Child of All Nations

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.

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.

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 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 imitates his father’s Pure-blood Dutchness and hates Natives; Robert Suurhof, Minke’s Dutch rival from school; Magda Peters, the liberal Dutch teacher expelled from the Indies; Jean Marais, the one-legged Frenchman, painter, and veteran of the colonial war in Aceh; Mr. de la Croix, the liberal but interfering Dutch district officer, and his two socially conscious daughters, Miriam and Sarah; Maiko, the Japanese prostitute used by both father and son Mellema; Robert Jan Dapperste (alias Panji Darman), the Native boy adopted by a Dutch preacher; Maarten Nijman, the editor of the powerful Dutch newspaper published in the Indies, the
Soerabaiaasch Nieuws;
Kommer, the exuberant Eurasian editor of a popular Malay-language newspaper; Dr. Martinet, a representative of Dutch science and education at its best; Darsam, the tough fighter and right-hand man of Nyai; Mr. D——. L——., the cowed Dutch accountant; the mysterious Fatso, shadowing Minke
everywhere; Minke’s authoritarian, aristocratic father and his gentle, Javanese-educated mother; as well as a host of minor characters.