The Makings of a Javanese "Anti-colonial Gong” in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind

When, in a letter to Minke, Miriam de la Croix recounted how her father had both ordered her and her sister to study the music of Gamelan, it was meant not only to enjoy its sounds, but also to impart comparison between Javanese music and its people. In this traditional Indonesian ensemble, it can be noticed how all the tones wait upon the sound of the gong which, according to Miriam’s father, does not translate to the actual lives of Javanese people because they “still have not found their gong, a leader, a thinker, who can come forth with words of resolution”. 

True, that in the novel’s depiction of colonial Indonesia, the gong in the life of Javanese people has still not arrived; but it is being formed – gradually, in the consciousness of Minke, a Dutch-educated native elite who must confront the political and socio-cultural realities of the Dutch colonial presence and injustice in the Indies. Following Minke’s journey towards his own cultural awakening, one can see the makings of a Javanese anti-colonial “Gong”, one who will, in the future, be loudly heard by his people, and to lead them towards the path of national consciousness and freedom. According to the postcolonial critic Frantz Fanon, the projected pattern of a native subject’s anti-colonial awakening and cultural evolution follows three distinct phases of assimilation, reaffirmation, and, finally, rejection of the occupying power’s cultural influence. 

Following this evolutionary schema of a native intellectual, the book begins by allowing us to see Minke in the assimilationist phase where he, as a product of colonial education, attaches himself, in admiration, to European modernity and civilization. Here, we see him praise Europe for its technological advancement through the invention of zincograph, trains, telegraphs, and soon, oil-powered cars. The assimilationist phase gives proof that Minke can be fully integrated in the culture of the occupying power since his social and intellectual abilities bear resemblance to that of a learned European. This is profoundly evident in Minke’s ability to write fluently and creatively in Dutch, a feat which earned admiration from his Dutch teachers and newspaper editors in Surabaya.  

With this, Minke’s colonial education has alienated him from his own culture but even so, he still admits feeling hurt and offended whenever “the essence of Java is being insulted by outsiders”. Here, we see how Minke takes it to heart, though subconsciously, the plight of his people and their weakness which, according to Robert Suurhof, is that “there is no European blood running through their veins”. From this, we can only infer that Minke’s thrust to excel in academics and write about the Indies, its people and society, is somewhat driven by his consciousness and defense of their subjugated existence as natives. We can see from here how Minke enters the nationalist phase of his intellectual journey, equipped with awareness about the richness of Javanese civilization – their centuries’ old chronicle Babad Tanah Jawi, for instance, and their majestic temples of Prambanan and Borobudur – shows how, in that era, Java was more advanced than the Netherlands.  

Even with his feats as a young native, Minke’s aspiration, as he confessed to his mother, was not to become a priviliged Bupati but “only to become a free human being”. When this desire, however, was curtailed due to the vicious imposition of colonial laws – that invalidated his marriage to Annelies, who would be sent to the Netherlands under her legal, Dutch guardian – Minke finally decided to fight colonial injustice, ironically through writing – the product of his own colonial education. We see how, by the end of the novel, Minke, the native intellectual, enters the fighting phase as he prepares to strike the gong – whose sounds shall shake and awaken his people – towards, as Max Lane puts it, their revolutionary future.

The State of an Emotionless State in Gopal Baratham’s A Candle or the Sun

Seeing Singapore through Hernie Pereira’s eyes reflects and affirms the country’s reputation for being the world’s least emotional state. Just last year, a Washington-based research group, Gallup reported that only 36% of Singaporeans recounted feeling positive or negative emotions – an ironic result in a society that is supposed to enjoy one of the lowest unemployment and highest GDP per capita rates in the world.

Reflecting on this study as a Filipino living in what is claimed to be the world’s “most emotional nation”, I am careful not to equate emotionality with happiness. Being emotionless does not necessarily mean being unhappy, it simply means being in a state where one lacks the capacity to be moved by feelings. This incapacity to express emotions has something to do with whether or not an individual has means or rights to even convey feelings. In other words, being emotional necessitates having first the freedom to express emotions.

Whether this freedom is curtailed or romanticized reflects the respective differences in the emotional landscape between Singaporean and Philippine society. In the Philippines, freedom is an integral part of what is usually characterized as the “happy and resilient disposition” of its people. The country is a big room for exercising the freedom to express and be moved by both positive and negative emotions. Filipinos love freedom – so much, in fact, that we sometimes refuse to be ruled by the transitory nature of time and limiting values of societal laws. 

The effect of freedom, when excessively imbibed, exercised, or idealized, can lead to disorder, chaos, and poverty in society – or at least this is how Singapore, through its state exercise of authoritarian democracy, justifies the surrender of freedom as a necessary trade-off for societal order and economic prosperity of its people. However, for a serious and creative writer like Hernie Pereira, the submission of individual rights and freedom in exchange for “good housing, safe streets, free education, and a colored TV” is no different from what a prostitute does: giving up self-respect for money. It is from Hernie’s comparison of what a whore and a Singaporean writer must grapple with – disentangling temporarily the (writing and sexual) act from its association – which made me understand the state of “emotionlessness” prevailing the country. 

