Pramoedya: Autodidact and Tokoh Harami
Alex G. Bardsley
Indonesian public life is driven by personalities, one of whom commented recently that "politics is just the commotion made by a set of VIPs, who think the masses float, like corpses."ii The star-struck style of political culture is not in itself unique to Indonesia, but Pramoedya Ananta Toer is a peculiar kind of star: a sort of tokoh haram, or forbidden figure. An anti-VIP perhaps, who, though silenced, is the focus of noisy controversy. Given the restrictions on his own opportunities for public expression, the question arises: what role, if any, has Pramoedya played in the production of the various and contested representations of him as a tokoh? The thing that has attracted public attention in Indonesia, both antagonistic and admiring, and that continues to fuel his public role, is his own determined kepribadian, or sense of personal sovereignty—an idea that is also reflected in his work.
Pramoedya is an autodidact, and in our era, during which formal education has become an increasingly common experience, this denotes an unusual approach to the acquisition and application of knowledge. His fictional and non-fictional works have long been informed by issues of pedagogical experience: the coercions and resistances, humiliations and discoveries that accompany processes of learning. An examination of some of his writings, together with a look at his own educational experience, and at the controversy that attaches to him as a public figure, will illustrate the connection between the autodidact and the tokoh.
One character central to what is probably Pramoedya's best-known later work, the Buru Quartet of novels, is explicitly described as an otodidak. Nyai Ontosoroh, as the character is called, bears an interesting resemblance to a figure from European literary tradition, Galatea, or better yet to Galatea's Shavian incarnation as Eliza Doolittle, but in her achievements Nyai far surpasses them both. An innocent Javanese girl of thirteen, she is handed over to Herman Mellema, the Dutch manager of the sugar plantation where her father works, for twenty-five guilders and the promise of a promotion, to become his concubine. Raped, humiliated, isolated from her own community, she resolves to do everything in her power to regain her self-worth, and never to become dependent on her "lord." For his own reasons, Mellema undertakes to educate her personally—in languages, literacy, bookkeeping, management—and for her own reasons, she learns these things. By the time he breaks down and turns on her, she is running their huge dairy business herself, and it is he who is dependent on her. She has become seemingly omni-competent, with one interesting caveat: the family physician Dr. Martinet remarks that "each autodidact has one striking shortcoming, and in her case it is that she is unable to teach her own children to be independent.iii Mellema was, by Nyai's own account, an excellent teacher, but her success is predicated on her drive to master her own destiny, and the harsh personal experience that gave birth to that drive is not something that she can teach in turn.
One can, however, learn the lessons of humiliation and resistance in school. An early short story of Pramoedya's, "An Illegitimate Child,"iv involves Ahyat, a Javanese boy in the first years of Indonesia's independence, whose father collaborated with the Dutch during the revolution. Ahyat's teacher takes evident pleasure in bullying the "traitor's son," and the other children learn to enjoy Ahyat's humiliation,which relieves their own fears of authority. Driven to the breaking point, the boy rebels:
"Ahyat could no longer endure all of it. Suddenly he felt he could not let himself be abused any more. His courage, so long hidden inside him, burst forth—a courage that was almost a reckless determination....
'I demand justice,' said Ahyat heedlessly.
'Where did you get this lesson about justice?'"v
the teacher retorts. Ahyat ultimately throws a bottle of ink in the teacher's face, and is sent off to juvenile prison, having learned about justice by experiencing injustice—a lesson his teacher did not intend. The events of the story occur around National Independence Day, and the irony is clear: the traitor's son has a more authentic understanding of the meaning of the revolution than the other, "legitimate" children.
In a third passage, this one again drawn from the Buru quartet, Pramoedya introduces a quite illegitimate sort of teacher, a radical Dutch journalist, whose very enthusiasm for lecturing the narrator makes his informal lessons that much harder to digest. The Dutchman Ter Haar's lectures—on political economy, José Rizal and the Philippine revolution, international relations, and the colonial press—are rather over the narrator Minke's head, and Minke's attention repeatedly slips away to focus on the fluttering of Ter Haar's lips, and the crackling of the chain-smoker's clove cigarettes. But Minke is fascinated by Ter Haar's passion, "the enthusiasm of an unpaid teacher," as he puts it, "...deadening to the enthusiasm of the student who hasn't paid."vi Grotesquely, he imagines Ter Haar as a she-wolf, greedily thrusting her teat into his mouth and force-feeding him milk so thick it is hard to swallow. He is compelled to take in information he cannot comprehend, and between sessions, he writes down as much as he can remember, to go over again later. The gap between what Minke can grasp at the moment and what he will come to understand on his own at a later date, together with the coercive and discomforting aspects of the lectures, stand in contrast to the congruity of interest here between teacher and student: Ter Haar seeks to provide Minke with the tools he will need to advance his people's aspirations against the interests of the colonial state.
