The Islands of the Setting Sun
This Earth of Mankind and Man Tiger review
‘Now, as I think of setting down my pen the sky has a dirty cast. But surely, the clouds are not eternal.’
The Mute’s Soliloquy: A Memoir, Pramodya Ananta Toer
This Earth of Mankind was one of two Indonesian novels that made the 15,000 mile round trip with me to the island of Bali last month. Amidst all the preparation for a long haul flight which would take me as far from home I had ever been, I got into the habit of buying things to alleviate the anticipation. Two types of insect repellent, two different factors of suncream and two compression socks (I hear they work better as a pair). And while Amazon had my every desire covered, and even planted a few I wasn’t aware of, what wasn’t quite so straightforward was finding a local novel to read when I arrived.
Scrolling through lists of the best books written by Indonesian authors, it seemed there was a curious lack of literature for a country that is the fourth most populated on earth. Where were all the writers amongst the 280 million Indonesians? Most of the books on each list I browsed seemed to be by tourists, with titles that could have been written by a dial up generator for beach read clichés: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and ‘A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul’…
Digging a little deeper, I discovered a list of the country’s greatest works which included the impressive contemporary writer Eka Kurniawan and his meditative novel, Man Tiger. Nominated for the Booker Prize in 2016 for the magic realist story layered with perspective, Kurniawan has addressed the question of his country’s lack of literary success as being due to the rarity of Indonesian writers being translated for a global readership. Whether the chicken or the egg is to blame remains a pregnant question.
Alongside Man Tiger was Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet. A series of four novels mentally composed and recited by the author in a feat of artistic defiance while imprisoned as an uncharged dissident on the notorious prison island of Buru. Described by Christopher Hitchens in his 2008 essay for Vanity Fair ‘A Prayer for Indonesia’:
‘The national laureate of Indonesia is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a magnificent novelist in the tradition of Zola and Steinbeck (and translator of the latter) who is Asia’s chief candidate for the Nobel Prize. His masterpiece is The Buru Quartet, a fictional sequence written on the remote island of the same name, where he was imprisoned without trial for 14 years as a consequence of the coup of 1965. (It was easy for the Indonesian generals to create a gulag for the left: they already had an archipelago.)’
The allusion to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn here is of course an irresistible one. Arrested by the NKVD under Article 58 of the Russian penal code, an amorphous regulation for ‘counter revolutionary activities’, Solzhenitsyn like millions of innocent soviet citizens was convicted of transgressing Article 58 by a special council of the NKVD in absentia. For many of these millions, this was a death sentence by cold, starvation or exhaustion in one of the sprawling islands of Siberian penal colonies that Solzhenitsyn was to expose and provide an undying name for in The Gulag Archipelago.
As the Russian author wrote In the First Circle, ‘A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his own country’. This would appear to be a sentiment shared by the far right Suharto regime in the case of Pramoedya. Max Lane notes in the postscript to his 1991 translation of This Earth of Mankind that the Suharto government accused Pramoedya’s 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.’ To invoke the spirit of Hitchens again, totalitarianism is noting if not a cliché. Universally Kafkaesque in its attempts at a grand redesign, irrespective of the right, left or populist guise the despot du jour may adopt.
Like Solzhenitsyn, Pramoedya was forbidden to read or write anything on his island of the Indonesian archipelago. As he recalled many years later in old age, during a search by prison guards one of his fellow inmates was once found with a scrap of newspaper that had been used to wrap a set of nails and which, in an act of silent resistance, he had held onto. The man’s body was discovered a few days later face down in an irrigation trench. That words can be more powerful and precious than life itself are principles that unfortunately cut both ways.
Exiled to toil or perish, each writer found himself in literary purgatory; unable to eat his daily bread or write about his spiritual hunger. But as Pramoedya would write many years later in his autobiography, with echoes of Solzhenitsyn: ‘Great artists become great because their life has been crammed with profound experiences’. And as such, profound hostility to the written word forced the hand of these great artists to return to the primeval origins of their modern art; to observe and conjure a narrative from imagination, and to publish via an oral tradition that was fortunately strong in both Russian and Indonesian folk culture. But I digress across continents and must return to This Earth and Man Tiger.
Pramoedya and Kurniawan are two of the few Indonesian authors to have escaped the obscure majority and been deemed worthy for translation, in turn receiving levels of international acclaim according to the test of time. What was most pleasing in reading them one after the other (first Man Tiger and then This Earth of Mankind), was that the more I read of the latter, the heavier the influence of Pramoedya began to hang like a humid jungle mist over Kurniawan’s story.
For there are more than a few simple parallels. Both stories are primarily seen through the eyes of a young male protagonist on the cusp of manhood, Margio and Minke. A cut above his peers and therefore somewhat aloof from the crowd, ‘M’ emerges into a new reality which challenges his sense of self as seen from the past, present and future. This may all sound highfalutin, but time plays such an important role in the development of each of the plots which are not necessarily linear, and how the boy, each father to the man, grows in awareness as events around him demand a reaction. For they find themselves not only at a transitional stage of life, but also in a transitional stage of history, suggesting that for both Pramoedya and Kurniawan, it is vital to look back and weigh the country’s past if one is to understand the modern Indonesia.
And while the question each writer asks himself and the reader are similar, the conclusions to this retrospective examination are intriguingly different. The contemporary Man Tiger seems to reject foreign influence to evoke a rose tinted origin myth of small village life, even if the simplicity and tradition are found to be illusory and the teak closets full of skeletons. While This Earth, published in the 80s with Suharto still in power, finds merit in both the history of Javanese culture and the benefits which colonialism brought in respect to education and, ironically, the ability of this imported learning to emancipate native peoples from the imperial yoke which had poisoned the earth of Indonesian society.