Emotionlessness is embodied in Hernie Pereira – a cold, clever, and emotionally detached character who conceals what is most important to him: his writings and Su-May, his young mistress. Hiding both his deep affair with words and Su-May is the only way by which Hernie can genuinely express himself, without the interference of his wife, family, workmates, and the rest of the society. Being indifferent and staying emotionally neutral to the mass of people around him was his preservation of the littlest freedom and individuality he has. In Singapore, where conformity is expected to push uniform progress, the need to be distinct can perhaps only be found in silent eyes and in the “hidden” activities that people do to make them feel unique and alive. 

Moreover, being emotionless in the country means staying focused to compete and adapt to changes in the global economy. Laying off workers at Benson’s, for instance, is viewed as a sign “progress”, as the company plans to enter the mass market. Since these changes around him threatened the economic stability he once enjoyed, Hernie altogether gave up his writing freedom and betrayed Su-May and the children for “natural conservatism”. However, it was his emotions which, in the end, overpowered him and made him overturn his decision by betraying the state.  He paid thus, the sore price of being physically and figuratively toothless. 

Overseas Chinese as Cultural Chameleons in Suchen Christene Lim’s A Bit of Earth

When I was 14, my best friend’s father – a Swedish businessman in Davao del Norte – handed to me a book which greatly altered and expanded my view of the world. It was Sterling Seagrave’s Lords of the Rim: the Invisible Empire of the Overseas Chinese. Part economic analysis and part chronicle of fortune within the Pacific Rim, the book explores the waves of migration and the extraordinary course taken for centuries by Overseas Chinese, over 55 million of them, now dominating Southeast Asian economies through their “unusual ethnic solidarity, underground networks, political pragmatism, exceptional information, and adaptive capacities”. These qualities, according to Seagrave, enabled Chinese expatriates to build an “opaque and invisible” empire of conglomerates that now rule, financially and organizationally, all over the Pacific Rim.

Reflective of what I read almost 10 years ago, A Bit of Earth, as a historical novel, depicts the same intricate system of cultural, linguistic, and trade alliances an Overseas Chinese must tread his way through, cautiously and tenaciously, in order to survive and ultimately acquire wealth and power in a foreign soil. An offshore Chinese, like Wong Tuck Heng, was born out of China’s long and dark history of civil wars, corruption, disasters, and extreme tyranny. It is not surprising, consequently, that an instinct for survival and an aim for prosperity is central to China-born, first generation migrants of Malaya.

Overseas Chinese operate without “border, national government, or flag” – hence, to navigate their way through the tumultuous times during the onset of Western colonization, they are demanded to: 1.) adhere to hierarchal structure of families as they are the basic and most reliable economic and social units; 2.) form solidarity with clans, kongsis, secret societies, and organizations as they are vital for building financial linkages and social connections; 3.) maintain dual cultural and political allegiances depending on the more potent cultural force in the country; and 4.) employ cultural flexibility by adapting the ways, language, and useful practices of both the native population and the colonizing power.

By maintaining plural identities, both China-born and Straits Chinese act as “cultural chameleons” in order to ensure the survival and welfare of their own cultural group. However, what separates them is the degree of transculturation, which relies on the attachment over the patch of earth one roots on. In other words, the extent of hybridization for Straits Chinese, based on the novel, is more pronounced in their adoption of foreign language, customs, and even religion than China-born migrants, primarily because they are rooted on the land which gave them “identity, stability, and family” (275).

Nevertheless, nothing is fixed and complete, according to Stuart Hall, when it comes to cultural identity for diasporic cultures, only “constant positioning and repositioning in the politics of identity and in the politics of position” – such that Tuck Heng assured his son that the present identity assumed by their Baba side of the family is subject to constant change and is highly dependent on the present cultural force controlling their adopted nation. With this insight, we can only assume that Overseas Chinese nowadays, with the evident rise of China, are once again directing their gaze towards the land where, centuries ago, their ancestors planted their lives, hopes, dreams, and memories.

Fifty Shades of Green: The Individual and his Identities in Lloyd Fernando’s Green is the Color

Green is the color primarily associated with nature; it is also the color that represents our natural state of existence — that is, as individuals belonging to the human race, unified by our common humanity. Green, as the representative color of universal human identity, is notably mentioned only towards the end of the novel when Siti Sara went out of the house one evening and sensed how “the color of the leaves differed from bush to tree and from tree to tree, in dazzling shades of green after the rain” (192). 

