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Indische Letteren. Jaargang 11 (1996)

Indische Letteren. Jaargang 11

(1996)– [tijdschrift] Indische Letteren–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

An absentee enemy
The non-existence of ‘The Dutch’ in Indonesian literary works
Goenawan Mohamad

Every year Indonesians celebrate the wrong image of their revolution. Around the 17th of August, or Independence day, people build wooden or bamboo ceremonial gates (or gapura) at the entrance to the little alleys leading to their kampongs and invariably, the pictures painted on them, in styles which are both clumsy and crude, are all about a muscular man in green battle-dress, with a red and white headband around thick, long hair, holding a gun or a blood-stained bamboo spear.

The message that comes across to the public mind is that it was the guerrillas who won Indonesia's Independence through armed struggle. I once conducted a kind of survey, using the method of sketchy interviews, asking about fifteen young people under thirty from various places in Indonesia whether they thought that the Proklamasi on the 17th of August, 1945, was the outcome of, and preceded by, a guerrilla war for Independence. Most of my respondents answered ‘yes’ - as if the history books they read (if they read them at all) give no clue whatsoever to the fact that there were more meetings and rallies than bullets and battles before Sukarno and Hatta signed a text proclaiming to the world Indonesia's freedom from Dutch and Japanese colonial power.

The war that eventually gave birth to the country's Independence on the 17th of August, 1945, was not an Indonesian war. The Japanese occupation ended after the American atomic bombs exploded destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby finalizing Japanese defeat. Three and a half years earlier, it had been Dutch military forces controlling the colony that surrendered without much resistance to the invading Japanese Imperial Army.

Indubitably there would have been visible signs of joy among the Indonesian population at seeing their old master brought low by an East Asian power. Yet the last days of the Dutch in Indonesia were generally unmarked by the savage cry for revenge foretold in a poem attached to Multatuli's Max Havelaar, titled ‘De Laatste Dag der Hollanders op Java’ - although apparently there were Indonesians who sensed that a mood of vengeance was not out of place in 1945:

 
Dan zullen wij onze oren strelen
 
Aan uwer vrouwen klaaggeschrei,
 
En staan, als juichende getuigen,
 
Om 't doodsbed van uw dwinglandij.
 
 
 
Dan zullen wij uw kindren slachten
 
En de onze drenken met hun bloed,
 
Opdat der eeuwen schuld met rente,
 
Met woekerwinste word' vergoed.1

This poem, like the crudely crafted drawings on the kampong gates, may be just an expressed preference for the dramatic; after all, massacres and war make better poems, paintings or films than politics and diplomacy do. Or maybe, in the New Order Indonesia, one should not underrate the military bias in Indonesia's current public arts and the way the regime wants to represent the past. Recent monuments built in various Indonesian towns to commemorate the perjuangan years, overwhelmingly depict soldiers in uniform with guns or in armed vehicles.

Still, the fact remains: the whole corpus of documents from the pre-1945 nationalist movement betrays a general lack of urgency on the part of the Indonesian political activists to look into the possibility of waging an armed struggle against the Dutch. Sukarno's idea of a revolution, as mentioned in the text of his defence before his celebrated trial

illustratie
Goenawan Mohamad (omslag tijdschrift Gatra, april 1996).


and imprisonment, Indonesia Menggugat, has nothing to do with guns, bombs, and grenades. Even the communist uprising in 1926, as well as Tan Malaka's Bolshevik letters, give no hint of bearing a dictum similar to Mao Zhedong's, stressing that power emerges from the barrel of the gun. I am persuaded that one of the basic political problems with which Indonesia has had to grapple since Independence - namely, how to deal with the problem of the role of the army - has its origin in the absence of any serious thinking about devising a military option in an ongoing political movement for national liberation.2

Further research is required to explain why the mainstream of Indonesian political thinking on national liberation was seemingly untouched by a profoundly adversial attitude towards the colonizing power as expounded in the works of other Third World intellectuals, particularly in the ideas of Franz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, who promote the balancing of the violence of the colonial regime by the counter-violence of the native, who speak like Fanon does, of the ‘alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle’.3

