A Life Beyond Boundaries (17 page)

With the help of my Javanese labour activist friend Arief Djati, and after many false starts, I eventually discovered that Tjamboek Berdoeri was Kwee Thiam Tjing, a well-known Sino-Indonesian journalist and columnist during the final twenty years of the Dutch colonial regime. With the additional help of some Sino-Indonesian friends, the two of us managed to get the book republished in 2004, with a huge number of footnotes to help modern readers with no experience of the colonial era.

Kwee – we got used to calling him Opa (Grandpa) among ourselves – came from an old East Java Chinese family stretching back many generations. Born in 1900, he was among the very few Chinese youngsters of his time to be educated wholly in Dutch-language schools, but he never went beyond high school because there was
no university in the vast colony. (At the end of his life he laughingly recalled how he often got into fights with his Dutch and Eurasian classmates, and thus was one of the very few ‘natives' who had the luck to beat up a white boy now and then without being punished.) After a brief and unhappy experience working in an import-export firm, he turned to journalism, where he enjoyed immediate success. He worked for various newspapers till the arrival of the Japanese, who suppressed the entire press except for a very few newspapers sponsored by the military authorities themselves.

During the Occupation and after, he worked as the head of a local branch of the Japanese-installed Tonarigumi neighbourhood association, officially created in 1940 for mutual help and national mobilizations, but originally born out of the Gonin Gumi of the Edo period, also set up for mutual help but mainly for spying on behalf of the authorities. (This set of associations still survives today in the Indonesian term
Rukun Tetangga
[Neighbourly Local Group].) He did his best to protect Dutch women and children in his neighbourhood when their men were imprisoned and often killed.

After 1947, we largely lost sight of him until 1960, when he went abroad for the first time in his life, following his daughter, her husband and children to Kuala Lumpur. In 1971, he returned to Indonesia, and began to write a serialized autobiography for the Indonesian newspaper
Indonesia Raya
, which was banned by Suharto in January 1974. He died a few months later. Arief and I edited the serialized stories into a successful book, published in 2010
with the title
Mendjadi Tjamboek Berdoeri
(Becoming a whip with thorns). The more research we did, the more the mystery of the disappearance of Kwee's 1947 masterpiece became understandable. We concluded that there were two primary factors, which are so interesting that they are worth detailing here.

The first was that
Indonesia dalem api dan bara
is written in an extraordinary combination of languages. While the basic language is Indonesian, parts are written in the Chinese dialect of Javanese used in East Java, and the text includes many phrases in a cunning parody of colonial Dutch and Hokkien Chinese, as well as a sprinkling of words in English and even Japanese. The one language Kwee never used was Mandarin. He was proud of the fact that he could not read Chinese characters, and felt himself to be an Indonesian patriot. He was sent to jail in early 1926 for defending an unsuccessful rebellion by the Atjehnese of north Sumatra the previous year. In late 1926, the young Indonesian Communist Party started a hopeless rebellion, and Kwee watched the cadres enter Jakarta's Tjipinang prison just as he was being released. He had been imprisoned for political reasons by the colonial authority a few years earlier than Soekarno, who in 1945 would become the first president of Indonesia.

The use of all these languages (which makes the book almost impossible to translate) was not casual or random. Kwee typically switched languages for satirical purposes, or to give a flavour of the conversation of the people he observed during those years. Sometimes he would also use the technique for poetic or tragically ironical purposes. For
example, in one place he uses the complex expression ‘Of Romusha, of Tjaptun'. It is a mixture of the doubled Dutch word ‘of' (meaning ‘either/or'), the Japanese ‘Romusha' (forced labourers recruited during the Japanese Occupation) and the Hokkien ‘Tjaptun' (ten guilders). It was a bitter remark, saying that ‘money is the best lawyer in hell'. Elsewhere, he describes a grim scene in which revolutionaries are torturing or killing fellow Indonesians suspected of spying for the Dutch. He writes gruesomely that the sound of the battering of the victims' heads was like that of the metallic
kenong
and
kempul
(key instruments in the Javanese
gamelan
orchestra).