Shades of green in nature signify chromatic harmony despite the variation of shades or, to aptly demonstrate this in the novel, the shades of identities are exemplified in the characters of Dahlan, Sara, and Omar –  all Malaysian colonial subjects who acquired Western education which produced “dazzling shades” or ambivalent effects on their respective identities: Dahlan advocates against racial inequality for minority groups; Sara struggles with her individualism and attachment to her restrictive culture; and Omar embraces fundamentalist Islam and nativist ideology through an elimination of all “traces of colonial legacy”.

While the reference to color green appears to be a mere passive mention in the story, its symbolic quality is being emphasized pervasively through our historical reading of the text. The depiction of greenery sets the backdrop for tropical Malaysia where different shades of green are visibly painted on its multicultural, multi-religious, and multilingual landscape. 

Malaysia, as a modernizing yet tradition-oriented society, grapples not only with sociocultural differences between racial groups but more significantly with economic disparity among them. Green, as a known representation for envy and resentment, characterizes Malaysia’s classic problem of racial, political, and socioeconomic divide: the dominant Malay group perceives themselves to be at an economic disadvantage in the agrarian countryside against the Chinese and Indian minority who prosper in urban centers, respectively for their handling of most commercial enterprises and constituting the country’s professional sector.

It is important to note how this racial strife in the country originally stemmed from British colonial policy that previously encouraged Chinese and Indian migration to supply the demand for labor in the country’s flourishing rubber and tin industry. Green, in this sense, becomes the symbol for money as the capitalist Britain, during its occupation of Malaya, concerns itself not with the promotion of cultural harmony among racial groups but merely for financial gains from its colonial activities. As such, racial conflict emerging from colonial policies dominated Malaysia’s postcolonial history after it gained independence in 1957.  

Referred in the novel as the “unsightly scab” in Malaysian history, these racial discords, which later erupted into a widespread racial riot in May 1969, provided the main backdrop for the story where multiracial characters representing their shades of identity are at odds not only with their inner selves but also with their distinctly cultural as well as universal human identity. What Lloyd Fernando tried to portray in the novel is how ultimately, the human identity, with love as one of its universal qualities, prevails over both sociocultural and personal identity.

Being green is embodied in the bold and “transgressive acts” of the main characters, Sara and Yun Ming as well as Dahlan and Gita, who are involved in interracial relationships. Green is the color associated with nature primarily because it does not discriminate but rather celebrates diversity through love in its varying shades of existence. 

The Society and the Isolated in Shahnon Ahmad’s Rope of Ash (Rentong)

It is not difficult to notice, as Filipinos, the striking similarities between Shahnon Ahmad’s idyllic portrayal of Malaysia’s countryside and the sceneries of Philippine rural life. In the novel Rope of Ash (Rentong), we are given familiar images of typical countryside life in a remote village of Banggul Derdap: farmers scattering across various square fields, village rice lands looking like a “large single lake”, and typical village meals consisting of sticky rice and grated coconut. It is from these rustic images that our appreciation and understanding of Malaysian village life are vivid and familiar.

But while these rural sceneries are reminiscent to Philippine countryside life, it is also easy to understand how we are able to relate with Malaysian rural values which put emphasis on the importance of kinship and sense of community among rural folks. In the Philippines, headmaster Pak Senik is represented by a well-respected Barangay Captain or Purok Chairman whose leadership is central in maintaining harmony in a village. Similar to Philippine provinces, the lives of families in Banggul Derdap are closely knit since villagers are “dependent and independent from each other” for their living and sustenance. Because of this, it is almost unimaginable for village residents to isolate themselves from the community that works towards unity, order, and harmony.

If negative values such as violence, jealousy, and ambition disrupt the idealized notion of harmonious coexistence among villagers, then the community – being a structured social and political unit – has the power to isolate and make an outcast out of those who initiate societal division and conflict. However, it is interesting to note how, in the novel, we are given the perspective of the isolated; that is, we are given insights on how, at times, the society misjudges an individual based on past deeds and subverted opinion that challenges the prevalent view of the village group. In the novel, the isolated becomes vulnerable to malicious rumor and prejudgment of character; for instance, we are drawn to relate to Pak Kasa and Semaun’s violent character as similar to the popular Filipino adage: kung ano ang puno ay siyang bunga.

With societal seclusion, the isolated Semaun is forced to shape his character based on the presumptions of society; hostility and violence becomes his recourse to defend his family and their traditional ideals. Predictably, an ambitious character, personified by Dogol, is able to exploit this ambivalent and already delicate relationship between the society and the isolated. However, through the notable leadership style of headmaster Pak Senik, whose patience and compassion has led Semaun’s family to subtly acquire utang na loob or debt of gratitude from his goodwill, we can see how the gap between the community and its outcast is eventually narrowed and restored. This happened when the violent call to destroy Semaun’s property by fire was, towards the end of the story, prevented – signifying that the rope to tie, to connect the isolated with society did not burn and turn into ashes.