This article is just an attempt to describe what I see as an imbalance of representation - and in a way it is also an imbalance of the ‘violence’ implied in the construction of the ‘native’ by the ‘Dutch’ and the ‘Dutch’ by the ‘native’ in the Dutch-Indonesian encounter. Let me begin with Kartini's anguish, expressed in one of her famous letters early in this century, when this extraordinary daughter of the regent of Jepara privately complained about the way the Dutch treated the Javanese: ‘The Hollanders laugh and make fun of our stupidity, but if we strive for enlightenment, then they assume a defiant attitude towards us...’.

This is her story:

I shall relate to you the story of a gifted and educated Javanese. The boy had passed the examination, and was number one in one of the three principal high schools of Java. Both at Semarang, where he went to school, and at Batavia, where he took his examinations, the doors of the best houses were open to the amiable schoolboy, with his agreeable and cultivated manners and great modesty.
Everyone spoke Dutch to him, and he could express himself in that language with distinction. Fresh from this environment, he went back to the house of his parents. He thought it would be proper to pay his respects to the authorities of the place and he found himself in the presence of the Resident, who had heard of him, and here it was that my friend made a mistake. He dared to address the great man in Dutch.4

Kartini's is a testimony to the paradox of subjugation - generated by the colonial policy of race and language.5 The paradox also underlies the whole Dutch cultural policy in Indonesia. It is basically a discovery

and, at the same time, a control of alterity. The Dutch, or better, to use Maier's more apt metaphor, the ‘Authority’, constructed the ‘native’, and then tried to create something out of it and/or put it into a governing narrative. Its expression is either outright racist (dogs and inlanders were not allowed to enter certain places), or something more subtle, and more diverse. One can discern it as the idealization of otherness in the Mooie Indië-style of painting, in the way members of the Theosophical Society (apparently a group of significant influence among both the ‘Dutch’ and ‘native’ intellectuals in the late 20s) romanticized the ‘East’, or in Boeke's theory of dual economy. It could even have a protective pretext (or sentiment, if you will), guarding the ‘native’, the noble savage, from cultural impurity. This may explain the remoteness of Indonesian literary works under the Dutch colonialism from any contact with contemporary European arts of the avant garde, or in the educational design to save the ‘native’ from the abyss of ignorance and superstition, as many proponents of the Ethical Policy liked to claim.6

The option, which allowed the ‘native’ (or to be more specific, ‘the best of natives’) to become a member of the colonial society on an equal footing to the ‘Dutch’ in a process called gelijkstelling, underlines the paradox. This was a policy of openness - making the categorical boundary, or better, the apartheid, permeable - and yet it was a reiteration of closure, since in the end the standard of achievement set by the Authority was not to what extent the ‘natives’ could become ‘human’, but to what extent they could become ‘Dutch’. The ‘natives’, while striving to meet the standard - which they sometimes succeeded in doing - perpetuated their fundamental inferiority. In short, colonialism is identity-thinking, to borrow Adorno's word, on a grand scale.

Yet, interestingly, no social act of quid pro quo was noticeable among the colonialized. The ‘natives’ created no coherent ‘Other’. What strikes me in reading texts expressing Indonesian nationalist ideas and Indonesian novels from the last half century is the absence of any pronounced act of essentializing the enemy; ‘The Dutch’ hardly exist, even as a racial entity.

Sukarno's call to form a ‘brown front’, Naar het bruine front!, published in Suluh Indonesia Muda in 1927, was probably the only political appeal he wrote that has a racial argument in it. It was written, in Dutch, as a response to an abortive idea, propagated by the Soerabaiasch Handelsblad, which he described as a ‘conservative newspaper’, to create ‘a white front to put up a stronger opposition to the “native” masses’. The idea apparently received no support from the ‘whites’, and even though Sukarno wrote that the creation of the ‘brown front’ remained a useful political agenda to forge a unity among the various Indonesian parties working against the colonizing ‘foreigners’, his text brings forward no definite representation of the enemy.7