The second factor was a consequence of the Republic of Indonesia's entry into the United Nations, accompanied by the Republic's efforts to create a modern state worthy of international recognition. On the one hand, the new state, proud of its national identity and ‘world status', successfully imposed a monopolistic version of Indonesian, which even during the National Revolution had been variable, depending on the social or regional backgrounds of its speakers. The state now frowned upon any contamination by other languages, including even Javanese. The spelling-system was also standardized – something the colonial regime had tried to impose without much success. Hence Kwee's spectacular cosmopolitan polyglot prose was no longer acceptable. On the other hand, the state's education apparatus peddled a version of pre-1950 history which almost completely ignored the role of the Chinese minority, and insisted on a heroic past for the Indonesians, and a diabolical one for the Dutch.

Kwee's book is clearly written by a patriot, but also by a clear-eyed humanist. In it we find excellent, idiotic, pitiable and repulsive Dutch, cruel and tender-hearted Japanese, corrupt and generous Chinese, selfless Indonesian patriots, and sadistic ‘revolutionaries' who tortured and murdered some of Kwee's own relatives on the eve of the Dutch attack on Malang in the summer of 1947. In the political atmosphere of the 1950s and ‘60s very few people from any group wanted to read an honest, disconcerting and complicated book of this kind. So, to use a modern phrase, it was ‘disappeared'. Later, the Suharto regime's heavy repression of the Chinese community – shutting down their press, suppressing their schools, banning much of their writing and excluding them almost completely from politics – made the ‘disappearance' still more profound. (In the thirty-two years of his dictatorship Suharto never gave a Chinese a ministerial post till just before his fall. On the other hand, he cultivated the dozen or so Chinese billionaires who had no political power at all.) Only after the downfall of the regime was it possible to have Kwee's masterpiece republished, and even, to some extent, appreciated.

What I hope to do now is to write something I have never tried: a literary-political biography, largely based on Kwee's autobiographical writings and the several hundred articles we discovered he had written between 1924 and 1940. Its main focus will not be on Kwee's literary and political activities as such, but rather on the interlocked relationship between the two. The idea is to try to reimagine the ‘colonial cosmopolitanism' of that era, created by a huge tide of urbanization, capitalist expansion, new
means of communication and rapidly expanding education (including self-education). Kwee spent most of his time in Surabaya, the large coastal commercial centre which was full of Javanese, Madurese, Outer Islanders, Dutch, Hokkiens, Hakkas, Cantonese, Jews, Yemenis, Japanese, Germans and Indians, and included Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Taoists and Buddhists. They picked up bits of each other's languages for use when they needed to interact, read each other's newspapers, and had sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile relations with one another. In many ways it was a perfect environment for cross-cultural and cross-language creativity.

In 2012 came
The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand
, originally a long article in
Aan
and later a small book published in English by Naveen Kishore's Seagull publishing house in Calcutta. I had always wanted to do some amateurish anthropology, and now the time had come. Early in the 1970s I had gone on the first of many visits to see a large and very strange Buddhist temple, about two hours driving west of Bangkok. Inside, the abbot had built symbols of Islam (cement camels), of Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism from Japan, of Hinduism from India, and even symbols with hints of Christianity – but with Siam's Theravada Buddhism very much on top. Stranger still, outside he had built more than a hundred cement statues of the dead being tortured in Hell for their sins, situated in a kind of garden museum, surrounded during the daytime by vendors, tourist buses and food-stalls. Almost all the statues were completely naked – a
Theravada humiliation for the tormented (usually veiled in temples by tactful fiery murals). Even more strangely, in the abbot's office there were two glass cabinets, one containing a (Thai) skeleton, the other a copy of Donatello's spectacular
David
, but clad in a reddish pair of underpants exposing David's now substantial penis. Each statue of the tormented had a label explaining the sins of the character represented. My friends May and Mukhom carefully drew up a list of them all. The weirdest find was a village woman punished for forcing her husband to cook the domestic rice. On the other hand, there were no statues of corrupt monks, venal police, lying politicians, brutal soldiers, evil capitalists, etc. Why? No doubt out of fear.

