PENGUIN BOOKS
THIS EARTH OF MANKIND
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.
THIS
EARTH OF
MANKIND
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Translated and with an
Afterword by Max Lane
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First published in Australia by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 1982
First published in the United States of America
by William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1991
Reprinted by arrangement with William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 1996
Copyright © Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 1975
English translation and afterword copyright © Max Lane, 1990
All rights reserved
Originally published in Indonesian by Hasta Mitra Publishing House,
Jakarta, 1980, under the title Bumi Manusia.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:
Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 1925—
This earth of mankind/by Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61533-1
1. Indonesia—History—1798–1942—Fiction. I. Title.
PL5089.T8T46 1991
899’.22132—dc20 91–7346
Designed by Nicola Mazzella
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TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Bumi Manusia was translated as This Earth of Mankind in 1981. Since then the translation has been revised twice, including for this U.S. edition. During the course of this process, which I am sure is still not finished, a large number of people have helped. Among those who have made contributions to refinement of the text are Kerry and Caroline Groves, the late R.F.X. Brissenden, Blanche del Alpuget, Jackie Yowell, and Elizabeth Flann. A special mention must be made of the late Dr. Geoff Blunden, who put considerable effort into editing the manuscript.
I must also express deep gratitude to Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Hasyim Rachman, and Yoesoef Isak, who together provided permission, support, and, most important of all, inspiration to finish this project. Indeed, I thank all my friends in Indonesia for the inspiration that they have been.
Finally, I thank Anna Nurfia and Melanie Purwitasari, who have been tolerant of my absences, either physical or mental, while I have been working on this project.
This narrow path has been trod many a time already, it’s only that this time the journey is one to mark the way.
—P.A.T.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
This novel begins in Java in 1898. The port of Surabaya was an old town that grew up around a major harbor. On the ships frequenting the port were the famed products of the Spice Islands—the spices that originally attracted Europeans to the East Indies. There were also goods from all parts of Asia, machinery and products from nearly every country of Europe, as well as other natural products like rubber, coffee, sugar, and minerals, all heading back to Europe. They sailed southward, supplying the colonies soon to form Australia, while other ships returned, bringing, among other things, dairy cattle for Java’s dairy industry.
The ships carried Dutch officials, businessmen, and adventurers from all over Europe, seeking their fortunes and perhaps ending up in the Dutch Colonial Army or prison. Arabs, Indians, and Chinese were always in port; many had long settled in Java. All these people brought with them aspects of the life of their own countries: their politics; their ideas on religion, philosophy, and morality; their prejudices and their hatreds; and sometimes their imagination and foresight.
Many of these ideas and ways of thinking came in other forms—books, for example. The narrator of our novel says, as he introduces his story, that of all the wonders of science, that at which he marveled most was printing, especially the printing of photographs. Books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets were circulating everywhere; and soon there would be the international telegraph service.
This dynamic environment was no small problem for the government of the Dutch East Indies. That government presided over a colony the exploitation of whose resources made one of the smallest countries of Europe, Holland, one of its richest. This exploitation needed a special condition for its continuation: the maintenance of an attitude of acceptance on the part of the colonized and the governed. The colonizers’ determination was that the native people, especially the toiling classes, of the Netherlands Indies should remain forever submerged in a culture of silence. This made exploitation easier and gave some Dutch their rationale for exhibiting the traditional colonial feelings of cultural arrogance and superiority.
The characters of this novel are set amid the tensions and contradictions created by the colliding of the liberating aspects of the expansion of capitalist industry and its technology on the one hand with the power of the colonial state on the other. In the center is the novel’s narrator, Minke, an eighteen-year-old Native Javanese youth. He is the only Native in the Dutch High School (H.B.S.) in Surabaya. His attendance there points immediately to an outstanding success in primary school and, at least equally importantly, strong back
ing from an important Dutch or Native official, in Minke’s case his grandparents.
His grandparents (though they never appear in the book, as they have passed away) symbolize the third element in the world that the book presents. This is the world of Java itself, or, more specifically, the world of those who for so long had dominated Java. Minke’s mother, whom he refers to as Bunda (a soft, respectful, and loving term, inadequately translated in the text as Mother) and Minke’s father, whom Minke knew only as a title, Father, are feudal Java’s delegates in the novel. Through Minke’s relations with his family, we are brought back to the ways of thinking and acting that the modern world and colonial powers faced when dealing with Java’s feudal rulers. To the ways and ideas of Minke’s father and mother the forces of the imperialist economy pay no heed, while those of the colonial state seek only to manipulate them. But as his mother constantly reminds him, a Javanese must eventually come to terms with his own identity.
There are many more revelations for the reader about life in Java during this period. The reader may note, for example, the constant references to the languages used by the characters: Javanese, Dutch, Malay, Madurese, High Javanese. 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 intercaste, communication (as many elite Javanese could speak Dutch), as well as the language of many Eurasians. Indeed, in situations in which 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 based on the person to whom one was speaking or the person who was doing the 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, channeled their oppressive energies into culture, something which 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 because they do not simply identify racial origins, but manifest how, even in everyday life, race and caste dominated all of Netherlands Indies society. These categories were eventually given legal status. In the story that unfolds through this book, the true nonracial origins of this caste system—namely, the whim of colonial power and colonist—are exposed.