It would be presumptuous to say that the ‘natives’ never tried to

construct ‘the Dutch’ as the enemy, in some way or another. However, it seems that, marginalized by the Authority, they had no governing narrative to insist on others. Or maybe there was the subconscious ambivalence, or indefiniteness, dating back to the eighteenth-century experience, when there was not yet a ‘sense of cultural conflict which was to emerge in response to more aggressive European policies in the 19th century’. The words are from Ricklefs,8 who argues that among the Javanese of the eighteenth century ‘opposition to or alliance with the Dutch was not, it seems, necessarily a choice made upon a particular individual's view of the Dutch nation, race, or culture’. Let me quote further Ricklefs' description:

Generally speaking, the Javanese courtly elite seem to have looked upon the Dutchmen as ‘clowns’. But as with other aspects of Javanese culture, it would be easy to place the wrong interpretation upon the term [...] in Javanese culture the most famous clowns are not only the purveyors of atrocious puns, of a coarse or gentle humour, and sometimes of the most abominable behaviour, but are also wise and even divine figures [...].
Malay authors were also struck by many of the Dutch habits which the Javanese found characteristic, including drinking [...] also the Balinese sculpture and temple relief picturing an obese mustachioed Dutchman seated in a chair with his legs crossed, drinking beer.9

Undoubtedly by the early twentieth century things had changed a great deal, if not radically. The colonial policy then pursued by the Dutch was not only aggressive, it was increasingly oppressive. In the meantime, the Europeans, whose number comprised less than 0.5% of the population, were beset by a recurrent sense of fear perceiving the ‘natives’, who made up a huge majority,10 as an impending danger. Sukarno quoted the Soerabaiasch Handelsblad's writer as having used the words ‘murderous’ and ‘bloodthirsty’ when talking about the ‘indigenous people’ - possibly with a reference to the (above mentioned) poem printed in Max Havelaar extolling the Javanese thirst for revenge. However, such a fear, basically racial in nature, was never reciprocated. It is difficult to imagine the ‘natives’ viewing the European population as a threat in a period when the nationalist movement was increasingly confident of its future. At any rate, ‘the Dutch’ gradually came across as a transitory ‘Other’ - just like the presence of the grotesque, clumsy, and oversized figures, the buta and the sabrangan, in the wayang play. And like the buta and the sabrangan - ‘the Dutch’ had stopped being perceived as clowns, I gather - they represented a complexity of identities, just as one Dutchman living in Indonesia describes his compatriots and their race in relation to the ‘natives’: ‘First exploiters, second, guar-

dians, and third, partners in distress’.11 And like those transient wayang characters, they would soon be moving towards the exit.

It is also important to note that the strong dosage of Marxist influence had imbued the Indonesian nationalist movement with a well-founded sense of optimism, hence the perception of Dutch presence as passing stage of historical development. It also saved nationalist leaders from interpreting colonial social structure in purely racial terms. The birth of the Indische Partij in 1912, with its multiracial leadership, strengthened the more universalistic assumption.

It cannot be denied that the growing sense of cultural conflict of the later colonial period generated real moments of identity-consciousness. Hence the never ending debate of the ‘East-West’ controversy. The early years of the Poedjangga Baroe in the 1930s saw poets and essayists defending their brand of new writing. Sanusi Pane, who later went to India to rediscover the magnanimity of the ‘East’ under the influence of the Theosophical Society, challenged the view of traditional Melayu teachers who accused the young writers as being ‘too Westernized’. More widely known are the polemics expressing Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana's position about the future of Indonesia. The debate continued through the 1950s and 1960s. In recent years, a more acute sense of cultural conflict has been the feature of Islamic reawakening, with a more perceptible antagonism towards the ‘West’.12

None the less, the early years of Independence were marked by literary expressions that exhibit no such a susceptibility. Curiously, those were the years of severe armed conflicts between the guerrillas of the new-born Republic and the returning Dutch military power.

