Forgotten Words: Revisiting Colonial Indonesian Literature
The
1930s witnessed an increasing number and variety of literature in
colonial Indonesia that provided some of the national bases for
Indonesian politics and culture. Various themes, categories, and events
privileged the major actors, ideologies, or discourses that were
eventually appropriated by the nation. It was also the period when
national “forgetting” and “exclusion” began to take place. Popular
literature was marginalized and popular voices did not last once
Indonesia gained independence.
This panel seeks to reconceptualize Indonesian
literature during the colonial period by drawing attention to a wide
range of “forgotten” narratives, processes and epistemologies that have
remained marginalized by elite, nationalist, or scholarly priorities.
Individually, the papers draw from newspaper articles and popular
literature, highlighting the wide range of local, religious and ethnic
narratives of the period. Collectively, the panel engages with issues
of late colonial Indonesia as a crucial period for understanding
“modern” Indonesia by asking: (1) how have particular narratives within
the period been remembered or excluded by dominant histories; (2) what
alternative memories or perspectives emerge from focusing on
marginalized literature?
Abstracts
Reading Boven Digoel
YAMAMOTO Nobuto, Keio University
Boven Digoel, in the heart of the malaria-infested
New Guinea, was an infamous mass internment camp, built after the
“communist” revolts in Java in 1926. There, the Dutch Indies colonial
regime banished political prisoners that were considered particularly
dangerous. More than one thousand “communists” were exiled in the late
1920s, and in the 1930s these included nationalist leaders like Hatta
and Sjahrir. Boven Digoel was a menacing place, but it had another
image. The city of Boven Digoel (Kota Boven Digoel) was considered “one
of the most developed cities in Indonesia” (satoe kota jang paling
ontwikkeld dalam Indonesia kita ini), which seems to contradict the
image of an internment camp. After February 1927, local newspapers
carried articles on Boven Digoel, letters from the camp, as well as
articles by “ex-Digoelists.”
What exactly was Boven Digoel? Why readers and
journalists were obsessed by it? And how did they make sense of Boven
Digoel? Scholarly works on Digoel tend to focus on the colonial order
and policing aspects by relying on Dutch official documents and
personal memoirs, thus fail to describe how contemporary media reported
it and the audience received it. I will examine articles on Boven
Digoel published in two local newspapers, Sin Jit Po (later Sin Tit Po) of Surabaya (East Java) and Pewarta Deli of Medan (East Sumatra), and consider it from “local” perspectives as well as in its “national” connotation.
Social Novels: Tamar Djaja and the Publishing Worlds of Bukittinggi (1939-1941)
William Bradley Horton, Takushoku University
On around September 20, 1940, the Bukittinggi
publisher, Penjiaran Ilmoe put out another issue of its twice monthly
literary publication, Roman Pergaoelan. This issue presented a novelette by Romanita entitled A. Dahri, Romanschrijver.
A story explicitly labeled fictive, this story tried to draw readers to
learn more about the writers who presented them with entertaining, and
frequently provocative or sensational reading materials several times
each month. This is a gratifying story of a fictional character
developing an unemployed Bukittinggi youth with a little Dutch language
education to his becoming a journalist and founding editor of the first
literary publication in Medan. In the end, though, the reader is shown
the bad side of the main character, A. Dahri, with the reappearing
arrogance, violation of his father's advice and the final damning
thoughts of his accepting wife.
Today, the context of publications like A Dahri,
the identities of the authors and publishers, their goals, and even
titles are largely unknown. How were these stories read or intended to
be read? A very few scholarly works present useful information, but are
motivated by different, national concerns and thus fail to identify the
particularities of each publication and the local contexts. I will thus
examine the works of a key figure in Bukittingi, Tamar Djaja, his
literary periodical Roman Pergaoelan, and consider these not
only in a local context, but also in the wider contexts of late
colonial Indonesia and the Sumatran popular literature boom of
1938-1941.
The Lord of Romance: Njoo Cheong Seng and Chinese-Malay Literature in 1940s
Elizabeth Chandra, Keio University
In many ways, the life and works of Njoo Cheong Seng
typified the vicissitudes of the Chinese-Malay literature in colonial
and postcolonial Indonesia. A substantial textual production between
1880s and 1940s, Chinese-Malay literature declined rapidly and
irreversibly after independence. Njoo (a.k.a. Monsieur d'Amour and
Munzil Anwar) was among the most prolific Chinese authors between the
1920s and 1930s, churning out a total of several hundred novels, short
stories, plays and poems, before retiring in 1951. By then, he had not
only penned literary works, but also served as editor for a magazine (Interocean, later Hoa Kiao) and a literary journal (Penghidoepan),
and directed theater troupes such Miss Riboet's Orient, Dardanella,
Fifi Young's Pagoda, Sandiwara Bintang Soerabaja, and Sandiwara
Pantjawarna.
In postcolonial Indonesia, Njoo's works and others of the Chinese-Malay literature disappeared not only from circulation, but also from popular memory. By following the career of Njoo Cheong Seng, my paper aims to examine what happened to Chinese-Malay literature as Indonesia underwent social and political transformations from a colonial state to a sovereign nation-state. What kind of adjustments Chinese authors like Njoo had to make? How did he perceive the great changes around him and his place, if any, in the "new" Indonesia? How are we, scholars today, supposed to make sense of and represent Njoo's artistic legacy?