But this is not a book of revenge or hatred. Its spirit is not that of a simple denunciation. Pramoedya Ananta Toer set out to recreate the past through the telling of a story and the evocation of an atmosphere. He has actually brought to life in the first person the real ego of his main character, a new historical personality in the process of being forged by history itself. It is Minke, his psyche, his predicament, that is able to bring such a huge kaleidoscope of characters and stories together. The figure of Minke himself is announcing the coming of something that would envelop everybody, that would leave no part of society free of turmoil: a revolutionary future, the awakening of a people.
* * *
I have been guided by two principles in translating this novel. First, I have tried to cast it in a linguistic form that will facilitate the reader’s enjoyment and easy reading of the novel, while remaining generally faithful to the author’s text. Second, I have tried to avoid totally surrendering the translation of the text to the sovereignty that is sometimes given to the translator’s language. At the same time the peculiar social and political history of language in Indonesia has meant that some linguistic phenomena have not been reproducible. This is especially so as regards the play between languages and levels of language.
A glossary of Javanese terms appears at the end of the book.
Max Lane
Jakarta and Canberra, 1981 and 1990
Table of Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Afterword
Glossary
1
People called me Minke.
My own name . . . for the time being I need not tell it. Not because I’m crazy for mystery. I’ve thought about it quite a lot: I don’t yet really need to reveal who I am before the eyes of others.
In the beginning I wrote these short notes during a period of mourning: She had left me, who could tell if only for a while or forever? (At the time I didn’t know how things would turn out.) That eternally harassing, tantalizing future. Mystery! We will all eventually arrive there—willing or unwilling, with all our soul and body. And too often it proves to be a great despot. And so, in the end, I arrived too. Whether the future is a kind or a cruel god is, of course, its own affair: Humanity too often claps with just one hand.
Thirteen years later I read and studied these short notes over again. I merged them together with dreams, imaginings. Naturally they became different from the original. Different? But that doesn’t matter!
And here is how they turned out.
2
I was still very young, just the age of a corn plant, yet I had already experienced modern learning and science: They had bestowed upon me a blessing whose beauty was beyond description.
The director of my school once told my class: Your teachers have given you a very broad general knowledge, much broader than that received by students of the same level in many of the European countries.
Naturally this breast of mine swelled. I’d never been to Europe, so I did not know if the director was telling the truth or not. But because it pleased me, I decided to believe him. And, further, all my teachers had been born and educated in Europe. It didn’t feel right to distrust my teachers. My parents had entrusted me to them. Among the educated European and Indo communities, they were considered to be the best teachers in all of the Netherlands Indies. So I was obliged to trust them.
This science and learning, which I had been taught at school and which I saw manifested in life all around me, meant that I was rather different from the general run of my countrymen. I don’t know. And that’s how it was that I, a Javanese, liked to make notes—because of my European training. One day the notes would be of use to me, as they are now.
One of the products of science at which I never stopped marveling was printing, especially zincography. Imagine, people can reproduce tens of thousands of copies of any photograph in just one day: pictures of landscapes, important people, new machines, American skyscrapers. Now I could see for myself everything from all over the world upon these printed sheets of paper. How deprived had the generation before me been—a generation that had been satisfied with the accumulation of its own footsteps in the lanes of its villages. I was truly grateful to all those people who had worked so tirelessly to give birth to these new wonders. Five years ago there were no printed pictures, only block and lithographic prints, which gave very poor representations of reality.
Reports from Europe and America brought word of the latest discoveries. Their awesomeness rivaled the magical powers of the gods and knights, my ancestors in the wayang shadow puppet theater. Trains—carriages without horses, without cattle, without buffalo—had been witnessed now for over ten years by my countrymen. And astonishment remains in their hearts even today. The distance from Betawi to Surabaya can be traveled in only three days! And they’re predicting it wil
l soon take only a day and a night! A day and a night! A long train of carriages as big as houses, full of goods, and people too, all pulled by water power alone. If I had ever been so lucky to meet Stephenson, I would have made him an offering of a wreath of flowers, all orchids. A network of railway tracks splintered my island, Java. The trains’ billowing smoke colored the sky of my homeland with black lines, which faded into nothingness. It was as if the world no longer knew distance—it too had been abolished by the telegraph. Power was no longer the monopoly of the elephant and the rhinoceros. They had been replaced by small manmade things: nuts, screws, and bolts.
And over there in Europe, people had begun making even smaller machines, with even greater power, or at least with the same power as steam engines. Indeed, not with steam—with oil. There were also vague reports saying that a German had made a vehicle that worked by electricity. Oh Allah, and I couldn’t really understand what electricity was.
The forces of nature were beginning to be changed by man and put to his service. People were even planning to fly like the shadow puppet character Gatotkaca, like Icarus. One of my teachers had said: Just a little while longer, just a little while, and people will no longer have to force their bones and squeeze out their sweat for so little result. Machines will replace all and every kind of work. People will have nothing to do except enjoy themselves. You are fortunate indeed, my students, he said, to be able to witness the beginning of the modern era here in the Indies.
Modern! How quickly that word had surged forward and multiplied itself like bacteria throughout the world. (At least, that is what people were saying.) So allow me also to use this word, though I still don’t fully understand its meaning.
In short, in this modern era tens of thousands of copies of any photo could be reproduced each day. And the important thing was there was one of these that I looked at more often than any other: a photo of a beautiful maiden, rich, powerful, glorious, one who possessed everything, the beloved of the gods.