In 1948 a new literary journal, Gema Suasana, was launched, edited by three rising young writers, later known as the leading figures of Indonesian literature of the 1940s: Chairil Anwar, Asrul Sani and Rivai Apin. In its first issue, Chairil announces the journal's commitment to ‘fight through the stinking air and fog spread by the existing press’. In its second issue, there is a quote from an Indian woman intellectual, who condemns writers and nation-builders who put a stress on their national and racial sentiment. ‘This is a symptom of a disease’, the quote asserts.13

It seems that Gema Suasana's tone created a stir among Indonesian intellectuals of the time. In 1951, H.B. Jassin wrote accusing the journal of having been the instrument of the Dutch administration residing in Jakarta under the much-hated Van Mook. The magazine was published by Stichting Opbouw-Pembangunan, and there were ‘several Dutchmen behind the screen, of whom one was member of the Van Mook cabinet’, according to Jassin. The critic believes that ‘this is unforgivable’. The Dutch, he argues, were exploiting the anti-partisan stance of the magazine, while plotting to conquer Indonesians again, as proved by their 1948 military action against the position of the Republic.14



illustratie
Johan Braakensiek, De Amsterdammer (1920): ‘Nederland's kostbaarst sieraad’. In: Indische ‘waarheden’.


It is interesting to note that Jassin's highly partisan argument did not last long. In fact, in the same text, written less than one year after the Indonesian writers in the editorial board of Gema Suasana left the journal, Jassin introduces the idea of humanisme universil. Admittedly, it is a rather baffling combination of words and the thinking behind it is a little bit banal. Yet the spirit is basically in line with the intellectual tenor of the time, i.e. a fresh stress on the ideals of human commonality.15

It cannot be denied that Jassin's humanisme universil created a long and bitter controversy, especially during the renewal of a more nationalistic sentiment under Sukarno's ‘Guided Democracy’. It was the time when the proponents of ‘revolutionary literature’, using the socialist realism as a model, insisted on a more partisan intellectual and artistic expression.16 None the less, novels and poetry written during and about the Dutch-Indonesian war of the 1940s exhibit a remarkable absence of a governing construct of ‘the Dutch’. In the works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, written during his imprisonment under the occupying Dutch administration, or in Idrus' sketches of the battle of Surabaya, or in Mochtar Lubis' story of fear and violence in the guerrilla warfare in Jakarta (in Jalan tak ada ujung, Road without end), ‘the enemy’ is either remote or ‘the Dutch’ slip into a fleeting multifariousness.

A case in point is Keluarga gerilya (The guerrilla family), Pramoedya's novel written in the Bukit Duri jail in 1949. The hero, Saaman, who is waiting to be executed, is befriended by the warden, Van Keerling. Van Keerling is not exactly Dutch; his mother is a ‘native’ - most probably Pramoedya's method of disclosing a motive, more as a sociological explanation than anything else. He represents a difference, and at the same time an idea of human commonality, just like the totok Dutch soldiers who had to shoot him.17 Ironically, it is the army doctor, a dark-skinned man, who addresses some hostile, accusatory words to Saaman minutes before the execution.

Another novel by Pramoedya, Mereka yang dilumpuhkan (The paralyzed), is even more a richly varied landscape of human faces - under the crushing symbol of Authority, the prison. Again, the force of the text goes together with the recognition of otherness through empathy. It seems that in this space, the Authority crumbles in its habitual attempt to construct and control differences that are perfectly human.

One may argue, that the absence of ‘the Dutch’ in the Indonesian literary works of the Independence war has its origin in the complete separateness between ethnic communities in the colonial period.18 But the literary works written in the war years of the 1940s may be truer to the impetus of many social actions towards liberation. Fanon, for one, puts it eloquently: liberation is consciousness of self, ‘not the closing of a door to communication’.19 Maybe this is a good reminder of our own times, a time of ‘the hardening of identity politics’, when

different human communities seem to slide towards the premise that social groups have essential identities.20 Or, in the sad words of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his summing up of the mood of the end of this century: ‘What holds humanity together today is the denial of what human race has in common’.21


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