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| Sunday, February 22, 2004 |
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| Sunday, February 22, 2004 |
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The Girl from the Coast: A Novel
A sympathiser of the now defunct Communist Party of Indonesia, Toer has lived a chequered life as a spokesman for the poor and the dispossessed, writing mostly about the travails of growing up under various kinds of tyranny. The fact that his books are widely available in translations in world's major languages attests to his stature as a writer of international significance. His first novel, The Fugitive, about a soldier in the World War II who evades his Japanese captors to return home, combines acute social and political analysis with a taut emotional narrative. The Buru Quartet is an epic of Indonesian nationhood focusing on the growth and maturity of a Javanese student, Minke. It reminds us of Mulk Raj Anand's Saga of Man centred on the life and times of Krishan Chander Azad. But unlike Anand's rather rambling uneven story, Toer's quartet is skilfully plotted and avoids the former's crude discursiveness of presentation. The Girl From the Coast is a later work that exhibits the same qualities of sharp-edged, though tolerant, humanism that marks his writing as a whole. It is the story of a girl from a fishing village who is forced into marriage with a local aristocrat, the bendoro, who shows all the traits of a male tyrant typical of the feudal hierarchy of colonial Indonesia. The fact that the girl is nameless and is simply referred to as the girl from the coast signifies her inferior position in the hierarchy. She is brought to bendoro's household more as a piece of decoration than as a flesh and blood person. In this forced move she loses her carefree life on the fishing coast, its sights and sounds and broad airy prospects. Though poor, she revelled in the freedom of her semi-nomadic community. In her husband's household in the city she is caught between its dazzling aristocratic opulence and the prescriptions of its stultifying code of formal behaviour. The novel builds contrasts between the life in the fishing village "where the girl would stop outside the doors of other fishermen" and the oppression of the city home "in which no one laughs when I am around". The strength of Toer's novel is in his ability to transform these contrasts from simple geographical oppositions to moral and political judgments. As a committed Marxist, Toer occasionally romanticises the pastoralism of the fishing village just as Ignazio Silone does in Fontamara, but this does not detract from the novel's bristling rawness of presentation. The later scenes in the book where her husband returns the girl from the coast to her father for failing to deliver a male child stand out for their minute observations of the harsh living conditions in bendoro's house. The author's ruminations invest his descriptions with a symbolic purport. "A powerful enemy was coming to call, setting foot in the fortress where she had sheltered her heart", says the narrator about the girl's condition. Toer excels in drawing characters. He renders people with the concentrated economy of a master craftsman. There is the bendoro himself, spartan, stiff and withdrawn. He appears only occasionally but we feel his presence everywhere in the house. There is Mbok, the maid, who instructs the girl in the manners of the city aristocracy. Her story makes pathetic reading. There is Mardinah, reconciled to her serfdom. The girl's father and the fishermen community are studied with a comfortable ease born of familiarity. Above all, the girl herself, oppressed for most of the book, finally emerges from the shadows fully aware of her position. What makes Toer's world rich and solid like Silone's Fontamara is his complete absorption in the tumult of his times that deepened his experience of class conflicts. As it is, there is an autobiographical element in the story; the events described in the epilogue are an indication in that direction. This gives a palpable authenticity to the events described. But another aspect of the story is the perplexingly clear reflection of the motley colouring of life that pervades the descriptions. And this comes from devoted toil at things understood as much as from a long instinctive involvement of the writer with his people. Toer is in the best tradition of the great realist writing in that he boldly confronts life with all its unpredictableness, sidestepping simple ideological imperatives. This saves his writing becoming a lifeless tract. |
NOT widely known in this country, Pramoedya Ananta
Toer is a leading author and political activist of Indonesia. His claim
to fame primarily rests on his novels and stories, most notably The
Buru Quartet, that he wrote while in prison from 1965 to 1979. The
story of his life is like a fairy tale involving imprisonment and exile
both under the Dutch colonial rule and the military regime of Suharto,
and culminating in his present status as Indonesia's foremost writer and
aspirant for the Nobel Prize.