, without trial, for fourteen years. Denied access to
writing materials, he kept his literary vision alive by recounting his stories to
other prisoners. Only in 1975 was he permitted the facilities to commit his
novels from memory to paper.
A year after his release from Buru Island concentration camp in 1979, This
Earth of Mankind was published in Jakarta as Bumi Manusia. Soon after, its
sequel Anak Semua Bangsa (Child of All Nations) was published. Both novels
became best-sellers in Indonesia, as reviewers hailed Pramoedya’s return to the
nation’s literary life. However, in May 1981 both books were banned in
Indonesia. The government accused the books of surreptitiously spreading
“Marxism-Leninism”—surreptitious because, they claimed, the author’s great
literary dexterity made it impossible to identify actual examples of this
“Marxism-Leninism.” Later in the year students from the University of
Indonesia were arrested and expelled when they invited Pramoedya to speak on
campus. One of the publishers of Pramoedya’s books, Yusuf Isak, was
imprisoned for over three months, without being charged. Pramoedya himself
and Hasyim Rahmam, Yusuf’s partner in the publishing house Hasta Mitra, were
repeatedly interrogated.
In This Earth of Mankind Minke is an eighteen-year-old Javanese, the first to be
educated in an exclusive Dutch school in Surabaya. Striving for his own
personal and intellectual development, he is drawn into the more immediate and
dramatic struggle that faces his formidable native mentor, and then mother-in-
law, Nyai Ontosoroh. Sold as a girl to a wealthy Dutch businessman by her
ambitious father, Nyai had become acquainted with the true character of the
colonial system early in life, and fought back at it with vengeance. After her
corrupt and insane Dutch master is murdered, she rises to restore and control his
business, Boerderij Buitenzorg. Minke, on the other hand, has been spoiled by
the system. He has received an elite Dutch education. He is attracted to Dutch
ways by the apparent superiority of the West, such as the modern achievements
of electricity, machines, photographs, and books.
Minke’s struggle, sparked off by his association with Nyai, becomes
essentially against himself—against his integration into, and identification with,
the colonialists’ civilization. Nyai Ontosoroh is self-taught; she has never been
to an elite Dutch school, nor any school, except that of life itself. Yet she proves
herself again and again to be capable of both defending her principles and self-
respect, and imparting to Minke knowledge and understanding that he would
never learn at school. Nyai Ontosoroh’s dignity is evidence of an alternative and
superior civilization developed in spite of rather than because of Dutch colonial
authority.
The separate struggles—Minke’s against his illusions about Western values,
and Nyai’s against their brutalizing effects—are complicated and intensified by
their coming together. They are brought together by Nyai’s Eurasian daughter,
Annelies, whom Minke loves and marries. Minke moves into Nyai’s mansion to
live with Annelies. Annelies’s deep and unqualified love for Minke is an attempt
to resolve her own complex contradictions. Annelies is not legally Nyai’s
daughter and, after Annelies’s Dutch father dies, she “reverts” to being the
property of his far-off Dutch relatives. Nyai and Minke’s personal struggles are
put aside as they fight (unsuccessfully) to protect Annelies from being taken to
the Netherlands.
Minke’s eyes are opened by these experiences. He is amazed by the cold,
legalistic language of the court. In the colonialists’ eyes, Natives are just items
on inventories. Minke and Nyai become one force as they rally all their energies
and friends to resist the plans of the dead Dutchman’s relatives. Minke’s
outstanding talents as a writer are tested to the full: His passionate challenges to
the inhumanity of colonial “justice” are circulated far and wide.
the inhumanity of colonial “justice” are circulated far and wide.
The use of language in this period was an important indicator of a person’s
social caste. Dutch, of course, was the language of the governing caste;
Javanese, the Native language of the Javanese; and Madurese, the Native
language of Madura (an island off Java). Malay was the language of interracial,
or rather intercaste communication (as many elite Javanese could speak Dutch),
as well as the language of many Eurasians. Indeed, in situations where the caste
order needed to be emphasized, Natives were forbidden to use Dutch. Not only
did colonialism install Dutch as the supreme caste language of Java, it helped
reinforce and even exaggerate caste distinctions in the Native languages
themselves, especially Javanese. The Javanese language already operated on at
least three different levels, each used according to the person to whom one was
speaking. This feudal stratification was given extra force as Javanese feudal
notables, devoid of real political power in the face of the Dutch cannon and
Dutch capital, channelled their oppressive energies into culture, something
Dutch cannon and capital were, in turn, frequently ready to buttress. The
egalitarian and colloquial Javanese that was used in the palaces and royal houses
of Java actually died out in this period. Only the masses of peasants and other
toilers retained such an egalitarian Javanese.
The terms Native, Mixed-Blood and Pure are capitalized. This is because
they do not simply identify the racial origin of the persons involved, but manifest
how, even in everyday life, racial caste dominated all of Netherlands Indies
society. These categories were eventually given legal status. Thus racism was
institutionalized as a caste system by colonialism.
Among the many complex interrelated themes of political, cultural, and social
life in the Indies, Pramoedya describes the emergence of a bourgeois from a
feudal culture; the demands for rights of indigenous language and culture; the
divisions amongst the colonialists over their treatment of the Natives; the
intervention of Dutch colonial capitalism into the Javanese countryside; and the
humiliation of the Javanese nobility in their dependence on Dutch officialdom.
Most importantly, he writes of the development of those energies that would
galvanize the Indonesian people into finally standing up and throwing off the
yoke of colonial domination.
These themes are brought to life by the richly drawn characters in This Earth
of Mankind, many of whom reappear in Child of All Nations: Nyai, Minke, and
Annelies; Ah Tjong, the corrupt Chinese brothel owner who murders Herman
Mellema, Nyai’s Dutch master; Robert Mellema, his and Nyai’s son, who