These three examples suggest that knowledge for Pramoedya is not a gift of accumulated fact, passed down unproblematically from teacher to student through authorized channels. Rather, learning appears as a process in which the student, despite or even as the direct consequence of oppression, coercion, and humiliation, can acquire knowledge other than what is taught, and put that knowledge to unanticipated uses. This approach to learning characterizes the autodidact.
Pramoedya's own formal education was difficult and in its later stages repeatedly disrupted. It took him ten years to complete the seven grades of primary education at a Boedi Oetomo private school. Since his father, at least to begin with, was the principal of that school, and had always been a star student himself, Pramoedya got little sympathy from that quarter. When it came time for him to start secondary school, his father told him, "Dumb kid, go back to elementary school!" There, the teacher asked him why he was back, since he had already graduated. Pramoedya recalled:
"I took my books and ran into the cemetery, which lay between the school and home. There was a castor bean tree there, and I grabbed hold of it and screamed.... Even now when I am reminded of that, my eyes still get teary."vii
He and his mother raised enough money trading rice to buy his first pair of shoes and send him to a technical school in Surabaya, but when he discovered that the Dutch were about to draft the students there to defend Java against the coming Japanese invasion, he fled home without a diploma.
During the war, he worked for the official Japanese news agency in Jakarta, and attended a Taman Dewasa junior high school for two years—until the Japanese closed it down. He also studied stenography for a year, and was able to attend lectures in political science, economics and sociology. But the coming of Indonesia's independence, and the revolution, pretty much spelled the end of his career as a student.
This is not to say that he stopped learning. Indeed, he taught history for a few years at the Universitas Respublica Jakarta, though he insists he is not a trained historian. And he studied German while in Buru, apparently in part by memorizing vocabulary written on the walls of the latrine in the prison camp. As he remarked in a letter to one of his children:
"In many cities in Europe, even important announcements are posted in public toilets, and people are sure to read them. For a person to learn, however, does not require books, reading or writing. If there are no books, not even writing materials, doesn't a person have to learn anyway? By observing, noticing, remembering, listening, a person still learns."viii
* * *
The announcement of Pramoedya's Magsaysay award last summer provoked quite a "commotion of VIPs" in Indonesia, as dozens of celebrity and former-celebrity intellectuals entered the public arena to contest what Pramoedya, as tokoh, represents. A number of somewhat provocative interviews with him appeared, though at least one, in the Lampung Post, was suppressed before it was published. Pramoedya's exclusion from the debate since then has not ended his role as tokoh, however, nor stopped the circulation of his name as a sign for independent and dangerous thinking.
Through last fall, and sporadically since then, government officials, academics and other intellectuals have made public statements, written articles and letters to newspapers, even published a book (appropriately entitled The Cultural Tempest), about Pramoedya and his work. Aside from the usual bickering over the facts of history and their interpretation—history does, after all, play a role in the legitimation of every political system—much of the fuss has focused on the younger generation of Indonesians, in the apparent fear that they might be somehow influenced by Pramoedya. In mid-October, the Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff (Kasum) "linked" Pramoedya, along with a labor leader and a dissident academic, to the so-called OTB, or "formless organizations," which were said to be "preying on young people to spread communist teaching under the guise of democracy and human rights issues."ix Within days, the debate over the OTB grew so heated that the Assistant for Social and Political Affairs (Assospol Kassospol) had to ask the public to stop talking about it, remarking nevertheless:
"We bear in mind the need to be alert to the twisting of historical fact. Like the writing of Pramoedya Ananta Toer that is so well-liked by the young kids, who have no memory of the matter and take it for the truth. This is dangerous."x
One might suspect that the "danger" is exaggerated, and that Indonesian parents searching for forbidden literature among their children's belongings are more likely to find other kinds of contraband instead. Still, there is no surer way of attracting the attention of youth than to let them hear their elders declare something to be dangerous, prohibited, and popular with other young people. As one commentator observed:
"The possibility of an effort by the young generation to establish the creativity of Pramoedya as an issue of contemporary thought, is solely the result of the political controversies that take place around this tokoh. Let us say that this idolizing has to occur, surely its reverberations will last a very short time. The idol will change, in accordance with the appearance of new tokoh."xi
So the scapegoating appears to have backfired, and a seventy-one year old literary figure is said, at least, to have become a teen idol. All the hostile attention has given Pramoedya's work, as he wryly notes, a sort of "surplus value," as a source of unauthorized ideas.