After the abbot's death, other temples started to imitate him, invariably creating Disney-like little Hells which scared nobody, though they no doubt brought in some cash. The old abbot's statues quietly turned into erotica for teenagers and foreign tourists. Was Rural Hell dying out? I was struck by the strange symbolic presence of the Great Religions inside the temple, and the absence of any Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Taoist being tortured in the Garden of Hell. It suddenly came to me that all these religions had their own Hells, reserved strictly for themselves: no Christians in Islamic Hell, no Muslims in Hindu Hell, no Hindus in Christian Hell, etc. The old abbot's architecture somehow recognized both the other Great Religions and their own responsibility for punishing their own sinners in the after-life – and no one else. Theravada Buddhism would handle only the sins of its own believers.

~

In 2014 Cornell's Southeast Asia Program kindly published
Exploration and Irony in Studies of Siam over Forty Years
, with a really perceptive introduction by our then director and Siam expert, Tamara Loos. In the same year, my young Spanish friend Carlos Sardiña Galache, an excellent journalist on the current horrors of racism in Burma, and Ramon Guillermo, a first-class Filipino professor, worked with me on a translation from the Spanish of a curious and very funny work called
The Devil in the Philippines According to the Chronicles of the Early Spanish Missionaries
, published by Anvil Publishing in Manila. It was written in 1887 by Isabelo de los Reyes (then a twenty-three-year-old journalist), the founder of Philippines' folklore research. It is useful to recall that though the term ‘folklore' was coined in 1846 by
The Athenaeum
, the first scholarly Folklore Association in the world was founded in England in 1878 when Isabelo was fourteen years old. Perhaps as a trendy teenager he was thrilled by the novelty of this ‘science' and plunged into fieldwork in various parts of Luzon.

Very soon he was corresponding with European folk-lorists in Germany, Portugal, Italy and England, and especially with progressive Spaniards in Madrid and Seville. He discovered that the science of folklore was a perfect instrument for use against the Catholic orders that had dominated Spanish colonialism as far back as the late sixteenth century. All he had to do was to take the mass of ‘official' superstitions of the missionary chroniclers and put them in the same category as paganism's imaginary – as merely interesting myths, miracles and legends – under the microscope of the rationalist new science.

He was also cunning enough to give his original text the title
El Diablo en Filipinas
, suggesting that Satan only arrived his country with the earliest conquistadors. He pointed out that the various spirits known by the indigenous population were all local, and so were never referred to as Satan. On the other hand, it was easy to see that, thanks to the Papacy and the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions – with their enormous power, vast bureaucracies, elaborate hierarchies, executioners, and agents all over the world – Satan had to be imagined as following suit with his own demonic bureaucracy and the terraced ranks of evil giants, wicked dwarves, alluring sirens, witches, sorcerers and cunning shamans.

No wonder that in the 1890s, as Filipino revolutionary nationalism became a threat to the colonial regime, Isabelo was arrested, sent by ship to Barcelona in chains, and imprisoned in the sinister Montjuich Prison, where dozens of anarchists were tortured and sometimes executed. He became great friends with many of them, and when he was finally released and able to return home, his suitcase contained works by Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta, as well as Darwin and Marx.

All my life I have been excited by the difficulties and pleasures of translation. But Eka Kurniawan's novels and short stories are in a class of their own, far above all authors in Southeast Asia that I know. His works have been translated into Japanese, American, French and now, in 2015, into English-English by Verso. When he learned of my fascination with his narrative and my admiration for the
‘unbelievable' prose in
Lelaki Harimau
(Man Tiger), he asked me if I would help Labodalih Sembiring with the translation. Dalih is a mutual friend of ours, also a novelist, and good at English after living for some time in Australia. I spent about four months of constant frustration and laughter at the job. I had the foolish idea that I was in complete command of
bahasa Indonesia
, but on every page I had to rush to the best
bahasa
dictionaries, as well as Javanese and Sundanese (Eka was born and raised in a remote village on the border between the latter two languages). How beautiful, poetic and sophisticated his sentences were. The problem was how to be loyal to both author and reader. The first European novel he had read was Knut Hamsun's terrifying
Hunger
, and he had learned technically from Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez, but he was haunted by the rural traditions he had trusted in his childhood, the horrendous anti-communist massacres in 1965–66 before his birth, and the consequences of the brutal urbanization of his childhood. The biggest problem was how to use English, now an urban and self-satisfied language, to make things so remote also frightening, tragic and understandable.