A town of sleaze and
no calendar
You wouldn’t want to stay in Paruk, even if it was the only
sanctuary available during a tsunami. If
the fare didn’t finish you, the supernatural would – be extra wary for comets
portending tragedy.
This fictional Javanese village is not the quaint abode of
gentle rustics who maintain benign traditions while nurturing their fertile
slopes.
In the words of Ahmad Tohari, the author of the trilogy The Dancer, the people of Paruk are
‘impoverished and backward … thin, sickly [and] foulmouthed.’ Among this crew of dirty old men and their
conniving wives there’s just one attractive inhabitant, a talented artist called
Srintil. She’s inherited the spirit of a
long dead ronggeng dancer to become a
seductive performer who ‘wooed without words, enticed with the power of magic.’
Srintil was one of the few survivors of a mass poisoning
that overtook Paruk in the midst of a drought when many townsfolk died after
eating contaminated food. Raised by a
couple of relatives she exhibits her talents at an early age and is soon
returning fame and fortune to her otherwise blighted birthplace.
She becomes a prostitute, which is her destiny, but falls in
love with her childhood sweetheart Rasus who at times takes the role of
narrator. He gets into the army by
accident and finds religion, though remains consumed by desire.
Although we’re told the people of Paruk don’t keep calendars,
readers who know the recent history of Indonesia will sense calamity coming. For this is 1964 and a communist agitator
called Bakar (meaning ‘burn’) is stirring the folk, even though they have
little interest in abandoning their apathy and don’t even understand the
meaning of ‘proletariat’.
Doom approaches, and though Srintil wants out from being the
party’s propaganda dancer it’s too late.
Dreadful things are happening in distant Jakarta’s crocodile hole and
Paruk is about to be dragged into the pit.
This is a difficult book to grasp emotionally. Some of it is porn with the author gratuitously
embellishing the story, though there’s always been a level of obscenity lurking
beneath the politeness and respectability of Javanese culture.
The Serat Centhini
[The Javanese Story of Life] commissioned by Surakarta Sultan Pakubuwono V
early in the 19th century is so full of sex that translations into
modern Indonesian are reportedly still unavailable.
So it’s surprising
that this book was ever published back in the more uptight early 1980s when the
censor was king. It was first serialized
as Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk [The dancer
of Paruk Village] in Kompas, a high-standard
broadsheet keen to promote literature, and with a reputation for the serious,
not the salacious.
American ethnomusicologist Rene Lysloff, who translated the
text, came across a bound copy of the book by chance when undertaking research
in Banyumas [Central Java], and found it fitted his fieldwork:
‘I pondered the ethnographic truth of the novel, wondering
whether fiction could be separated from fact in its depiction of an isolated
Javanese village and the people who lived there’, he wrote. ‘I felt certain
that he [Tohari] had described a real world within the fiction of his novel.’
A ghastly conclusion, for if Paruk and its vile residents
represent reality, the police and child protection authorities should be
heading into the hinterland right now armed with warrants.
Yet the author is renowned, not as a smut merchant but as a
scholar and prolific writer, a Muslim intellectual who advocates a holistic
understanding of Islam, ‘one that embraces existing forms of culture.’
At the end of the second book in the trilogy, A Shooting Star at Dawn, the communists
break with the culture that nurtured them by vandalizing the graves of the
village ancestors. Then arsonists attack. After the coup of 30 September 1965,
the slaughter starts.
In the final book, The
Rainbow’s Arc Srintil is imprisoned and raped, though not before Tohari has
laid some ground rules for the reader, including ‘the courage to acknowledge
historical truth.’
This is an astonishing statement when set against the
current blindness towards the massacres, despite some debate flowing from
American film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer’s The
Act of Killing.
How did this taboo topic even get into print 30 years ago?
Apparently the version in the book is not the one that appeared in Kompas, which was written to fit the
government’s view of events.
The horrors, the killings, the moral questions raised and
the whole sickening purge of communists, sympathizers and even those like
Srintil and her neighbors who had no interest in politics, is confronted.
Here The Dancer
finds its worth, though the dilemma remains: In the earlier chapters Paruk and
its people are painted in such lewd hues that it’s difficult to feel great sympathy
when they are treated brutally.
They didn’t deserve such a fate – no-one did. They were victims because they were ignorant,
just ordinary people with simple beliefs who became useful scapegoats in
Soeharto’s time of terror.
Does this mean they are at fault? In this context the story
seems to by-pass the author’s aim to honor the nation’s culture and traditions.
Tragedy befalls Paruk ‘because it never tried to find
harmony with God’, whatever that means. Dr Lysloff helpfully adds an endnote
explaining that the author wanted to describe a community ‘entirely without
contemporary notions of sin and virtue’ – and in this he has succeeded.
He has also mastered the tricky art of keeping the reader on
track, even when we have little empathy with the characters. This is stirring drama covering the most
significant years since the birth of the nation.
Some claim it’s been written with raw honesty to make
Indonesians see themselves without the benefit of a government lens. Others
dismiss Tohari’s work as so much indulgent fantasy that shames a modern nation
with strong religious values. For this reviewer the former explanation carries
most weight.
The Dancer
by Ahmad Tohari
(translated by Rene TA Lysloff Lontar, Jakarta,
Modern Library of Indonesia, 2012 462 pages
(First published in The Jakarta Post 1 September 2014)
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