Monsoon Reads: This Earth of Mankind by Pramaedyo Ananta Toer

By Marcus Yee

Truth be told, I have not been a serious student of fiction— a term, however, that any fictionist would argue as nothing less than a shallow pool mirroring the depths of reality. No novel has been quite refreshing in my recent reading as Pramaedyo Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind. Beginning with the end of the novel, its final few pages are inscribed with:

Buru.

Spoken, 1973

Written, 1975

The stories were composed during Pramaedyo Ananta Toer’s six or seven as a political prisoner on Buru Island, where the stories were first orally recounted, in fear that he would not live to write them. Reading and writing material were banned. Four years after imprisonment and forced labor, between 1973-1979, Pramaedyo Ananta Toer was finally able to write his major works. These included “This Earth of Mankind”, also known as the “Buru Quartet”, a tetralogy that included, “Child of All Nations”, “Footsteps”, and “House of Glass”.

I knew close to nothing about Pramaedyo Ananta Toer, nothing about his status as cause célèbre for freedom of expression, as the Southeast Asian candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, until I stumbled upon an epigraph in a chapter by Pheng Cheah:

Seluruh dun kini damat megwasi tingkah-laku seseorang. Dan orang data megawasi tingkah-laku seluruh dunia

[The entire world can now observe the actions of any person. And people can observe the actions of the entire world.]

—Pramaedyo Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind

As a student of literature since secondary school in Singapore, I have studied at the foot of towering Shakespeares and Homers, Huxleys and Atwoods. Later in high school, kudos to the global aspirations of the literature department, I encountered works in translation by Chinese, Sri Lankan, Japanese, and Albanian writers to the later in high school. The reading, thankfully, did not stop in high school. But independent reading was directed towards American (Auster, Le Guin, Wallace), English (Woolf), European (Benjamin, Bolaño) and exceptional writers pigeonholed in the problematic ‘world literature’ genre (Lispector, Marquez, Borges, Liu, there are too many to name).

The problem is, where was Southeast Asian literature?

I ask this question both in an academic and a personal way. With the former, methods to situate Southeast Asia as a region as been endlessly debated within academia, as though the further one excavates the more fragmented the regional bloc becomes. One axis of regionalization is European colonization, and another, the imperial-strategic interest of the United States. It is almost a cliche to point out the linguistic, cultural, spiritual, political, and economic fragmentation of the region. This is clearest in the recent exhibition by M+ in Hong Kong, “In Search of Southeast Asia”.

In the personal, if not naive, sense of the question, Southeast Asia has been left to the backrooms of my heady adolescent reading. Neighbouring literatures were not so much treated with disdain, but they struggle to compete for attention against national (Singapore) literatures, and Euro-American literatures. Singapore is In Southeast Asia, but Southeast Asia is not in Singapore.

As though the nearer one is, the further what is nearby recedes from view.

Set during in the Dutch East Indies, the story is a bildungsroman of Minke, a student at the prestigious colonial high school in the Surabaya. Pramaedyo Ananta Toer did not hesitate to highlight the colonial-racial fact of the protagonist’s status as a native— neither “Indo” (racially mixed) nor “Pure-blood”, notwithstanding his brilliance. Minke falls in love with the beautiful Annelies Mellema, and meets her mother, Nyai Ontosoroh, the native concubine poised in the arts of European manners, literature and enterprise. But courtship’s spring was short-lived as Minke was soon embroiled in the tempest of the public gaze and their family affairs.

Protagonists in the novel struggle between multiple subjectivities, precipitated by oppressive colonial and feudal Javanese hierarchies. Nyai experienced betrayal both from his father, who sold her as an underage concubine in hopes of currying favor for a promotion, and her Dutch husband, who was her emblem for fair-weather European values, but eventually descended into madness after an altercation with his first wife. But it is Minke’s struggle balancing between his roles as a native elite, a native within a colonial institution, an adolescent, and an aspiring writer, that gives the plot much of its rich shadings. Minke’s bildungsroman is also a covert form of political education, one not only formally limited by schooling (although his literature teacher was an anti-colonization activist), but a form of education that seeps into lived experience: his interactions with Dutch and “Indons”, a murderous plot around him, a investigative trial around the Nyai’s poisoned spouse, and shortly after, a lawsuit lodged by his first wife over property and rights to Annelies.

Less obvious is the way in which colonial relations are marked by advancements of science and technology in This Earth of Mankind. In the first few pages of the novel, Minke remarks how, “reports from Europe and America brought word of the latest discoveries. Their awesomeness rivalled the magical powers of the gods and knights, my ancestors in the wayang.” And at a later part of the book:

Science was giving birth to more and more miracles. The legends of my ancestors were being put to shame. No longer was it necessary to meditate in the mountains for years in order to be able to speak somebody across the seas. The Germans had laid a cable reaching from England to India! And these cables were multiplying and spreading all over the face of the earth. The entire world can now observe the actions of any person. And people can observe the actions of the entire world.

But mankind and its problems remained as they have always been. And no more so than in matters of love.

These remarks never end in wonder but with caution, “Power was no longer the monopoly of the elephant and the rhinoceros. They have been replaced by small man-made things: nuts, screws and bolts.”

When Nyai found out that Minke wanted to be writer, she said, “Write always about humanity, humanity’s life, not humanity’s death. Yes, whether it’s animals, ogres, gods, or ghosts that you present, there’s nothing more difficult to understand than humanity. That’s why there is no end to the telling of stories on this earth.” This Earth of Mankind is one such story that draws one unflinchingly close to the life’s marrow under colonial injustice, and we, as readers, are displaced only to carry with us a fragile, precious thing, a thing tentatively called humanity.