During the OTB flap, the Chief of the General Staff (Kasum) told reporters, "look at what...Pramoedya wrote in the Australia-based Progres magazine."xii He was most likely referring to an essay that appeared in that publication, "My Apologies, in the Name of Experience."xiii A lot of things about the piece might appeal to younger readers—its ironic tone and language-play, its assault on sacred cows, its discussion of touchy political topics—but the thrust of the essay is to reveal how cultural myths and representations of history have been mustered for centuries to legitimate the existing power structure. It suggests, at bottom, that what students have been taught in school is not the whole truth, and that there are other histories, other ideas, and other viewpoints to be found in other sources.
In another essay,xiv which he wrote for the Magsaysay Award Foundation last August, Pramoedya demonstrates that one can in fact learn about resistance in school. He quotes one of the best known poems in the Indonesian literary canon, one that every child learns in school: "I am an untamed beast /From its herd outcast." Chairil Anwar's poem is called "Aku": I. Written during the Japanese occupation, it describes the sense of self discovered in alienation and oppression. As with Nyai Ontosoroh, or Ahyat, or Pramoedya himself, the discovery arouses the courage to struggle for independence and personal sovereignty. But even if, as a tokoh haram, Pramoedya exemplifies personal sovereignty, it is not something that can be taught directly.
So neither Pramoedya nor his work can lead the younger generation astray or send them out to protest in the streets. At most his writing, like Ter Haar's lectures, might provide the material that enables them to discover their own aspirations. The drive to sovereignty, however, is engendered by an intermediate denial, as nationhood is realized through colonization, or by an absence, as in the various exiles of a migrant worker in Malaysia, a student in Australia, or a political refugee in Portugal.xv Such absences frame an identity, and provoke a counter-assertion of it: kepribadian. It is like the parable of the House of the Law in Kafka's novel, The Trial: sovereignty, personal or popular, is not received as a gift, or even simply inherited. It cannot be bestowed or bequeathed. One has to demand it.
iA version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, April 11, 1996. I wish to thank the Cornell Southeast Asia Program for providing assistance for this effort; my co-panelists, Ben Abel, Julie Shackford-Bradley and Sumit Mandal, for offering the challenge; and Benedict Anderson, for supplying the confidence.
iiPolitik hanya keributan sejumlah VIP, dan massa dianggap mengapung, seperti bangkai. Goenawan Mohamad, "Pokok, Bukan Tokoh," Suara Independen 7 (January-February 1996).
iiiPramoedya Ananta Toer, Bumi Manusia (Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya, 1981), pp. 199, 244.
ivPramoedya, "Anak Haram" (1950), Cerita dari Blora (Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya, 1989): 144-170.
vPramoedya, "Anak Haram," pp. 165-6.
viPramoedya, Anak Semua Bangsa (Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya, 1982), p. 255.
viiPramoedya, interviewed in Suara Independen 3 (August 1995), p. 8.
viii Pramoedya, Nyanyi Tunggal Seorang Bisu (n.p., n.d.), p. 181.
ix"ABRI Names Faces Behind Incidents," Jakarta Post, October 17, 1995.
x"Syarwan Stop Bicara OTB," Media Indonesia, October 20, 1995.
xiNor Pud Binarto T., "Trauma itu Bernama 'Sejarah,'" Republika, October 1, 1995.
xii"ABRI Names Faces," Jakarta Post, October 17, 1995.
xiii Pramoedya, "Maaf, atas nama pengalaman," Progres 2 (aksi, 1992). Also published in Kabar Seberang 23 (1992): 1-9.
xivPramoedya, "Sastra, Sensor, dan Negara," Suara Independen 4 (September 1995).
xvSee Benedict Anderson, "Exodus," Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994), pp. 314-327.